Updated September 29 with the part that finally worked, which was reaching out to a real person and joining a community that already existed. An earlier update on September 17 added the free cribbage guide, what promo videos cost now, and a warning about who shows up when you ask for help.
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.
Give something away
Find a way to be useful to people who will never buy your game.
For me that turned out to be cribbage itself. Most people who might enjoy Double Skunk have never played cribbage, or played it once with a grandparent and forgot the rules. So I built a free, interactive guide to learning cribbage. Cards you can click, practice hands, a glossary, the rules explained one stop at a time. No signup, and it does not care whether you ever look at the game.
I get something out of it too. Every person who learns cribbage is one more person who could enjoy a cribbage roguelike, and the guide lives on the same site as the store link. But the trade feels fair in a way a reddit post never did. Nobody rolls their eyes at a free lesson. If it teaches someone the game and they never hear of Double Skunk, that is still a good day, and it is the first marketing I have done that I would be glad to put my name on however the game sells.
If you are a solo dev looking for your version of this, ask what your players need to know before your game makes sense to them. Then teach it for free.
Videos are cheap now
The other thing that changed since August is that a decent promo video is no longer out of reach for one person. The animated intro that now plays at the top of the home page on desktop was made with AI video tools and a lot of patience, and I can keep cutting it into new clips for as long as I want. A fresh thirty second promo costs me about thirty dollars and an evening. Two years ago that was a quote from a studio.
It is tempting to talk yourself out of it anyway. Say I spend thirty dollars on a video and it brings in two wishlists. On paper that is a bad trade. But that math only holds if reach is fixed, and it is not. A video is how reach starts. It is the thing a stranger can share, the thing a subreddit will tolerate where a text post gets an eye roll, the thing a streamer can watch in thirty seconds instead of installing a demo. Those two wishlists would not be the return. They would be the seed.
So the free guide and the videos sit on the same side of the list. Both worth making before there is an audience, because both are how an audience begins. I need to be making these, steadily.
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 went to Steam in September and is live now. 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 sat at 65 wishlists when I first published this on August 25. 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.
Not everyone who answers is who they say they are
The open call I first ended this post with worked, in a sense. People answered. Some of them were not who they said they were.
Twice now someone has messaged me on Discord offering marketing help, from an account about a month old, with a name and a face that a little conversation showed belonged to someone else. In one case a man introducing himself as a woman named Jane. I engaged both times, because I would like help and I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Both times the conversation rushed toward a commitment, a small paid campaign on Fiverr, a package of impressions, before any of my questions had been answered, and both times the details did not hold up.
Good marketers live everywhere. Where someone is from tells you nothing about whether they can help you, and I would happily work with someone on the other side of the world if they were straight with me. What I rule out is the lying. If the first thing you tell me about yourself is not true, the rest of the pitch cannot be trusted either.
So, some advice for the next solo dev who posts an open call. Talk to people who can show you who they are. Look at their past work, and actually look at it. If they say a post got three thousand impressions on LinkedIn, go find the post. Is it good? Would you want those three thousand people looking at your game? Is the person who wrote it the person you are talking to? A real marketer will be glad you checked. Anyone annoyed that you checked has answered your question.
It changed who I say yes to, and it changed how I look for help.
What worked was a real person
The advice above came from getting it wrong. This part comes from getting it right, mostly by doing the opposite.
Instead of waiting to see who answered my open call, I went looking. Dan from IndieGameBusiness had put up a post on LinkedIn inviting people to connect, so I sent him a message. It was cold outreach, the exact thing I spent half of this post avoiding, and he wrote back.
We talked. I told him what I was building and where I was stuck, and we connected a bit. He has far more experience than a game my size has any right to, and he made time anyway. Nothing in the conversation rushed toward a sale. He is the kind of person who wants to help and cares about the people he is helping.
Strangers who find you get to choose what you know about them. When you do the finding, you can pick someone whose work is public, whose name is attached to it, and whose history you can read before you say hello. Everything I told you to check in the last section, I had already checked before I sent the first message.
We have a small paid engagement now to give the game a boost on the way to launch. It is not a big budget, and it is the first marketing money I have spent without second guessing it. I trust him, and I did not have to talk myself into it.
The eye roll I kept imagining never came. One message to one real person did more for me than weeks of waiting for the right stranger to show up.
Find the room that already exists
The other thing I would hand to any solo dev is the community Dan is part of. The IndieGameBusiness Discord is full of people doing what I am doing, along with people who have already shipped games and know the business side. There are playtest requests, forums, and long discussions about the parts of this job nobody teaches you. There is a podcast too.
It has been the best place I have found to learn what to do next. The feedback is honest, which is the only kind that helps.
I opened this post worried about being a clumsy host in my own quiet server. It turns out I did not need to start by hosting. I needed to start by being a guest somewhere good. Joining a room that already exists is much easier than filling an empty one, and you learn how rooms work while you are there.
So if you are where I was in August, contact real people. Talk to them. Join a community. That is the part of the list I was too nervous to do the first time I wrote it.
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 demo is free on Steam, and 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. The marketing help I asked for in August I have since found, by reaching out to someone I could trust. Everything else on this list is still open.
The Discord is open. I may be a clumsy host for a while. Come anyway.
Double Skunk is built by one person figuring it out as he goes. It is a cribbage game with powerups, deck tells, and rivals who cheat. Play the free demo on Steam, and wishlist it so Steam tells you when the full game lands on November 4. The patch notes track what changes build to build.
