We're working on the worldbuilding for DREADMOOR, a flooded post-apocalyptic "darker" themed game, where humanity survived the end of the world, but never truly recovered from it. They're still there, but if anything, they're on the decline mostly focusing on surviving "today". As we're working on the world-building, I thought that it would be fun to share what we've got so far.

The setting (world) for the game is called The Submerged Lands. As the name implies, the world is flooded, but it's not 100% submerged, instead, the world is now made up of islands, broken landmasses (broken as in, what was once , swamps, flooded ruins, and isolated settlements.

What the World Looks Like

For a more visual idea of what this would look like, I used this tool https://www.floodmap.net/  and set the water level to about +150m and looked at the British Isles. Doing so gives you a good idea of how "islandy" our world would look.

https://www.floodmap.net/ is pretty good for visualizing worldbuilding if you're dealing with flooded worlds!

And this is what our artists put together as a drawn version of the submerged lands.

How Humanity Lives Here

When it comes to humanity in DREADMOOR we want the world to feel like humanity is still clinging on, but not in a clean or heroic way. People survived, yes, but that does not mean they rebuilt civilization. Settlements are isolated (communication has broken down), resources are scarce, and trust between people is rare. Some places might resemble structured towns, while others are more tribal, strange, or cult-like, depending on where they are, what they believe, and how cut off they have become.

This means that, we did have to give some thought to "how" humanity lives one, after all, they would need places to live. Given that they're not really looking to recover, the obvious choice is that they'd reuse the old structures as they can still provide shelter. And even if they collapse, there will be places where the fallen buildings might be usable. While that does not sound like a great idea to us (us being those in the real world), in a post-apocalyptic world, where humanity hasn't really recovered and for the most part, does not have the means to properly rebuild, people would use what they have.

We wanted to also work towards a goal of making the world feel somewhat recognisable, but never really comfortable. So, while playing, you might see something that clearly belongs to the old world (building architecture, landmarks, machinery that we use in the real world etc), but they should feel out of place in the new "game" setting. What's more, those recognisable features are likely to be misshaped due to the game's setting being that of a flooded world, infected (more on that below), or simply left to decay for so long that it has become something else. That is what's interesting when working on this sort of post-apocalyptic world, it's not about wiping everything away and starting again from nothing, the old world is still there, it's just that almost everything has been abandoned.

Geography also plays a huge part in this. As the world is broken into islands, swamps, flooded cities, and isolated patches of land, distance becomes a real danger. In our game, being far away from inhabited areas is risky, and this is even more so at night, as there are very few places that you can find to use as "safe shelter". What's more, the surviving settlements will evolve a bit (even if humanity isn't looking to recover, they are still trying to survive "today"). That means that over time settlements close to safer waters would develop very differently from one near infected regions, that's just something that we try to consider while building the level.

The Infected

Now, I've mentioned "infected" a few times, that is another part of the setting. One of the major forces in DREADMOOR is something called the Sea Blight. Before the collapse, (note, it was not related to the collapse), humanity found a biological substance, and though it was not fully understood, it was used in medicine, science, and engineering, it was a positive force. However, after the collapse, that changed as it began to spread and mutate living things (plants and animals), and in some regions, it even exists in the air as a faint green mist.

So, when people live among the remains of the old world, they are not just dealing with water and decay. They are also dealing with infection, mutation, and the fear of what the world itself is becoming. That said, there’s nothing to say that humanity won’t make use of the mutated creatures - if they can. There are a few problems though. First is, many of the mutated creatures are somewhat aggressive, so finding some that would cooperate with them is tough. Even a humble fish that was once peaceful can turn into something like this

A typically mutated fish

But when they do, interesting results, such as this sketch, can come to be.

Sometimes, inventions like this will pop up, you have to show ingenuity a bit otherwise it's too \"bland\".

The other issue is, and probably most important one, the Sea Blight affects humans as well. After a while, humans will change as well, take this fine fellow (a trader) for example. Luckily, he’s kept most of his wits about him!

This is what happens to humans after being exposed for too long.

Hi everyone,

We recently passed 200,000 wishlists on Steam for our game, DREADMOOR, a dark-themed first-person fishing and survival adventure game set in a flooded post-apocalyptic world.

I know milestone posts can easily turn into pure self-promotion, so I wanted to make this more useful from a gamedev / marketing angle and share what seemed to help us reach this milestone.

This is not a "do these exact things and you will get 200k wishlists" post as every game is different, and a lot of this was specific to our game, DREADMOOR. 

