u/Italians_are_Bread

i've been told it looks cozy for a dungeon lol. I post more on my bluesky

I'm making a game called Penguin's Progress that is basically a feudalistic Club Penguin mmo roguelike. Each time you log on you start as a peasant and struggle for power against other players to rise from peasant -> knight -> lord -> monarch.

It's unconventional in a couple of ways

1. It's an html5 game, to be hosted on penguinsprogress.com, not steam which means my call to action right now is not wishlists but rather discord joins. I miss out on the marketing push of steam, but gain extremely low friction to go from hearing about the game to playing. I will have just one click to start playing as guest with no downloads/registration or anything so inviting a friend to play will be an easy sell.

2. All the gameplay/rising through ranks/wealth is emergent from player interactions. All money enters the economy through peasants and all payments and promotions are negotiated socially so there aren't xp progress bars or anything. I have not seen a game do this so it is not straight forward to communicate but I think is a pretty key part of the game since it will introduce politics/alliances/betrayal as a core gameplay mechanic.

3. There is not a granular genre to target for marketing since it doesn't cleanly fit into a genre I know of. It is a roguelike and mmo but these are both quite broad.

So far I've just been posting on bluesky for about a month and went from 0-62 followers and about 8 strangers joined the discord. Which are not crazy numbers and for an mmo you really need a strong player base for it to not be dead on arrival.

So any suggestions on how to sell the vision/market/etc and what framing would make you curious to try a game like this.

These are the character models for my club penguin feudalism game. I sculpt all the models in blender and render them as sprites to use in game. I even animate the high poly sculpts and it works out fine, since only renders of the models are used in game