marketing for weird little dudes.

pitching a fit.

In the past few months I've had maybe a dozen conversations with people that have asked me politely what I'm currently working on. And each time, I really struggle to string a description together. Today I want to try and remedy that with a few different ways I see folks describe their games.

mashed po-titles.

Quite often game developers have a shorthand of X meets Y (where X and Y are popular games) that they can mash together to provide a description of what it is that their game is meant to evoke. So let's give that a go:

...hm. Not really a cohesive set of games. Metagame, platformer, factory, dungeon crawler, god game, simulator. There are bits and pieces of each of those in WLDIG, but certainly not enough that someone playing it would point and say 'oh yeah, that's like X'. Certainly not yet, anyway, and possibly not ever[2]. So, I can't really encapsulate it with a game name mash. Next up: genres.

platformanteau.

I fell like telling someone what kind of game you're making by blending genres together is less likely to really spike an interest. If I tell someone that my game is aiming to blend Satisfactory with Spelunky, if they are a fan of either of those games then ding ding we have a winner. But if they have never played them, a more broad category blend gives them some idea of whether they might like it. Survival horror, minigame RPG, and the ever-present (but apparently waning?) rogue-like deckbuilder are all great examples of blends that can pique the interest of anyone who has an interest in them, where an individual title-like might not.

So what might fit WLDIG?

What do any of these words even mean?! I think I'm reaching semantic satiation, I genuinely don't know how marketers do it. That first one might be something, but honestly if I were a player I'd have no idea what any of those meant. I guess the problem with this kind of descriptor is that if the genre blend isn't itself recognisable from a trend, it doesn't provide much in the way of info to the listener. Woof, another miss.

tell 'em.

I don't think I can give anything particularly snappy with the above method. So maybe I should work on a couple of sentences that describe things. Something like:

"As a grungy wizard apprentice and a new owner of your very own tower, you must pay back your mana loan to the Wizard Bank by controlling time and space for little guys in pocket dimensions. Automation meets platforming meets dungeon exploration in this multidimensional meta-game."

Not a terrible start. But with that, I should really go and actually work on making this word soup a reality.

  1. Where my Norns at? ↩︎

  2. Especially if I keep writing blog posts instead of code. ↩︎