So from watching projects like Overgrowth and such I decided a while ago that dev logs seemed to be the way to attempt and stir up buzz for your game before you had a finished product.
But now it seems that because people have been so exposed for so long there is Overgrowth fatigue and everyone is just sick of hearing about it.
Also I try to make sure to post at least once a week for videos but I’m also concerned about being irritating or coming across as spam.
And then finally I think Yahtzee croshaw put it best saying “getting noticed on the internet is like throwing a message in a bottle into a sea made of messages in bottles.” But a major difficulty with trying to spread the word about a project is coming across as an attention whore.
So these are the things I’ve been meditating about.
Any thoughts or wisdom? What have been your experiences?
I have found that the key is to balance marketing drives with development milestones. The problem of marketing “fatigue” is generally due to a lack of trust arising from missed release dates. If you have clear development goals, your marketing can reflect your daily achievements towards those goals and you will suffer no “fatigue”. However, if you miss even a single goal, it can lead to distrust and people will see your marketing efforts as misleading, which eventually leads to “fatigue”. A safe approach would be to use a “coming soon” tag line (or something equally ambiguous) to generate interest while avoiding the stigma of missed promises. The balance between the two is too be ambiguous until you have confidence in achieving major milestones, and incorporate those milestones in as you get close to them.
Posting updates is generally a good idea. I’m sure people who are interested in Overgrowth appreciate it, and they’re attracting new players to the game by posting about it; if people get irritated, those are people who don’t want it, so no big deal.
I’d focus on interacting with other developers. Talk to them and critique their work, and ask for input and feedback on yours as well (not necessarily to anyone in particular, but just the community in general). Usually, you’ll get people who are helpful interested in your project and work. If you just focus on “hey, check out my project”, “hey, buy my thing”, I don’t think you’re going to get very far. Using Twitter effectively (for example, using the #gamedev hashtag) is important as it’s, I feel, a bit more personal than a Facebook page, though FB supports conversation better, and with longer posts. Reddit’s /r/gamedev subreddit is also useful and helpful to communicating with other developers. Anyway, it’s more about the concepts than where or how you do it; communicate with people and make them interested in you and your projects.
I made a video about my thoughts on social media interaction, if you want to check it out.
I’m starting to think that about once or twice a month is a good timeframe for updates. And you have to have something people can play, right from the start. Just an instant action mode. Once people play it and enjoy it they’ll come back for updates, if the updates actually add something to experience.