Hey, guys and gals. I could use some marketing help. As the common advice goes, it's easier to market and spread the word when you know what niche you're targeting at, and where to find them. I'm finding the "where" to be a bit difficult.
As you can probably tell from my tagline to the left, I call myself an experimental developer. Which is a broad term, so to clarify, I personally like experimenting with different ways of playing games (unusual control schemes, objectives, method of telling narrative, etc.). I don't mind making fun games at all, and in fact, I frequently make games with absolutely no narrative to speak of. Needless to say, that makes it difficult to categorize my focus into any specific game genre.
Where can I find some enthusiastic like-minded gamers who like to try these new, experimental (and hopefully genre-defying) things? Links to forums, websites, Twitter hashtags, or heck, even meetups would greatly help. I've attempted to Google this for a while, but it's proving to be unhelpful. Thanks in advance!
Edit: As temp mentioned below, perhaps I have an image problem here. "Experimental" may not be fitting for the games I have created so far. Is there a different tagline I should use that better fits with what I previously made?
I was going to suggest the
Experimental Gameplay Project, but it looks to have died last year.
Perhaps you could contact the 2D Boy people and ask if something similar is running? I remember that's how World of Goo got started back in the day. I played their prototype before the real game came out.
The closest alternative that I can think of is
Ludum Dare. That's more about rapid development, though, than experimental games. The Something Awful forums run similar contests on their games forum, but I haven't kept up with that lately.
The contest format is the only one that I've really seen grow a proper audience for these types of games. As a player, it's fun to download a bunch of weird minigames in one go. It doesn't really make sense to hunt them down on a one-by-one basis. It's also easier for the press to write about when they're lumped together in a bigger event.
There's a bigger game jam community, but most of them have some kind of theme in addition to being experimental and time-limited.
I think the issue with a lot of the game james is that they tend to be more for the developer community than player communities. That's not a totally bad thing (especially, say, if you're trying to drum up contract work), but it does make it a little harder to sell directly to consumers. It might identify a concept that can be developed into a consumer product, but in general, normal gamers tend to have high expectations for stuff that isn't free.
Kongregate and other similar free sites are probably the best places to bring experimental games direct to consumers outside of the contest framework, though. This is particularly great if you like making games for kids, who prefer free games that they don't have to bug their parents for.