Two weeks before you want to announce, someone on the team asks "do we have a capsule image?" and the honest answer is no. What follows is a scramble: a logo stretched to seven different aspect ratios, five screenshots pulled from whatever level happened to be lit that week, and a short description written in a Discord thread at 1am. The page goes live, it is fine, and it quietly undersells a year of work.
A store page is not marketing fluff bolted on at the end. It is a deliverable with dependencies, acceptance criteria and a build order, exactly like a vertical slice. Here is the order small teams should build it in, and what "done" looks like at each stage.
Why build order matters
Every asset on a Steam page depends on a decision above it. Your capsule art is a visual answer to the question "what is this game?" — if that question is still open, you will redraw the capsule three times. Your screenshots depend on which features you have decided to lead with. Your tags depend on which audience you have decided to fight for.
So build top-down:
| Stage | Output | Blocked by |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | One-line promise | Nothing — do it first |
| 2 | Tags and genre shortlist | Stage 1 |
| 3 | Capsule art set | Stages 1–2 |
| 4 | Five screenshots | A playable, art-passed slice |
| 5 | Short description (300 chars) | Stage 1 |
| 6 | Long description blocks | Stages 4–5 |
| 7 | Trailer | Everything above |
Teams usually attempt this list in reverse, starting with the trailer because it is the most exciting part, then discover mid-edit that stage 1 was never settled.
Stage 1: the one-line promise
One sentence, under fifteen words, containing a genre anchor and one specific hook. Not a logline about theme — a promise about what the player does.
- Weak: "A haunting journey through a forgotten world."
- Better: "A deck-building roguelike where every card you play is removed from your deck forever."
Test it on someone outside the team. If their follow-up question is "so what kind of game is it?", the sentence failed. Write it into your pitch document and reuse the exact wording everywhere — page, trailer end card, emails to curators. The pitch maker module in GameDesignerX is a reasonable place to keep this canonical, because the same line belongs in your publisher deck.
Stage 2: tags before art
Tags decide which shelves and discovery queues your game appears in, so they are a positioning decision, not a housekeeping task. Steam lets you apply a generous set, but the earliest ones carry the most weight, so treat the first five as a ranked list rather than a bucket.
Build the shortlist by teardown: open six games that the same person would plausibly buy, write down their tags, and count frequency. You are looking for the two or three tags that appear on all six — those are your genre anchors — plus one or two that differentiate you. Avoid aspirational tags for features you cut; a "Co-op" tag on a single-player game generates refunds, not sales.
Stage 3: the capsule has to work tiny
Your main capsule will be displayed as a small thumbnail on crowded shelves far more often than it will be displayed large. The standard sizes you will need are stable and worth putting straight into your asset tracker:
- Header capsule: 460 × 215
- Small capsule: 462 × 174
- Main capsule: 616 × 353
- Vertical capsule: 374 × 448
- Library capsule: 600 × 900
- Library hero: 3840 × 1240
- Logo: 1280 × 720, transparent background
Two rules save most indie capsules. First, one focal subject, large, with high contrast against its background — ensemble shots of five characters turn into mush at thumbnail scale. Second, the title must be legible when the image is scaled to about a quarter of its width. Do the squint test: export the small capsule, shrink it to 25%, and look at it from two metres away. If you cannot read the title or identify the subject, redraw rather than tweak.
Keep the approved references in a mood board next to the capsule brief so your artist is working from direction rather than from a Discord scroll-back.
Stage 4: five screenshots, five jobs
Most visitors skim images before they read a word. Do not give them five variations of the same corridor. Assign each slot a job:
- The core verb. The thing the player does most, mid-action.
- The breadth shot. A second biome, mode or weapon class, proving the game has range.
- The systems shot. The inventory, skill tree, base or map — proof of depth for the players who care about depth.
- The signature moment. Your most distinctive mechanic or spectacle.
- The quiet beauty shot. Composition and mood, no UI clutter.
Capture at 1920 × 1080 or higher, with debug overlays off and a consistent time of day. Turn off any placeholder UI — a TODO_ICON in the corner of screenshot three reads as "this game is not real yet".
Stage 5: the short description
You have 300 characters, and they appear in search results and on wishlist emails where nothing else does. Structure that fits reliably: genre sentence, hook sentence, stakes or scope sentence. Write three candidates, then cut every adjective that would survive on a competitor's page. "Atmospheric", "immersive" and "unique" are free to claim, so they carry no information.
Stage 6: long description in blocks
Nobody reads a wall of text on a store page. Write it as four or five labelled blocks, each a bolded two-to-four word header followed by two or three lines, with an animated GIF between blocks where you have one. Lead each block with a mechanic, not a mood. Close with a short honest section on scope — length, number of levels, whether there is controller support — because answering those questions upfront prevents the refunds that come from mismatched expectations.
Stage 7: the trailer
Cut gameplay in the first five seconds. No studio logo, no slow fade from black, no engine splash — those belong at the end, if anywhere. The structure that holds up: hook moment, core loop demonstrated for fifteen to twenty seconds, escalation through two or three distinct features, title card with the one-line promise and a release window. Keep it under ninety seconds and make sure it reads with the sound off, because it will frequently be watched that way.
Pre-announce checklist
Run this before the page goes public, not after:
- One-line promise identical across page, trailer and pitch deck
- All capsule sizes exported and squint-tested
- Five screenshots, five distinct jobs, no debug UI
- Short description under 300 characters, no filler adjectives
- Tags ranked, with no tag describing a cut feature
- System requirements measured on real hardware, not guessed
- Release window you can defend ("Q3 2027" beats a date you will move)
- Legal, privacy and content warnings filled in
- Page reviewed on a phone — most traffic is not on your 27-inch monitor
Steam requires a review pass before a page goes live, so budget for a round trip of a few business days and do not schedule your announcement the day after you submit.
Keep the page in sync with the build
A store page rots. You cut the co-op mode in month nine and the page still promises it; you overhauled the art direction and screenshot two is from the old palette. Add a recurring task to your sprint board at each milestone: re-verify store page against current build. It takes twenty minutes and it is the cheapest trust you will ever buy.
Treat the whole set — promise, tags, capsules, screenshots, descriptions, requirements — as tracked deliverables with owners and dates. A Steamworks prep checklist alongside your milestones in GameDesignerX works for this, and so does a shared spreadsheet; what matters is that the page has a build order and a sign-off, instead of arriving as a panic two weeks before announce.