
I’ve been making a game called Race The Sun for about 6 months now, with my brother Forest.
During this time, in addition to development, we’ve also done a lot of things outside of the game itself. We’ve done frequent blog and social media updates. We made a “teaser” video, and sent press emails to try and stir up some previews. We developed a somewhat unique business model, in hopes that it would create a “marketing story” for ourselves as a company and help build a community. We held giveaway contests. We setup a Greenlight page and a forum on our website to try to further our community-building.
We also released an early “alpha demo” on Kongregate of the game, and opened up pre-orders on our website, with Kickstarter-like tiers of purchase. We even entered the game in the IGF
These things have had varying levels of success – but they’ve also taken an awful lot of time away from actually finishing the game. Once in awhile, I think it’s important to evaluate where you’re spending your time, to ask yourself what’s working and what’s not.
Here are two lessons in particular that have given us some clarity: Continue reading…