What is genre specific elements for incremental game capsule for Steam?
So right now I decided to go with art-studio to do my capsule art and I have a hard time deciding what should be shown on my capsule.
Here is my game for reference - it is an incremental city builder game mechanically similar to Tower Wizard, Gnorpue Apologue and also Crownhold - fresh release that went quite well for the developer.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4670160/Ember_Folks/
I know that general advice is to do something similar to what other genres do in their area:
- Making a racing game? Your capsule should include cool looking car, maybe drifting car or couple of cars
- Farming simulator? Tractor on the field, 100%
- Store simulator? Well, it should definitely have store shelves on the background
- Factory automation game? Big factory on the background with conveyor belts, or like Satisfactory did - one conveyor across all capsule
- Melee combat roguelike? Cool character with a sword slicing through bunch of enemies
- City builder? You should show giant city on the capsule
But with incremental games it is quite tricky
Here are couple examples of popular incremental games
Fortune mill - it has tons of gold and numbers on capsule- well, pretty incremental to me
Gamblers table - action, characters running, gold coins - also incremental vibe
Crownhold - kingdom builder incremental, capsule displays castles and land, nothing visually incremental
Chef Knight - capsule looks more like roguelike built around cooking theme
You Know The Drill - cave and drill, which tells us it is a mining game, nothing tells about incremental part
Tower Wizard - mega popular incremental, and by all design principles capsule should not work - it is pixel art which is not good for capsule by opinion of all marketing experts, more than a half of capsule is dark background which make it less noticable, all it has in terms of art - is a tower, which tells nothing about game genre basically. Is it tower defence? Is it roguelike about wizard running around in tower? Anyway, somehow it works. I guess. We dont know about CTR stats that barribob has
So generally, what I see after looking through a tons of successfull incremental games capsule - it is hard to define what genre specific art element can easily tell the audience that this is an incremental game.
Except money and coins. If incremental game build around money or gold (Fortune Mill, Bills must be paid, Sticky Scratchy) - it should display tons of dollars, coins, gold pieces etc.
But what should I do for incremental city builder game?
- Show quirky and funny collague of city construction process? Because it is basically main game flow - constructing and expanding city? I'm afraid there can be genre mismatch with city builder or strategy games
- Show a lot of characters running around and doing something - building, mining etc? Maybe, considering that those characters are basically name of my game
- Show main game fantasy about reigniting a star? Not sure that idea of heat-beam pumping into the star is so much interesting that it should be main part of capsule. Also I tried this once, and I got feedback like "I thought your game is about protecting planet, like tower defence"
- Show cursor as a part of game logo, as I tried to do with current capsule I kitbashed in couple of evenings? Not sure anymore, I thing that clicker games and incremental games are not exactly the same (cursor is more about clicker game, not incremental). Even though a CTR is 2-3 times better compared to previous version, but still not great
- Show a lot of resouces flying around, because game is also about collecting resources and make numbers grow up?
In main capsule I can basically show all of the above, but what to do about those tiny capsules that will be shown on tag page and other lists?
What are your opinions? What do you thing is the best approach in designing incremental game capsule? What can you recommend for my case? Any advice will be much appreciated
