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Welcome back to the Little Squid Dev Blog!

Happy New Year! We hope your holiday season was the best it could be and you stayed safe and healthy! Ours included getting Little Squid merch as a gift from friends & family - check it out!

What a year 2020 was, huh?

Despite it being a difficult year to get through, there was some good to come out of it all and we've still made a lot of progress that we're proud of. I mean, just look at this comparison of where B-Side was last January vs December!

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Let's look back on some things we accomplished in the past year and then look ahead at what's to come in 2021, shall we?

What we did in 2020

• Created Little Squid! - we formed our personal brand with logos, website, a mission, goals...the works
• Revealed B-Side - only a few people had seen the game before this past year and now it's fully out in the open. Whoa
• Had people besides us play it for the first time - thank you so much to anyone that has tested it!
• Made a Steam page - it's like, a real game that will be released!
• Big technical improvements - we talked about some of them in our blogs. They'll lead to a much smoother game experience
• Outlined the game's mechanics from start to finish
• Determined the art direction
• Wrote the plot from start to finish
• So much narrative design - making sure the mechanics and narrative are intertwined in every possible aspect‍
• Designed a bunch of new puzzle mechanics, encounters, and characters - here's some of them in action

• Released 9 weekly challenges
• Put out monthly (or more) updates on B-Side and our little (squid) studio
• Wrote some general blogs about game design and development
• Attended IndieXChange and other online  events
• Networked with other indie devs - the indie dev community is so welcoming and wholesome, we're lucky to get to connect with such talented people. We're a little squid in a big pond!

Numbers!

Our goal this year was to just “make the game” - meaning production was the focus and marketing was mostly on the backburner. Our only marketing goals were “brand awareness,” start getting people interested in the process of making a game (for future consideration), and grow our network within the Indie game industry itself. We don’t have a product yet so our efforts were very “top of the funnel” and required 0 dollars. With that in mind we did want to share some highlights on our analytics to share openly with other devs and those that are interested!

For context, all these metrics are purely organic (no paid amplification) and with minimal dedicated effort (I.e., quality over quantity of posts laughing face, folded hands).

Some highlights include:

On Twitter, we have 49 followers and between Feb-Dec 2020 we received over 50,000 impressions with an engagement rate of 3% (anywhere between 2-5% is looked at as a ‘good’ engagement rate).

On Facebook we have 241 followers and between Feb-Dec 2020 we received over 12,000 impressions over 63 posts with an engagement rate of 17% (the platform average is 1-5%).

Lastly, on STEAM we currently have 71 wishlists and between July-Dec 2020 we received over 85,000 impressions with a click-through-rate of 11.18% (the average CTR is anywhere between 2-4% so we’re super happy to see this!), and 10,000 store visits.  

What we hope to do in 2021

• Release B-Side! - and hope lots of people have fun and enjoy it! It’s truly a labor of love  
• Grow a bit of a community so we can all be friends
• Participate in more industry events - either as an attendee or, hopefully, an exhibitor
• More dedicated marketing and sharing cool content of the game to come!
• More focused devlogs showing the process of developing certain aspects of the game - seeing the process behind games being made is one of our favorite things so we want to bring some more of that to you

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Whether you've been with us since the beginning or you're just joining us, we can't thank you enough for being here. 2021 is looking bright and we can't wait to tackle it head on with your support!

Like always, we'll see you on the internet!

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