- I applied to showcase the game at the Portland Retro Gaming Expo with the Portland Indie Game Squad. They accepted me so I was able to showcase it at the expo for a day. This got me some players right off the bat
- I shared it on HN, Reddit, Mastodon, etc.
- The website Thinky Games wrote an article about it
- The YouTube channel Cracking the Cryptic shared it which got a lot of new players. More recently a couple of other YouTubers (Timotab and Stro Solves) have been posting videos regularly
- I link to it from my blog, and this unrelated rant went semi-viral in web dev circles: https://paulmakeswebsites.com/writing/shadcn-radio-button/
- Winning the award gave me more visibility and players
I've also tried using things like Instagram and Discord but haven't had much luck there. I don't really get how those platforms work.
To be honest I'm not great at marketing. I've just been experimenting and seeing what works.
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I would say the most important thing is the game itself:
- I've worked hard to gather feedback and incorporate it into the gameplay.
- I focus on keeping the puzzles fresh and striking the right difficulty level. (Challenging but something most people can do in 10 minutes.)
- I built a sharing feature that ~300 or so people use a day
I think all my marketing would have been useless if people didn't like the game and want to play again and share it with their friends.