My my last post I wrote about making smaller games quickly. We have now started working on a game just like that.
Our first game
It's called SHOCKFACE, heavily inspired from The Night Of The Scissors in terms of gameplay. And the movies American Psycho and P2 in terms of story. The gameplay is largely hiding, manipulating environment, puzzle solving and lore discovery. The story is set in the 90s and is indeed very 90s slasher in terms of tropes and characters.
We're still working on getting ths Steam page live and in the meantime have a Discord server. Steam dashboard looked a lot more intimidating that it actually was and our Steam page has been delayed mainly because we didn't have a lot of screenshot variety (we've only finished the office level right now) and there's no trailer. But as I type this, I think there's really no reason to keep waiting.
Some screenshots of SHOCKFACE environment design
Leaving an online footprint
The first obvious step for us was to get active on Twitter/X and we've both gained some followers and some posts that took off (10k+ views) have helped get a lot of eyes on our game.
The other approach I've been trying is releasing some assets (and some code) that I make for this game for free. Currently they're on itch.io
Screenshots of the assets I've released for free
And some code on Github:
Why?
Reception to all my free stuff has been lukewarm, but then again, it's just low poly assets and little scripts. Regardless, this something I enjoy doing as I see it very much as an extension of my open source work. Just like I made UniVoice and it became helpful to others, I hope that these would too.
In addition to contributing to the gamedev community, every webpage that I create is a "digital real estate" that I can use it to promote our game. As soon as we have our Steam page live, we'll promote it through all these pages. The assets I have uploaded on itch.io will also go on Unity Asset Store (I assume Unity Asset Store will have more traffic)
By the time this game is out, I'd hope to have released at least a dozen free things.
This year is all about working on our own projects, so I'm excited to see about our body of work over the next 6-8 months.