I ran some Reddit ads last week to get the word out about Travelling At Night. It may seem odd to be doing it so early in the dev cycle - we're still in pre-production! - but we take the Lord of Light approach to marketing: "An army, great in space, may offer opposition in a brief span of time. One man, brief in space, must spread his opposition across a period of many years if he is to have a chance of succeeding."
Surprisingly, these were our best performing Reddit ads ever. Travelling gained 2,500 wishlists in one week with a cost of just over $500, and a blinding CTR of 1-5% (generally, a Click-Through Rate of ~1% is considered a good result). A lot of this was because I followed ParsleyMan's extremely useful advice on r/gamedev about his ad setup, so thank you to him! But the ads also made a splash for other reasons, good and frightening. Here's a sampling of insights gleaned.
Sunless Skies fans were most interested when we microtargeted AK's Failbetter creds ("From the creator of..."). Fallen London fans were most interested when we ran more general campaigns ("Twelve years ago you were hollowed out by the Worms from under the world..."). This is weird because AK had very little to do with Sunless Skies: he came up with the original concept but didn't write any of it, as he'd left so he could work on Cultist Simulator by that point. Perhaps it's just that Skies is the most recent PC entry in the FL universe, so fans are hungriest?
Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader fans were notably keen, making up nearly 30% of all clicks from our general campaign. Owlcat Games make great narrative-driven CRPGs, so this makes sense, and it's encouraging that the communities of bigger and shinier CRPGs are already taking an interest in Travelling.
Our most successful ad was this one:
It had a high 5% CTR from all who saw it, and a totally banonkers 10% CTR from members of r/cultistsimulator. Who knew: Secret Histories fans are nuts for the lores. I think r/cultistsimulator responded so well because there's less awareness of Travelling in the non-official subreddit where we rarely cross-post, but the same level of excitement at being spoken to in the specific language of the Secret Histories.
Our least successful ad was this one:
It was part of our general campaign, had the least clear direction for why Reddit should care (Is it a CRPG? Is it even a game? Wat) and was shown to the widest range of people. It still had 1% CTR, which is great. But it seems people are not intrinsically fascinated by the phrase 'occult carnival' like I am.
Disco Elysium fans are very interested. This is wonderful because anyone who enjoyed Disco Elysium has a high chance of enjoying Travelling At Night. But I actually turned the DE-specific ads off early because they were generating so many organic posts in the subreddit - people sharing screenshots and discussing what this game was - that I got a bit scared. Some were just sharing there was another Disco-like coming up to join others like Rue Valley or Summer Eternal's unannounced project. Some were wondering what this interloper game was and if it was a rip-off. (Thankfully, lots of DE fans know Weather Factory and said 'Weather Factory don't just copy stuff' and 'actually, AK has the chops'. Thank you extremely much to them.)
However, some DE fans did not like me leaning * too much * into their game. I thought the Pysche-skill 'Inland Empire' (itself a reference to David Lynch's film of the same name) would be a fun way to connect Disco's worldbuilding with Travelling's. So I used in-game Disco formatting and ran copy that started: "INLAND EMPIRE [Medium: Success] - Europe, 1948: myth-scarred ruins, night-sky abysses...". Most people who saw this understood what I was going for and responded positively. But some people saw it and thought we were plagiarising actual content from Disco Elysium and sticking it wholesale into our game. For the avoidance of doubt, we are not. But lesson learned: let people know Disco is an influence and we love it; don't go into its house and raid the fridge. Sorry, DE fans!
Similarly, our current UI seems to cause concern. We’re explicitly using Disco‘s vertical UI as our starting point because it’s a great innovation which makes the reading process more enjoyable for text-heavy narrative games. I’m not worried about it being too similar in the final game, because I know there’ll be a bunch of iteration before we actually launch (see below for how BOOK OF HOURS‘ UI changed over time). Disco, like all art, built on existing work – we’re also using the Pixel Crushers’ Dialogue System middleware which they used to build their Feld Playback Experiment UI, and we’re both arguably building on previous games like Shadowrun Returns/Dragonfall/Hong Kong which (we think!) were the first CRPGs to use a vertical sidebar for their dialogue. But now I know that if people love something and see something else that looks a bit too much like it, they get antsy. Noted.
Earliest version, featuring a full-screen port-hole effect
Updated version: simplified buttons, first iteration of card trays
Final launch version
The more informed people became, the more positive they were. If you're aware of the game dev process, you see this game and think 'it's clearly in the early stages, but one to watch'. If you don't, you think: 'lmao'. If you've heard of Weather Factory, you think 'hey, they do good writing, I'm theoretically up for this'. If you don't, you think 'this looks awfully familiar - are they ripping off something I love?'. This is definitely worth thinking about when we move into more general ads later down the line: I live in fear of r/gaming's 45 million subscribers responding to ads I run.
Finally and most importantly: word of mouth eats everything for breakfast. These ads did great, even though we have little to work with so early on in development. But even when things got a bit hairy like those organic DE posts, people talking about Travelling At Night had a huge impact on wishlists overall. So if you're jazzed about it - and I hope you are! - please tell people about it for us. That's the closest we can get to a Roger Zelazny army, except rather than making war we will make dialogue-driven occult choices, and that sounds good to me.