Devlog 3 - Pre launch week and Marketing

Hello, and welcome back to the Fern Sprout Studios Devlog!

First of all, ASTROHAULERS IS OUT NOW! We are so excited to share this project with our community, and if you have gotten a chance to play so far, we hope you have enjoyed it!

For this Devlog, we want to go over the process of launching the first version of the game, from a week before to the weekend after launch.

In terms of development, things could have gone a bit smoother. Our Game Development Lead, Cade, was a bit crunched, but he pulled off some important changes within the last week. This included:

• Added 4 new levels, then ended up removing 2 to stay consistent with game scope and time, as well as being able to have one song match up per level pair.
• Adjusted game balance for stations and levels.
• Added score decay, which means as a package exists, its score decreases after a certain amount of time passes.
• Adjustments to audio timing and mixing, and adding final versions of music
• Changed how levels are unlocked, by adding a hard version for each new level completed.
• Added more details to the menu, including enhancing the credits and implementing CODA prompts on certain actions within the menu.
• Added a new ship list in the top left of the screen, which shows queued stations and the option to enable or disable auto-load for each space ship acquired.
• Added colorblind mode to improve accessibility!
• Added highscore indicators to track high scores between levels.
• Refined game controls.
• Finalized game tutorial.
• LOTS of various bug fixes.

Rollout went relatively smoothly overall. We put together our itch.io page before, and polished it up to the best of our ability to make it match the aesthetic of our game. Once that was done, it was time to move forward with launch!

The game so far has been received super well. We have gotten adequate reach for the amount of effort and scale we put into this game, and we are happy with the recognition and support we have received so far.

Now, for the next part of the Devlog - Marketing for Astrohaulers!

Our promotion for Astrohaulers has been focused on the second half of development. Since our studio is still very young, about 4 months old, we focused our promotion on our team and brand in the beginning of our formation this winter. This was accomplished by promoting ourselves within our already established and adjacent career and social groups, and creating biographies of each of our core members and promoting ourselves as a group entity across LinkedIn and Instagram.

Once we had our general idea for Astrohaulers, we were ready to show off our progress throughout the development process. For a lot of us, this was our first game project, and so we wanted to present ourselves in a professional yet honest manner. We decided early on to designate social media platforms for specific purposes. Instagram would be designated primarily for community updates and engagement. LinkedIn would be used for major company announcements and updates. Youtube would be assigned to trailers, development spotlights, and showcases, with content quality taking precedence over quantity. And our website/blog would be designated for devlogs and showcases of our games and our team. 

From then on, we made a basic content plan rollout for the months prior, which included our first and second devlogs, and sharing images and videos from the game. We also pitched our group halfway through development for investment, which we promoted as well.

We created a separate rollout plan for launch and the week prior to launch. We wanted to create a variety of trailers and teasers to create hype for release, which were staggered throughout platforms throughout the week. For launch day, we finished our final game trailer and posted on all previous platforms mentioned. We also prepared to spread awareness across multiple personal and public discord servers, and many reddit threads. Here are some charts detailing the results from promo posts across platforms:

Now, for Post Mortem plans.

We plan on running ads on different platforms within the next week or two to see if we can expand our reach. We created our first TikTok account for the brand to run a test to see how far we could get our reach. On TikTok we are now at 214 likes and 2200 views, which is good.

Before we move along with that though, we need to push out some additional changes. We want to make Astrohaulers more accessible to our community, so we are planning a 1.1 build to include Mac and browser support. From then on we will launch 1.2, which will include a couple of smaller features we couldn’t fit in before launch. From then on we will launch ad promo and hopefully funnel in new members into our community.

In the next few weeks, we also plan on sharing detailed showcase and breakdown videos to share more in - depth the full creation process for different parts of our game.

In the meantime, play Astrohaulers if you haven’t yet, and thanks for checking in!