I just read this article by Raph Koster about self-promotion in game development over on Gamasutra. You should check it out - it's good stuff. You know, if you're a game developer. What struck me most was the section about being kind to fellow developers. Sharing in successes and failures and generally being a nice person to the other people around you. So, I'm beginning a development blog to share in my success, failures, and interesting things I've found or am thinking about. Raph says, "...there’s almost no advice as good as a signpost that says 'watch out, a flood washed out this road.'" Here's a little nugget of advice that I learned between the time I wrote the title for this post and the time I wrote this sentence: Sometimes, you'll discover a huge bug in your game that you've already released. This might be a major, hard-to-fix bug, but, more likely, it'll be something stupid that takes two seconds to fix. It's really nice if you have the capability to fix it whenever, wherever you are, because otherwise you'll be pounding your fists against your head, berating yourself for not playing it through THAT FINAL TIME. So, even though I was at work, I was able to sync my latest build version of The Sinking Feeling from github, turn the script that I'd stupidly disabled back on, and re-up the builds to GameJolt. Then, I felt way better. So, there's a little signpost for you. I'm not saying that you ALWAYS have to play ALL THE WAY through EVERYTHING you do EVERY TIME you change anything, but, by golly, it wouldn't hurt. | "...there’s almost no advice as good as a signpost that says 'watch out, a flood washed out this road.'" |
dsfa sdfa
1/29/2015 06:10:39 am
what I dislike about self-promotion is that it makes it so that you can't take what anyone says at face value, because you might think that they're being nice just so they can get a favor out of you. I made a game, and I did act that way a little when I put it on the web, so I can't fully take what people say at face value. But maybe that's because I approached self-promotion the wrong way, instead of thinking about the game itself, and what's good about it, I thought about myself and was maybe slightly dishonest and didn't think about the actual game enough.
Reply
I feel like I've done the same thing. The trick, I'm beginning to realize, is to offer more to the community than just saying, "Look at this game I made!" There's certainly a place for that, but if people don't know who you are, they're less likely to play it, much less share it. It may be (and this is the voice of inexperience talking) that part of self-promotion is helping other people - sharing their games, leaving comments, sharing resources, etc. That way, when it comes time to share your new game, people are more endeared to you and more invested in helping you succeed ... because you helped them succeed. I feel like that's when self-promotion stops being so much "i want a favor from you" and starts being more "let's all help each other."
Reply
Leave a Reply. |
This is my old GameDev website. Click here to be redirected to my new one!
Archives
June 2015
Categories |