Our Studio W3 studios is currently working the game Abatron, a RTS/FPS hybrid for Windows. We also create VFX for video games available on the Unreal Engine 4 Marketplace.
My name is Tamara Ryan and I work on community for the studio to help promote our games and listen for feedback from our players. We use Sketchfab to share in-game screenshots on Abatron’s Facebook page as we develop them. It’s nice that Sketchfab is natively integrated, which makes it really easy for us to post content and for our audience to engage.
https://sketchfab.com/models/20c8ce5541e548afab23a142bb485cae
Keep in mind that your artists can upload and tweak their models to match your in-game look pretty quickly with the 3D Settings options. If you’re having trouble there’s tons of helpful information here.
If you’re creating new content to share, it’s important to remember references are the key: look for references in real life, look out your window, pay attention to movies, artists, or anything that can inspire more creativity. Looking at other artists to see what they do on sites like Pinterest, Artstation, or searching the Games category on Sketchfab are great places to look.
Ultimately, the devil is in the details. Your work doesn’t need to have a lot of information – sometimes less is more, but the details need to be there. Show clean good work that anyone can understand. I recommend asking friends and people around you – they will let you know you’re on the right path.
When it comes to sharing and managing your community social channels for games, remember “Tools are your Friends!”. Take advantage of sites like Hootsuite that allow you to not only manage multiple social channels from one dashboard, but also upload content in bulk. I find it much easier to sit down for one night and write a bunch of updates at once than constantly posting throughout the day. Trust me, it will save you time in the end. We also use Audiense to find out the best time to tweet.
Finally, learn from your competition. You can use Similarweb, input a game that’s similar to yours (choose something successful), then can check out their top referral sites. Now you know where they get all their traffic from! Boom.
The referral sites from your competition will be a great help in growing your community, however there’s still more you can do. Posting to forums, Facebook groups, and Subreddits are all needed to get a fanbase going. One of my favorite ways to gain Twitter followers is to copy the followers of similar successful games (I’m all about taking advantage of your competition). Go to Crowdfire, insert a Twitter handle from a similar successful game or studio, then follow anyone who looks like an everyday gamer (following other devs doesn’t help a whole lot). Targeting users this way is extremely effective and we’ve gained some really diehard fans from it as well!
If you have any other question leave a comment or tweet us at @AbatronGame.
Company Bio:
W3 Studios believes that players shouldn’t be labelled by their genres. By creating Abatron, a game everybody can play, our small indie team aims to unify the Gamer World. Our goal is to deliver a high quality gaming experience to a diverse player base by ensuring that Abatron is simply to learn, but difficult to master.
About the author
Michael
An artist in the pursuit of dopeness.