That said, looking back, there are a few clear patterns in what helped, what surprised us, and what we learned, and some of these points may be useful to you, the reader.

The concept had to be instantly understandable

Everything needs a starting point, so with DREADMOOR the first thing that we set out to do was to compress the game into something very simply - like really simple - that anyone can understand. For us, this was:

Fishing, but the water is not safe.

Or, a slightly longer version:
A dark survival fishing game where the sea itself feels dangerous.

To many, it may seem over simplistic, but this was one of the biggest things that helped the game grow the wishlists as it was this emotional hook that did a lot of the work. 

Why? People could understand the fantasy almost immediately: a small fishing trawler, murky waters, mutant fish, giant creatures, and an overall sense of tension, especially when accompanied by a few visuals, but, just as importantly, the visuals are not really needed to get an idea of the game.

The main lesson here was that the audience needed to feel the idea of the game before they care about the systems. Detailed mechanics matter, of course, but most people did not first react to the upgrade tree, crafting, or progression. They reacted to the mood of the game.

Wishlist growth was not linear

Another thing that became obvious is that wishlist growth does not always happen smoothly.

For a while, it can feel like nothing is happening, then, suddenly, several things start working together and you get a spike. 

This is something that I'm sure many of you have come across already.

For us, there were a few clear moments where growth jumped, and looking at them has helped us to learn what worked well and why.

Playtests, many Playtests!

Probably one of the most important early moments for us was the first semi-closed playtest in January 2026.

When we first announced DREADMOOR, we received a surprising amount of backlash from people who assumed the game was fake, or that it was only a concept trailer and not a real project, the reaction was strange to us, but we also understood that players have become cautious - and honestly, rightly so as a lot of games are announced too early, and some projects never turn into something playable.

Instead of arguing with people, we decided to mostly stay quiet and let the game speak for itself once we had something playable, and ultimately, launching the playtest was the solution to that problem. This was an important point as, suddenly, that negative response we got could be very easily proven wrong, so the questions about the game were an opportunity for us to reach people directly.

It goes to show that when you are being unfairly criticized, often, the best course of action might be to be patient with the answers, and don’t rely on saying “xyz will come in the future”, say it once, but then just wait until you have the proof ready.

On the playtest side of things, we did very little to market it. It was mostly done via our own social media and a small amount of user acquisition. Even so, we gained around 4,000 wishlists in one week.

The more important result was trust. The playtest helped shift the conversation from "is this even real?" to "okay, people are actually playing this."

After that, we started running smaller focus tests through our Discord server. These were semi-open; players only had to join the Discord and tell us that they were interested. Then, whenever we reached a useful development milestone, usually every month or so, we the interested people to play the game over a weekend, focus on the features we've worked on, and give us their feedback.

What's more, each focus test had a clear purpose. We would tell players something like:

We worked on fishing, progression, night danger, or another specific system. Please test this part and tell us what you think.

This made the feedback much more useful, as players were not just playing randomly; they knew what we wanted them to focus on.

It had the added effect that it let people see the game changing from test to test, and feel like they were really contributing. So, when people outside the community still claimed that the game was not real, we often did not need to respond ourselves, as players who had actually tested DREADMOOR were quick to correct them (without us getting involved).

For us, that was one of the biggest benefits of playtesting: it did not just improve the game, it also created a group of people who understood the project and could speak about it honestly.

Events helped, but only because we supported them properly

In February 2026, we showed our first full gameplay trailer during IGN Fan Fest. At that point, the game still did not have a huge amount of content to show, so our goal was not to communicate the scale, instead, it was to communicate the atmosphere and vibe of the project as clearly as possible - again, leaning on the emotional front.

The trailer helped, but the important part is that the event itself was not the whole campaign.

Around the same time, we also:

• sent the trailer to vertical-content creators (TikTok, YTShorts etc).
• ran press outreach
• supported the trailer heavily across social media
• had one Reel reach nearly 300k views

Together, this created a snowball effect and resulted in more than 44,000 wishlists in one month.

Events work much better when you treat them as a starting point, not the whole plan. The showcase gives you a solid starting point / an excuse to share more, tell people more. However, you need to do that (sharing more) otherwise, you waste that opportunity.

Short clips did a lot of heavy lifting

Another important point is that a lot of our strongest visibility came from short-form content. 

In April, several of our videos started performing well across TikTok and Instagram Reels. There was no major news event behind this, no new trailer, no showcase, no big announcement, instead it came down to consistent content work, even when the results were - at first - almost nothing.

At that time, several videos started gaining traction, reaching close to a million combined views, and this led to around 13,000 wishlists in one week.

