How a game made in 4 months reached 2 million players - the short story of Dagon

Five years ago today, I released Dagon: by H. P. Lovecraft, my first original game. 

It is a faithful adaptation of Lovecraft’s 1919 story. Some people describe it as a walking simulator without the walking or an audiobook with visuals. You can’t move around - the camera is placed at a fixed position in each scene, and you can only look around within a limited range.

But the original idea actually had very little to do with walking simulators. I wanted to create a classic visual novel, but in a “premium” version: 3D graphics, animations, voice acting, and a much more cinematic presentation.

The lack of movement, and the way you jump between scenes, was inspired by comics, where the reader can spend as much time as they want looking at each panel, without being rushed. Another partial inspiration was a very specific PSP release: Metal Gear Solid: Digital Graphic Novel. That slow, deliberate pace seemed like a perfect fit for Lovecraft’s stories, which rely so heavily on atmosphere and a sense of overwhelming dread.

Although, ironically, I wasn’t a big fan of Lovecraft when I started the project.

I love classic horror literature, but compared to other writers of the period, Lovecraft initially seemed repetitive and overrated to me. I originally wanted to use the works of other authors, such as Algernon Blackwood or Stefan Grabiński. I ended up choosing Lovecraft for, admittedly, a purely marketing reason. He was the most recognizable “brand”, so it seemed like a better idea to start with him.

Choosing the story was relatively easy.

Dagon was one of the early stories from what would become Lovecraft’s most recognizable Cthulhu Mythos period. It was short enough to be a good fit for a first project, and it allowed me to make the game without expensive character animations - something that’s difficult to do on a low budget, while poorly animated characters are one of the quickest ways to break immersion.

I also wanted to add some unobtrusive gameplay, so I decided to include collectibles, inspired by Metal Gear. They contained various bits of trivia about Lovecraft, Dagon, and the historical context behind the story. The idea for this came from the fantastic historical collectibles in Valiant Hearts. I didn’t want to fill the game with dry Wikipedia facts or clickbait-style “fun facts”, though. So I started digging into Lovecraft’s biography, letters, worldview, and the historical context of his life.

And that completely changed my perspective.

It was actually the moment when I fell in love with Lovecraft’s work. To the point where I now believe that it’s impossible to truly understand the depth of his stories without knowing something about the man who wrote them.

As for the promotion, the biggest things that helped were the fantastic reception during Steam Next Fest, the strong response from Lovecraft-related communities on Reddit, who provided valuable feedback from the earliest stages, and an Imgur article where we explained why the game would be free that became the top post that day.

A huge part of the credit goes to my friend Maciej, who joined the project to handle the promotion.

We've also contacted hundreds of content creators of all sizes, from accounts with a million followers to much smaller channels, and many of them covered the game. We think thanks to its bite-sized length creators could fit it between bigger titles, which lead to more exposure.

This helped us reach 21,841 wishlists at launch. A really nice result considering it was the first project and we had such a short development and promotion period. My optimistic estimate was that, in the best-case scenario, we might reach 80% positive reviews and 100,000 downloads over the entire lifetime of the project.

The launch of Dagon was probably the most magical moment of my 17 years in gamedev.

The game exploded and we passed 100,000 downloads in two days. With the review score above 95%.

A crucial moment was getting into Steam’s New & Trending very quickly and staying there for several days. The fact that the game is extremely short also helped here - players could finish it quickly, which meant reviews started appearing just a few dozen minutes after release and helped drive even more interest.

And now, five years later, there have been over 2 million players and more than 12,000 reviews on Steam.

To celebrate all the amazing support from our players, we’ve prepared a free DLC that was previously exclusive to the console version. It’ll be coming very soon. Stay tuned!