Hi everyone!

I was wondering if you have tips on how I can generate interest in my projects? I basically want a small community around my projects where I get feedback and most importantly the occasional "How's it going?".. I believe interest would give me more motivation to work on projects even in the slow and boring periods.

For example, I wrote an RTS game/engine demo featuring most aspects of an RTS, but in very limited form. It has buildings, unit training, 4 resources, upgrades etc. It also has Python scripting for adding civilizations/buildings/units/whatever, diplomacy (alliances, resource gifts, ..) and multiplayer support. I feel like it has some potential, but I can't be bothered working on it when noone cares.

Marketing.

For that type of group you want to start with a large group of friends who care about you rather than the project. Since you probably have no budget you'll need to rely on word-of-mouth advertising, which requires a large pool of friends and convincing a few friends who know everybody to spread the word.

I could potentially have a small budget (few hundred dollars per year perhaps), and I already have access to servers and hosting. Lets say I find 25 friends who find this interesting (not impossible), it feels impractical to use skype/whatever to report progress. I want to make it easy for people to follow development, so I think I should create some form of website, but I don't really want to spend too much time on it..

Some people use blogs for example. Those are easy to follow, which is great, but provides limited ways for followers to interact with me, the project(s) and eachother. I believe discussions are a great way to keep their interest alive. A forum? A wiki? Facebook group? Combinations?

A blog tied to a facebook page is a pretty simple way to promote visibility of your project. The blog provides you with the ability to control content and formatting, and blog comments are suitable for lengthy technical discussions, while the facebook page lets people trivially follow your project, and have light 'conversational' interaction with the content.

Why not do this within the "Developer Journals" forum on this website? That way both the peer group you generate as well the community here can share a common point of interface.

For short status updates and user replies, you could also look at tweeting about your project -- if you decide to also run a blog you could tweet when there are new entries, and stick to smaller but more regular progress updates in between. The blog would have larger topics you're want to expand on or are looking for detailed feedback on ("How I designed <subsystem>", "fixing the balance of my enemies", "which of these ideas are better", etc.), whilst your twitter would be very short and to the point micro-updates (
"implemented x", "fixed <some known bug>", "starting on physics", etc.) on your progress.

Show screen shots and/or video in a blog where appropriate -- picture and video helps generate interest, and if you host the videos through YouTube or a similar service may also provide another means of people discovering and commenting on your content.

A blog tied to a facebook page is a pretty simple way to promote visibility of your project. The blog provides you with the ability to control content and formatting, and blog comments are suitable for lengthy technical discussions, while the facebook page lets people trivially follow your project, and have light 'conversational' interaction with the content.

I just want to say as a consumer this is the method I prefer the most. Honestly getting your foot in as much stuff as possible couldn't hurt, but facebook/blog happens to be the mode I'm most willing to stay interested in. I'm already on facebook at least once every couple days anyway, so it's simple for me to follow things.

Like jbadams said though, more coverage never hurt anybody. Just make sure you aren't starving any of the communities of content, as it's likely each website will have it's own set of followers.