Akabaka
Award-winning indie game dev // Sucker for Love // Chromatose //
chronic shitposter
@ChromatoseDev on the bird app
Wishlist: store.steampowered.com/app/1003900/CHROMATOSE/
www.akabaka.dev
Discord: discord.gg/ky4KuT5adR
- This all was a major consideration with Sucker for Love: Date to Die For. While it's tagged as a dating sim, we actually banned the phrase "dating sim" from our own marketing copy, for genre comfort reasons. We only had one datable girl, which is a negative aspect for players who expect a dating sim
- me sitting over here with two date-able characters in my dating sim 😬
- weird dating sims get a pass, wouldn't worry haha Players were fine w/ SFL: First Date only having two (kinda 3) datable characters, i think b/c word of mouth pitched it as a weird game lol "I promise its good" is common phrase i hear 😆
- Why Date to Die For sucked: I have Mommy issues and I won't admit it
- Date to Die For exists b/c of mommy issues lol I make games instead of going to therapy
- in our marketing. Esp. in the Steam copy and in the trailers. Also leaned on word of mouth and press interviews to emphasize the changes: more horror, still funny, and a visual novel- not a dating sim Luckily(?) we had a lot of time between the demo and full release to correct this mismatch
- If we hadn't have had the time to do that, I think we would have gotten a lot more negative reviews at launch 🤷♀️
- We saw this mismatch of expectations crop up when we first released the demo-- we noticed some players were disappointed that the 2nd game deviated from that dating sim structure the 1st game had, w/ only one main route and one main love interest. (Cont)
- And to a certain extent w/ the genre shift from the horror-comedy of First Date to the the heavier lean into horror of DTDF. For a lot of players, this is an unexpected but welcome change! But for others, the shift was not hitting. So we started being very deliberate in setting expectations (cont)
