First of all, my friend Cory recommended The Big List Of Indie Game Marketing, which is a collection of links that go into great depth about every aspect of indie game marketing. If you want to learn this stuff, know that you can’t absorb it all at once, so be patient and just start reading.

A lot of what I have read–on that list and other places–indicates that the most important marketing tools for an indie game developer are a website and a blog. This website has existed in one form or another for around fifteen years–seriously, has it been that long?–so my basic web presence is taken care of. Web traffic is consistent too, with an occasional huge spike when some big-name blogger like Chris posts something about my site. I added the blog last June to try to increase traffic, build an audience for Retrobooster, and get constructive feedback from anyone who wants to give it.

I have also been working to improve other aspects of this website recently, putting a Retrobooster level playthrough video on the front page, creating a page devoted to Retrobooster to give some details about the game, and adding social sharing buttons (Like, Tweet, +1, etc.) to some pages and each blog post. (It turns out a lot of people had already Liked and Tweeted my site even without those buttons. Isn’t the Internet neat?) I also removed the donations page from the screensavers section. The donations have been great and I appreciate each one; they allowed me to get a new graphics card a couple months ago when my old one died. But now I feel a bit weird having a donations page when I’m trying to transition the website from only giving away free stuff to actually making money. Similarly, I removed the Google ads from the front page while leaving them on several other pages because I had read some comments online that my ads on the front page make the whole site look a bit sketchy and untrustworthy.

There is still plenty to work on, like needing to figure out how to use all this new web infrastructure to build hype. And a lot of smaller things like beautifying the social sharing buttons, which are way too bright on this predominantly black website.

The bottom line is that marketing is about communication. I need to do a whole lot more of it in smart ways, such as by getting interviews, previews, and reviews just as soon as I am ready for that stuff (so far it seems like nobody wants to do an interview until you are about ready to release your game), maybe building a discussion forum, etc. It would be great to already know how to do marketing properly, but this is a good learning experience. Please let me know what you think about all this in the comments. Or send me an email if you want to talk about marketing or anything else.

The best way I have found to make Retrobooster toy-like is to make each level a unique toy. Testers have been letting me know which levels keep their attention the best, and I have a chart in my notes that lists what new concepts I introduce on each level. Testers pretty clearly start to lose interest on the levels where I have neglected to introduce something new and fun.

Lately, I have been working on a level that is an homage to Asteroids, which is a good example of a toy level. It’s hard to imagine making this game and not throwing in some asteroids. After all, it already has a thrust ship and some decent physics for bouncing things like asteroid off of one another. Of course, I had to add Retrobooster’s sense of fun by making alien critters attack you while walking around on the asteroids.

There are other, more subtle ways that make this game like a big toy. Once you unlock a level, you can start a new game on that level anytime you want. This is more like something you would see in a racing game instead of a linear action game, but it supports the toy concept really well.

I suspect the biggest deficiency right now is that the weapons don’t feel enough like toys. Testers spend most of the time using the primary weapon and often forget about the secondary weapons. Part of this is probably because the primary weapon is too powerful right now, but part may be because the weapons just aren’t enough fun to use. I’ll have to keep working on this and tune the weapons a lot better.