From Dice of Kalma

Dice of Kalma — роглайт-декбилдер, в котором предстоит одолеть Кальму, мрачного стража Преисподней, в его настольной игре про бросание костей. Собирайте колоды из мощных черепов, находите безумнейшие синергии и грамотно распоряжайтесь удачей, чтобы одержать победу.

Dice of Kalma es un roguelike de construcción de mazos en el que juegas dados contra Kalma, el sombrío guardián del Inframundo. Construye un mazo de calaveras poderosas, encuentra sinergias y usa los dados a tu favor para escapar de vuelta al mundo de los vivos.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3885520/Dice_of_Kalma/

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3885520/Dice_of_Kalma/

Dice of Kalma is an unholy deckbuilding roguelike game where every roll matters. Build devastating skull combos, play poker-style dice hands, and challenge the guardian of the Underworld. How far can you push your luck before Kalma claims your soul?

Hello everyone!

I’m one of the Devs of Dice of Kalma and I wanted to share how I managed to gather 2000 streamer emails by myself. First of all, I’m sorry but I can’t share those emails here for legal reasons. Don’t want to take any risks at this point. My point of this post is that after grinding really hard with this task I found multiple ways that we’re much quicker & efficient than the ways that we use gather influencer emails in the beginning. Hopefully these Tips and Tricks help you as well!

Background (if you don’t like storytimes you can skip this part ): During our 2-year game dev journey I have noticed multiple reddit posts how other devs got their games covered by influencers. BenBonk made an awesome video how he contacted 200 influencers (A BIG recommendation for this video: https://youtu.be/ebWYi7ko_u0?t=37 )  and since we really didn’t have much on our marketing budget, this seemed a really good way to gain some traction.

After first 200 emails I can say that it wasn’t a great success, but it clearly did something. I soon realized that it’s also a numbers game – The more influencers I contact, the better the odds are that someone will cover our game. We also tried writing very customized emails to about 30-50 influencers who we though were ultimately the best match for us. This took a lot of time, and we didn’t receive any replies nor none of these streamers covered our game in anyway. So, I kept grinding and here are the  best two strategies so far:

Strategy 1:

Ultimately my best tools were SullyGnome (https://sullygnome.com/) and Twitch. Here is the quickest and the most efficiest way:

1. You use search tool on SullyGnome to find all channels that streamed games that are a good match with out game. This because if you offer Tekken for a Horse Simulator Streamers, they’re most probably not gonna cover it.

2. You’ll get a big list of streamers, so now you copy streamers name and paste it to Twitch. The trick here is to use the mobile version and just replace the ‘STREAMER* part with streamers name so https://m.twitch.tv/*STREAMER*. This because mobile version is much lighter and has no ads that pop up straight away on your face**. It also shows you the “user bio” right away.** This the first place where streamers often put their emails.

If this bio doesn’t have an email address, the next step is to click users About section. It’s very common that streamers have their email here. For me about 90% of the time I was able to find the email just from the bio or from this about section.

3. If a streamer didn’t have an email on Twich, there’s still a couple of quick ways to find it. Next to their bio there’s often links to their X, Instagram or YouTube. Very often if I didn’t find email address from their Twitch, it was in their bio on X or Instagram! So, try those first!

The last option is YouTube. Some streamers have added their emails on YouTube description which is still very quick to find. If not, there is a chance that you can view their email address, but you need to do a bot verification – which is slow and after about 10-20 attempts your daily limit is full. I would recommend going this far only if the streamer is one of your the top priorities – otherwise, like I said it’s a numbers game so go back to your list and try your luck with another streamer.

4. Obviously you want to copy paste Streamers name & email to a some sort of spreatsheet. SullyGnome also give you a csv. version of your search which might make things quicker. I personally just made a sheet with name, email, language (if not English)

5. (Optional): I would highly recommend that if your game is localized, ask your translators to translate your email as well. In SullyGnome you can search streamers based on their language. We got much better results when approaching streamers in their native language, so big recommendation for this!

 Strategy 1 TLDR

1. Use Search Tool on SullyGnome to find Streamers that have played similar games than yours
2. Copy paste streamers account name on https://m.twitch.tv/*STREAMER NAME* (Mobile version)
3. Check Bio under the username -> check “About” section -> Check links X & Insta -> Check Youtube Description
4. Copy paste to a spreadsheet

Strategy 2.

1. Find a streamer on X/Twitter that has streamed similar games than your game
2. There’s a “You might like” box on the right side of the feed. Click: Show More

3. Now you have a list of “Similar To” and “Suggested for you” Infront of you. You can quickly notice that many accounts you see here have their email in their bio as well.
4. When you have copy pasted all the accounts and emails, just click one of the accounts in this list and open of “Similar To” and “Suggested for you” lists again. It often has different accounts than the first one.
5. It’s easy to just copy paste accounts and emails but I would strongly recommend checking just briefly every account. In case of the account is inactive etc

Strategy 2 TLDR

1. Find a streamer from X
2. Open “Similar to” list
3. Copy paste the accounts and emails
4. Click another account and open “Similar to” list again

Additional Tips:
Remember that you don't need to get 2000 emails in one day. Just simply 50-100 every now and then can help you a lot. For example I often sat on my couch watching tv-shows and at the same time I had my laptop on my lap and I was just copying emails. It didn't feel that bad when I was able to do something at the same time.

