u/AliceTheGamedev

It's also a roguelite deckbuilder but the competition in that tag is a lot tougher lol

Sorry for the repetitive post after this one, I posted the meme when I thought I was giving up on doing an actual article, but then I ended up cutting much of the model/animation analysis and just summarized some basics. 🙈

Our artist Anna has been fleshing out all the stable buildings, paddocks and pastures, and making sure they all fit together even if you upgrade them at different times, here's a look behind the scenes at her work.

I also put together a tiktok and reel with a bit more info (it won't surprise anyone I hope: we don't use any generative AI on this!) :)

ICYMI, the game is Horses of Hoofprint Bay, there's a free demo on Steam and the full game is planned to release at the end of this year.

Game: Horses of Hoofprint Bay

Team: 2 people doing dev, plus me doing part time producing/publishing (i.e. total marketing time is about 0.5-1 day per week on average, though more during the intense times). The studio has no previous games and had no previous following, but I've been doing relevant community buildup and social media work focused on this niche (horse games) for years, which I'm of course leveraging for the project.

We've spent no money on acquisition, this is all "just" work, and benefiting from community building work done in the past.

WL Spikes:

1. Announcement, Reveal Trailer, Steam Page set live. Note here that we got quite a lot of organic views on our trailer. We were also included in Steam's Animal Fest that week, but had very low visibility in it.

2. Viral-ish post about our Horse Care mechanics on Social Media, most notably tiktok and twitter. Have tried similar formats before and after, but this one worked by far the best.

3. Decently successful post about yard management gameplay, see Tiktok

Side note here: my tiktok account is relatively new (started in July 2025) and most of the ~12k followers were gained after I started posting about this game. The concept and art just really resonates with people and has been very popular. I think I had somewhere around 2-4k followers before announcing the game, and those were gained mainly with two other successful 'check out this horse game' videos.

4. Demo release & Content Creator embargo lift. For our demo release, I contacted 150 content creators about 2 weeks in advanced, very focused on the horse game niche, i.e. people who had played very similar titles (The Ranch of Rivershine, Horse Tales: Emerald Valley Ranch, Star Stable Online, Sims 4 Horse Ranch, Wildshade etc etc). I sent advance access keys to about 50 people and I count at least 40 videos that people made (though ofc some people picked it up after the demo actually went live).

We got around 2k Wishlists every day for a week or so following the Demo release and were featured on Steam's "top demos" page and "trending free" for several days. About 35k people played the demo.

5. Steam Horse Fest started, we had good placement in it, I did an AMA on r/Games the same day.

6. Abigail Pinehaven (the biggest horse game youtuber, 278k subs, who we had offered a preview key to but who didn't get around to making a video sooner) made a video about the game, it has about 44k views now. The same day, we also exhibited the game at a local convention and made a decently successful tiktok/reel about our booth setup. We were also in the Women's Day Sale on Steam starting on that day, but honestly I can't imagine that contributed much because our placing was abysmal (you had to scroll waaaay back to the about 15th page of the 'demos' section in the sale to reach our game)

Since then I've mostly had to focus on other work and let things calm down. I made a few posts but none have hit big yet. Our core audience has very much been reached, but we haven't properly breached containment outside of the horse game niche.

We applied to numerous showcases but so far Horse Fest is the only one so far where we got really good placement and saw impact. We've been declined for lots of the privately organized showcases, though I keep applying to every opportunity.

In terms of social media, I think I'll just have to keep trying and hope that something ends up being good enough to breach containment again, but I haven't gotten around do just sitting down and preparing a few videos, that's very much on my to do list.

I hope that's interesting and/or helpful to someone!

I'll add (because I've gotten similar replies before) that if your response to this kind of post is "Well of course you got a lot of attention/WLs real quick, you already had the community/followers for this kind of game" please take a second to think about why I had that. That reach did not fall into my lap, it's the result of years of work. Building community for genres, themes, topics etc. is something you can start doing before you even have a game to market. And yes, the best time to start doing that was years ago like I did, but the second best time is now, to build reach for whatever it is you plan on doing in the future.