We dig adorable slime farming sequel Slime Rancher 2, which co-creator Nick Popovich already revealed sold 300,000 units just after its Sept. Features include a community loyalty currency, social amplification, trading card systems, and matchmaking and playtesting systems. In addition to that, they’re working with a number of game, music, and Web3 companies - including the My Hero Academia physical CCG, Universal Music Group, and Limit Break - to help run their Discords and community outreach.Īnd they’re just launching Harbor.gg, which distils all of their learnings around Discord into a ‘no code’ system to be used by community managers. The game that Windwalk ‘workshopped’ is now signed with a publisher. Essentially: “Build a community early, to make sure you are making a game that has an audience.” Then closer to launch, you can build a game-specific Discord community, and work with marketing to help plan your launch. And we thought that was early!īut Windwalk’s approach was to make a general-interest Discord, and then workshop a game around it. It was showing concept art for feedback on Twitter even before its Kickstarter launched, a couple of years before its successful Steam launch. What’s interesting about this approach is that the feedback is even one step before games like The Wandering Village. The goal? To gather potential players on a Discord server & ask them what type of co-op roguelites they wanted to play :Īs Colin told me, “if we can talk to these users and find out the stuff that’s important to them”, then Windwalk is able to ask them about how they play co-op titles and exactly what they’re looking for: “Nothing beats being able to talk to” hardcore fans - “there’s no artificiality to it.” They created an ‘influencer’ called Spritecicle, they gave away keys to popular roguelite games like Griftlands on IMGUR and Reddit, and they started evangelizing the roguelite genre. So when it came to their next project, they did something I haven’t seen anyone do. 95% of studios I have talked to are flabbergasted by this, and want to know how we did it.” But note some of the positives Windwalk mentioned when they postmortem-ed the game: “We built a healthy, thriving Discord community of over 30,000 members with a $0 budget. Though it had some hardcore fans, the game peaked at about 900 CCU on Steam. This was Enemy On Board (above), which they wrote a public post about having to move on from in early 2021. So how did Windwalk craft a solution for this? They’ve already had learnings from killing a social deception game that didn’t work out. This struck a chord with us because, it’s true - how many times have you seen a big trailer announcement push a bunch of users onto a game’s Discord, but then give them nothing - or almost nothing - to do when they get there ? They’re a VC-funded company that is both making their own online games, but also selling tech and expertise around growing community, especially via Discord. So we had a chance to talk to Colin Feo & Richard Warren at Windwalk Games recently.
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