The Escapee

The Escapee achieved over 800 views and 100 downloads in it's first week!

The Escapee is a Twenty One Pilots Fan game I created in around a month and a half for my Game 240 Final. I continued development for 2 weeks after up until its release. 

Checkout a playthrough of my game from Dada1337 on YouTube!

My Role and What I Learned

I was the sole developer for this game and enjoyed all the work I put into The Escapee. Let's first talk about what I did right on this project the main thing being Marketing. On my Snowy Siege page, I talk about how marketing makes or breaks a game and this game is the perfect example. The Escapee in its first week got more views and downloads than all my previous games combined. At the time of writing it has 872 views and 111 downloads. 

The Escapee is a fan game for my favorite band Twenty One Pilots. It takes you through the story and lore of their first 3 albums in the Clancy Storyline. This is why this game did well. I had a known audience that through my personal experience interacting with them, I knew wanted this game. I even saw halfway through development an Instagram comment on a fan animation asking for a Twenty One Pilots game (I of course responded with the fact that I am developing this and did a bit of promotion). I also was not able to find any other games that were created for this band thus showing me that there was a void in the market I could fill. 

Finding a target audience for your game is the easiest part of marketing, in my opinion. What matters is getting the eyes of your audience on the game. I did not have enough money nor did I think a campaign of Instagram or YouTube ads would work. What I did instead was contact nearly 20 fan pages of the band on Instagram and ask if they would create a post about my game when it was released. A bit less than half responded and all those that did said yes! Some of these accounts had over 30 thousand followers, a huge audience! On release day I had an overflow of views and downloads due to these posts that allowed my audience to learn about my game. 

The Escapee was my case study of the fact I already knew, that marketing is the most important part of a game's success. I wish I could say The Escapee is a perfect game but it is certainly far from it. I love the game and I'm so proud of what I was able to do with it but it's not that my game's quality was far superior to other titles out there. It was that I found my audience, a hole in the market, and I was able to market the game and find success with this title.