I had intended to post an update sooner than this, but such is the way of development blogs. The main reason is that Signy And Mino, my active project, is undergoing a potential name change. The idea was to finalize the change and make a big announcement about it, but names are… well, hard. A name change prompts an entire marketing discussion about logo design, key art, tags, and so on. So I’ll table that for now and focus on development, along with some low-key community building.
My current efforts have been focused on the mailing list and Discord community. Twitter’s tumultuous acquisition has made me realize that relying on any particular social media network(s) for outreach is a bad idea: even in a best case scenario I’m at the mercy of the algorithm. Running a mailing list can be costly but is a much more direct method of getting the word out to those that care. Not to mention that after the site redesign I did some digging into my old database and realized I had an unused subscription list with over fifteen THOUSAND entries! Granted, many of those are probably outdated. But if even 5% of that list is active it’s better than tweeting into the ether for manufactured bot engagement.
On the other hand I realize that pushing people to Discord still carries the risk of putting your audience in someone else’s hands, but so far their decision making process and feature/tool sets puts them far ahead of the other platforms in my book. At the end of the day I’m following the same trends as everyone else, but I just want to make sure I can use my site and mailing list as a fallback.
So if you want to see small but more frequent updates on Signy And Mino, OR would like to mourn the loss of old/dead flash games, head this way to the AN Productions Discord! And if you only care about some (presumably) big news delivered straight to your inbox, sign up for the mailing list on the home page.