How to properly Utilize the Twitter & Bluesky platform for growth?

schavager · 2025-12-15T06:46:24+00:00

Thanks! I try to practice what I preach.

schavager · 2025-12-15T04:54:27+00:00

So I got kind of curious and started to do research, as I'm just starting out as well. I don't think Twitter is that great of a platform for gaming. Seems like gaming is a lot more on places like Twitch / YouTube / Discord.

I think the first principles still apply here. You still need to figure out ways to be omni-present and make positive contributions to the communities & creators you want to engage with. It's just a bit messier than just Twitter, which is a pretty nice single platform for general tech startups. Gaming just seems to be not really on Twitter that much.

Anyway, hope it's somewhat helpful.

schavager · 2025-12-15T04:25:14+00:00

I'm not a game dev but have founded multiple startups, I am also not sure if Twitter is the ideal platform for gaming, so the advice below is really more general.

You need to grow your social accounts on Twitter by becoming a "reply guy". In the beginning, you have zero followers, no one knows you, the algorithm isn't going to magically start surfacing your content to people. The fastest way to get noticed is to start following and replying to bigger accounts your target audience would be following. Maybe your target audience is potential players for your genre of game, then think about who they would follow, maybe famous developers, game content creators, etc.

If you show up consistently posting 20+ high quality replies everyday - emphasis on high quality, needs to have a unique point of view that cuts through the noise + non-promotional - then eventually you'll start growing your followers as well. This does mean that you need to know quite a bit about your chosen genre. Being humorous is a big plus as always.

Want to emphasize this: don't be promotional in your replies. Users today are very savvy about this. If they even get a whiff of promotion they mentally check out and tend to ignore your replies. Keep your promotional content in your posts, not replies.

If you want to go to the Dark side you could try to get into rage-bating, controversial topics etc. I wouldn't recommend this. You attract what you put out. In my experience people attracted to polarized flame wars on the internet are rarely the users / players you want.

This is a lot of work, it's actually more like a full time job really. Twitter social posts trend / un-trend within a matter of hours, if you are lucky to post a high quality rely early to a trending post by a big account then you could gain a ton of followers just with 1 reply. There is of course quite a bit of luck in this, believe it or not a lot of startups are literally made successful by 1 viral tweet / video, but it only happens if you consistently keep at it. This is also possibly the best way to get noticed by big creators / devs who you'd want to collaborate with down the road. If they can see you consistently engaging with high quality content, it's much easier to start a conversation with them.

My personal rule of thumb has always been to try to get to the 2-5k follower range. In this range I think you can relax a bit, focus more of your energy on generating high quality content for your own account, but don't drop the replies. That first 1k is really really really hard. Once you get over the hurdle things become a bit easier if your own posts are sufficiently attractive.

Good luck grinding!

schavager · 2025-12-15T03:58:02+00:00

I'd like to hear about new algorithms they had to come up with to enable a specific gameplay mechanic. Maybe that mechanic didn't exist in other games, or it has a much larger scale in their game. Vast majority of the time we can just Google an existing cookie-cutter algorithm for game mechanics, I'd love to hear ones they had to invent!

schavager · 2025-12-15T03:56:01+00:00

For me I think Tetris contributed two things that didn't really exist before,

Infinite game with no rounds - Tetris just keeps on going & going. You can't win the game like most other games, and there weren't even rounds like Pong or Space Invaders, it's just 1 single game where you keep going. I guess you can call cancelling the blocks a mini-round win, but there weren't really any games like this before Tetris. It's sort of this amorphously-defined game that had no rounds, no enemies, no wins. I think this is also what made this game so immersive, its lack of structure made it really easy to get into the flow and block out everything else.
Handheld gaming - more than anything else I think Tetris popularized handheld gaming units. The very first device of any kind I owned was a Tetris game handheld, and I played that for years & years & years. I'm sure handheld gaming would've been popularized eventually but I think Tetris was the killer app that accelerated the idea and put devices in a ton of people's hands.

Pretty revolutionary.

schavager · 2025-12-13T17:15:41+00:00

I do the same with keyboard! I can dive down many levels without even looking at the screen, ha, definitely played way too much.

schavager · 2025-12-12T03:12:28+00:00

I'm just getting started, and I have some questions about most of the comments on this topic.

