Firstly, you need to make lots of dope gifs from that trailer, especially the last shot! You've got an aesthetically pleasing game, so you need to use that to your advantage to draw interest.
Thanks! And oh yeah, plenty of gifs in the bag already.
Still trying to find the right balance between smoothness and file size for this one. The shame of it is that Kickstarter's image hosting is such garbage that it really messes up a lot of them, and it often takes a ton of tweaking to get them to look 'acceptable' even after you have a good gif.
OK, so, with Beacon and our debut reveal trailer, we made sure we as prepared as possible beforehand.
We had all of our infrastructure setup previously (website/social media/soundcloud/tumblr/etc) and then also made sure we had a presskit.
A lot of that's together, think I'm gonna skip the Tumblr, still polishing off the last bit of a presskit.
We then sent out individually personalized emails to each editor of every site we wanted to get coverage on....sooo a lot of emails. It's best to try and target the person who would most readily cover your game if you can. Focus on what makes your game unique, don't try to refer to other games too much when describing stuff, even if its a source of inspiration. You want to highlight what makes it fresh.
And this is the part that I'm dreading.
First of all, because I'm an iterative person, so I know that by the time I get to the third email, I'll look back at the first and be like, "Damn, how'd I write that piece of shit?"
Second, the game itself doesn't fit all that well into a genre, or even an explanation of reasonable length. It's most heavily inspired by the Ogre Battle games, which 1) can't even agree on a genre between themselves on their Wikipedia pages, and 2) haven't been around in ~20 years. Then you throw the JRPG layer on top of that, and you have something like 'RTS-meets-SRPG-meets-JRPG'. Basically, there isn't really concise, accurate terminology for the game, which is important in both PR and Kickstarters.
Third, it's niche, so I'm sure a lot of places won't cover it regardless, which pretty much just means that I've wasted my time. 'Niche' is good in a lot of contexts for indie games, but pixel art JRPGs? Not so much. I've preemptively braced myself for inaccurate RPGMaker comments.
So yeah, good advice, but thinking about doing it sends me into a catatonic state.
I have been hedging my bets a bit by getting in touch with Kickstarters whose fans I know exist within that niche I'm targeting, so hopefully some shout outs to the right audiences will counterbalance a lot of the hurdles I have with more standard PR.
We were obviously quite lucky that we had the timing of GDC to help with coverage, meaning we got some initial announcement news and then early previews from press at the events.
This would be a good week to announce though, GDC is over, PAX East isn't until next week, so it's likely you'll be able to draw some attention to your game!
I guess you could say that I've 'announced', but I haven't done any actual PR this week for two reasons. Number 1, Dark Souls 3 sucking all the air out of the room. Number 2, if I do get coverage right now, it just makes it all the less likely for me to get coverage next week when the Kickstarter is actually live. I might get a few mentions now, but it's really doubtful that any outlet would throw two articles my way in less than a week, and I'd much rather have the articles be able to direct straight to a live Kickstarter rather than my Twitter/website.
Hopefully by early next week people will be coming out of DS3 hypnosis and I'll be able to squeeze in a few days before the PAX deluge so that the beginning of my KS funding curve doesn't get too heavily affected.
