Hello friends,

Today I wanted to share the journey of our small creation with you that was born out of the personal pain and suffering of attempting to navigate the indie game marketing process.

As developer folk, we love to build and develop cool, amazing things, but letting the world know about our creations is often, at worst an afterthought or better, just a pain in the derriere. It’s a struggle – we know. We found ourselves in just that position when attempting to build our own games and trying to let the world know about the pride and joys we were sinking our hearts and souls into on a daily basis. We had absorbed all the videos, podcasts and blogs about how, when, why to market our games, then came the grind of doing. Creating frequent social posts on multiple platforms, with progress updates or just showcasing our work was just not something we looked forward to every week. We felt we’d much rather be spending our time on the good stuff, i.e., development.

Thus, one day, it occurred to us, couldn’t we automate the process, or at least make it much simpler and less time consuming? Any we wanted to make the tool cater specifically for indie game devs, not some generic social media posting automation app. So began an interesting journey of building something completely new from the ground up that we were sure would work and learning a lot of new things along the way.

The idea was “simple”, but of course, as convention dictates, simple ideas have a way of being much more complex than expected - fast. But I digress – we wanted to build something that allowed us to link our various social accounts in one centralized platform, and then use that platform to take in some of our gameplay footage and split out a bunch of short-form clips, compete with usable captions that could be themed and tweaked. We could then automatically schedule these clips daily or otherwise selected to be posted to multiple social platforms according to a weekly schedule. It would be even better if that platform then collected the stats of those posts and made it easy to track how our posts were doing in one place. We didn’t want the tool to simply spew out rubbish – this was something we wanted to use for our own marketing purposes after all. I mean, how hard could that be? Six months tops, surely?

So here we are, 10-ish months and a few blood pressure raising social media audit processes later – finally! We’re super excited to share our creation with you. We called it Autigma, an acronym we hacked together from “AUTomated Indie Game MArketing”. It’s taken us off on quite the non-gaming development tangent, and the more time we spent on it, the more things we kept think of adding and improving. But we believe it’s at point now where we find it generally useful for ourselves, and so we thought we’d open it for all of you to check it out and give it whirl (no cost) – we’d love to hear what you think and get feedback as to what we need to work on, or for functionality we should add. We’d really like to make this something useful and accessible to everyone that’s doing their own game development, be it something you do for kicks or a serious side or full-time hustle.

You can check it out at www.autigma.com.