From a single game to a brand: the suicide guy recap

1) CONCEPT

The first con­cept we had for the game was back in 2011.

At first we were try­ing to find an orig­i­nal con­cept for our next game:
that’s when we had in mind the idea that the play­er had to kill him­self in order to sur­pass every level.

Since the con­cept and the action in the game has a real­ly strong impact on the play­er’s reac­tion, we decid­ed to make the game in first per­son.
For the first alpha ver­sion we had in mind a total of 3 lev­els that would help the gamer to under­stand the mechan­ics, con­trols (how to acti­vate an object etc.) dur­ing the whole game.

The game­play can be con­sid­ered as a par­o­dy of the most clas­sic videogames in which you have to find a way to save the life of your char­ac­ter, while here you have to find a way to kill him.

10) MARKETING (After release)

The day we pub­lished the game (on 14th of July 2017) we imme­di­ate­ly start­ed to cre­ate adver­tis­ing, here the steps we took in order to improve the sellings:

• Youtube video trail­er uploaded on Youtube and Face­book: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU6Fxi-l-54
• Announce the game in the Steam Groups (send­ing few pro­mo codes to attract traffic)
• Announce on our Face­book Page 
• Twit­ter Announce on our pro­file 
• Announce on the red­dit game dev groups https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/
• Announce on Steamgifts and mini­give­away on their web­site https://www.steamgifts.com/
• We sent pro­mo codes to youtu­bers and press like Kotaku, Mul­ti­play­er, Poly­gon and many more.
• As final step we announced the release to our fans through our mail­ing list (100.000 gamers)

The first days of release went smooth­ly with thou­sands of copies sold in the first week and a lot of youtu­bers play­ing the game:https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=suicide+guy

After the first days a lot of youtu­ber videos of the game went viral with over 1 mil­lion views, here some examples:

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UOBBduW84Nk

This helped the vis­i­bil­i­ty of the game A LOT and infact Big youtu­ber starts start­ed to play­ing it, even mak­ing more than just one video of it (Jack­sep­tic­eye and Jue­gaGer­man) with over 3 mil­lion views:

In the end after the first month, this helped the game to sell over 10k copies, and mil­lions gamers aware of the exis­tence of the game.
The great thing for us is that the game is still sell­ing con­stant­ly even after the first few days (with a 20% dis­count), while gen­er­al­ly the sales drop after the first discount.

I would say that for us the youtu­bers views count was the deter­min­ing fac­tor that helped the game to be fea­tured on the front Steam page in the most pop­u­lar games

The first reviews from press start­ed to came out after the first week of release (we send­ed press copy AFTER the game was out, but prob­a­bly we should have sent them 1 week before) here some few:

Game­News+ Score: 7.4

Seri­al­Gamer Score: 7.0

A rude awakening

Ok friends, the time has come in the review to take stock of Suicide Guy VR. Suicide Guy VR starts from a base (already good) of an unpretentious, light-hearted and fun game but full of technical imperfections. Although in the virtual reality version these gaps have been filled in, the problems related to the tight budget are evident. Nonetheless, Suicide Guy VR looks like a great title for VR, a fun puzzle platformer and a great release valve.

The low poly atmosphere of the game, the not serious tone and the variety of the puzzles do not bore e entertain, and although the levels are not many il price is worth the candle. Despite having to deal at times with the problems in physics, at times with the remaining technical problems, the gaming experience is valid and light. And let’s face it, who else gives you the opportunity to get it over with for the modest sum of a margherita pizza?

We hope ours Suicide Guy VR review you liked it, and as always we greet you wishing you a good gaming! Don’t forget to keep following techigames for more news, updates, reviews and much more about the world of video games. Hello and see you next time!

Points in favor

• Cool and interesting basic concept
• Spot-on and colorful low poly graphics
• Varied and very well characterized contexts
• Successful transposition in VR
• Fun puzzles, but …

Points against

• … sometimes a little too mundane
• Sometimes problematic game physics
• Small technical problems
• Movement system that is sometimes imprecise and fallacious
• Audio sector a bit poor

5) PROJECT MANAGEMENT

We used Trel­lo as project man­age­ment tool and Source Tree as repos­i­to­ry for the assets.
It’s per­fect for orga­niz­ing the work­flow when you have a team of 3 or more peo­ple. In our case we were in 6 as you can see in the image below and we divid­ed the work like this:

• Fabio Fer­rara (Game and con­cept devel­op­ment, Game­play pro­gram­ming, 3D mod­el­ing, Sound­tracks and Sound effects)
• Yan Daw­id (Cam­era pro­gram­mer and Gameplay)
• Giu­lia Airol­di (Con­cept art and texturing)
• Fabio Mas­nari (Tester)
• Andrea Mas­nari (Sound­track com­pos­er and Sound Effects design)
• Sel­cuk Yag­ci (Char­ac­ter modeler)

We’ll soon share the trel­lo link when the game is finished.

4) STORY DESIGN

Since the main con­cept to pass the lev­els is to kill your­self, we want­ed to cre­ate a moti­va­tion to it.Why would the char­ac­ter need to kill him­self in everylev­el to go to the next level?

That’s when we devel­oped the idea of dreams inside of dreams, inspired by the movie “Incep­tion”.

We first made the sto­ry­board to make the sto­ry under­stand­able by every­one, then used the cin­e­mat­ics to make a tan­gi­ble story.
The char­ac­ter had to be char­ac­ter­ized since it’s one of the few beings in the game, that’s when we had the idea to char­ac­ter­ize him dur­ing the lev­els, thanks to the objects he imag­ines in his dreams, derived direct­ly from his expe­ri­ences in the real life.