Tips for growing your game's community in the early days

By now, you probably have your game concept down. You've drawn it out on paper, figured out the underlying mechanics, and started thinking about how to make it fun. Having come this far, we're going to assume that you are planning on releasing your game and having people actually play it. But it's still early days. So, how do you get people interested and following along with your development, especially when there's not too much to show off just yet?

Let me share a few tips for how we've grown Spacefreighter's following to about 400+ players and an active discord of about 50 ... a happy starting size for a very early pre-alpha.

Make something playable

If you haven't already, start work on a playable prototype. An early playable prototype will be very powerful in building interest and excitement from the players. Whatever your game is, it's better to have people playing than just following along passively or watching videos of what could be. You need something for players to test and give feedback on - something that you can direct their energy and excitement towards. So, make a simple, playable demo around a core mechanic and put it out there. Even if it's broken, let people participate.

Community members will help you find bugs and suggest features, while others may just want to play about with the game's systems. We've put out 5 or 6 playable prototypes of Spacefreighter already, two of which were really basic, even unusable from an end-user perspective, but we still had people playing them... and a lot of those people joined our Discord.

Post regularly

Once you've got a playable prototype, show it off and put it out there for feedback whenever you have something new to talk about. Community members will start talking among themselves and getting excited for updates if they know that you're at least trying to make the project. It's always better to give people too much information than not enough. Community members will post about your game themselves if they're interested and they know you are definitely working on something. You will get the most out of people in the community by having relatively frequent updates and 'hype' points for them to follow along with. Consistency has been the key ... interest is always low when I've slacked off on updates, but with regular posting, we saw much more consistent engagement.

Sell it in a gif

Right now, you have a working prototype and some interesting mechanics. Now start posting gifs to Reddit. Reddit has a very good community for indie game development articles and discussion (/r/indiegaming, /r/unity3d, etc.) and gifs are a great way to get people's attention in the comments and on social media, since they're so quick and easy to digest.

We've put out about 40 gifs across Reddit, Twitter, and even Imgur so far... all for Spacefreighter, all posted by me (u/spacefreighterman). This is how I've kept up the hype and maintained a consistent stream of interest in the project. The gifs have allowed us to both show off what the game is becoming as well as communicate our progress without needing to write too much text.

Also remember, 'selling' doesn't really mean selling out - it just means letting people know about your cool idea and how excited you are.

Share useful content with other game devs

There are many communities that indie game developers can be a part of and none of them should be neglected. Community members will want to talk about the kinds of problems they're facing in game development, view new gifs and screenshots for any games you have in development, ask questions about your work processes/philosophy and generally take inspiration from other developers. Some of these people might form the early nucleus of testers or community members too.

Find a spot for everyone to meet

If people are interested in what you're making, they'll be posting on Reddit and talking about it. Make sure that there's one place where all of these discussions can happen together - whether it's Discord, Twitter, or something else doesn't really matter. Community members will become more engaged if they feel like their opinion matters, feel like they're involved, and can ask questions easily.

Conclusion

The tips here should help you grow your game's community, or at least help you get started.  Community members are the best kinds of people we developers can have - they're interested, care about your project and will help you out with development and testing. Community is everything for indie game developers... without an engaged community, it seems that support completely dries up. If a developer isn't constantly posting updates or news on their game to somewhere, then people will lose interest and move on.

If you want to make it as an indie game developer, focus heavily on the community aspect of your game's development. They're that small group of people who really love what you're making - get them involved!