Announcement Tasks
I recently announced my new project Flotilla 2, and wanted to share what I do when I announce a game.
This is the task list I wrote for the announcement:
The task list program I use is Workflowy. It’s a bulleted list that can be updated from your phone, desktop, tablet, wherever. I like Workflowy because of how bare-bones it is. You can find a ton of similar task list programs that’ll fit your specific needs.
There are so many moving parts in announcements/projects. For me, having a task list keeps these parts from getting lost.
Pre-announcement prep
I try to prepare all the announcement work beforehand, starting a month or two prior to the planned date. These tasks include:
- Make the website.
- Make the press kit.
- Make the announcement video.
- Make the storefront.
- Write the email to press.
- Write the newsletter email.
- Write the announcement social media post. [1] [2]
- Write the blog post.
The goal of doing all this work beforehand is to de-stressify announcement day. Because, as you can see: there’s a lot of prep work!
Announcement day
When the announcement day does come, I upload / release / post / make public all of the pre-prepared work I did.
Even though the work is all prepared and ready, it belies the fact that it’s a sizeable task to slam it all online. I try my best to release all of it at the same time, but I only have two hands so it takes a while.
This process ends up taking a few hours or so – partly because there’s so many parts, and partly because no matter how hard you prepare, there’s always, always, always some last-minute thing that was forgotten or needs to be tweaked.
Et al
When I released my first commercial independent game in 2010, I didn’t think much about marketing. I hadn’t done marketing before, and didn’t have much interest in it.
And the game sold well!
But, that was eight years ago.
I love making games. I want to keep doing it for a long time. And that project that you’re working on? I want you to continue making cool things like that!
Marketing is something I’ve been trying to better understand, and better integrate into how I work. It’s hard. There’s a million ways to do it, and I think it takes time to figure out what ways work for you.