We announced our company and game on Monday. Here are the numbers | Hacker News Reader

We announced our company and game on Monday. Here are the numbers

blog.sharkpunch.com

26 pointsaakour14 comments

From the information available, this game could be literally anything. It's one thing if no gameplay video is available. It's another thing entirely if there's no way to figure out even what genre the game is.

For all that this tells readers, it could be anything from a tower defense game to an economic simulation.

I have no idea what this is, but the name is awesome & catchy and if I saw it in the app store - I would probably try to download it.

Happy to hear that! We wanted to see if the vibe of the video would resonate with people, and it seems like it did.

That's why we're calling it a "teaser", but you're absolutely right.

(We'll be releasing in-game material very soon.)

Thanks for sharing. I too struggle with getting the word out for my games and have experienced similar levels of success.

Some unsolicited feedback,

1. I watched the trailer and came away with no clue what your game is actually about. Ideally it would tip your hand a bit more

2. I didn't find the trailer very compelling, either. In fact if anything it made me skeptical that this game was going to be some crazy political message.

3. With that being said, I thought I'd learn more about the game but didn't see any easy way to do so from the YouTube page or from your website. Add a link in the description and put the game in the top level navigation for your site.

4. The art style seems cool at least.

Best of luck, I hope you share more about your experiences as they develop.

Thank you for the excellent feedback! We were hoping to have a dedicated site for the game before the launch, but the realities of being a three man development team (or, bad planning) made that impossible.

Thanks for sharing this.

Will you be planning a gameplay video? I think it's particularly difficult for viewers to extract value from non-gameplay trailers/teasers involving new IP.

Can you explain an embargoed press release?

Is it:

a) giving your "favorite" journalist(s) an exclusive time period to make announcements,

b) a heads up of when you will be submitting the press release,

c) a firm "time" when you'd like all press/media to hold stories before publishing?

If you're heading to GDC, good luck! It sounds like an exciting conference.

C. "For publication on 3/10/2014 at 9pm GMT or later"

I've found something similar with reddit. Posting in a niche subreddit might look like a nonstarter with many posts only receiving a couple upvotes and 0-2 comments, but the actual site visits seem to be a couple hundred times the upvote count (at least for me).

It makes sense to me, in that small subs see something like a trickle of content, and subscribers tend to be pretty into the topic to have sought the specific community out. So you could get a much higher % of the subreddit's total population visiting your site, even if they don't bother to actually upvote it.

Makes sense. And to be honest, that reflects at least my Reddit behavior very well - out of a thousand clicks I link, I'll probably comment on a couple.

Nice post and interesting information.

And I love the name of the company and your logo. I think the video doesn't quite hit the nail on the head. (The art kind of reminds me of Interstate 76, which I love -- assuming that's the goal, you're not quite there.)

Thanks!

We'll be releasing some in-game footage soon - hope that'll give you a better idea of what the game is about.

I wish more people would share these kind of results for comparison.

How can you not like a game called Sharkpunch?

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