Today I am excited to have a guest post written by my friend Ryan K. Rigney who heads up marketing at Odyssey Interactive. You should definitely subscribe to his weekly newsletter for game developers, Push to Talk, which highlights people doing interesting work in and around games.
There are many ways to market a game. (You know this, of course, since you read HowToMarketAGame.com.) But usually—almost always?—you do need to make a game before you can expect much success from your marketing.
Today’s blog is about an exception to that rule, a game where the prototyping phase and the marketing are inseparably woven together. The two-man team behind the “5D platformer” Screenbound—in which you control a character in a 3D first-person environment and a corresponding character in a 2D side-scrolling Game Boy environment at the same time—are forthright about the fact that they don’t yet know what their game is. Instead, they’re figuring it out day-by-day, trying out crazy ideas and posting the resulting gameplay footage to TikTok and X.
The approach is working: Screenbound‘s Josh Presseisen says the game has earned over 50,000 wishlists on Steam and close to 100 million views across all social channels.
We reached out to Presseisen and Screenbound co-lead Kyle McKeever to learn more about their approach to building for (and alongside) a social media audience.
The many phases of Crescent Moon
Josh Presseisen has published a lot of games.
His first title, released in 2010, was the Morrowind-esque action iOS RPG Ravensword: The Fallen King. The game sold well, topping the App Store charts and earning Presseisen enough money to fund the development of follow-up titles like Aralon: Sword and Shadow and a large-scope Ravensword sequel that performed even better the first game.
At some point along the way, Presseisen learned enough about marketing mobile games to start publishing them himself under his label, Crescent Moon Games. Over the last 15 years Crescent Moon has published over 100 titles on mobile, with 20 games reaching Steam and a half-dozen on console.
Throughout his time as an indie publisher, Presseisen has continuously released his own original games, partnering up with programmers and artists on a contract basis as needed for each project’s scope. This was how he first met Kyle McKeever, who around 2014 was making spare cash by selling 2D game starter kits on the Unity Asset Store.
“I always wanted to make games,” McKeever says, “but I didn’t know how. I didn’t go to school for it. So I just started trying to learn how to code and selling assets and starter kits as a little side business.”
The Deer God, by Crescent Moon Games and Cinopt Studios
“I found this nice little 2D pixel art pack on the Unity Asset Store,” Presseisen says, “and Kyle was really easy to get in touch with. So we just started working together on this game called The Deer God—a really weird game. But we had a good time making it.”
The working relationship was a fit, and the duo collaborated on a number of projects over the years. The Deer God was followed by dungeon-crawler Hammer Bomb in 2016 and FPS adventure Morphite in 2017. The two worked on separate projects for a time (McKeever was a developer on the indie hit Totally Reliable Delivery Service, released in 2020) before reconnecting last year, when Presseisen approached McKeever with an early prototype of what would become Screenbound.
Morphite, by Crescent Moon Games and We’re Five Games
At this point, the game’s basic concept was already in place. But, says Presseisen, “the graphics were horrible, and the idea wasn’t really fleshed out.”
With McKeever on board, the two started experimenting. “At first it was an endless runner,” Presseisen says, “but then it was like, ‘what if we do this Super Mario style and make some real levels to test?’ Kyle was implementing things and I was shoveling art into the project.”
On January 20th, Presseisen posted the first gameplay clip of Screenbound to the official Crescent Moon Games X account, earning 800 or so likes. A few days later, he posted another clip on TikTok, and response was overwhelming: over 24,000 likes, and 343,000 views—on an account that had never gotten 2,000 views on any previous post.
“I was kind of confused,” Presseisen says, “because it was 100 times more than any of my other games. I was like what the heck. And then I would post a new thing and it would get even bigger and just kept snowballing.”
By early March, Screenbound was regularly pulling in millions of views on social. A tweet from content creator Jake Lucky featuring the game earned over 80,000 likes. Soon, IGN reached out about featuring the game in a video. Presseisen says the game is now scheduled to appear in six different showcases this summer, including Day of the Devs, Future Games Show, and the OTK Games Expo.
Presseisen says that means he’s signed up to make six different trailers for the game. After that work is done, “that’s when we’re gonna really sit down and figure out what this game actually is.”
But in the meantime, the game’s pulling in tens of thousands of wishlists. The Screenbound team launched their official Steam page on March 25th, a decision Presseisen calls a tough one.
“Multiple people told us we were really missing out,” he says, “and it was a tough call because we were so limited on content. We had some short videos, barely anything that looked polished enough to feel comfortable showing on a Steam page. But once some of the posts went viral, we were really forced to make a Steam page, otherwise we would lose out on a huge amount of wishlists. I think we made the right choice.”
What’s different about Screenbound?
In a world with thousands of games releasing each year, there is something to be said for game premises that can make any half-asleep social media doomscroller stop mid-swipe and say “Wait… huh?”
