Monthly Memoirs - March 2024

March 2024 was a month of a lot of technical wins and some losses in the timeline. Visuals are a big part of developing a game, and the assets that were being used were not the assets I wanted to include in the vertical slice. This lead to some additional work that I was not planning on doing until after the vertical slice was made, but the end result is something to be proud of. Due to the amount of technical work necessary, there was little time left to experiment more with social media. Even so, there were significant strides in the direction of getting visibility for my game.

TLDR;

• Complete asset updates

• Switch to full screen and support for different resolutions

• Consistently blogging once a week

• Got my first Twitter follower (thanks @lopolystudio !) and currently up to 12 real followers.

• Hired a contractor to help with the game character asset creations

• Updated the frontlinefantasy.com site

New Assets for Frontline Fantasy

Frontline Fantasy had all of its assets redone and now allows for full screen play. Originally the plan was to create the vertical slice using the placeholder assets, but after reviewing some feedback, the decision was made to go forward with creating and implementing the new art style.

The game was originally designed for the 4:3 aspect ratio. This was mostly because I had always created games with this ratio. After some research and looking at the Steam statistics, the new aspect ratio of 16:9 was implemented as the default with support for almost any resolution all at full-screen.

Blogging

Creating blogs has been a consistent way to catechize my development methods. Along with creating blogs, I experimented with posting links to the blogs on both Twitter and Reddit. Posting to Twitter had no feedback, and posting to Reddit mostly resulted in feedback that was not constructive. The blog posts will continue as I genuinely enjoy making them and the hope is that they are useful to someone (maybe even my future self).

Social Media Growth

Twitter

Twitter has been my "go-to" form of social media. Currently I make sure to at a minimum post for "#screenshotsaturday". So far the @upbeatgalaxy account is up to 12 real followers, which is 11 more than I planned for this month. I see this as a huge win. There is some unexpected time cost that is required to remove all the fake accounts and there is research being done to see if there is an easier way to manage this.

The goal for next month is 20 followers. I believe in order to reach this goal, I will need to provide additional value other than just "#screenshotsaturday". There is currently work being done to understand what kind of Tweets users would like to see, what are the correct hashtags, and at what times is it best to post.

Others

Additionally, the following also exist:

• Discord - More research needs to be done before opening to the public

• GitHub - Created to support a blog post, but there are plans to provide several repos relating to how Frontline Fantasy is being developed

• Youtube - Channel created but research is still being done how how to efficiently create "dev log" videos

• Reddit - This is an interesting place, to say the least. It seems like Reddit prioritizes asking questions, but this could be because of the amount of Karma I currently have

Numbers

The following are the numbers I would like to keep track of. Mostly there is still a lack of understanding of what to include as the measurement for everything except Twitter, but expect clearer statistics with more experience.

There was a significant drop in page views, which I expected since this month was mostly spent on technical work.

Conclusion

This was a great month for technical updates, but improvements can be made on the "marketing" side. April will start by finishing the technical updates necessary for the vertical slice, and then there will be a focus on improving the social media presence and creating the Steam page.

For more details on Frontline Fantasy, check out the March Developer Update, and be sure to follow on Twitter for more frequent updates.