Plan: Finishing Up August, and a Frayed Knights Question

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 17, 2015

Now that the two conventions are done (WHEW), the remainder of August… well, remains busy, but a little less so. Here’s what’s going on…

This week, my daughter gets home from South Carolina, where she’s been serving as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints for the last 18 months. We’re excited to get her back home, although she’ll only be here less than two days before we take her off to college again. That’s going to make the latter part of this week pretty busy.

Until then (and all the following week), I’m working on my demo for Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath for Utah Game Wars. The submission deadline is the end of the month (Monday the 31st). While it’ll be a little crazy, it won’t be as crazy as preparing for the ToshoCON and Salt Lake Gaming Con demos. Mainly what needs to be done – aside from fixing some embarrassing glitches – is to get everything back to its keyboard & mouse driven default (for conventions, handing people a game controller is easier), providing instructions since I’m not there to manually explain things, and fixing issues where I needed to guide people around in the live demos.

I’ve got an aggressive development schedule between then and the new year. Plus writing projects. And I came to the realization that if my planned schedule is anything to be believed (HAH! HAH, hahahahahah!), I have to start ramping up the marketing stuff for Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath.

Which brings up a question I wanted to ask before the principal audience – you guys. Do I keep the “2” or drop it? I have worked hard to make the story in the sequel stand on its own, and it’s such a major improvement over the original – and will be available on more platforms – so that I don’t want people to feel they can’t play it until / unless they’ve played the original. As much as I’d love for this game to help drive sales of the first game, I don’t want it to be restricted by the sales of the first game, either.

So what say you folks? Should I keep the “2”, or just call it “Frayed Knights: The Khan of Wrath?” And why?

Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Rampant Games - Comments: 7 Comments to Read

McTeddy said,

This is a hard one. On one hand, the 2 will likely prevent people from buying it on impulse… but not having it will make buying the games in the correct order confusing. :/

I’d say ditch the 2 because it is standalone and it can sell on it’s own. Probably would hurt to include “The follow-up to The Skull Of S’mak Daon” as a marketing tagline or something though.
Dave Myers said,

Gamers are smart enough to know that they don’t need to play 1 to enjoy 2 I think. And if 2 is going to be in channels where 1 will not be, there’s something to be said to drop the number from the title. Either way I would hazard a guess and say you’re fine whatever you decide.
Josh Sutphin said,

I think the logo looks a lot better with the 2 in the background. Without it, it looks kinda boring.

I doubt the “but I haven’t played the first game” crowd ends up being that big a proportion of your overall audience, but if you want to hedge against that, you could probably use verbiage like “a stand-alone sequel” placed prominently at the top of your Steam page/anywhere else the game is featured.
Kyle Haight said,

Leaving the ‘2’ also preserves the title parallelism to “Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan”, which I assume is ‘part of the joke’.
FallenAngel said,

Any reason that besides missing the “2”, the second title is also missing the shadows on the letters? Changes the colour and makes it look flatter. Probably influences people’s decision here subconsciously.

I’d agree with Kyle and Dave though, the “2” seems like a natural part of the reference to “The Wrath of Khan” and nowadays I don’t think many people(especially considering the target audience) who qualify for an impulse purchase are instantly turned away by a number in the title(though that *will* of course be the case for someone, somewhere, sometime…gotta weigh that against the potential benefit of having people go “ooh there’s a part 1 for this, let’s check that out as well!”).
Maklak said,

At first the answer seemed obvious: this is the second FK game, so it should be 2. Then I saw the logos and the second one looks much better. Maybe tuck a 2 at the end of first line and not in the background.

> Gamers are smart enough to know that they don’t need to play 1 to enjoy 2 I think.
Yeah, that’s true with a lot of games.
Cuthalion said,

First thought: the “2” tells people this isn’t just another game that came out of nowhere. You need the 2 for marketing reasons. No one’s going to want to be it without knowing that it’s the second and therefore better. (The “yet another sequel” thing gets bashed a lot by critics and devs, but I think it’s more of an assurance than a deterrent for players, or at least it is for me.)

Second thought: the logo looks much better with the 2.

Third thought: after reading others’ notes, of course the Trek joke works better with the 2.

So, keep the 2, on all 3 counts, but especially the first. It tells me you know what you’re doing, and this game won’t be a half-finished bundle of conflicting ideas.