u/AwesomeGamesStudio

Hello Survivors!

The wait is almost over! 🧟

YAZS is leaving Early Access on August 20. Launches on Steam, GOG, PlayStation (4&5), and Xbox (One&Series X|S), with Nintendo Switch coming soon after.

Mark your calendars!!

It's been a long road since 2023. Thank you for every wishlist, bug report, suggestion, meme, and kind word along the way. LET'S GOOO!

Read more details about the 1.0 update (which will be the biggest one yet) on our blog: https://awesomegamesstudio.com/blog/yazs-release-date-announcement/

Hey all!

Our game (HELLREAPER) is officially part of the Indie Arena Booth lineup

We're not quite ready to release a demo online yet, but we'll have a short playable build waiting for everyone who stops by our booth

Hopefully everything goes smoothly and lots of people check out the game. Wish us luck, and see you there if you're attending!

We'll have a short playable demo waiting for everyone who stops by. Come say hi!

Rockstar taught us a valuable marketing lesson today.

Unfortunately, we've already revealed our key art, so please enjoy this exclusive first look at our new Survivor's dog paw. 🐾

Jokes aside, we're deep in development of YAZS 1.0. See you in Q3!

Gatekeeping makes no sense in our opinion. Indie marketing is hard, changes constantly, and things stop working super quickly - so we think sharing knowledge is important. And we recently discovered new marketing trick.

In one of our recent posts on r/gamedev we talked about how important content reuse is, and how Twitter/X trends can still work really well for indie games if you find the right ones. Some trends can still bring hundreds of wishlists.

The key part is "the right ones". The more specific and relevant the trend is to your game, the better it performs.

But we wanted try something new. We like to experiment.

Recently we noticed a few game posts written in Japanese. We decided to try it ourselves and added information that our game supports Japanese localization.
Post gained 12,000 views, gave us 160+ wishlists.

Then we remembered a post we made back in March about being a Polish studio. We posted a Polish flag with fragments of HELLREAPER gameplay (the trend wasn't our idea, but we were one of the first from Poland who did this).
280,000 views, 53 comments, brought a lot of new followers and 150+ wishlists. Other Polish studios joined the trend, Polish gaming media covered it.

It made us realize that writing in your audience's native language unlocks a completely different side of Twitter/X. And current algorithms seem REALLY good at pushing localized content to the right people.

So far we also tested:

- French - 8,000+ views, 150+ wishlists that day*
- Spanish - 16,000+ views, ~300 wishlists total over two days*
- German - 7,000+ views, around 130 wishlists that day*

*Please note that we're also running a paid campaign that brings in around 70-80 wishlists daily, so the actual number of wishlists generated by these specific activities is a bit lower.

The Spanish one especially kept getting pushed for much longer than usual.

We're also starting to experiment with Threads because it seems more promising than we expected. But we're not sure if localization posts will work with Threads algorithms.

We still have more languages queued up, so we'll probably update this post later with more data and comparisons.

For translations we're hiring professional translators, but these are very short posts, so the cost is tiny compared to the results.

So yeah - if your game already has/will have localization support and you have a good-looking trailer or gameplay clip, this might be worth trying.

And if you test it yourself, let us know how it goes. We haven't really seen anyone doing this yet, so we'd love to compare results and data.

Thanks!

Last week, Steam finally introduced the Bullet Heaven tag, so we put together this small appreciation video.

This never would've happened without the Megabonk community - thank you!

Hey Survivors!

Since a lot of people in this subreddit have either played YAZS or at least heard about it, we figured this would be a good place to post this.

As we're getting closer to the full release of Yet Another Zombie Survivors, we've prepared a super short (but super important!) survey.

We'd really appreciate it if you could take a minute to fill it out - your feedback genuinely helps us shape the game into the best version it can be, and make sure we meet your expectations.

Thank you!

this is what 20 years in gamedev does to an artist

Hey all!

We're working on a dark fantasy action-platformer (trailer here), and recently wrapped up animations for an enemy we currently call "Tick Host".

Hope you like how it turned out!

The 'tick' itself also appears as a separate flying enemy - adding it here as a bonus.