A little over two weeks ago, I announced my roguelike deckbuilder Now You’re Cooking!. As promised, here’s my postmortem on the announce.

Table of Contents

Announce Timing

IMO there are two competing forces that dictate when you should announce a game.

The sooner you announce the sooner you can start accumulating wishlists, and taking advantage of relevant marketing opportunities such as online festivals. The later you announce, the more polished your announce materials will be which maximizes what you can get out of your first press beat.

I was originally hoping to announce about 6 months earlier but chose not to. I feel good about this choice. At the start of the project, every two weeks of work Carolyn and I put in, the project would look basically twice as good. It would have been crazy to cut a trailer while the polish was improving so rapidly.

I ultimately waited until the rate of progress leveled out, and then started work on the trailer with the goal of announcing before the Steam Cooking Festival. I think this was the right call, but as I’ll discuss in the next section, the timing was tighter than I would’ve liked.

Trailer

I hired a friend who happens to be a professional editor, Michael Boulter, to edit the trailer. I’m glad I did, we all know how to read the language of film but we don’t all speak it.

There are some things that I think I should have done differently to get better results: I should have started watching trailers that got press coverage earlier in the ideation phase, I should have made a more elaborate “trailer mode” so that Michael could capture the footage himself, I should have had a way to record replays as structured data and then render them offline at a high resolution and refresh rate, etc.

The biggest weakness of this trailer wasn’t procedural though. The way I see it a game trailer has two audiences:

1. People who might buy the game
2. The larger group of people who won’t buy the game, but might share the trailer with others

I think our trailer serves the first audience very well, but it doesn’t serve the second audience at all. The “for lease” screen tends to get some laughs, but not enough to have a chance at going viral.

I realized this was a problem early on but wasn’t sure what to do about it. In retrospect, I can think of multiple ways I could have made the trailer more entertaining for casual viewers. You’ll have to wait until my demo trailer to see them.

Announce Day

Announce day was a bit hectic, but maybe not for the reasons you’d expect.

I wanted to be a part of the Steam Cooking Festival, but Valve told me that I needed to publish the page a week in advance of the festival to give them a chance to check if it qualified.

I hadn’t planned for this much lead time, and was out of the country both to attend the ZSF retreat, attend Software You Can Love, and to run a workshop. I set aside a day to do all of my announce chores in one go on the questionably configured airbnb wifi.

This took me about 12 hours. It didn’t help that all the social media sites have apparently slopped up their login and post flows; I don’t really use social media and so I didn’t realize how bad it had gotten.

During that day I published the Steam page, published trailer on YouTube, made the press kit public, made one more last ditch effort to reach out to press, published my announcement to Discord, messaged my newsletter, reached out to personal connections, shared my announcement on various forums and social media, and followed up with everyone who got back to me.

Results

When drafting my plan for this game, I estimated how many wishlists I’d get in the first two weeks of the announce. I broke this estimate into a conservative guess, a median guess, and an optimistic guess.

The median was what I expected to hit. The conservative guess was the cutoff at which I’d need to downscope and release the game more quickly, the optimistic guess was the point at which I could consider cutting back on freelance work during development.

Here were my cutoffs:

1. Conservative: 100 WLs
2. Median: 200 WLs
3. Optimistic: 1k WLs

Two weeks in, Now You’re Cooking! accumulated…258 wishlists! I’m writing this a few days later, so it’s now at 317.

I hired Warlocs to localize the store page to 11 languages in addition to English. This is more affordable than most indie devs think and Warlocs were great to work with, here’s the wishlist breakdown by language:

Analysis

I’m very happy with these results. According to steamdb my first two weeks outperformed most of my comps, though I suspect that this is in part due to the fact that many indies don’t put enough effort into their announces. I also noticed that unlike my last game, social media seems to convert well, but more experimentation is needed to confirm.

I think to hit my optimistic target of 1k WLs I would have needed press coverage, or significant festival featuring. In the future I won’t leave that up to chance.

I think the optimal strategy is to have the trailer ready and then shop it around for a few months, ideally leaning on the aforementioned replay feature to keep it up to date.

There were multiple major events timed well with my launch that I missed out on because my trailer wasn’t ready in time for their submission deadlines. I knew this was likely to be a problem, but didn’t want to keep pushing back the announce while waiting for the next round of festivals to pop up.

I also didn’t get any press coverage. I had a few contacts I was planning on reaching out to, but realized too late that they had all been laid off or changed jobs, which left me with only cold outreach. If I had more lead time I would have realized this sooner and had more time to pivot.

(Apologies to my acquaintances at smaller outlets that I didn’t reach out to. I didn’t have it in me to send even more emails on the airbnb wifi, and so I chose to lean on the fact that most of you are on my mailing list. I will email you personally next time!)

There were a few other small missed opportunities, like the Portland Retro Games Expo. I was just too exhausted which is another reason to reserve more time for this phase. I did run a round table at Seattle SLICE, give a talk at AIE, and run the previously mentioned workshop all within a month of announce, so I was making an effort to put myself out there but none of those activities promoted the game directly.

What’s Next

I need to get to 6-7k wishlists before launch. Most of my comps didn’t get serious attention until they released their free demos, so that’s what I’m working towards next. Even in the Steam Cooking fest, I would have received much more prominent placement if I had a demo.

I’ve been running small playtests on and off from the start of development, the next step will be to run a larger private beta, a Steam Playtest Beta, and then a free public demo. There’s still a lot of work to do on the game before I can start the next testing phase, so that’s what I’m focusing on now!

If you haven’t already, consider wishlisting Now You’re Cooking! on Steam.