Vania Update #2: Press Kits & The Vania Dashboard

Although boards and market research will always be a foundational part of Vania, they are just the start of our journey.

Our goal is to build Vania into a platform that can help you from inception to launch, and to link all those things together to give you a suite of tools to handle marketing that's more efficent and more fun than going it alone.

Introducing Vania Press Kits

All press kits are kind of the same, right?

Well, a modern press kit is still all about reducing the friction between intent to talk about your game and actual coverage appearing; that hasn't changed.

But the actual use case and audience for kits certainly has. The sad reality is there are remarkably few traditional, written press left actually covering small to mid sized game releases, and fewer still with audiences that can really move the needle on wishlists. There are awlays some exceptions, but wishlists and interest in general from "the media" typicaly now come from influencers.

So our design for kits focuses on influencers as the primary audience.

How do we reduce friction for this audience? What other tools and features can we implement or highlight for a new generation of coverage? And how do we do so while still serving the diminished but still important traditional press and not burying the "standard" features you might need?

Well, you could login and make your own for free right now -- they can pick up the latest assets and metadata from your Steam page as a starting point so can be produced in minutes.

But here's a few examples:

1 - Vania kits allow you to upload fully uncompressed, downloadable and embeddable versions of your trailer.

One of the key ways you may get coverage on YouTube pre launch is compilation channels like this, and there's nothing worse than seeing twice-compressed versions of your trailer appear somewhere because the only downloadable option was another YouTube embed.

2 - We allow large file size uploads across the board, and allow upload of layered formats and custom font uploads and previews,

"I need to make a unique thumbnail" is now a more likely use case for a press kit than a game site needing a static piece of key art for an article. This also removes the need to link out to Google Drives and Dropboxes, which in turn reduces the chances that you forgot to update those links in the first place.

3 - Other Stuff

• All of our kits are fully exportable in both JSON and XML, which makes it super easy for other platforms to pick up assets and metadata that they need
• We have a ton of themes to use, which while probably not going to increase your coverage can at least help your match your kit the look and feel of your own website and branding
• Multiple analytics options including Google Analytics, the privacy friendly Plausible Analytics and our simple in-house view counter for when you just cannot be bothered

As always, there will be many more features to come. If you have any ideas, suggestions and of course, bug reports, please join us in Discord.

Vania Dashboard

Ok, this one is slightly less exciting, but we didn't actually have a backend for Vania until now, just boards!

Right now, the dashboard lets you create a game, a company and a press kit, as well as access various settings in a single place. You can quickly swap between the two areas via the Vania logo.

In the future this area will be the "command centre" of Vania, and new features we develop will either appear here or as features on boards. And, as we grow, we'll integrate the two as much as we can!

Oh, and some other fixes...

• Game Blocks are now correctly displaying wishlists / owner accounts rather than sometimes showing "0"
• Charts no longer reset your options for what to show when you refresh or reload
• Setting release date "after" a year now correctly shows of dates after that year, not just that year alone
• Fixed some games not showing up in search, and some other not games stuff (tools and DLC) showing up and causing mischief
• Fixed a few blocks whose help files were linking to the wrong page