Devlog difficulties

[EthanFox]

Who here maintains a devlog for in-progress projects?

Do you find it difficult?

I do. Not so much the writing part; the early entries were great. The problem is, after 11 weeks, I'm kinda in the groove with the project and I have two problems:

1) It just feels like I'm saying "yeah, carried on this week"
2) I feel if I post much more than this, I'm posting spoilers (as my game is more of a graphic adventure

Thinking about whether I should stop letting the second one of these problems be a concern.

 

[dulsi]

I consider devlog to be part of marketing. If you want people to pay attention it is useful to post somewhat regularly. It doesn't have to be about your current project. It's something I'm trying to do more of.

 

[Shaz]

You can use your devlog to introduce characters, talk about their relationships, talk about towns, talk about some of your systems. There are lots of things you can say without going into spoilers.

If you're really stuck, just talk about the process of game making, some of the obstacles, ways you've overcome them. Don't do that all the time though - just intersperse your regular stuff with slightly off-topic stuff that's still about game making.

 

[TheoAllen]

Coincidentally, I made a similar thread (that I haven't yet replied to my own thread for some reasons)
https://forums.rpgmakerweb.com/index.php?threads/development-log-demo-and-stuff.106152/

But the one I'm currently doing is
> Post something meaningful in my game page/blog like something major such as demo availability.
> Post something random in my twitter, but I don't even care if people even look at it. By nature, I like to show whatever I do, sometimes it's a spoiler I really want to let it out. Having a friend to throw off my spoilers helps sometimes. They're a part of the team, fortunately.

 

[Onism]

I think you've got a focus on ensuring your devlog is purely for progress reports. Take a step back, why not take a week to discuss how far you've come since you've started, discuss how you go about doing certain things (how'd you come up with a character, how'd you design a town), talk about something you're struggling with, or struggled but found the solution for.

As others have stated, try and think of it as less of a progress report and more as a marketing scheme/blog post about how you and your game is getting on. People will read it because they like you, your game and the progress it's making. They'll also enjoy reading how it came about, and details about the game and characters that you know, but may not even be touched on in the game. Maybe use one week to do an interview with some characters? It could help you flesh them out more for yourself and the readers.

Of course include the factual bits about what you've done. But there's no reason you can't combine that with other topics that relate to your game as well. What did you get excited about this week during the games creation- share that!

 

[lianderson]

A few years ago, I had a devlog for a while. Had it for about two years.

Long story short, I removed it. It had almost no engagement and was just taking too much time. (time that could have been spent on actual game development)

Now I just use my patch notes as a sort of devlog, and every now and then I type things into my discord or twitter.

 

[EthanFox]

Long story short, I removed it. It had almost no engagement and was taking far too much time. (time that could have been spent on actual game development)

Yeah, admittedly, part of the problem is that a Devlog on itch io is only seen by your followers. This is something of a circular problem. It might have some use in informing those already following you about what's going on, but it has no visibility, so you can't really use it to interest people in your game.

Actually, by faaaar the biggest sources of engagement I've had were a lucky Reddit post, and organic searches on Itch. I've found it very difficult to interest my followers on Twitter/Tumblr, because even though I have a few thousand, I built that following as an indie author and that group isn't necessarily interested in playing a graphic adventure game.

 

[watermark]

I just started one too. I read articles that warned how some devs spent so much time on making devlogs that it caused significant delays to the game. So I decided early on to set only a limited time to work on it.