This is how we made our Trip the Ark Fantastic brochure for publishers and investors

In our last blog we talked about how we made our pitch video aimed for publishers and investors. In this blog, we are talking about something similar – a brochure.

For starters, you may ask yourselves: why would you make a brochure if you made a pitch video? Pitch video is much more cooler and, at the end of the day, way more dynamic. And, yep, we agree. That’s why we’ve made the brochure much before the pitch video. Look at it as the first step in getting closer to getting a publisher/investor.

If you’re an indie developer and looking into making your own brochure, here are a few tips ‘n tricks.

What to talk about in your brochure?

Sure, you decided to make a shiny new brochure that will blow away your potential publisher, but first, you need to know what will you talk about in it. So, here are a few bullet points to get you started:

• What is your game about
• Three to five key features in your game (and explain them a bit)
• A bit about the story and lore (if you have any)
• Gameplay mechanics
• Your team
• Your inspirations
• SWOT analysis
• Some facts about marketing you did by yourself so far (if you did, that is)
• Details about your budget, e.g., what will you spend on all those millions you get from the publisher
• Also, don’t forget about the timeline for the production of your game

We used only free and open-source software for the brochure

When you’re an indie developer, you’re always on the budget. Until you get the investment or a publisher, you’ll have to find a workaround for everything. Luckily, Gamechuck comes to a rescue!

For this brochure, we used three completely free and open-source software solutions. For image manipulation (and much, much more) we used Krita, which we already wrote about. Read more about Krita below.

Now, for everything design-wise, Inkscape is the way to go.

Basically, you’ll have to do the brochure page-by-page, and Inkscape is a pretty powerful tool for that purpose. Inkscape is made for designers, illustrators and magazine/newspaper publishing, so you may say it’s rather capable. The UI is a bit rough around the edges, but you’ll get the hang of it relatively quickly.

The software saves your progress as a SVG file, but it can export the page in various formats, as shown below.

Considering we use an open-source desktop publishing tool, Scribus, we have exported each page in PDF format.

Scribus is another neat open-source software, and pretty easy to use. Basically, all you have to do is to know the dimensions for your brochure, and you’re ready to go. Why the dimensions? Well, because you’ll also want to print your brochure for all the events you’ll attend when this pandemic goes away.

When you generate a new document, then you’ll just import all the PDF files you’ve made with Inkscape; page by page, of course. Like so:

And, that’s basically it. When you’re satisfied with the layout, just export the thing, and you’re ready to spam the publishers and investors about the awesome new game you’re making!

Does making a brochure take a lot of time which I could use for making my game instead?

Glad you asked that!

It definitely depends on how much you want to show in your brochure. It took us about a week of continuous work only on the brochure with additional fixes and updates. So, in total, we spent around two weeks on it.

Does it mean that you could have spent that time for game development instead? Well, yeah, but your brochure is definitely necessary as a communication tool you’ll use to reach the publisher and/or investor.

Or you could just ask your colleague/friend/family member to help you with it. It’s up to you.

But, before you go, here’s something really cool!

As a token of gratitude for reading this blog, you can download our Trip the Ark Fantastic brochure on this link.

How did you like it? Let us know in the comments below, or on our Twitter, Facebook and Insta!