Quarrel Hill Marketing Blog

Back in 2016 I participated in a game jam. It was hosted by a relatively unknown game engine called Stencyl, which I still use for creating games. The jam theme was "spooky" because it happened close to Halloween holidays. I was very happy with the outcome and it was actually my first fully finished game.

This year I am nearing to finish and launch a game that has the same mechanics as the old jam game.

It is called Quarrel Hill and it should come to Steam this Summer.

I realized that before I enjoyed writing the dev blogs which I did on Stencyl forum sites for all my games - even 5 of them. Since I did not have a lot of time during the development of this current game, I skipped the dev log completely.

Since better amount of development is already finished, I would like to share my marketing attempts and experiences here.

Let's start with itch.io

I uploaded a free HTML version of the game with 100/500 levels ready to play, including PvP mode. I received only 15 views and 9 plays.

I realized I did not put up screenshots, trailer etc. to itch.io page so I quickly did it but it did not do anything to improve visibility. I read on Reddit that itch.io practically does not generate audience on itself opposed to what Steam does. Indeed, even my earlier published games got only like 100 of plays even though here they are for free and without any ads available as HTML. It seems for itch.io you would need to drive traffic from eg. Twitter or elsewhere.