Here’s something I’ve been struggling with.

As the two readers who usually visit this site know (and I say that non-ironically because I see the visitor graph when I log in to the dashboard), I whip out these development posts at random times during the day. In truth, they coincide with the completion of a feature or the solving of a problem. They are as much a record for my future self as they are a live-blog of my current attempt at game development.

That’s where my conundrum lies. What I am doing here is complete amateur-hour stuff. When folks hear about “game development” they think UE4 or Unity or even RPGMaker. “Games” are synonymous in 2019 with a downloadable product that is installed on a PC or console. The era of “web games” more or less died when Flash started to become a burden. Yes, there are a lot of “games” you can play on the web, like MUDs, interactive fiction, and pure design-based games (like mine), but where do these products fall in the spectrum of “game development” as the general public thinks of it?

I’ve been thinking about trying to increase the reach of these posts by adding hashtags to my Twitter advertisements because right now I feel they are falling on mostly deaf ears. Very few people in my usual circles are interested in my posts. My updates are dry, usually without images, and I don’t want to pull punches when talking about design so they can be code-concept heavy which I know tends to make people’s eyes glaze over if they’re not super hyped about coding. I feel that I should be directing these posts to those who might appreciate them more, where these kinds of posts would be more at home.

But then the imposter syndrome kicks in, or more accurately the “poseur syndrome”. I keep calling this a game, but that’s me. What would folks on the other end of the hashtags call it? If I used #indiedev or #indiegamedev or some other tag, would people turn their noses up at the project as unworthy of the inclusion? Often times I feel that I’d rather toil in obscurity than get piled on for my efforts. I feel bad enough already about this project taking over a decade, and having failed so many times in the past that I can do without gatekeepers deciding that my “web game” doesn’t qualify for half that consideration.