Ren_Dem

We didn't do any type of paid marketing or ads for NIVA. Most of the marketing we did was social media marketing and at that time we still used tumblr to share gifs and screenshots. The game was picked up by octocurio who shares a lot of gaming gifs and had a very wide reach on tumblr at that time and the post about NIVA went viral.
NIVA was also released as "pay what you want" on itch.io and thanks to that quickly reached the front page where it lingered for at least a week or two.
The game was very visually appealing and it was basically free if you decided to not pay anything. Because of that a lot of small streamers and Youtubers picked up NIVA which pushed it even further.
I think we also (by chance) hit the perfect timing to release the game. Since the release of Journey there weren't many popular relaxing exploration-based games and NIVA was the first (or one of the first, I obviously don't know the whole games market) with a forest theme. Very shortly after NIVAs release a lot of nature and foresty exploration games were released and a lot of them went big. So I feel like there really was a demand for those types of games. All this showed me that it is important to observe the market to find your particular niche. For Weaving Tides we tried to not leave things to chance.

If you are creating a game/app and can't invest large sums in ads or a marketing you have to do a lot of legwork. I cannot recommend one particular thing since the popularity of Weaving Tides is the sum of all the things we did so far.
We started to share our progress basically at the same time as we started to work full time on the project about 2 years ago. We posted very regularly and tried to do at least 1-2 project updates a week. We also tried a variety of different channels before we found the ones which work best for us (Twitter, Newsletter & Discord)
Early in the development of Weaving Tides we also went to a lot of gaming events where we showcased the game. Events never have a huge impact on tangible things like wishlists or news coverage, but what it did for us was that we found our most dedicated fans there. Those who stuck with us during the whole time up until now, who are advocates for the game and who basically built the ground work for the community we have now.
One more things which is really important imo is try to make friends with a lot of devs who are in the same place as you are. (Who have the same experience, a similar amount of reach, a similar game and so on) It really goes a long way when you cheer each other on, give shout outs and exchange tips.

A lot of our initial funding came from our own savings (from jobs we have worked previously and freelancing) and through private loans from our families. Once we had a working prototype we also applied for a governmental grant which funds projects at the intersection between business and art. Throughout the development of Weaving Tides some of us also did some freelancing on other projects. We also tried to simply save money wherever we could. Two of us are renting a flat with four rooms. Two of those rooms are bedrooms, one is a living- and meeting-room and the last one is the office for the four of us. Thanks to that our office and living costs are extremely low. Now that we are getting closer to finalizing our game we did a Kickstarter campaign in order to be able to afford polishing it.

Story can be more important than gameplay in some cases especially in narrative-heavy games, but generally I’d say the gameplay is most important.

Cinematic experiences in games have been around for at least ten years now so I believe they will always remain part of the gaming landscape.

I think a lot of AAA studios make their games movie like because their high production quality is an eye-catcher and simply a lot easier to market than a game that has mediocre graphics but absolutely amazing gameplay.

We love to see people stream our games! And it is also fine to us if you use cropped screenshots or other Weaving Tides assets you find online for the streaming UI (at least as long as you are streaming Weaving Tides - if you want to use it for other streams we'd have to take a closer look at it first)

We also share any WT streams we find so feel free to send us a link to your channel when you're streaming and we'll share it with our community.

Games and video games in particular always played a very big part of my life. I often noted little game ideas and came up with my own card game. And while I always wished I could make my own video games I never thought I actually could do it until University where we had lecturers which directly worked in the industry and where I met my team.