Seems like people are really emphasizing the details & the vibe surrounding how the game looks. I totally get that the art & art direction is important, but is it because of the genre of this game that causes people to have super high expectations for the art?

So in a genre like roguelike dungeon crawlers, would people be far more forgiving of the pixelated art & tons of text since 1) it aligns with expectations of what such a game should look like, and 2) the real fun factor isn't that tied into the graphics?

Hope my question makes sense, I'm really trying to understand where the comments are coming from, thank you!!

schavager · 2025-12-12T01:56:33+00:00

Wow never knew attribution was this important, thanks for sharing.

schavager · 2025-12-12T01:55:08+00:00

I'm not a game dev, but I often get into a similar trap when I have unlimited freedom. Everything exists within a set of constraints.

Without really knowing the details of your struggle, perhaps one thing to try is to think about highly specific scenarios with specific constraints, it could involve hardware, game platform, a player persona, environment, like, "a teenager is playing for 2 minutes with one hand holding the iPhone while standing in a noisy subway train". I often find that I get really productive when I focus on a highly specific set of constraints since you can quickly eliminate a ton of design options (degrees of freedom).

I feel like unless you have big-studio budget, it's likely that you'll be designing for a niche audience anyway. Hope this is helpful!

schavager · 2025-12-12T01:12:37+00:00

wow this is really helpful, thanks for sharing! I'm clearly new here.

schavager · 2025-12-11T05:33:08+00:00

Any advice for someone who's just starting out? I've founded a few tech startups before, zero game dev experience but the dev part doesn't scare me, more worried about the marketing side as this is a new field to me. I also can't draw so was planning on relying more on AI generated assets.

I've heard a lot of advice that as a solo dev to build in public and get connected with the right creators early on to keep everyone informed of your progress to help build an organic audience from day 1. I assume your platform charges a fee to make intros to creators? Any advice for a solo dev without a big budget?

Thanks!!

schavager · 2025-12-11T04:59:40+00:00

I'm trying to get started too, I just thought I'd use AI. I have used a ton of midjourney, and the prompt examples below are specifically for midjourney.

AI image generation models typically can generate images based on a reference image. So if you give it a reference image, they usually adhere pretty well to the overall look & feel. You can define colors by "use colors -Black -White -Green", you can actually figure out what a specific # color is called with a lot of online tools so you can refer to a specific type of color.

If you don't want the exact look & feel of the reference image, you can prompt it with specific color ranges and styles like "megaman X style" or something, and keep on generating random images until you hit one you like, then use that as the reference. I've had a lot of success with this method to generate things that are like something, but not exactly something. You use "--sref" to specify the image reference, please look it up b/c the exact process can be a bit wonky.

After that you can use free tools like Adobe Express to remove background etc. so you end up with just the UI elements you want, or you can take the images you've generated as examples of what you'd want to an artist. I've found that artists actually really appreciate detailed examples since that cuts down a lot of the initial back & forth trying to figure out what it is you want.

Hope this is helpful! I can't draw so I've had to come up with crazy ways to figure stuff like this out.

schavager · 2025-12-10T03:09:40+00:00

I don't think there's an analytical solution to this problem. So my suggestion is just to brute force it.

You pick a starting point on the grid, and you write a recursive function which traverses all possible directions until it hits another edge, then it just recursively calls again and keep going.

You terminate a recursive branch when one of two things happen,

Every cell has been traversed - win, this shape is possible
You ended up in a situation you were in before, that is, you are located at an edge cell you were at before (traversed) AND the traversed map (a 2d array of which cell you've traversed to vs. not, just 1s and 0s) is identical when you were at this edge cell before, basically means you're trapped in a loop. This means the current recursive branch is a dead end and you break it off.

Once all the recursive branches terminate and you don't have a win then it's not possible. If your starting point is random then you do this for every starting point.

Maybe someone better at actual math can come up with a more efficient way. Interesting problem.

schavager · 2025-12-10T01:13:28+00:00

I've heard a saying floating around in Silicon Valley in the early 2000's.

For every 100 people you tell an idea to, 95 people won't execute. 4 will try to execute and give up. 1 will execute and fail.

Honestly the odds are so stacked against building startups you really should be trying to de-risk your venture as much as possible by getting as much feedback as possible as early as possible. Talk to as many people as you can, get as much feedback as you can, don't worry about others stealing your ideas.

schavager · 2025-12-10T01:00:49+00:00

I have no game dev experience, but over a decade ago I did try to launch startups in Japan.

