~12 hours after ....

I set out on this journey as a solo technical guru, here and there I had some friends and colleagues take a look at what I was building. Here I am about 12 hours after releasing a playable test to the masses and I realized something very important.

It's hard out here. 

To roll out the release I started cold posting on my personal and secretive social accounts. This first wave was just across Instagram, reddit, and discord. I got fancy with a google chrome generated QR code to the download page and plopped that on Insta, the caption said "Beta test just released, Android users go give it a try." Then I moved to reddit, chatGPT recommended 4 sub reddits to post to. I could only post on 3 of them due to my lacking Karma. From those 3 one was placed on hold and another was removed all together, leaving me with a single post. Like Instagram my post was lacking I used a similar tagline but also asked for feedback. A good user subtly let me know that I was lacking marketing. At least that was my interpretation of the comment. The actual words stated that I didn't have a description or a link to the game. That's when I turned to chatGPT and prompted the same session that led me to reddit in the first place here is the output:

""" 

🎮🤖 DROID RAGE: BETA TEST NOW LIVE! 🤖🎮
Blow up bots. Break the rules. Beat the rage.

Are you ready to unleash chaos in a neon-lit robo-apocalypse?
Droid Rage is dropping its beta, and we want YOU — the wild, the brave, the slightly unhinged — to jump in and test the madness.

💥 Fast-paced combat
🧠 Deadly A.I. with a bad attitude
🔧 Glitches? Bugs? Rage against the machine and help us smash 'em.

✅ Play now: https://s2g1.itch.io/droid-rage-beta-test
🎁 Give feedback, get early supporter perks (and serious bragging rights)

Join the beta. Break some bots. Become a legend.

#indiegames #gamedev #betatest #itchio #droidrage

"""

Not bad for a game it never saw or so I thought. So I proceeded to update what ever post remined with this description. I decided that was enough for a quick Saturday session.  After one more post...

I useed another of my reddit accounts, thinking it would have some more history and a trail of activity. It still didn't have enough, my years of being a reclusive lurker were feeling punishing, but I did manage to get off one more post to the top thread in game dev with over 20mil users. it was "r/gamedev". I posted the description above and nothing more, after a few minutes I was over 300 views. I viewed that as a success. I started the day unknowing of the best way to get fast exposure and here it was moments before closing my day out. I know it's not millions of viewers and downloads but it's an order of magnitude more exposure than my handful of friend s who played it on my own device. I go to rest feeling accomplished.

This morning I returned to see that my post had over 1K views it has been my most successful post in all my years of social media. BTW I'm old enough to remember the beginning, shout out to Tom from Myspace and Gateway computers. Unfortunately it looks like this round of exposure came to an abrupt end when I was called out for using a GPT generated description and the post was subsequently removed.

Here I am left with one active reddit post :https://www.reddit.com/r/playmygame/comments/1ln32zd/play_my_android_game_please...

and lots of lessons learned. I don't feel like I failed this cold release, in fact I feel the opposite. I'm proud for exposing my pet project and opening the aperture for more feedback and constant improvement. 

Here are some more take aways:

- There are avenues for smaller focus groups of developers and testers, i.e. discord channels and websites dedicated to testing beta releases

- More screenshots, more gameplay, more hype. Looking back my rapid release definitely feels cold and robot generated. Spend more time capturing a day in life of a developer or a player.

- No one said this but personally I feel that this thing plays like a tech demo, it needs more life and more personality