How to promote an unusual visual novel?

[FrankenLaFranklin]

**New to posting here so I'm sorry if this is in the wrong place.**

I'm still in the scripting phase but this is question that has been bothering me.

My idea that could be a problem for promoting:
The VN would be about 3 different types of love the MC can develop (fatherly, romantic and friendship), with 3 different people. There's only a possibility of being in a romantic relationship with one character.

The main characters gay but its not really a bl game. It's about relationships but it takes mostly place on fantasy adventure missions. It also has strong horror themes.

How can you promote/tell people about a game like that without straight up sending a short novel as a summary.

I don't want to mislead anybody who wants to play the game. Its my first visual novel that I will bring to completion, so it's based on what I would like to play, rather than what would appeal to people.


"Quick" summary: MC is a young half orc, left to raise his little half brother after his father walked out on them. Father left a ton of debt so he has to find a better paying job. MC gets an opportunity to work with a team of higher ranking adventurers after a member dies.

The rest of the story takes place on missions and the short space in between missions.

Each mission is based on a horror trope (paranormal, body horror, horror comedy, etc) and has multiple ways you can complete them depending of information gathered before the mission and past missions.

You can choose a member of the team to get closest to, each one representing a different aspect of love (the team leader/human = fatherly, the elf/healer = romance, the dwarf/fighter = friendship).

[parttimestorier]

I think the idea of each route being about a different kind of love sounds really interesting. If you're looking for a one-sentence way to condense all that information, I would probably say something along the lines of, "A young half orc in desperate need of money to support his family joins a team of high-ranking adventurers, and his relationships with the other members of the group explore different kinds of love, while their missions explore different genres of horror." I think something like that would already clue people in that it's not a basic romance game. It's also pretty popular in marketing to make little character profiles for everyone who has a route, so if you want to be more specific you could list the different types of relationships they can have on some nice images like that. Then if someone still thinks they're all romance options and looks at those images to pick a favourite, they'll see that detail and realize right away that they were wrong.

Good luck with the project! I'd love to read it when it's done.

[Shanter]

Indeed, it seems to me that promoting something is the most difficult. I know that a large number of people of different ages use social networks who may be interested in playing this game, so I would start promoting on social networks. For example, I know that TIK TOK is gaining popularity. There is a lot of information on the Internet about how to promote something on this social network, for example, I found an interesting service here for this. Or your YouTube channel with a video reviews on your game. It seems interesting to me.

[Cami-sama]

Your visual novel has a complicated plot or genre, I guess? You can make a video trailer and upload it on YouTube or any social media you have. You can also make a short note or warning before people download your link, telling them it's not your typical visual novel so you don't mislead or upset them or anything.