Back With The Blog

Due to the fragile and messy state of social media and with some influence from this -- https://howtomarketagame.com/2022/11/14/done-with-twitter-you-should-start-a-blog-instead-of-joining-another-social-media-site/ -- I decided to start a blog once more -- sort of.  I wrote a few posts on my current website -- https://www.mattrifiedgames.com -- which I want to redesign anyway, but editing pure html for blog posts is cumbersome, so I'm back to blogger...or blogspot...or google?  Whatever this is.  Well technically it's blog.mattrifiedgames.com now, but you know what I mean.

So with that being said, this first post is essentially going to go over where I'm at with my game development career, the goal of this blog and more.

Social Media Everywhere

There are a lot of social media platforms now, probably too many.  After Twitter's recent acquisition, it really felt like it was going to go the way of the dodo, and a ton of new sites were popping up -- cohost, hive, a revival of mastodon, and more.  I have a few, and I'm trying to sort of better manage them from an indie dev perspective:

• Cohost -- https://cohost.org/mattrified -- I may go back to, but who knows.  This seemed more useful for smaller groups to discuss and not for greater, marketing efforts, which as a small indie dev, I need more of.
• Mastodon -- https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@mattrified -- similar to Cohost, but trying to use more for networking purposes to game developer peers.
  
• FGC.Network -- https://fgc.network/users/mattrified -- I think this is a mastodon base, but since it's centered around fighting games, I felt it would be a good place to go.
• Twitter -- https://twitter.com/mattrified -- still using Twitter a bit, but less so as it still may end up going away.  Regardless, I refuse to get twitter blue.
• Tiktok -- https://www.tiktok.com/@mattrified -- I'm trying to use TikTok more for gameplay videos and trailers and content for my gamdev streams.  Making videos is just a bit extra work I don't love doing though, so I'm still not quite hitting the suggested 3 videos per week quota.
• Twitch -- https://www.twitch.tv/mattrified/ -- I've been trying to stream more often too.  Not only to share more of my work but just to get more comfortable speaking live.  I only do it once a week now, 10 PM ET on Thursdays as this is the best time that works for me.
• Instagram -- https://www.instagram.com/mattrified/ -- I neglect this a bit too much and post more food than game development stuff at the moment.
  
• Patreon -- https://www.patreon.com/mattrified -- I have my Patreon still, which is getting a bit harder to update.  I'm running out of ideas, but I'll continue supporting it until I have 0 patrons.
• Tumblr -- https://mattrified.tumblr.com/ -- dare I?  Dare I go back to Tumblr?  I need to refresh myself on how .gif uploading works there cause, but it could be a decent place to go.
• YouTube -- https://www.youtube.com/mattrified -- I have a YouTube channel as well, but I usually only post longer videos there such as tutorials or patch notes.  Though I'm trying to get more comfortable with talking through streaming, I'm not sure if I really wanna do longer videos for YouTube.
• Discord -- discord.mattrifiedgames.com -- Discord has probably been the best use of my time lately to get and gather good player feedback about my work and interact with players.
• Direct.me -- direct.me/mattrified -- I think this is just a linktree clone, but it has links to all of these, so it's not so much a social media platform.
  

There are a few others too like Hive, which I don't know what that was now -- some Twitter clone allegedly created by the FBI?  I made an account and never used it.  I have a Facebook but that's more for just personal things, not game development.  LinkedIn is...yea...LinkedIn.  I don't really post there much either.  I never go to reddit and feel subreddits have too many rules about self-promotion, so I don't bother.  DeviantArt...yea, I'm not going back there until I cleanse my gallery and even then...probably not.

Regardless, my overall goal in the future is to be more cohesive and proactive with my posting on different fronts as these are all free marketing to varying degrees -- well financially free, they all still take time to create posts for -- but they can still be to growing an audience for my work.

Where Does This Blog Fall Into That? 

Well, my goal for this blog is to post my longer thoughts somewhere more easily with the added benefits of a blog site such as getting comments.  I'd say once a month, I'd like to post something here.  It could be the state of my current project or some game development thoughts when I have them.  For example, I plan on posting about my experience with having MerFight shown at MagFest this year.

I think the biggest challenge with social media juggling is it takes time away from actual game development.  If you spend hours making post and marketing and grow a following, that's great, but if you don't actually finish the game, then it almost doesn't matter, so I'm trying to find ways to be more efficient and prevent that from happening.  For example, this blog post having all of these links will help so when I get content to post, I can just sort of go across the various platforms.

Anyway, thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully my new posts will be more exciting than this one!