Right… so as others have asked already, can you put off release for a while? You’re making significant, measurable improvements. I’d hold off and keep improving things for a while, or until the improvements plateau. You really want to get the store page as optimised as possible before you release your game to take advantage of it on release day/hour. Plus, you’ll build up the number of wishlists along the way.
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It’s not just a matter of having or not having a trailer. The quality and content of the trailer itself is also important.
Do the same thing with your trailer as you’re doing with the page itself. Put something up there, then ask for feedback on it and iterate on it. Or do some split testing (put up different trailers and see how it impacts conversions).
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Yeah, to be honest, I am struggling with this question. There’s no real immediate need for a launch. We could hold it off indefinitely.
Originally, we planned for this to be a very short turnaround project (6 weeks). It’s closing in on 3 months but we only really got the store page together a bit over a week ago.
I know that @BIGTIMEMASTER favors continuing to polish and launching as strong as possible. I’m more in favor of starting on the next game and getting that up and running. Either way, we definitely need to make a final decision soon!
I would say, consider your first release, as business card.
First release quality will reflect, how next release will be perceived by others, expecting similar, or better quality.
I would utilize here gained respect as much, as feasible, to improve product, since you got guys something of good quality. You spent tons of good effort on models, game and mechanics. Make sure, front page stand up to quality as well. Otherwise, you may loose selling potential.
This is also good learning exercise, which you can transfer to future products.
I expect, at least just after release, your attention will be much divided, between game release, players feedback, and trying to produce new game. Something to consider …
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I think it’s a pretty ok trailer, shows of your visual style. Maybe try to focus more on the few first seconds of the trialer, it’s here you catch the player attention or lose it. As an example in our trailer we focus the first few seconds on our item interaction since it sticks out compared with other shooters.
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I love seconds 7-20 of your trailer. Manipulating the attachments and stuff is just sick.
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I totally agree with @angrypenguin , you’re in a position now where you are building up a lot of potential and it’s all in your control, and you’ve got nothing to lose and everything to gain by focusing on building momentum now.
As for the trailer, I think there’s a lot to improve.
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Sound effects and VFX! The music is okay for a background sound but that’s where it belongs. We need to see and hear the rewards of winning your game! I was watching a GDC talk about Into The Breach, their trailer seems exactly the kind of thing your game needs, it’s non-stop cool SFX.
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Don’t repeat camera angles so quickly. It was cool in the beginning when you had a panning shot and then a close-up gameplay shot, but then you went back to panning exactly the same angle which killed the tension for me.
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Consider interludes with some exciting phrases to break up all the camera shots.
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The trailer just kind of stopped at some point.
Anyway, great work you guys, looking forward to seeing how this pans out!
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I watched the trailer just now on desktop (few times). Didn’t want to watch on mobile, to get wrong impression 
So definitely it shows some gameplay, which is good.
But my feeling is, it is very jumpy alike. I take impression, it takes far too short for each scene to show. Cutting off in wrong moments. For example, at T0:20, when destroying enemy, debris didn’t finish falling sequence, before switch to next scene. Maybe least important, but somehow leaving me unsatisfied to watch. I think need just few sec longer sequences. Bit more of gameplay.
And probably some form of headlines, i.e.
Immersive battles, campaign, satiric (show where? Highlight on vid.), hunt for enemy, conquer, mythological units (highlight moment) etc. Maybe worth to show gameplay as mythical nation, rather than human nation. We are all familiar with peasants and cavalry.
But for example @BIGTIMEMASTER avatar / unit
Very easy to miss in short sequence. And that something potentially interesting.
I haven’t noticed any mythical units, until I rewatched video few times, and actually put on full screen. Simply too fast changing scenes.
I am still not convinced, about used such intensive color filters, where many things become one blob, specialty visible on smaller screens.
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+1 to all. Too tired to actually click all the individual like buttons.
