gaming themes
A Guide to Creating an Awesome Gaming Community
In order to create a community around your game you need to invest in a lot of time and the process does take time. You need to plan something that will be enjoyed by most people which means something that appeals your current fans and also attracts newcomers to your game which involves using aesthetically pleasing best wordpress themes and gaming templates. Even if the game is above your competitors it doesn’t ensure success to your game. To succeed you need to build a game community that boosts your game’s visibility, if not you’ll always be struggling to gain and retain players.
Creating a game community can be much more difficult than developing a game, it takes more time and patience than the developing phase and can initially feel pointless to you. A step by step guideline of the process to grow your community without having to invest a lot of cash is as follows:
Plan and Research
You need to focus on a long-term strategy in order to successfully build a lasting community because if you aren’t actively informing the customer base even the most committed people will start losing interest, which means you should keep on engaging with them. You need to take out time and sit down, think and plan about the things you’re going to be posting and revealing as the time progresses. This step includes the selection of appropriate gaming templates, WordPress gaming themes, such as Respawn and go with the one that would engage the audience more, attract them. Your goal should be to choose a theme that would obviously require work and proper research and planning.
Players would want to get the reward for their loyalty which means you would need to build a strong brand power which means it would require trial-and-error and paying close attention to how audience are responding to these. IndieBoost provides with advice for planning in terms of the social media channels you should focus on. If you have worked on the basics then rest assured of finding the best branding strategies, goal-setting and company posting. All of this is ultimately going to affect your perception by the community, your brand and the game. Game Analytics has articles when you’re ready to start off with the hard stuff and you can read case studies as to how other studios are using game centric social media channels. Reddit has a dedicated subreddit with the name GameDev, which provides the experienced developers with the opportunity to share their journey’s.
Set up Social Media
This can be further divided into three chunks which are set-up, identification and execution.
Set-up
Here we talk about how important it is to have a presence on all social media platforms regardless if you are not a fan of them, if your customer can be on that platform then you should as well. Numerous blogs talk about how to create a game community using Twitter, Dark Square Game is also a part of which provides with a good checklist that come in handy. The social media apps in trend keeps on changing with time which means having a presence of all these holds utmost importance.
Where is your Audience
There’s no need to panic since all these social media platforms have established and we need to focus on the ones that cross our mind when we think of social media. Using research for the game’s demographics tells you a lot about their preferences e.g. if your game is a dress-up one it means your user would most likely be on Instagram or snapchat, using websites like Discord might not be necessary in such a case. You have to carry this research out during the game development process and beyond which means it has to be sustainable for the life of your game. People like knowing about your story even if they’re late in joining and social media is going to be the one you’re going to do that through.
How to engage with them
The theme of pictures you post on your platform needs to be in line with the WordPress gaming theme, particularly Arcane and the gaming templates you’ve been using which provides the fans a more relatable experience. The question you need to answer here is resources, you need to calculate the time you have and where to focus your efforts to gain efficiency. The more time you’ll spend on maintaining your channel higher will be the engagement. Different social media platforms have different metrics and skills that are required to utilize it to its full potential. The list of the platforms is continuously evolving, with which the functionality evolves and new features can be added in before we can catch up. If you’re up to date with them it can be time saving and useful.
You need to always be aware of your original goal and keep it in mind. If you think you cannot maintain a platform then there’s no need to commit to it.
Go to events
By attending the different events you get to know more about the games an in-depth knowledge and a fair idea of how the game is doing by signing up various newsletters which keep you updated on the ongoing trends of the market. The newsletters can often make the customer inquisitive and they’ll be motivated to go through your social media which can ultimately keep them engaged in the game. This helps the customer in building a connection with the game when they move from just players of the game to developing an emotional connection which then keep a check on the social media of the games and start a community of its fans over there.
You can attend various events that provide several low-cost alternatives to new developers to showcase their gaming talent. Before that you need to have setup the social media accounts so people are easily able to approach you after the event.
Running your own events
Exhibiting games is a fun activity where you can network with various gamers and see their games and see the most common Skywarrior themes for games, like Game Addict and gaming templates they’ve used. This is where you can also interact with other developers but this comes with certain downsides as well. It takes tons of effort to set the whole event up, have adequate staffing and materials. Which has a time and cost with it moreover having a solid game ready well in time.
Some teams find it fruitful to run their own meet ups and events which gives them more authority. The events aren’t all about you and your game it’s about the community and the customer as well, having side activities they can participate in comes in handy. You can plan giveaways around your games and some complimentary items to get more people to attend. People would automatically get interested in your events and this will also help generate a buzz on social media with the right hashtags and images.
Blog a lot!
Whether you’re a biggie or an indie, you will have a unique game development story. If you want to create a game community, this story is what’s going to drive interest during the development period.
