Every solo dev I have met has roughly the same shape. We are good at making the thing. We are worse, sometimes much worse, at telling anyone the thing exists.
Indie game marketing seems designed for a different kind of person. The devs who are good at it appear to genuinely enjoy being in fifteen Discord servers at once, posting daily, replying to everything, hosting community game nights. That is a real skill and I respect it. I do not have it. Until this year I had never used Discord at all. Now I run a Discord server for my game, and my first honest thought after setting it up was: if anyone actually shows up, am I going to be a good host on a platform I have never lived in? My players have years of reps on Discord. I have weeks. Being the novice in a room where your customers are the experts is an uncomfortable place to stand.
There are agencies who do this work. I have no budget for them. Even if I did, I would not know how to tell an ethical one from a grifter, or how to run that hiring process well. That is its own skill I also do not have.
I do have AI, and I can point it at anything I need to learn. But its cycles are cheap and mine are not. Every hour I spend becoming a mediocre marketer is an hour the game does not get better. So the question I keep circling is not how to market a game. It is which 20% of marketing buys 80% of the value, so the rest of me can stay on the work I am actually good at.
The 20% I am betting on
After a few months of reading, asking, and getting it wrong, my list is short.
The game comes first. Nothing downstream works if the game is not excellent, and an excellent game quietly markets itself every time someone plays it in front of a friend. This is also, conveniently, the one job on the list I already know how to do.
Second, when someone does find you, do not waste them. A store page with a real trailer, a site that loads fast and answers questions, a wishlist button that is never more than one click away. You earn traffic in drops. Converting the drops is the cheapest marketing there is.
Third, ride machinery that already has an audience instead of building your own from zero. That is the whole argument of the last post. Steam has spent twenty years assembling the crowd. Next Fest is them letting me stand in front of it for a week.
Fourth, publish steadily. This devlog is that. It costs me writing time, which I can afford, rather than social courage, which I apparently cannot.
And last, the long shots. Streamers, subreddits, review keys. Low odds on any single shot, but the shots are cheap and one hit changes everything.
That is the whole plan. You may notice only the last item requires me to be brave.
The half that went fine
The site half of this got done, and I would grade it good enough. The Steam page is live with a trailer I am no longer embarrassed by. This site is fast, indexed, and turns a decent share of its visitors into playtesters or wishlists. The devlog gets read.
It is not an accident which half got done. A trailer is a deliverable. A store page is a deliverable. This is marketing that looks like engineering, and shipping deliverables is my comfort zone.
But I am learning that making a website is a small part of the success of a website. Mine converts the traffic it gets. The problem is the traffic. Good enough plumbing, not enough water.
The half where I feel stupid
Then there is the other half, and I want to be honest about it because I think a lot of solo devs are stuck in the same spot and nobody posts about it.
I have posted about Double Skunk on r/Cribbage twice, once looking for playtesters and once about the game mode that became duplicate cribbage. Neither was well received. Cribbage players can smell an ad, and mine were ads wearing a thin coat of discussion. And yet those posts produced wishlist signups, and one of those threads is where a stranger told me the mode I thought I had invented has existed since 1905, still the most useful single comment anyone has made about this game. I am still working out how to hold all of that at once. I want to be a good steward of these communities, not the guy flooding them with content they did not ask for. But the thing the community rolled its eyes at also worked, and pretending otherwise would be lying to you. My current read is that the answer is fewer posts, better posts, posts a cribbage player would want to exist. Now that the trailer is decent and the page it lands on is better, I probably owe reddit another, more respectful attempt, in more subreddits than one.
I put free review keys up on IndieSpot for anyone who covers games. So far, no takers. I do not know yet if that is the platform, the game, or the pitch.
I have a list of streamers I should be emailing and I have emailed exactly none of them. Every time I open the draft I picture them rolling their eyes at one more solo dev with one more key. That picture has cost me more marketing than any real rejection has, because the real rejections cannot happen if the email never sends.
And there is the Discord server from the top of this post. Live, quiet, run by a host still learning where the light switches are.
Long shots are the job now
The fix for all of this is not a better framework. It is reps. Nobody remembers the outreach email they ignored. The eye roll I keep imagining lasts three seconds on their side and three weeks on mine.
The calendar is doing me a favor here by removing the option to wait. The demo is due to Steam on September 21. Next Fest runs October 19 to 26, and it is the one week when strangers will actually be looking. Whatever shots I am going to take, the window for taking them is now.
Double Skunk sits at 65 wishlists today. I am publishing the real number because I wish more devs did, and because someone a few months behind me should get to calibrate against something honest. That number is what a good site with no outreach buys you. The next number is what outreach buys, and I will report it either way.
Help me
Which brings me to the actual point of this post. I am looking for partners.
Not employees, not an agency. People who like this game, or like cribbage, or just like helping small weird projects exist. If you want to playtest, the earlier your notes arrive the more they change. If you cover games or stream them, there are free keys on IndieSpot with your name on them. If you know a community where a cribbage roguelike would actually be welcome, tell me, or better, introduce me. And if marketing is the thing you are great at the way shipping code is the thing I am great at, I would love to talk.
The Discord is open. I may be a clumsy host for a while. Come anyway.
Double Skunk is in development, built by one person figuring it out as he goes. It is a cribbage game with powerups, deck tells, and rivals who cheat. Join the playtest or wishlist it on Steam. The patch notes track what changes build to build.
