Darkness Dwells - Reaching into the dark

When constructing the promotion strategy for Darkness Dwells we first dove into research on other indie horror games to see their actions in regards to promotion. Once of the massive decisions which we took away from this research was players were intrigued by having a main monster to the game, for example Freddy from Five Nights at Freddy's. We took this interest and built it into our promotion by creating the core character of Longtooth and creating various images of him which were made to create intrigue. These images only showed small parts of the character like in the Five Nights at Freddy's promotional imagery which hyped players up. This lack of information for the players was also a conscious decision as when researching other indie horror titles they utilised left these gaps in the lore of the game which the communities surrounding the game filled in themselves. Not only did we do this through promotional imagery but we even placed the children's blocks models in the game to spell out certain words and followed exactly 666 twitter users which actually lead to a fan messaging the account about that. Since we knew that streamers were part of our target market we spent a large amount of effort contacting them. Since our team members had worked on a previous horror title that gained streamers attention we had a core group of streamers which we could guarantee

e we could connect with. Branching out further from that we trawled through other indie horror games on both Itch.io and GameJolt looking for video comments. Once we found videos from streamers with over 1000 views we added them to a spreadsheet to be contacted three days prior to the games release. When the time came we got in contact with these streamers and currently our promotion has gained us over 12 videos in just the first weekend.