Hi guys,
I’ve spent the last two years pouring my heart and soul into writing and illustrating Nemo’s Fury, a digital choose your own adventure gamebook app created in Inky. (Techie stuff by my more clever co-creator.)
Please can you suggest how I best publicise it?
Here’s a little about the game which may help you answer my question.
Based on Jules Verne’s classic sci-fi adventure 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Nemo’s Fury is a gamebook app inspired by the choose your own adventure Fighting Fantasy game’s books such as Deathtrap Dungeon. It comes with hundreds of original illustrations, a unique combat system and about 90,000 words.
You can download for free by picking up your smartphone, opening the App Store and searching ‘Nemo’s Fury’. (Should you wish to complete and buy the game, it will only cost a one-off £2.99, but there’s no obligation to do so.)
I’ve moved your message to Project Announcements. That’s about what you can do here.
The usual best way to publicize IF is by entering a competition, but since you’ve already released as a commercial game on App Stores that most likely disqualifies you from many of the standard Comps that either require unpublished works, or non-commercial ones since most competitions require the full game to be available to voters and judges for free.
I see you’ve got it listed on IFDB which was my next suggestion:
My only feedback is your “Web Site” link from IFDB errors out and goes nowhere. I would suggest hosting the game on itch.io (they will host for free and you can set your price at £2.99) then use that as your “Web Site” link on IFDB. Then those of us on desktops can also purchase and play or at least peruse your site in the browser instead of needing to switch to an App Store. Tagging and categorizing your game intelligently on itch will get a lot of eyes on your game.
You said “If you wish to complete and buy the game” so it sounds like you have a free “demo” portion of the game. You may want to set it up on itch so the demo is browser playable which can be done on itch for free without downloading, then charge for the full game download in its entirety.
(I highly recommend you make the demo portion of your game browser playable since you’re selling the game. Being able to do a quick browser-play without an initial direct download removes a lot of hurdles to people taking a look at what you’ve got to offer.)
This is all great advice, thank you!
Itch doesn’t host mobile games. You can create an Itch page for a PC game and say “Also available on App Store and Google Play”, but it’s not a big target for mobile-only games.
Publicizing mobile games is kind of a hellscape these days, I’m afraid.
Understood. In the original post it was mentioned it was made with Inky which will release a playable HTML. I mistakenly assumed it was a browser game packaged into an app like most of us tend to make which could be incorrect.
I know itch has an app that will for the most part play browser games and the line might be a little blurred for me - itch is a desktop game store, not an App Store.