Building My Personal Brand

"Branded" by Derek Gavey, used under CC BY

One of the questions eating at me while preparing to release my Android game is "Do I need to establish a company (LLC) to sell on the Google Play market?" I know you can't trust everything you read on the internet, but this StackExchange post leans toward the negative. I haven't pulled the trigger on creating my Google Play Developer account yet, trying to get some details in order first, but that post indicates there is a "Developer" field where I can simply enter the name I want to use for my brand.

To do that, I thought really long and hard (and did quite a few Google searches) to find an obscure enough brand name that's easy to spell, easy to say, and sounds pretty darn cool. I'm almost too excited and about to blurt it out right now, but I've acquired the big three (website domain, Facebook, Twitter) and am in the process of fully configuring my accounts before a proper introduction. An excellent blog post from Mr. Bestebroer at OrangePixel got me thinking about the importance of building my brand. In addition to some useful marketing tips, he talks about including a little logo with each of your game icons to help players remember your games. It's a little mnemonic so that if they've played and enjoyed one of your games in the past, they are more inclined to try your newer games.

With that in mind, I've spent the past couple days creating my brand logo. I used a free vector-graphics program called Inkscape so I can resize the logo to any size without losing image quality. And I think I have a good plan for using the first character of my logo as the brand on my game icons.

Things are coming together, but I'm really not too good at the whole marketing aspect. I'm sure I have some friends who are way better at this, so if you have any tips or ideas about building your personal brand, or marketing in general, let me know in the comments below!

Code Isn't Everything

I recently saw this Gamasutra blog post by Pascal Bestebroer, titled "My game's done. Now comes the stress, struggles, and adrenaline of a one-man team doing his own PR". And I thought... HOW RELEVANT!

For the longest time I was laser-focused on writing the code for my game. And I would occasionally blog about it. But I didn't give much thought to marketing the game after it was completed. Kudos to Mr. Bestebroer for starting his PR as early as the first week of development! This guy clearly has had more time in the trenches than I.

Marketing is perhaps more important than the coding of a successful game, at least by conventional definition of success. For me, I think just getting my game out on the Google Play store will be a success. But it's good to realize, as I'm learning, that you're not done once the game code is completed. And if you can get a head start on your PR efforts, the earlier the better.