The game wasn't playable. We didn't have a trailer. We barely had combat working. But we had dev logs, and apparently that was enough.
We started posting on TikTok around August. Me and a few friends running the accounts, posting whenever we had something worth showing. The videos that hit hardest weren't deep technical breakdowns or combat showcases. They were quick tours of the maps we'd built and simple explanations of what the game was: a DanDaDan PvP game on Roblox, spin for characters, fight. That was it. People could immediately picture what it would feel like to play.
The views trickled in at first. A few hundred here, maybe a thousand there. Enough to know people were watching, not enough to feel like it mattered. Then we had an idea.
We set up a content creator reward system. If you posted or reposted a video about Yokai Trials, you'd get a content creator role in our Discord. Simple as that. No minimum view count, no application process. Just post something and you're in.
That changed everything.
People started posting. Not just reposting our clips, but making their own. Edits, reactions, speculation about the game. You could search "Yokai Trials" on TikTok and the only thing that came up was our game. Every result, every video, all us. For a game that wasn't even out yet, we owned the entire search.
Our own videos were doing well. One hit a quarter million views. Another crossed 100k. But the biggest video wasn't ours. A community creator, someone who'd originally posted just for the content creator reward, put out a TikTok that hit 900,000 views and 150,000 likes. We didn't make it, didn't script it, didn't ask for it. They just made something that resonated and it took off on its own. Thousands of comments. Thousands of saves. That single video, combined with everything else the community was putting out, pushed us past 2 million total views.
At a certain point, we stopped being the ones growing the community. The community was growing itself. New creators would see existing videos, make their own, get the content creator role, and the cycle repeated. We just kept building the game and posting updates. The machine ran on its own.
The Discord went from a quiet server to chaos overnight. 3,000 people joined in a single night. I woke up to a server that was completely different from the one I'd gone to sleep with. People introducing themselves, asking questions, posting fan art, theorizing about characters. By the time things settled, we'd peaked at 4,900 members.
The strangest part was managing expectations. Every day, the same question: "when is it releasing?" Hundreds of people excited about a game they'd never played, that we were still actively building the combat system for. We'd post a dev log showing a new ability and the comments would be split between "this looks amazing" and "just release it already." It's a weird position to be in. You're grateful people care, but you also know the game isn't ready, and rushing it would disappoint everyone who showed up because of those TikToks.
We never lied about the timeline. Never dropped a release date we couldn't hit. Just kept posting progress, kept the Discord active, and trusted that the people who stuck around would be the ones who actually cared about the game being good, not just being first.
We gave people a reason to talk about the game. They did the rest.