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Hi all,

In the first two months of 2019, lots of interesting things have been done and a new game has been started. We’ve also totally revamped our social media marketing strategy…

Discord Server

We recently made drastic updates to the Vanadium Games Discord Server.
For those of you who do not know what Discord is, it is a voice and text communication platform which is typically used in gaming. We are now also using it as our main internal communications platform as well since our original solution, Stride, was shut down. It is also open to the public, where anyone can freely make use of the voice channels or ask us questions through a question channel.

Because of this, we improved our Discord server by adding emoji to our channel names and even creating our own bot, Vanadibot.

Vanadibot is an automated robot which moderates our server, keeping it family friendly and tracking statistics as part of a levelling system. It also has a developer-only feature where it syncs with our job management system, Trello, to track time spent on each project. This helps us to more accurately predict how long things take and how long people have spent on what.

Hopefully, this infrastructure will enable us to become more productive in the future.

Social Media

We decided to revamp our social media strategy.
In the past, we would post the same images on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook at irregular times. 
Now, we are posting separate images on different platforms. We also post different types of content on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, providing a reason for people to follow us on all of these.

On Instagram, we are posting at least 2 times a week, at 7pm (due to this being a time when most people are active). The actual content alternates between an infographic (a fact, quote, or other text-based subject) and a colourful image with a detailed caption (which could be an update of what we have been working on). In the long run, this will help our grid-based feed to be more artistic, in a checkerboard style, and when combined with being more active in our community, for example, following and liking other game development accounts, will enable us to reach a larger audience.
Instagram will be the platform we focus the most on, as most of our target audience are on there. These methods have been proven to work – we already have around 150 followers, which is around 100 more than when we first started with this.

Twitter is being used to post up-to-date news of what we are working on, as well as anything else which we find interesting while Facebook is being used the least regularly, used for posting more important content, such as major game or company updates.

New Tower Defence Game

We have also started a new Tower Defence game which will be of a science fiction genre, based around an overarching storyline. We are still in the process of planning everything out so we can’t reveal too much, however we can show you a preview of the prototype game at the moment (with placeholder sprites).

All in all, January and Februrary have been very productive months for Vanadium Games, and we hope for this progress to continue in the future.

See you in April!
Josh
Lead Game Developer