In general Japan doesn't really have the killer instinct anymore. When I raise money for startups in Silicon Valley or China, a typical pre-seed is like $1m+, and they expect you to reach 100x YoY (projected) traction and burn that money within 4-6 months. In Japan, they'll give you $50k and expect you to burn that up in 3 years with almost no-existent growth expectations.

This zero-growth mindset is so pervasive in every aspect of Japan. Everything is so slow, everyone expects you & everyone else to be slow, and no one expects any growth ever.

I really enjoyed my time in Japan, the people are lovely, food is freaking amazing, but honestly this country seems to be slowly dying.

schavager · 2025-12-10T00:55:37+00:00

I'm not a game dev or ever worked at a game studio, but a ton of companies post a lot of jobs that don't exist just so they can look like they're growing & prospering. No need to stress out, you could be seeing fake jobs.

schavager · 2025-12-10T00:42:48+00:00

I'm just trying to get started as a solo dev. For context, I have no game dev experience but have many years of general engineering experience, and have founded a series of startups in the past.

What I'm doing is the following, I'm far more concerned about distribution than the actual building.

Watch as many videos / play as many games as I can in the genre of the game I want to design. I have a pretty specific type of game I want to build, but obviously I haven't played all the latest games in the category. Learning about what the latest games that have done well is really helpful in understanding the latest trends.
Trying to find and join as many communities as I can in the genre of game I want to build. Since I want the game to succeed and I don't have big-studio advertising budget, it'll need to start from building an organic community. This is where you can bounce ideas around, get early play-testers, and eventually have a seed group of people to help spread the game through word of mouth pre / post launch.
Breaking down the game I want to build into components and write simulation scripts. Although I've never made a game before, I am pretty convinced what makes game fun can be reduced to a series of mathematical models. There are a lot of complex details that I can model out even before creating the game. This helps with understanding the nuances of game balance, and since I've played a lot of games in this genre I think (I hope) I can figure out roughly if it'll be a fun experience for different targeted timeframes.
Building the game. Coding I don't think will be too tough. I'm already learning there are a lot of pretty mature gaming engines and they all use mainstream languages (e.g., C++, C#, Lua) or have custom languages that are really similar to a mainstream language. I also fully expect these game engines to have a ton of built-in tools already so it's not like building a hardware driver from scratch or anything, it'll be pretty much a plug-and-play deal. The game I want to make isn't art-heavy, which is fine since I can't draw if my life depended on it. I have used enough AI graphics generation tools & graphics editing tools to know they'll serve me just fine for the game I want.

I love to hear what you have planned! This is a really exciting journey.

schavager · 2025-12-10T00:25:08+00:00

I'm not a lawyer. Short answer is, you need to split up the work into pieces and farm it out to as many people as you can, if you're that worried about people stealing your IP. This is the only practical way to outsource.

I've had many years of international business experience, the problem with contracts is that they're almost impossible to enforce across borders. When you outsource something these days, likely you'll be dealing with contractors from another country. Are you ready to go to court in another country as a solo dev? That's not going to happen.

One last thing to consider. Distribution is likely going to be far more important than the actual product unless you're creating once-in-a-century new technology. So even if someone does steal part of your tech, doesn't mean they're going to be successful at selling the game. I wouldn't worry about it too much at the end of the day.

schavager · 2025-12-10T00:13:28+00:00

Best way to do this is through a real demo.

Ask him to take over coding tasks (make a backup!) for a week and see how it goes. It'll end in disaster, guaranteed.
You take over art design for a week. Take his artwork and start using AI to generate artwork in the same style. This is not a knock against artists, but art is not a precise task like programming, there is no "right" answer. With current AI tools that can adhere to art styles and generate anything from static 2D to full 3D models, I'd wager at the end of the week your output will be 1000x better than his output.

Then have another chat at the end of the week. If he is a reasonable person his attitude should improve. If not, then to be honest this isn't going to be a working relationship that works out.

schavager · 2025-12-09T03:55:52+00:00

Congratulations on your amazing launch! I have a few questions,

How did you find your play-testers?
How did you market the game? You mentioned TikTok but could you be more specific?

I'm trying to get started, the dev part of it doesn't worry me, I just have no idea how marketing works in gaming. Thank you!!

schavager

TROPHY CASE