#Boyfriend dungeon guide how to#
#Boyfriend dungeon guide plus#

Victoria emails 300+ press with the link to the trailer & Kickstarter, PLUS reveal info about our previously secret 5th weapon, Glaive and the mysterious cat figure, Pocket.

We post the finalized trailer to YouTube in a private/secret link.

Victoria, our community manager, starts hinting at a big announcement on our social media channels and opens up a press list sign up.

We improve the timings, audio, content, and tiers as needed based on feedback (many of our wordings were confusing).

We also more shyly post it in our Discord, to get community input.

We put a trailer rough-draft on the Kickstarter page and send it to 50+ friends and mentors for their feedback/opinions (begging for harsh honesty).

We get our transformation sequence finalized (thanks Sunder!).

We decide we will launch the Kickstarter August 15th ( using this method).

We don’t have time to improve everything-so we pick and choose to finish what will actually be shown in the trailer, and the rest looks broken.

We revamp the combat to be 12-directional, so this takes most of July.

We continue improving the game itself.

We hire Sunder from Particle Beam to make a “magical transformation sequence” for Talwar-this becomes a key piece of marketing art.

We start to improve the parts of the game (art, animations, features, menus, content) that the trailer will use.

Rough-draft the Kickstarter page, come up with trailer idea.

So I’m going to try to write it all down in a sensible chronological looking list but really it’s a bit more chaotic than this.

#Boyfriend dungeon guide how to#

Sometimes people ask how to coordinate their PR/marketing campaigns. regularly appearing on panels, doing multiple talks at conventions like GDC, and sharing knowledge (++visibility and ++trust)Īnd that doesn’t even start on the actual work we put into the Kickstarter itself.we regularly accept tons of interview requests, whether written, podcast, or video (++visibility).we’ve been maintaining and growing a Kitfox newsletter for five years at 12+ gaming events (++visibility).we took that teaser and showed it at PAX South and PAX East alongside our other games (++visibility).we built an announcement teaser, Steam Coming Soon page, and website 11 months ago and emailed all 3 to 300+ press (++visibility).a previous successful Kickstarter with only minor complaints from backers (++trust).prior releases of pretty cool games, 10 on itch.io, 3 on Steam, one on GOG, PlayStation, Xbox, and Switch (++legit).five years of building our community via high-quality social media, especially Twitter (++visibility).What do I mean by “worked hard”? I mean, even BEFORE all this nonsense in the past month, our hard work included: But that isn’t the story of Boyfriend Dungeon. Maybe they had a good game idea, made that game, and enjoyed sudden fame and prosperity. I guess it’s possible SOME game out there enjoyed overnight success.

Plenty of people work for years and their game still doesn’t blow up-that’s certainly what happened for our previous games. Overnight successes don’t exist, from what I’ve seen. There’s usually years and years of work behind the scenes and then MAYBE your game blows up, but mostly not. Usually they don’t.Ĭontrary to popular belief, these do not actually 'sell themselves'. We didn’t know if any of our efforts would work.From the outside it looks like we just sat there. But most of that work is invisible to fans & peers.We worked hard, hoping a “blow up” might happen.I don’t want to waste your time bragging-it’s not like Boyfriend Dungeon is the next Minecraft or anything! Plenty of people have still never heard of the game! If you haven't, that's fine. We also have been covered by many major outlets, including GQ, Polygon, RPS, etc. We recently reached our Kickstarter goal of $50k in ~6 hours, and ended up with $272k CAD, or 415%. If you haven't heard of it, Boyfriend Dungeon is a dungeon-crawler about dating your weapons, which turn into beautiful people. In this crowded time, when there’s more beautiful and more innovative games than ever before, it’s hard to get attention, but we did it, this time. It seemed like it “blew up” when we launched our Kickstarter on August 15th and got funded in just 6 hours. Boyfriend Dungeon has gotten a lot of attention.