Some examples from our own channels:

• One TikTok reached around 400k views
• Some Instagram Reels reached 400k+ views and 250k+ views
• Several X posts also performed well for us

The clips that seemed to work best were the ones that showed a clear situation quickly:

• sailing through a dangerous swamp
• fishing in waters that feel unsafe
• a strange creature or tentacle appearing
• the trawler moving through the world
• a “what is going on here?” moment

The best clips were less about explaining the game and more about making people curious enough to check the Steam page (note the emotional hook again).

The lesson for us was that algorithms rarely reward you immediately, but if you post consistently, your chances of catching momentum increase. This might be common knowledge to many of you, but, it is still very often overlooked, so do keep it in mind!

Creator and media posts amplified the hook

Creator and media support also helped a lot, but I think it is important to frame this correctly. I wouldn’t say that these posts were the only reason we reached the milestone, it was more that they amplified something that was already working: the setting, the atmosphere, and the core idea.

The biggest example for us was IndieGameJoe.

We contacted him directly, showed him the project, he liked it, and we arranged several posts. This resulted in him featuring DREADMOOR on X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, and within the first 24 hours, those posts generated more than 2.5 million combined views.

That resulted in around:

• 10,000 wishlists in the first 24 hours
• 25,000+ wishlists within one week

That was one of the clearest moments where we saw how powerful a well-matched creator can be.

That said - I would not reduce the lesson to "find a big creator" as - yes, of course, having a big creator will give you a boost - but that boost is more of an amplification boost. Think of a content creator as a multiplier effect on your work (not an addition). If your side of things is strong, you get a much larger boost.

Other posts from creators and media pages helped as well, including Dexerto, Pirat Nation, Clemmy / Best Indie Games, Blue Thunder, Annemiloo, and a few more; some reached hundreds of thousands of people, and some even went much further.

Old content can become useful again later

One of the stranger things that happened was that an older announcement trailer suddenly started performing well again.

In May 2026, Indie Games Hub uploaded our old announcement trailer, and it unexpectedly went viral with more than 150,000 views, which was much higher than the channel’s usual performance, this led to around 17,000 wishlists in one week.

This was not planned by us, and it was probably the most chaotic spike out of all of them, however looking back, it makes some sense. By that point, the game already had more recognition, more people had seen it, creators had posted about it, our own short-form content was performing better, and the game had more context around it. What's more, the whole "is this a real game" question had been answered. So, the old trailer was suddenly more useful than it had been before.

The lesson for us was that content does not always fully "expire." If your game has gained recognition, older footage can suddenly travel further than it did the first time. I’ve seen some people recommend deleting old posts/hiding old content, but I fall heavily in the camp of never hiding your roots.

The biggest takeaway: the shareable idea matters a lot

If I had to summarize what we learned, it would be this:

A game needs more than good-looking clips. It needs a shareable idea and a strong emotional identity.

As I mentioned earlier, for DREADMOOR, that idea seems to be:

Fishing, but the water is not safe.
(yes very simplistic but that's why it's good, everyone can understand and picture it instantly)

That is simple enough for people to understand quickly, but broad enough that we can keep showing new versions of it through creatures, locations, systems, and survival mechanics.

I would say this is probably one of the biggest reasons the game has continued to gain traction.

A few things I would do again

• Focus on the emotional hook before explaining mechanics
• Keep short-form clips simple and readable
• Support events with outreach instead of relying on the event alone
• Run playtests not only for feedback, but also to build trust
• Give focus tests clear instructions so the feedback is more useful
• Keep posting even when it feels like the algorithm is ignoring you
• Work with creators who naturally fit the game, rather than chasing every large account

A few things I would be careful with

• Do not assume views automatically mean wishlists
• Do not over-explain the game too early in a clip
• Do not rely on one event or one trailer to carry everything
• Do not treat creator posts as a replacement for your own consistent content
• Do not ignore skepticism if people think the game is not real, but also do not waste too much energy arguing
• Do not confuse curiosity with long-term player understanding

Final thoughts

Looking back, I do not think DREADMOOR reached 200k+ wishlists because of one post, one trailer, one creator, or one event.

It was the combination of:

• a strong core hook
• a clear atmosphere
• consistent short-form content
• playable proof through tests
• event support
• creator and media amplification
• and several spikes that started reinforcing each other

We are still learning a lot, and I am sure there are many things we could have done better, but breaking 200k wishlists has been a useful moment to look back and see what actually moved the needle.

I'm happy to answer questions if anyone has any to ask us!