A little experiment...

It's something I've been meaning to do when this visual novel is released, but I got burned out. Whoops.

A small experimental idea I had ever since the start of making Catching Butterflies! is to add a mini 'press release' folder alongside the regular game files you download in the itch.io section. The goal of this folder is to make it easier for content creators to make content for standalone visual novels/ games right from the itch.io page. This is because I don't have much of a following as a newbie dev, and visual novels are a niche, making some sort of connection and partnership with content creators is going to be important from here on out. 

So far, it mostly contains transparent pngs and random art assets to create cover art (because attractive cover art is clickable). In the future, I might make this more extensive but still easy to parse through, including stuff like behind-the-scenes commentary or extra information about the next VN I'm working on. 

There are some risks for doing this. Providing images online the way I did means that it's a bit easier for people to steal my assets and use them for AI training or put it on a shirt or something. But they can do it with my game anyway (it's just slightly more tedious) so I don't have that much to lose. 

I don't know how effective this will be, but I'm going to try! Feel free to comment if you have any other interesting promotion ideas (that I can steal- I mean get inspiration from)!