What after this:
Now it’s time to write the emails and send the activation keys. That’s a whole new world and it probably needs a separate post as well. I’ll just drop couple of tips that have helped us a lot:

First of all watch BenBonks video:
https://youtu.be/ebWYi7ko_u0?t=37

These things helped us:

1. Personalize your emails a bit. Just adding a streamers name have made a huge difference for us. I’ve used Gmail Merge plugin to send bulk emails with customizations.

2. Translate your emails: Use the streamers native language if possible

3. Have a link to your game easily accessible – It’s been better if the receiver doesn’t need to scroll down to find a link to your

4. Remember to add your Press Kitt

5. Add Gifs to make your email more approachable

If you made it this far, thank you for reading and hopefully you found something that helps you on your game dev journey! Would be also great to hear more tips & tricks regarding to this topic, so if you have something, just drop a comment or DM me :)

Cheers!

Hello again, wayward souls! The 1.4 "Daily Dice" update is out now on all platforms!

This update adds a daily challenge mode, new skulls, rebalanced skull looting logic, and much more!

App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/dice-of-kalma-dice-roguelike/id6752259371

Play Store:
https://play.google.com/store/search?q=dice%20of%20kalma&c=apps&hl=en

DAILY CHALLENGE GAME MODE:

- A short 10-level challenge where the player starts with three mechanically different skulls, but eight skulls in total: two of the skulls are given as blue, red, and yellow, and the last one is given as blue and red.

- All hand upgrades are locked to level 2, and no hand upgrades are offered during a daily challenge.

- The player must reach level 15 at least once to unlock access to daily challenges.

- A new daily challenge arrives every day at 10:00 or 11:00 UTC+0, depending on daylight saving time. The level changes globally at the same time, but the daily game mode description shows the localized time when a new daily challenge will arrive.

- If a daily challenge hasn’t been finished by the time a new one arrives, that daily challenge can’t be continued, though if the player is playing a daily challenge at the moment a new daily challenge arrives, they are allowed to finish the ongoing run unless they close the game or return to the main menu.

- Challenges and some achievements can’t be unlocked or used in daily runs.

- When playing on daily mode, some statistics will not be tracked in the player’s statistics, records, and leaderboards.

- Daily runs use the same music as endless mode past level 25.

- Four new achievements related to completing daily challenges.

NEW SKULLS:

- Knight skull: +10 bones / +2 mult / +1 reroll when playing a hand if the number of hands is even.

- Inventor skull: +10 bones / +2 mult / +1 reroll when playing a hand if at least one die is equal to the difference of its two adjacent dice.

- Spiked skull: +15 bones / +3 mult / +2 rerolls when playing a hand if the number of odd dice is equal to the middle die.

- Pot skull: +10 bones / +2 mult / +1 reroll when playing a hand if the sum of the dice is larger than 22.

MISCELLANEOUS ADDITIONS AND IMPROVEMENTS:

- The stats screen in the main menu now has the “daily challenges completed” stat.

- Kalma has a new alternate “bored” animation that triggers 33% of the time instead of Kalma falling asleep or reading a book if the player doesn’t give any input for a while.

- Added subtle sound effects to the sleeping and book-reading “bored” animations.

- Added a tutorial hint about using skull rerolls.

- Added hint dialogues for Kalma in case the player hasn’t won yet and lost due to not utilizing their skulls properly.

- The small breaks between score calculation phases are now skippable.

- The score calculation “hit marker” animations for the number indicators have been improved.

BALANCE CHANGES:

- As the skull pool is getting larger, in order to keep building a particular deck possible, skulls skipped by skull rerolls are now put on a blacklist instead of being simply shuffled back into the skull pool. This skull blacklist doesn’t care about skull colors, so if a blue skull is skipped, the red, purple, and yellow versions of that skulls are also put on the list. Skulls that the player already has in their inventory are never put on the blacklist, and if the player exhausts the skulls outside the blacklist, the list is emptied to make all skulls available again. In short, if a skull is skipped, it isn’t seen again in a while, which makes finding desired and differently colored versions of already owned skulls more likely.

- Buffed the yellow Archer skull from 1 to 2 rerolls.

- Nerfed all four color variants of Fungal skull.

- Nerfed the base mult of High Die from 2 to 1 due to the hand working so well with a very large portion of skulls.

BUGFIXES:

- Playing a High Die now highlights both the number 1 and 6 instead of only the latter, as both 1 and 6 are required to be in a hand for a High Die.

- Reroll-activated skulls now properly trigger the “hit marker” animations for bones and mult indicators.

- Fixed a bug where Kalma’s eyes could get stuck pointing down when exiting the book-reading animation.

- Localization fixes for several languages.

Now he's reading a book

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3885520/Dice_of_Kalma/

It's from our first game: Kaamos

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3317660/Kaamos_Puzzle_Roguelike/?beta=0

Pretty accurate though :D

Exactly one year ago we released our first game: Kaamos: Puzzle Roguelike with Indie.io

What a journey it has been and we can't wait to see what future holds 🎉

Thank you

https://store.steampowered.com/app/3885520/Dice_of_Kalma/