I wouldn't bother with having a bespoke website for the game. As others have said, itch.io will host your game. They've been adding a bunch of community management tools as well. If you were to have a personal or studio site, it would be super easy just to do mysite.com/mygame. That said, I absolutely would not spend money where I didn't have to. People usually get around using links, so as long as you have a link that reliably gets you to a page with info about your game you're good. There are tons of great free options for that. Don't let your ego blow your money. I speak from experience, as the proud owner of GeraldBurke.com, a site that consists entirely of links to my itch.io page.

I've been running a small local meetup for a couple of years now. Most of the time the best we can do, no matter how hard we push, is about 5 or 6 regulars. This is a college town, we have three universities within thirty miles, two of them offer game development programs. It seems like there's a ton of interest, but our attendance rate is stagnant. Our group is pretty active. We run bi-weekly meetups like clockwork, we hit all of the local and regional cons, and we run game jams every few months(usually Ludum Dare). In a region with a population of roughly half a million, I could believe that maybe the 10 or so active devs we've worked with are the only 10, were it not for the fact that just about every week I hear somebody talk about making games or wanting to make games.

I feel like I've hit a wall with what I can do, and I'm not really sure what else to do to push numbers. That said, I love the little community we do have. Every person besides my wife that I speak to daily, I met through the meetup.

Has anyone here had similar/better/worse experiences with running a dev meetup? Am I maybe missing something huge and obvious?

This is my first time going to the event. I don't really have a good idea of what to expect. I've been to a few of the smaller cons around me, and I've also been to some huge ones, so I'd like to get a feel for what it's going to look like. Anyone here on the East Coast been? I'd like to get your thoughts.

Howdy folks!

My name is Gerald! I've been making games for about three years now. I dropped out of a game design bachelor's about halfway through, around the time I discovered I could teach myself what I needed to know for waaay cheaper. Now I'm working on a more practical CS degree and making games in just about my every spare moment. I'm a generalist, but I'm a much stronger programmer than an artist.

Aside from that I'm husband of nearly a decade, a father of two, and I live up in the Appalachian mountains of Northeast Tennessee. Recently I've been working on a game with a buddy of mine that we intend to put out under our new moniker 'Cephalomania Games'. Most of the stuff I've worked on can be found here. Looking forward to getting to know everybody!