How Slay the Princess earned 25,000 wishlists in two weeks
Note: This post is intended to be read as a case study for this particular game, as well as a source of general strategies for leveraging a pre-existing audience. It is not a “how to” guide.
This article was originally published on August 8th , and data contained within is only accurate for that time-frame.
Hello hello! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m one of the two developers at Black Tabby Games, an indie game studio I run with my wife Abby Howard. You might know us from our first game, Scarlet Hollow (currently in early access) or you might know us from our recently announced second game–and the subject of this article–Slay the Princess.
For those of you who don’t know our work, a bit of background. I think this section is pretty important for getting a full picture of our launch strategy, but if you’d rather just hear about Slay the Princess in a vacuum, go ahead and scroll to the next header! Anyways-
Scarlet Hollow is an episodic horror visual novel that’s probably most accurately been described as “Twin Peaks meets Gravity Falls and Life is Strange”. We started development on the seven-episode game in March of 2020 and launched the first of those chapters for free in late September of the same year, before driving that launch into a successful Kickstarter the following month. And, while we initially planned to release the rest of our episodes as DLC for that free-to-play page on Steam, we ultimately decided we were better off pivoting to an Early Access model both for the sake of simplicity as well as to better optimize our visibility during sale events on Steam. And thankfully, that pivot’s paid off — Scarlet Hollow’s been doing quite well for itself!
As of the time of this writing, the first three episodes are released, with the fourth slated for this fall. Which undoubtedly begs the question: why are you working on a second game at the same time? To answer that question, it’s probably important to talk about what work on Scarlet Hollow looks like.
As mentioned earlier, there are two of us working full time on our games:
- There’s Abby, who provides all of the (mountains of) art and co-writes the story.
- And me: I co-write the story, code and balance the game, manage our community, and do the marketing and business side of the studio.
We also contract out some of the things we can’t do to a small but invaluable group of amazing people:
- Brandon Boone, our composer.
- Phil Michalski, our sound designer.
- Lucia Retamales, our cutscene animator.
For a given episode, our process has looked something like this:
- Abby and I chart out all of the scenes and major story beats together.
- She writes the first draft of the script, while I focus on marketing and community. We like to make sure that only one of us is actively working on the script at any given time to limit confusion. (And it would be madness for two people to simultaneously edit the same Celtx document.)
- When the script is done, I do a round of edits, re-writes, and additions while putting it into the engine. While I do this, Abby and I work on a list of all of the art assets we need for each scene, and she gets to work on that.
- We send Brandon, Phil, and Lucia the assets and direction they need to provide their contributions.
- We finish, test, and release an episode — I do a bunch of bug fixes once it’s live, and we usually put out a large content patch adding in content we had to cut before release a month or two later.
- Wash, rinse, repeat.
The biggest inefficiency in this process felt like my part of step 2– namely, there was a two to three month period in development where I was mostly doing marketing, and, frankly, a lot of those marketing efforts felt like an inefficient use of my time. Those efforts included:
- Pitching the press, which as a lot of developers know is an uphill struggle, especially for narrative indie games in early access. We’ve had some big successes on the press front, but this was a big time sink that amounted to little payoff.
- Pitching influencers, which was usually more successful than pitching the press, but still had a relatively weak effect on sales and traction for Scarlet Hollow.
- Coming up with and running community competitions — probably one of the best returns on my marketing time.
- Experimenting extensively with social media, which on top of being challenging, was a little soul sucking! It’s really hard to get TikTok to work for visual novels.
- Talking to publishers, which, as much as I love the folks we’ve talked to, can be a drain both time-wise and emotionally, especially since we care a lot about retaining our independence as a studio.
A lot of those activities were driven by the fact that, while Scarlet Hollow has treated us insanely well, and has had an incredibly long tail, there’s always the lingering question of what happens if that tail evaporates before we finish the game? So far, sales have been quite steady and the game has defied a lot of industry standard expectations, but it’s always a tight situation to be in for artists!
So a couple of months into this workflow post-Episode 3, we started to wonder if it would be a better use of my time to just make a second game.
So we did.
At its core, Slay the Princess was intentionally designed to slip seamlessly into Scarlet Hollow’s workflow, both in terms of effectively utilizing my time while minimizing the demands it would make of Abby’s.
- The premise relies on a single character (at least in terms of physical representation) in a single location, minimizing the sheer quantity of art we need without impacting the quality of that art.
- We took the art style Abby developed for Scarlet Hollow and stripped it down to its bare essentials. Every art asset in Slay the Princess is done in pencil instead of inks, which cuts down on time considerably, and the game is monotone, so coloring isn’t a concern either. On top of this, we decided to scale down the size of the paper used for the project. (Scarlet Hollow is drawn on 18"x24" paper, while Slay the Princess is drawn of 11"x17" paper.)
- The smaller scope of the project means I’m able to write the game very quickly and in parallel to Abby’s first-draft work on Scarlet Hollow. This also had the added effect of making Slay the Princess pretty easy to talk about! While Scarlet Hollow is incredibly complex, the core premise of Slay the Princess is something we can get across in just a single sentence.
In terms of our time commitment, I’d say this strategy has, at least so far, wound up being a resounding success. This might be horrifying to hear, but I finished my work on the Slay the Princess launch and demo (~1.5 hours of gameplay) in a little under three weeks, and it took Abby an incomprehensibly short 6 days to put together the two-hundred illustrations used in the demo!
