Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

I've been working on a kind of strategy game called Fall of an Empire (https://fallofanempiregame.com), it's a bit like a mix between Crusader Kings, Total War, Mount and Blade type games (just the overworld, not the battles), but rather than expanding you're trying to prevent an empire from collapsing.

It's a ton of work, especially with the number of systems - you've got combat, resource management, settlement development, food managment, espionage, diplomacy etc - these all need to play together well. And then you've got to add in the storyline, graphics, marketing -but I think I'm making pretty good progress.

I'm still using Unreal Engine 4 because I started work on that version and I haven't needed to upgrade to 5 since it's been released. I've got a free prologue that I'm releasing on October 1, so now until then is a lot of polishing to make it work well.

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?

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.