PogoGirl Devlog #29: Scrap Brain

Well, the release of Go! Go! PogoGirl is 7 days away.

Yikes.

As expected, things behind the scenes are still very, very heated. It doesn’t matter how much you plan ahead, the final stretch of a project will always be a mad scramble. Either you’ve forgotten something, or you think of something new that absolutely, definitely has to be in the game, or something just breaks for no adequately explained reason. Or, most likely, all of these things happen at once.

When I was making a build to submit to Steam for approval, I discovered a host of gamepad-related bugs that caused crashes. Well, I said “discovered”, but they may have just spontaneously appeared, I really wouldn’t know. Took me over 10 hours to fix them, if they are indeed fixed now. But Steam did approve the build, so at least that’s good.

So, what am I doing now? Fixing bugs and adding polish. And panicking.

There are so many factors and variables that go into making a game, so many things you have to keep track of and juggle in your mind. You need so many skillsets if you’re (mostly) working solo. The thing that I (and many other indiedevs) struggle with is marketing. Sure, I write these logs and tweet things, but that’s about it. And once you get close to releasing your project, that’s when you start to feel like marketing is the most important part. After all, what good is a great game if nobody knows it exists? So, I started panicking and tried to figure out what to do.

Naturally, it is way, way too late to think about that, like, 2 weeks before release.

The main thing I looked into were sites like Keymailer, which you can use to send out game keys to streamers and reviewers. I felt like this was still the best option to get your game out there. But after reading up on it, I noticed that most people had the same experiences as I did. Back when I released [Speer] I used distribute() to send out keys. And I did get a lot of requests. The thing is, most of these were bogus. I’d get key requests from streamers who had never streamed anything, and from Youtubers who had made one Minecraft video with 5 views about 2 years earlier…which made them think they had enough status to request 3 keys from me.

Nah.

So screw it.

I’ll just try the oldschool attempt again: Make a good game and get it into the hands of people who appreciate it. I’ve done my best to get that first part done, but I’ll need your help for the second. If Go! Go! PogoGirl seems like a game you’d enjoy, please check it out. If you do enjoy it, tell others about it. It doesn’t matter if it’s on Twitter, Reddit, in person, or whatever. Just spread the word. You would be doing me a huge favor.

Anyway, enough rambling from me, I have bugs to fix. I’m super excited to finally get the game into the hands of players and I really hope you’ll enjoy it.

See you next week on launch day!

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