I count any developer with a following of less than 1000 a "smalldev" for the purpose of this article.

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I bring up this specific example because of how much it stung: I spend all week putting the finishing touches on the demo and finally got ready for a release date, only for the post announcing it to be up for 24 hours with no interaction at all.

Though I don't blame anyone, I just think the timing with the site issue just ended up being REALLY BAD - it hurt all the same, because for a while I thought that everyone just got tired of caring about the original content I work on (especially in the wake of fanart for another dev posted a day before breaking the record for my most popular post as of yet), or everyone just wants me to do fanwork instead of my own. Either way, the event was demotivating and at one point physically painful, so I got to the bottom of it by asking questions.

I then mentally backtracked to how I first started on this site - I took the time to explore a little bit, figure out how to use the features, see what was poppin, which fandoms were the biggest and what games seemed to catch everyone's attention. Horror was a leading genre (lowkey still is), Sonic and FNAF are among the most encompassing fandoms here, and almost no one seemed to be interested in a game/story that doesn't include a player character for them. I also took note of the community being saturated - on average, every nine out of ten posts I saw was a devlog and/or promo for a different indie project.

In my view, making the choice to be a romance/fantasy Ren'Py dev of all things, after seeing ALL of that stacked against me in terms of success....denies me the right to feel any type of way about a post performing lower than I would hope for any reason - why should I be angry when my success is mainly due to quid-pro-quo and luck?

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My point to my fellow devs is essentially that the cost of creative freedom is the speed and probability of the public eye. The further your work strays from the focus of the platform's mainstream in terms of your target audience, the harder you have to work to get it seen.

Whether it be starting a new project or bringing a finished one to a new platform, you need to look at this platform and go "what is my end goal" and "how necessary is it for this work to get an audience"? You need to find the answers by looking around, exploring places both in and out of your scope of interest, look for patterns. You also need to remember that just slapping a link, typing "Play my game/see my work", and hitting "post" will not be enough - you have to get more creative in how you present your information to make up for the fact that the public cannot recognize anything about your work due to it not explicitly being fandom-related. All of this will help you build reasonable expectations for what you're doing, so overreactions can be lessened.

That's my little spiel for today. If you happen to be interested in reading and/or Ren'Py novel games, I humbly ask that you check out my previous works and/or follow the progress of this current one! Otherwise, best of luck to you and your works!

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