Still working on the Threshold. I think I’m finally back to something close to my original development pace. Regularly scheduled posts here and there still hit like speed bumps, but things are feeling much more manageable now.
Twitter impressions suddenly dropped to somewhere between a tenth and a fiftieth of what they were. After digging around, it seems I’ve likely been hit with some kind of visibility penalty. There was no clear announcement—just something people seem to have pieced together from the source code, as if that’s supposed to count. I get that they’re trying to fight spam and bots, but for someone like me—who relies almost entirely on Twitter to share their game—the initial shock was brutal. Later, I realized other indie devs had already stopped adding links or hashtags. Or maybe the ones who didn’t just stopped showing up in my feed.
Back when I worked at a company, I sometimes looked at the marketing team and thought, “Why are they so loose about everything?” or “Why is their execution so sloppy?” But after doing even a small amount of promotion myself, I’ve started to understand. If you don’t build a bit of emotional distance from this kind of work, it’s hard to stay afloat. It’s more like 99 out of 100 things won’t work—and unless you find a way to keep that from grinding you down, it’s hard to stick with it.
In my case, I don’t have the kind of tough mindset marketing people seem to have, so I just trained myself to think of it simply—like a system where 99 failures are normal and 1 success is the expected outcome. I decided to treat it as if you’re supposed to press a button 100 times to get a single result.
Game development, on the other hand, is more like stacking blocks. If a piece doesn’t fit, you break it, patch it, rebuild around it, or tear the whole thing down and start again. But with this promotion stuff—it doesn’t just not work. And even if you figure out why something failed, the next failure doesn’t seem to follow the same rules—and just to top it off, sometimes the platform drops a penalty on your head out of nowhere.
I realized staring at the numbers too long would mess me up, so I’ve shifted back to development. From what I’ve gathered, if you want to avoid getting flagged—or recover from whatever’s lowering reach—you’re supposed to post irregularly (every 2 to 4 weeks) and leave out hashtags and links. So that’s what I’m doing for now. Still, it’s annoying how all of this is based on stuff like “someone said” or “it’s buried in the source code.” If they don’t want us to do something, why not just say so? And do these rules actually stop AI and spam bots? Honestly, I doubt it. If anything, they’re better at dodging this stuff than someone like me. I could be way more profane and vicious about it, but I’ll stop here.
Anyway, whether it’s development or promotion, I think I’ve got a rough idea now of what just needs to get done and what needs to keep being repeated. So for now, I’m trying to keep my head empty and focus on what’s in front of me.