Development is only half the battle. To carry out our mission of making quality RPGs, we have to sell them - a minimum of 10,000 copies - of our next game if not this one. One does not simply make a game, upload it to Steam, and sell 10,000 copies. We need to get noticed by at least 100,000 gamers.

Where do we even start?

• Social Networks: Twitter, Minds, Gab, Facebook, Instagram, etc.
• Chat: Discord, Slack, Telegram, etc. Distracting but very popular now.
• Forums:  There's one for every niche. High on our list.
• Video: YouTube, BitChute, and a few also-rans and new upstarts. We'll upload trailers & gameplay vids soon.
• Livestreaming: YouTube, Twitch, Dlive, Bitwave, etc - and now in testing at BitChute!
• Gaming Press / Review Sites: Gamers hate them for shilling bad games, panning good challenging games, and injecting joyless intersectional feminism into our bad-boy hobby. There are exceptions, and we'll reach out to them when we're ready.
• Crowdfunding: Kickstarter, etc. It's not just for money - it's a hype amplifier. Not a starting point, however.
• Distribution Platforms: Steam, GameJolt, Itch, etc. These sites offer devlogs, more forums, and early access as means to promote upcoming releases.
• Traditional Advertising: Only for steaming hot AAA sh*t.
• Local word of mouth: It's something.

We got off to a slow start in March, just on Twitter and Gab, hampered by less-than-stunning graphics; we couldn't post a decent screenshot (with shadows) until the end of the month, and no animated GIFs until late April. In June we crossed the 100-follower barrier on Twitter and achieved exponential growth (the hard way, no cheating). That puts us on the radar, but nowhere near our target. We need videos. We've been hard at work on combat mechanics & animations so we can finally show off the gameplay.

Naturally our development effort is also behind schedule, so the hype train a chance to catch up. We hoped to release this summer/fall, but it's looking like 2020. We're warming up to the idea of half-price early access / open beta - when it's complete but not polished. That may be what it takes to get people interested. It's also possible we'll have a very underwhelming first release. At least we'll have something to show when we're hyping our second game.

That's the big picture; on with the details...

Twitter

If Facebook is for bland pleasantries among family and colleagues, Twitter is the place to seek attention from random strangers. Perfect. We followed a few accounts in/around our RPG niche, discovered a few more from their interactions and even Twitter's recommendations, and started learning the tricks of the trade by observation. It boils down to this: participate in other people's threads to gain exposure, write a succinct bio and upload a nice banner image to catch the eye of potential fans, and fill your profile page with eye-catching images. Flatter other users with likes and replies. Avoid retweets; they're not helpful because most users filter them out; all they do is clutter your profile page. Use hashtags like #gamedev for low-grade free exposure. Use Analytics to gauge what works for you, but ignore the numbers; they're meaningless. Try TweetDeck to filter out the noise and keep up with actual conversations. Stay active, post at least once a week, but don't overdo it; have patience. That's what we've learned, anyway.

Beware the pitfalls of Twitter: addiction, censorship, and the follower game. To that we say, "strictly business". We don't kill time on Twitter, we don't use it on phones, we don't have personal accounts, we don't talk about our personal lives, and we resist the urge to test the limits of censorship. (That's not to say we don't engage in a little banter, a necessary business risk in these times; no one loves bland corporate PR). The "follower game" is more insidious. If you're famous enough you don't have to play it, but in the beginning you really have no choice. If someone follows you, you follow them back. This works both ways; it's an easy way to gain followers. Naturally, half the people who follow you are just trawling for follow-backs, but they don't care about you and they'll soon dump you. It becomes difficult to tell them apart from people you follow for better reasons. Are there tools to help? Why yes, there's a whole industry of follower management apps - and they're slimy money-grubbing parasites meta-gaming the follower game. Nope, not worth our time or money. Strictly business.

We eventually developed a simple method to track followers/ees so we can detect when someone gets banned and reconnect with them on other platforms. Or reconnect with everyone if our account gets the axe.  It works okay for smaller accounts with up to ~1000 followers/ees.

• Updated script for Nu Twitter: https://pastebin.com/0X1RYbdi
• Open in a spreadsheet or use a diff tool like Meld to compare with old versions

"Strictly business" doesn't mean we take Twitter seriously. It's like a game. Normal social rules don't necessarily apply. Shameless self-promotion and political arguments are the norm here; there's nothing to lose. Objectively, gimmicks like #FF (Follow Friday) are cringey as hell, but on Twitter they work great and everyone loves them. When in Rome, eh? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The biggest problem with Twitter? It's full of indie game developers! Where are the actual gamers? Well, most people don't use Twitter anymore unless they're selling something. Strictly business! The gamers of Twitter are mostly indie devs, artists, musicians, streamers, podcasters, bloggers, promoters, etc.

Other Social Media

Facebook remains popular with boomers who don't mind living in a "Minority Report" world - not exactly our audience. The best it has to offer is (in)famously precise ad targeting - but everyone who know who's tried it says it's too expensive. Instagram could be more useful to us, but it's difficult/impossible to post without the phone app. We ain't got time for that - and we're too paranoid! And with 2 recent major outages it's getting hard to take the Zuckerborg seriously. Make that 3 as of today... ROFL

Minds is probably the biggest Facebook alternative. We joined a month ago but we have some reservations... we'll wait and see what happens before we put any effort into it.

YouTube may be the last mainstream platform (besides Steam) where the average gamer still has an account with which to LIKE, COMMENT, AND SUBSCRIBE!!!! We'll find out when we start uploading gameplay/trailer videos.

Gab and BitChute are by far our favorite alternate platforms. Both are on the front lines of the free speech crusade, and they have the racist content to prove it. But as mainstream platforms expand their definitions of "hate speech" to include "anything that offends anyone", Gab and BitChute are rapidly filling out with a balanced variety of users & content. One year ago these sites were pretty dead. Today they're seeing respectable engagement. In another year they may be the top dogs, in practical terms if not in raw numbers.

20% of our followers are on Gab. Half of them seem like actual gamers. None are the type who'll shun us for failing to push the progressive agenda in a damn game. So, for our purposes, Gab is already Twitter's equal.

Here's a shoutout to our first ?human? Gab follower @conrad1on, from way back before the Great Deplatforming of 2018. He just posts memes and stuff - good raw material for the NPC factory!

Everything Else

RPG forums are next on our list, once we have trailer/gameplay videos - it's important to make a good first impression.  We'll try scifi forums too if there's any interest in gaming.

Livestreaming is big now, but we've seen the indie devstreams of our relatively successful peers, who regularly pull a whopping 0 to 5 viewers. They're boring. And we would be too! We'll leave it to the LPers.

Someone suggested devlogs. GameJolt has pretty slick devlogs, but it's bloated with ads and trackers. Itch.io is just the opposite, a model of quality web design and respect for users. It could use improvement, but so far we're not really getting enough views to justify the time it takes to write these posts, so whatever. We'll probably use it more in the beta and post-release phases.

Locally, there are a few dozen gamedevs we hang out with occasionally, but they're all in different niches. Publicity-wise, we get more out of talking to our normie friends. They'll never play our game, but talking about it helps us hone our sales pitch. That's valuable.