GAMING ADVICE WITH PROFESSOR KNOW-IT-ALL: HOW TO BECOME A SOMEBODY IN THE GAMING COMMUNITY AND GET MORE GROUPIES

Congratulations, good man. By directing your time and efforts from working on the next killer app for an old engine that nobody has used since 1997, you’ve just made someone’s day and given yourself a couple of points in overall community service! Now don’t you feel all warm and accomplished inside?

Now for the most of you sitting in the back row with your precious MP3 players cranked up to the max – “Professor,” you say, “what does this have to do with game making?” Well, I’m very glad you all asked that question. For you see, game making isn’t all about spending the entire duration on your comfy butt slaving away over tweaking the same sprite over and over again – oh no! It’s also about establishing your sexy persona all over the Internet to market yourself to other nerds and nerdettes. You can make the most impressive piece of ass all you want with your sleek menu design, parallax mapping, and yada-yada-yada, but the most important thing is to paint a respectable image of yourself on to others. Just simply joining an indie community and posting your game and precious screenshots of you failing on the same boss fight over and over again isn’t going to cut it! You need to get your feet wet and do something for them for a change. It’s the same classic expression: you scratch their butt, they’ll scratch yours.

“But Professor,” you may ask, “why should I help them when they’re supposedly the scum of the Earth!?” Well…technically they are, but at the sametime, you have to work together in order to compete against each other. Just simply being a confident loner isn’t going to cut it in today’s heavily relied social media world. You need to do something to become something. And I know just the ticket.







Now that user will probably tell his or her other virtual friends and that person will tell theirs and so and so on. The point is, by reaching out to this other young man and putting on a brave courageous face, he was not able to garner more attention towards his own games but also put on a clever marketing disguise. Don’t ever underestimate the power of marketing…and sex appeal.

But there are many other ways you can create more well awareness of yourself around the community that just is not limited towards doing comments or reviews. There’s a brave whole world out there for you. For starters, there are the community forums where people go to frolic and comingle about the latest DLC pack for the latest MMO RPG game. Even if you don’t play that sort of junk (or even remotely care), you can still comment on other things and give yourself a voice to be heard. You can also create your own topics as well. What exactly does all of this do? It gets you more noticed with your bright shiny username for all to see. Out of all the visitors that come to that particular gaming site, someone might click on your profile and check out all your stuff because they see that you're quit active in the community. All it takes it just one click to become insta-famous!

If the forums and commenting isn’t your thing – what about posting up some reviews, let’s plays or create some sexy fanart for someone, especially fanart if you’re an awe-inspiring artist. Other lurkers might see your freshly hand drawn creations or your incredible video editing skills and might give you a like. You see, it pays to be a team player. By getting involved in your community, you’ll get more popular, more noticed, and more fans coming on to you (ew…) Just joining alone and making the odd post here or there won’t necessary cut it. If you want to be a superstar, you gotta put in the work to become that superstar, not just on your own projects, but on your own fanbase as well. It may not occur to you, but someone out there is a person who is rather fond of your work, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. And as long as you have that one person that’s drawing interest, you have done your job.

You don’t need to contribute something all the time; just take it slow and do what you can. If possible, try to contribute a few things on the other indie game sites you want to post your game up on too. The more attention that you give others, the more that you will receive back in good nature. So – go ahead! Write a review for someone; draw that sexy piece of fan art of the main character that you've always wanted to do; compete in a game making contest...the more you contribute, the more people will be drawn to you and your many kind deeds, which will generate into a healthy amount of downloads and word of mouth for you. By coming together, you can do better on both fronts. And who knows!? Maybe you might meet that special someone who you can help or they might be able to help you out with your own games, especially the parts you’re the weakest at, and then you’ll start making some true killer apps.

So what are you waiting for!? Get your ass out the door and start contributing! I would contribute too if I wasn’t making less than minimum wage on a teaching salary.

(Please don’t tell the dean that I said that.)