The Protagonish: one year on!
Today marks the one year anniversary of us unleashing 'The Protagonish' on an unsuspecting world! This post aims to give a bit of background, how we did marketing and promotion, and details of sales and Steam and all that jazz, and to celebrate, it's 50% off on itch for the next week!
I had been working for several years on a crazy idea for a classic adventure game, a point-and-click that was an adaptation of Les Miserables. But as we worked it out, plotted the scenes, characters and story, it became clear this was a classic overly bold first game. It was going to take years to develop, and the things that were really important for me, like high resolution, hand-drawn art, live voice acting and interactive music recorded on real instruments were stupidly ambitious. Finally, if such a game was ever going to be commercially successful, or even break even, it would need to come from a more experienced team, and have an eager audience behind it.
So it seemed like a good idea to make a short game first. Something to test the waters, learn new skills, and prove that we could finish and release a quality game (and maybe even get sales). But what?
I was drifting to sleep one night, when the idea suddenly came to me: an adventure game where you don't control the adventurer. There's a 'hero' come to save a village, but you play the various characters in the village who's lives are upended by the hero's bumbling quest. I was so excited I woke up my confused partner, shouting, "I've got it! I've got it!" - it seemed perfect for a short quick game, that had a nice 'twist' to pitch.
I founded College Fun Games on my birthday that year, my second company, and quickly brought on board Lucy and Elena to do backgrounds and character art respectively. But when I first met them (in our secret Edinburgh cafe, so far undiscovered by the tourists) the thing we were excited about doing was the Les Mis game. None of us had made a game before, but we were going to learn with The Protagonish, so that when we started the big game, we had learnt through a bit of trial and error.
Because we were all working on other projects, we were working off and on for about 6 months, but Lucy and Elena recon it would have been about a month or 6 weeks of full time work. But the whole ethos of the studio was 'No Crunch' (sickeningly uncommon in the animation industry), and that we would always have time for our own side or dream projects that came up. Andy and Suilin helped with writing, and Richard helped with sound: recording music and voice in his amazing studio. We released the game at a party on 26th October 2024, a year today!
But before that I'd done a bunch of work on promotion, press releases, a demo, games expos in person across the UK, adverts in Debug magazine, and local flyers, posters and badges. We had around 3,000 wishlists at launch, which I was really happy with considering the scale of the game and unknown team, and it was awesome to see coverage in adventure game websites like Adventure Game Hotspot and a small number of streamers and review websites covering the game! Steam reviews were coming in, and we didn't know who all these lovely people were playing and reviewing our game!
But gradually the reviews have turned 'mixed' on Steam. Although we had a couple of glitches which were fixed in the first week, the negative comments have one main focus - it was too short. I feel the length of the game is pretty clear in the description, but still, the thumbs down reviews have definitely hurt on-going sales, even as we've done discounts and further events. Nevertheless, our aim was to get more than 1000 wishlists, get 100 sales, and more than 10 reviews. We achieved this easily within the first week, and now have sold more than 600 copies - not Silksong numbers, but way more than we were expecting for our first game, made in about a month.
We reached out to many reviewers and publications who were really enthusiastic and lovely, but explained they didn't want to cover such a short game. Considering the sheer number of short (but fun) itch games out there, it feels like a sad but necessary editorial decision, but again limited our visibility on this project
It was never expected for The Protagonish to make enough money to cover costs. Because of all we wanted to practice for the full game, we did full character design, art design and background style guides for just 5 characters and backgrounds. Since so much of this time is in the pre-production, it was a very bad cost/gameplay ratio, but a really invaluable experience for me, having to try and give meaningful direction to an art team for the first time!
So while the game likely cost about £5,000 to make, after the Steam cut, taxes, card fees and the like, we've had less than £2,000 of revenue back. This might sound like a disaster, but for me it's a good investment - cheaper than a medium advertising campaign, but so much more valuable. It builds an audience for us, has let us engage with a wonderful community of developers and fans, and when we do a Kickstarter for Less Miserables, ahem, we can show the style and quality we are aiming for, and also that we can make and ship a game on time and budget. It's helped us refine our production process, give us real-world info on how long our art style will take to complete, and confidence engaging with professional voice actors, musicians and testers. Less Miserables will have at least 10x the budget of The Protagonish, but have roughly 10x the locations, characters, puzzles and run time, so we need to get things right, without having to go back to the beginning and fix things we got wrong at the start!
This all sounds a bit clinical, but putting on the business and production hat and getting those bits right is what will allow us to make, and actually finish, a big project that has been filling our hearts for the last 18 months, complete with all the crazy ideas and gags we keep coming up with. So thank you to our amazing cast and crew of The Protagonish, and to everyone that played, streamed and supported us! We raise a glass to you, and invite you to join the revolution with us next year!
