Steam recently made some changes that are pushing game studios away from prologues. Instead, demos can have their own steam pages. Plus all hyperlinks will soon be banned.

I also noticed your game has been up on Steam since January 2022 and by the looks of it, you've done about zero marketing (steamdb.info). Hope that's on the horizon, it's a pretty darn important part of game development now!

Love the concept of your game. Reminds me of my favorite roman emperor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurelian

- Fellow game developer

Thank you! If you replace a prologue (as standalone game) with a demo, can you transfer the wishlists?

Marketing isn’t my strong point, if I ever had the money to make another the first person I’d hire would be marketing. My boss owns a PR agency and she said she can help in getting it out to journalists but that’s about it. I tried CPC and it came in at about $1/wishlist.

Are there any methods of marketing you recommend?

This is a good start … A press release may be a good next step.

Maybe announce a unique competition with a paid prize (if steam allows this).

Ask steam if you can swap out the store pages. I've never seen it done before though.

$1/WL is good (not great or bad), depending on how much your game is going to cost and the projected WL->Sale conversion.

I recommend you read through most of the articles and blog posts here: www.howtomarketagame.com

It's a good starting place.

In case anyone has the same problem, I asked and they can't. Luckily I only have couple of hundred wishlists on the prologue so I'll switch it out easy.

Send a playable, presentable demo to Splattercat.

Just remembered Age Of Empires. Awesome trailer.

Looks really cool & quite in-depth, awesome project. Are you a solo-developer or a game studio building this?

Just me, I work on it in my spare time. I’ve contracted out for some of it - some of the UI elements and models, and the soundtrack.

All in all I’ve probably spent $5000 max on it.

what kind of a spare time is that, i want one also, congrats bro.

Whoa. You need to write about how you've accomplished that. How long have you been working on it?

I started in uni during the start of Covid because I was playing Warband and I wanted to see if I could do something like the overworld in Unreal. Then I left it for a few months, got the idea of turning it into a proper strategy game and worked on an off until this year when I really started working on it. I probably put in 2-3 hours on weekdays after work and 6-7 on weekends. I think that I'm definitely more productive now because I have more experience, and I had literally no money at all at the start due to not having a job.

Wow! Can’t wait till the preview drops!

Very attractive！

Rad!!!

Wishlisted!

A feedback: the art and assets feel like they are AI generated but an interesting game idea, not sure if it makes sense as most the need to defend an empire that took me days to build greater than a procedurally generated one.

Good for you! Graphics and audio (music, sfx) are such a huge part of game dev that every time I attempt to get in, I walk away shortly afterwards

Yes, every time I see some impressive demo I realize that it is mostly the artwork.

This looks fantastic! Love the premise & well done for what looks like an incredible solo effort. I was tech lead on Ozymandias & have another minified 4X in the works at the mo & putting out feelers with publishers etc. Sounds like you plan to self publish this one but I’d love to chat & see if there’s any way I can help with your launch, whether just through advice or via introductions etc. You can reach me at biggles (at) bravobravo.games though I may end up finding a way to contact you directly first :-)

is there a game where you're the indigenous people and you are trying to stop an empire colonizing you ?

I wondered this myself and found some. I've played: When Rivers Were Trails, Thunderbird Strike, Dialect, Zulu Dawn, This Land Is My Land. There are a lot of options in boardgames (maybe more than with video games?), such as Burn the Fort.

thank you

Most paradox games enable this to some degree. It's pretty limited in terms of imagining what this could look like outside of the european conceptualization of civilization progress but it's there.

So, you thought that Attila wasn’t dark enough?

In all seriousness, there’s a constant nagging in TW community for more historical games. Pharaoh didn’t cut it for the wast majority of players. You could capitalize on that, the genre would benefit from that.

If this one does alright my next would be a crusades game with similar-ish mechanics, feudalism, the pop system from Victoria 2, multiple-settlement provinces and realtime movement.

They recently released Pharaoh: Dynasties which is pretty much a complete overhaul of the base Pharaoh game, and is pretty much what the game should have been.

They gave everyone half their money back, this free upgrade, new factions, bigger map and a ton of changes. Overall its been a big push from their side to keep the player base happy.

But yeah, there's obviously a big market for historical games, from city builders, combat, etc. and I'm here for them all.

A safe generalization about Dynasties is that “no one cares”. It has about 2.5k players now, same as Attila (one of the most controversial titles released 10 years ago).

People keep bringing up Dynasties, but it’s obvious CA doesn’t know how to make successful historical titles anymore. They dropped the ball even on 3k which had some kind of potential.

This looks great! It seems to solve the issue I always had with civilisation where the game becomes progressively easier as you advance ahead of the AI, leading to a late game which involves lots of management but little risk.