Pushing ourselves to get the Slay the Princess demo out also had the unintended effect of being a sort of training montage — development on Scarlet Hollow has sped up significantly from the skills and practice we gained through this exercise.
All of this is to say that for folks who might have been worried about us developing a second game in parallel to Scarlet Hollow — fear not! We take our responsibilities as early access developers extremely seriously. Slay the Princess was designed to have a minimal impact on Scarlet Hollow’s development cycle, and at least from our test-run with the demo, that’s proven to be the case.
Anyways, with that background out of the way, it’s time for the main event:
How did a visual novel get 25,000 wishlists in two weeks?
I’ll preface this section by saying something a little disappointing: there wasn’t a single magic bullet that led to Slay the Princess getting this level of traction. Rather, that traction is the culmination of a lot of things going right, and it’s coming off the back of years of dedicated audience building.
The overall strategy was pretty simple: we’d announce the page and drop the trailer on the same day, along with a limited access early build of the demo we sent along to a select number of press and influencers. I’d like to give a huge shoutout to Vicarious PR, who we worked with on this launch and who contributed a lot to crafting this strategy. And, while giving shout-outs, I’d love to give a couple more to our voice actors, Jonny Sims and Nichole Goodnight, both of whose talents have gone a long way towards people getting invested in Slay the Princess.
In terms of timing, we also worked to pick a week that was relatively free of major industry announcements, hoping we’d be able to dominate at least a day’s cycle on social media. This meant we specifically avoided trying to be a part of Summer Game Fest, since we wanted Slay the Princess’ announcement to be the thing people were talking about that day.
We settled on July 25th for our announcement date, which also happened to give us a week of lead-up before Slay the Princess got to be a part of Tiny Teams. That lead-up, by extension, led to us settling on a week-long exclusivity period for our demo before releasing it to the general public.
Some of our biggest assets going into the July 25th launch were:
- Our mailing list, which we only tap a couple times a year for big announcements — 8,300 recipients.
- The Scarlet Hollow community — in particular, our Discord server (1,500 members at the time of the STP announcement, with a lot of activity!)
- Scarlet Hollow’s Steam page (~3,300 followers)
- Abby’s twitter presence (that good good blue checkmark and just shy of 40k followers.)
- Relationships we’ve built with a select few influencers through our work with Scarlet Hollow.
- A sick trailer, and a sick demo (imo)
- Eye-catching capsule images on Steam.
We were lucky enough that both Gab Smolders and Alpha Beta Gamer were interested in recording full playthroughs before the embargo we set for the trailer reveal, so on that day we:
- Had a significant pre-pitch out to media and streamers (thank you so much again to Vicarious PR for this — it’s been amazing to not have to write these emails myself.)
- Two big videos that went live minutes after our announcement.
- An effective email blast (60% open rate! 9% CTR!)
- Discord and Twitter communities ready to amplify our announcement.
We were able to get 1,000 wishlists on the first day Scarlet Hollow’s paid Steam page launched, and 2,500 in its first week. Given our track record with that game and the community growth we’d seen in the year and a half since that page launch, we were hoping to double those numbers.
We wound up with just over 2,600 wishlists on the first day, and a little under 14,000 by the end of the first week.
So what went right?
The trailer is probably the easiest thing to point to:
It wound up doing a little over 4 times better than Scarlet Hollow’s launch trailer did — I think this is partially attributed to the voice acting really selling it, as well as to the community and interest we’d slowly built up over the course of the past couple of years. On top of the traction on Twitter, it’s gotten another 28k or so on YouTube.
On top of providing early access to the demo for a limited number of streamers, we also provided early access to our patrons, and were able to grow our Patreon by about 25% over the course of the week. This limited access also contributed a fair bit to the hype of the launch, and led to a couple of big YouTubers requesting keys, including ManlyBadassHero, whose playthrough injected our announcement week with a second wind of momentum, and which in turn led to even more coverage from streamers and YouTubers.
We released the demo the following the Monday and once again outperformed our expectations. To date, ~13,000 people have downloaded that, ~60% of those folks (8,000 players) have played it, and the median player in that group has played for 45 minutes, enough time to uncover at least half of the demo’s endings.
Something that we try to do with all of our games is make efficient use out of our menus in terms of helping our players get plugged into the community. In Scarlet Hollow Episode 1, for instance, we prompt players at the end of the playthrough to wishlist the full game on Steam, and for all of our games, we give players an opportunity to join our Discord server at the end of the playthrough.
With the Slay the Princess demo, we also took the opportunity to let players know about Scarlet Hollow. Like our Discord calls to action, we put this one at the end of the demo, so players ideally see it just when they’re craving more content.
This cross-promotion has wound up being incredibly successful with the Slay the Princess demo–Scarlet Hollow’s sales and wishlist numbers each increased by a factor of 5x over their baseline pre-announcement, with little signs of slowing down at the time of this writing. Similarly, our Discord server has grown by another 50% since the Slay the Princess announcement, jumping from 1,500 to nearly 2,300 members.
Demos for narrative games can be tricky to nail down, but I think it can be helpful if you approach them with your hooks in mind, especially in terms of your ending. You have to assume that your demo is your only chance to get a player interested in your full game, and having a strong cliffhanger and an active community are good ways to capture that interest and leave your players excited for more.
That’s all I’ve got for you for now! If you’re interested in hearing more about our development process, be sure to follow us on twitter (@blacktabbygames)