Blogs are the easiest and cheapest way to get about it. When you feel like you’ve achieved something you want to share, make a note of it and what it entailed. Before you know it, you’ll have racked up a number of achievements and reached several milestones. Some do their developer diaries in the traditional format, noting down all weekly achievements in the form of a blog post shared through social media. It’s super easy, quick and doesn’t cost a lot.
If writing doesn’t interest you, or you have the resources to create something more visual, like small clippers. They allow you to tell your story with the team that created the game. This also puts a face on your company and will enable you to show emotion and passion for your project.
You can get a good local camera operator and produce something low-cost, like a standing banner. Then all each member of the team can spend a few minutes in front of the camera discussing their areas of knowledge. This will help you attract people who want to hear about you, they will share their own stories and you’ll get better reach possibly in new communities.
Take part in Game Jams quickly
Hundreds of Game Jams take place every year, bringing in dozens of game devs each time. But what makes them so special, and how can they help create a game community for your game?
A Game Jam is a gathering of game developers to create games within a 24, 48 or 72-hour window.
Game Jams are immensely popular with independent game developers because it gives them a chance to work alongside fellow creative devs with a range of disciplines such as playing around with game templates and WordPress gaming themes.
If you’re a developer that sources creative assets online, meeting artists or designers face-to-face is very rare. This is another chance to actively engage your fans. Many Game Jams now have people actively watching and commenting on everything going on via Twitch.
There are some incredibly popular Game Jam events hosted around the world, where there is pretty much every Game Jam being held that you will find across the world.
To run your own Game Jam check out the popular games conferences/events are local to you using calendars. Spread the word via social media and by submitting your event on any of the calendars we’ve already mentioned. Check game events aren’t running their own Jams. For example, Creative Assembly runs Game Jams, so your attendance figures are going to be extremely low if you’re going head-to-head with them.
Speak to devs
The experience of other developers holds significant importance, talking to them about how they build their communities will help increase your game success. They’ll be aware of things you’re not of and they’ll also tell you about the dos and don’ts from their experience. The best way to approach them is to use dedicated game developer forums.
As with game development, speaking to other people from other cultures, backgrounds and specialties not only expands your horizons but also allows you to understand new markets; particularly useful if this is your first game on a platform you’ve never developed on before.
Pretend you know what you’re talking about
You may feel outside your comfort zone when not talking about game development. All you have to do is gather what you’ve got, put together some business results and lesson learned and reflect on everything that’s happened.
In all of this, you’re going to uncover trends, facts and interesting statistics that everyone wants to hear. You can share in on LinkedIn and Reddit, that’ll help create a game community via reach, but now you’ll also get the added degree of professionalism that’s associated with having a strong presence on these business channels. It’s also going to help improve your writing ability and help you, your game and your company rank better on Google.
Tell the world you’ve progressed
Tell the world about your latest adventure: creating a community from nothing. You see, by learning this new skill, you’ve got yet another weapon to add to your inventory. Best of all, there are going to be a lot of new things to discover that are unique to you.
You might find that going to events did absolutely nothing for you, your game or your brand. But your blog post on Gamasutra about creating meaningful video game was something smaller sites picked up as a good, consumer-facing story.
Posting a whole bunch of beautiful artwork on social media will build that targeted community. You have this new skill, however you obtained it, and the world wants to know.
Start small and local. Even if you’ve never spoken publically before there’s no need to panic. Being on the indie track means your audience is likely to be 50 people max and you’ll get a free ticket to the event.
If you want to take it to more formal levels, hosting a webinar is very effective. But these webinar opportunities are out there to help you create a game community, and if they’re free, you should be using them.
Create a game community by copying the best
This does not mean you’re stealing, merely replicating what others have done well and are learning from it. Starting with the team behind the exceptional game Rocket League; Rocket League quickly grasped a large audience in a short space of time.
A few things worked in their favour which are; they released the game in July 2015 with very few other releases that month. Plus, it was included as a free game as part of the PS Plus scheme, this led to millions of downloads and a lot of buzz on social media. You can look into how they developed their gaming templates and gaming themes and which worked out best for them.
Justin French of indie game studio Dream Harvest put out this piece on how to create a game community for a video game, talking about the studio’s game Failure. You don’t have to go it on your own; use tools such as CoPromote and Promotor can help get the word out.
You need a site for your game as well as a website for your studio because it allows for your fans to be invested in your brand, and provides the hooks for any subsequent products.
Conclusion
If you’re still confused, take a deep breath. Creating a community to boost your game’s success or around a game as a fan takes time and tons of effort. And that is the big takeaway.
We’ve also seen that it’s going to take a bit of luck. You have to try to ensure that each piece of the puzzle fits together to produce magical results. In reality, this is all theory but you can use this knowledge as the foundation to create your gaming community.
Significantly important is the last and final point: you’re going to have to make sure you are focusing on one game, one niche, in the first place. If you’ve got that, you’ve got a fighting chance of creating a strong community for it.
