This has been an exciting (albeit kind of unproductive) week for Bloodmoon Survivors! As the title states, I finally got my first Streamer coverage! It was a small step in my quest for World wide success but a fun one! Thank you to pseudopstupid for being the first to check it out!

https://www.twitch.tv/pseudopstupid

This week we really haven't gotten much done in terms of development, so I think I'm going to avoid the usual template of covering each section of design.  Instead, I just want to discuss what I've done for promotional material work!

Trailer

The biggest time sink of this week has definitely been the trailer.  My god do I hate editing videos.  The previous week I paid an editor to compose the trailer, and the week prior to that I put together a video very quickly, but each time I haven't been totally satisfied with the results.  The biggest issue I've faced is actually that the game's trailer is very tiny inside of Steam, so small in fact that every frame actually requires a TON of zoom because the characters in my game are pretty small.  This week I decided I was going to redo the whole trailer to make something that actually looks good at smaller resolutions so that it properly showcases the game.  This took about 4 days but I finally got it.  The new trailer is uploaded, and I think I'm pretty happy with this one.  My only complaint is that I zoomed in so much, that some of the footage is a little blurry in the beginning.  This is something I know I'll have to fix eventually, but for now I'm leaving it as is.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3115310/Bloodmoon_Survivors/

Influencers

The next project I started working on was compiling a list of influencers to reach out too about playing my game! Funny enough this had nothing to do with pseudopstupid playing my game (I'll cover that in the next section) but I've started putting together a massive contact list of streamers and youtubers to reach out too and composed the contact email.  I'm glad I started this process early because it's been slow going.  Right now  I have about 150 that I want to contact, but there is a pretty brutal Daily restriction that youtube sets on how many contact emails you can get per day.  I think the limit is around 10. So accumulating all of the influencers I want will take a while. It will be slow going but at least I have a game plan!

Getting My Game Streamed

The last thing I wanted to cover was the streamer playing my game and how it happened!  This story actually started on reddit, where I posted clips of my game to the r/survivors-like channel.  The game was mostly ignored sadly :( but one redditor actually provided some helpful feedback and decided to check it out!

Fortunately for me, I responded and played his game in return, and he invited me to this interesting discord channel called Game Devs x Streamers. This channel seems to specialize in connecting streamers with developers and basically I was put into a pool of devs showcasing their games.  Streamers then chose the ones they liked, and played it internally inside of the channel.  I was lucky enough to get picked and approved so one week later I landed with a dedicated streaming timeslot.  

This was actually a great part of the week because it was interesting to follow the machinations that finally led me from being unknown to this community to getting coverage.  I'm really glad I chose to persue this lead, because I met some cool people, got some traction on the game and also just had fun checking out other people's work.  It was a great experience and I'll definitely be doing more of it in the weeks to come!

Next Week

Next week (or maybe this weekend) I'm planning on dropping a new patch for the demo of blood moon survivors.  This will fix some small bugs and open up some new accessibility options that people on my discord recommended I add.  I'm doing this now because I'm preparing to make the biggest changes on this game to date.  Now that I've had play testers and some coverage, I want to start tuning the demo to have more replayability. I have some ideas about how to accomplish this, but it will take a lot of testing and I want my game to be stable before I start doing any drastic experimentation :) 

Anyway, that's all I have for now, till next week!