Here I am, in Desura and IndieDB, doing stuff that I tought that I would never need to do...
While in university, I had several classes with a teacher that worked at Eletronic Arts as leader of the marketing team (I dunno his actual title, probably South America Marketing Manager or something like that), he taught us business administration and marketing.
I tought that I would never use the marketing parts, specially PR (not press release... but "Public Relations"), also I always tought that mouth-to-mouth would spread anything that I want fast...
So I released my first prototype, and wrote in my site to people don't hype it, mostly because I feared they would go around badmouthing the game, since it was my first public release...
Well, the game turned to be awesome as I wanted, not a single hater showed-up, and some people already turned into rabid fans, but they all did what I asked, and did not spread the word, soon I noticed that I was not getting sufficient amount of testers, almost all feedback was positive, never negative, and when I want feedback to know what to fix, this is a problem.
To solve that problem, I came here to this site, published the game, and hoped for the best... Then I remembered my PR lessons, and so I went to prepare everything, I learned the hard way, that without doing marketing and hype, I will not build a good community, and without a good community I won't get even testers, meaning that during release I would not get sales either. So I made a Twitter account (twitter.com/agfgames for those wondering...) I took my time to wrote my first press release ever piece to be published here on IndieDB (and I got featured on the first page! It is awesome! Even with my english that I learned playing fan-translared JRPGs!), and on four days, what I have is a rank around 100, from 2000, of course, it is a low amount of views compared to stuff like Platinum Arts Sandbox from my friends Hirato and Calimer (btw: It is a great engine, I used for a university project), but it surprised me, it got popular faster than I ever thought it would be, but of course, this would not happen without some hard work.
So, thank you all IndieDB people that are already my fans, and now you know, that you not only can spread the word, but I encourage you to do so! Let's build a community around a lovely arcade game, and let the high scores roll!