It’s tempting to dismiss Screenbound‘s success on social as an outlier result, driven by a gimmicky premise. And it’s true that very few games are capable of driving this much attention based on what amounts to a prototype.
But dig beneath the surface, and you’ll see that Screenbound‘s devs have been extremely savvy about the playbook they’re running:
- They’re continuously showing off features that may or may not make it into the final game, solely because it’d make for a great social post.
- The “can it play Doom” post is another great example of this, posted in direct response to a real fan’s request. With every asset they post, they take in more suggestions from players for zany ideas to add.
- Even small tweaks to art assets make the game feel fresh again. This post showing off a handheld clearly inspired by the Game Boy Advance SP—complete with functional clamshell design—was another winner.
- In a sense, they aren’t just “building in public.” They’re also taking their followers on a fun journey that includes jokes, gags, and detours that aren’t meant to be taken too seriously.
- For whatever reason, the game seems to be doing better on X than on TikTok. Presseisen says he’s “not exactly sure why” this is the case, but his team leaned into it anyway.
- Though Presseisen has promoted almost all of his other games through the Crescent Moon Games account, he built a game-specific X account for Screenbound. “It seemed very important to build a fanbase for this game specifically, one of the reasons being it’s not a game that I’m only publishing, but one I’m co-developing with Kyle.”
- To earn their place in the various showcases this summer, they say they’re holding back some features. Per a post on X: “Really fighting the urge hard to show these new features we’re working on – but have to save them for the expos coming up.”
That said, the game undeniably has an “X factor” driving behind it: Presseisen says the game’s natural word of mouth outperforms anything he’s seen on his previous games: “This is definitely by far the most viral title I’ve had in my many years of developing and publishing.”
Even beyond their savvy social shitposting, the Screenbound team has made some smart decisions about the fundamental positioning of the game:
- The half-serious elevator pitch for the game as a “5D platformer” (because it’s a 3D game + a 2D game) is catchy and succinct.
- Despite the 3D graphics being relatively simplistic, the fidelity of the in-world handheld is high-quality and visually interesting.
- The core premise is inherently attention-grabby, to the point that even non-gaming social accounts like No Context Memes are able to communicate it in a single sentence.
And, in between all the goofy ideas built for social resonance, there’s real progress on the game happening behind the scenes. McKeever has built a custom level-editor for the game that allows him to design its connected 2D and 3D environments using a simple 2D interface that procedurally expands into 3D spaces. (See it in action in this video they put together for IGN).
“As we add more assets and more content to the editor, it translates into very fast level design,” says McKeever.
Presseisen says the team’s considering giving players access to the level editor—another possibility in a game defined by possibilities.
The risks and rewards of building for social
Presseisen says that over the past couple of months he’s gone to several in-person games industry events, and when people ask him what he’s working on, a funny thing happens. He starts to describe Screenbound (“it’s a platformer where you’re playing in 3D but you’re holding a Game Boy and…”) and inevitably the person he’s talking to jumps in excitedly to say “I’ve seen that game! It was on my timeline!”
This is an enviable spot to be in for any game developer, but it raises the question: will all these drive-by social media likes be enough to actually convert into real players? Maybe more pressing: is the core premise of playing two games at once actually fun, or just distracting?
Even Presseisen and McKeever admit that the basic challenge of moving around in the game world takes some getting used to.
“When you’re moving around with your left thumbstick,” Presseisen says, “you’re actually moving right in 2D while you’re moving forward in 3D. You really have to be paying attention to both the handheld screen and the 3D background. If you don’t look at the screen for five seconds, you’re gonna get hit by an enemy.”
But, says Presseisen, he’s confident players will be able to make it over that mind-bending hump. “Once you play it for about 30 seconds, then you’re in it and you feel it.”
In some ways it’s both a boon and a curse that Presseisen and McKeever have been able to sell the “dream” of the game even before the core thing has been committed to.
“We’ve determined it’s some sort of 3D puzzle-platforming adventure,” Presseisen says, but much of what happens over the course of the game is still up in the air. “We’ve talked about the ability to load other cartridges into the device that have a top-down Zelda-like view, or a racing game. We’re still figuring it out.”
At the same time, the guys seem to be having a lot of fun with the process of discovery: “We keep discovering, as we work on it, all these weird mechanics that are really fun to play with,” says McKeever. “There’s all these things that translate in weird ways from 2D to 3D. There’s something about it that’s really interesting about it—it’s not just a simple gimmick.”
The good news: these are guys who’ve shipped a ton of games. They estimate that they’ll be able to finish up Screenbound and release the game “sometime next year.”
In the meantime, they’re going to keep shitposting and driving a ton of wishlists.
Find Screenbound on Steam, and follow its progress on X or TikTok.
Also, subscribe to Ryan’s weekly newsletter: Push to Talk