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Weekly Update - Preparing for Promotion

2 years ago656 words

This week, I've seen the light at the end of the long tunnel I've been frustratingly stuck in for the past several weeks, and have been preparing to face the promotion stuff I've been avoiding.

I spent the first half of the week wondering about a Clarence's Big Chance port, or sequel, or something, but... I don't even clearly remember, I think I just got distracted, or fell into some panic about what I'm doing with my life and the hopelessness of it all, or something, and then decided I should really just be trying to face the main thing that I'm avoiding rather than getting distracted with things that'll only delay the inevitable.

(I'd still like to port that, and look into my other old games too, but I need to find a balance and get into a better state of mind first.)

So I've been doing some reading, research, checking posts on indie dev subreddits mostly. Someone linked to a site called ∞ HOW TO MARKET A GAME ∞, where some guy gives some advice that seems useful enough... though his ∞ about page ∞ only mentions two games he's made and neither of them seem to have been phenomenally successful. They also look like every other indie game, though, so maybe being able to get as many reviews as he did despite that means his ideas have some value. Gives me somewhere to start, at the very least.

While I suppose I've been posting about Atonal Dreams to Twitter fairly regularly for a while now (though not for the past few weeks, as I feel embarrassed about linking to what are essentially just excuse posts), I know that posting to Reddit would be the best next step, so I wrote out something I could post there... but haven't posted it yet; I'm mentally building up to it.

Posting at different times yields different levels of engagement, as I've learned from posting on a subreddit related to my mental illness; ∞ this website ∞ says that posting to r/gamedev - which seems to be more likely to generate any attention than smaller ones like r/SoloDevelopment - would be most effective on a Monday, so I was hoping to do that today...

...but I realised I'd got so distracted that I never got around to revising the store page to match the newest version, so I should probably do that first.

A lot of indie games tend to have painted 'cover art' images they use across Steam (which annoy me because they typically don't match their in-game art), which they usually hire an artist to make, but since I draw myself, I thought I'd attempt to make one for Atonal Dreams. I only have a rough, unfinished composition sketch so far though:




I also posted an progress gif thing on ∞ my Patreon ∞.

I was hoping to do some practise studies over the weekend to shed some of the rustiness that's built up over the years neglecting my skills, but stuff came up so I wasn't able to focus on that as much as I would have liked. Hopefully I'll get to that and a second attempt at this soon though; the finished version will look much better.

I'll likely spend this next week preparing stuff, optimising my store page based on research, maybe making changes to the game based on tester feedback which I also realised I hadn't done, with the intention of posting on Reddit on Monday.

I've also been working through some mental-health-related stuff this week, but this time I think I'll actually put that in a separate post for people to ignore!