First things First 

We're on Steam as well as Itch - yeah!!!! The Gauntlet on Steam (steampowered.com)

That Was Easy

Well, sort of. When you're developing a game you think it's going to be easy - just getting it together and publishing on steam and hey presto great sales. 

Its a Job

Getting up on Steam and Itch and starting to promote the game is a full-time job in itself.

Luckily we have two people assigned to this job - Evan and Damian (Me)

On the positive side, the great thing about Steam is that they do give you a checklist of all the things you need to do, from legal, pricing, technical, etc. They are very helpful - and most of it is straightforward.

Luckily for us, Evan is the technical brains and I have the business side. You can assign a 2nd person as admin to your Steam account - so they can work alongside you. 

Some of what you need to put together.

On the business side - you need to have an EULA for your game. Steam doesn't supply any templates - so you have to write one yourself. This took some time to make sure I was happy with it.

For the game, you need some high-quality images and a trailer video.

The trailer video is the one that is and has taken the longest for you.  You need to decide what parts of the games to show, what text to display, and what call to action you want and then put it together. The hard part is cutting the video together. If you haven't done this before and have to learn the tools - it can be a struggle. In the end, I've been using ClipChamp - which to be fair - is pretty good.

The other challenge I had with gameplay was that I couldn't play the game.  This is one genre I'm really bad at. So the game developers' had to play the entire game for me and send me a video. I simply used my phone and shot this live demo on TikTok - video attached.

Adding a bit of text, and zooming in - gives a reasonable look.

Oh, and all of this also is the same for itch. Each time we updated any video or image - we had to do it in both places. So thats my job - keeping track of what changes.

We've tested a few different videos for Steam, and tools. Right now the one we have is our 1st play though, but we hope to update that in the coming days..... Come on Evan !!!! You need to replace my video.