The trailer we do intend to improve upon. But its very time consuming so we wanted to get something up there at least in the meantime. We are also gonna do a “developer let’s play” type of thing, probably get that up on monday.
About holding off release, this is something that we have several plans for, we just gonna watch the weather so to speak and figure out which course of action will be best for us, all things considered.
About the high-saturation colors @Antypodish , that is not from post but just the way I did the lighting on certain levels. Because all of our environments are built from a very small kit, the only way to get strong variety was to use pretty extreme lighting. It does make for tough screenshots, but when you play the game everything is pretty clear and we even got some special effects to aid you in darker missions.
The better thing to do would be have more range of enviro stuffs and color palettes, but such is life. Lessons learned for future projects.
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Sure, I get the point. Fact is in action may look different. But colors in worse case scenario, can be fixed later.
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There’s no reason you can’t do both. But assuming you want to choose one…
Consider that any given game is only a new pre-release title for one, usually short part of its project life cycle. Opportunities to gain experience at this part of a game project is comparatively rare. On the flip side, as long as your team sticks together you can get experience making new projects together literally whenever you want.
I would not be in a rush to turn away from a rare opportunity to go chasing a common one.
Of course, I’m biased. I tell people to make small projects in part so that they can reach this phase of the project as quickly and as often as possible. Anyone with some technical skills can make a game, but there are relatively few people who can also sell them effectively.
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In my opinion this is the best way to do it. I often see people spending ages on making improvements that they think are important without testing with their audience. Much better, I think, to get something out there sooner rather than later*, get real feedback from non-developers, and then make your improvements when you know what the real issues are.
- As long as it’s not so bad it’ll be damaging, of course!
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Yeah, the times when you can collect real data and try different marketing ideas on a near-completed product are few and far between! I think this is an opportunity too good to let slip. The success of the next game completely depends on how much you learn from this too.
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Tru dat.
This is the time we don’t have much on the line so its good to experiment.
Something to think about: This may be true if playing the game, but I would never buy the game because with my old eyes I simply cannot tell the units apart in your screen shot. I would assume that the game is just as likely to give me a headache and would hit the Ignore button.
If in the game it is easier to tell the units apart, the screen shots must reflect that or you are going to lose sales.
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@Socrates , I’m reworking the lighting on a couple of the maps.
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It needs a video, you really cant have a game release without a video and expect people to buy it these days.
Also, I notice it says releasing this month, but personally I would push that back 2-3 months and take some time to build hype and market + do as much PR as possible, posting on reddit, facebook, twitter regularly as well as indieDB, any forums you can find such as this one, and then contacting youtubers and magazine + website/blog writers about the game with a press kit (possible the most important piece of a game release).
I pulled down the video yesterday to test the difference in wishlist rate. In terms of wishlist per visit, at this point, it does not appear that there is a significant difference (although its only one data point). On the flip side our traffic overall dropped pretty significantly (perhaps steam is less likely to push your game if it doesn’t have a trailer?)
I would personally never buy a game that didn’t have a trailer on its steam page, but perhaps the psychology for ‘coming soon’ pages is different. Or at least, the negative of not having a trailer while in pre-release is far less.
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A word of advice, I definately would not use wishlists as a metric for determining how many people will convert to sales. I can guarantee you will see more sales with a video than without. The psychology surrounding how people buy things with money is not comparable to the psychology of bookmarking a video game in a wishlist.
Certainly I would say get a trailer up as soon as possible, not just a trailer but one that does all the right stuff a trailer should do (there is talk here on unity learn about $0 budget marketing by indiegamegirl I believe that explains perfect marketing trailer and the 7 things required for one), otherwise you cant really tell if its the video making a lack of impact or the fact that the video itself is lacking in some regard.
EDIT: @frosted Here is the video for you :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkEQtMP2CuA
enjoy! Really good tips in there, follow them all!
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Okay this is just screaming for an AR release as well. If you add that before release you got something they might talk about If you could also play with your tablets or whatever. It would probably get featured on apple because all the ar content sucks right now.
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