content marketing
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While Jenna was focussed on our Instagram page, I was in charge of the content marketing on TikTok, a powerful platform if used right. Our dev-vlogs gained quite a bit of traction. With just a few video posts, we reached over 100 followers. However, it seemed TikTok boosted our first two videos and after that the views and likes started to decline. Perhaps it was the lack of effort we put in our third TikTok, or it's simply how the algorithm works. Two boosts to get you started and hooked and then continue to make videos and hope you'll go viral. In the end we never figured out what the reason was, because we didn't stick with the project (and thus the TikTok marketing) long enough to see a clear pattern in our views/likes. TikTok is definitely an intriguing platform and I've seen it work very well for self-publishing indie devs, but it's definitely a trust the process type of thing.
From my (short) experience, the most important two things to pay attention to when posting on TikTok are
1) consistency - after a while our views slowly climbed back up, emphasis on slowly
2) authenticity - when it's clear that you're using TikTok to make very obvious and soulless advertisements for your own product, your own benefit, people tend to disengage. Showing realness, honesty and doing so with humor and confidence is what seems to be the appeal of TikTok. People seek authenticity in a world that's so full of digital identities and curated perfection. Of course there are exceptions to this rule, but I've seen the most interesting characters rise through the TikTok ranks, simply because they owned who they are and never tried to mold themselves into the ideal version of what they thought their audience wanted.
This is my hunch based on a few (semi-successful) months of content marketing. You might want to take everything written here with a grain of salt ;)
about this PROJECT
Toasty was the perfect playground to learn more about game development as Alex, Jenna and me were trying to make our indie game studio Clapstool a reality. Being a team of three meant that all of us needed to be generalists. From game design, to levels to environment art and animation, whatever was needed for the project, we were excited to figure it out together. Apart from programming of course, Jenna and I gladly let Alex take the reins on that :)
This game was very popular among playtesters. During an event called Night of the Nerds in 2023 our booth was very popular and all three of our laptops were constantly occupied with players who wanted to prove they could finish the demo and do it in record time.
My favorite memory regarding Toasty is during a travel experience in Albania when a little Italian boy learned that I made games. I showed him Toasty and despite being a little too young for the game (it was difficult for him to walk and dash at the same time) he insisted on playing. He delegated the dashing to me and screamed 'FUOCO' whenever I needed to fire a dash. Seeing him excited about the game reminded me why I love game dev and why it's almost inevitable that we'll return to this project someday to finish what we started.
