Popcar's Hub

Releasing GodotOS and Finding an Audience

This week was wild, hectic, and a bit surreal. I've released GodotOS on January 9, but two days later I got a suddenly massive amount of attention, mostly from unexpected places! Here's a post on how the release went.

If you're not aware, GodotOS is my project to create a desktop-like experience in the Godot engine. It's always been intended more of a toy or proof of concept than a serious project, something I've been working on for fun in-between looking for freelancing work. I made a release trailer for it too, check it out!

Pre-release

Before releasing, I had to make sure that everything looks good and all the info anyone would want is included. This includes setting up:

All of this sounds easy in theory (and it is), but making everything properly takes time. I spent roughly 2.5 months on the project, and spending just a day or two to tighten up the presentation is quite important.

While being almost done with editing the video, I realized I had it on the wrong framerate. Changing the framerate from 30 to 60 in Kdenlive broke all the timings I had, and this is apparently a known issue that I had no idea about. I tried salvaging what I can but in the end everything was so messed up that I had to make the ENTIRE video from scratch.

"Is this really worth it?" I kept grumbling to myself while redoing 1.5 hours of work. Yes, it is. So I kept working on it and made a million backups along the way. Never again.

Release Day

The plan is simple: post on every social media I currently use. I generally don't enjoy spamming the same post in what seems to be everywhere, but you don't release a large project every day. These include:

Ironically, releasing the project and crossing the finish line is the most stressful part of the entire project. It's the moment of truth, knowing whether you'll attract a lot of people or if your posts will simply vanish in-between the noise of the internet. What if it's worse? What if people don't actually like it?!

I had doubts things would go smoothly, but there was only one path forward, so I started posting.

Surprisingly, I didn't get much attention from Reddit, which I was betting on being the easiest of the bunch to gather people. I barely made it on Hot for a bit, and the post ended its first day with roughly 60 upvotes. Disappointing, but not terrible. My mistake was submitting a YouTube link compared to uploading the video directly to Reddit, that must have hurt analytics because many people don't like clicking outside of the website/app. Lesson learned.

Even more surprising is that the most successful platform was Lemmy. I got well over 100 upvotes in my post over there on day one, with lots more feedback and discussion!

Rather than just rush posting everywhere, I decided to sleep on it and think about how to better advertise the project. Surely there were some better moves I can make. Still, the level of attention wasn't bad. I would say day one was a moderate success!

Day 2

Day 2 was relatively tame. Views increased by about double now that it's started making the rounds. I decided to also post it to Hackernews even though I am a bit weary about using it. For those unaware, Hackernews is a fantastic resource for computer science related news and discussions. It's usually extremely technical with well-informed people throughout.

Despite liking the platform, I found it a bit intimidating to approach. My project arguably had no real-world value and was made for fun, so I was unsure how industry professionals would look at it or judge it. Oh well, I posted it anyways... And one minute after posting, the website went down for roughly an hour. The worst downtime in the last 6 months.

Not everything goes as planned...

When Hackernews was back, the website was a little unstable. My post received 2 upvotes before being buried beneath dozens of other posts because of the outage. Oh well, I spent the rest of the day taking a well deserved break and occasionally popping in to respond to comments in other social media.

Day 3: The day the project took off

This is where things get interesting. I woke up and saw my itch.io page get a sudden boost of players, almost double what I've gotten in the last two days combined. Something must've happened. I checked my page's analytics and they seemed to be coming from... opennet.ru? What is that?

I entered the website looking for an answer but was very confused. Doing a bit of digging, it seems to be a Russian version of Hackernews, where they discuss open source and tech. I also noticed... My project was on the front page!

The article was full of comments!

This was a surreal experience, finding a website I've never known before on the opposite side of the earth talk about me and my project! The thread seems to have garnered a lot of interest, and there were a lot of comments too. I translated the website and started reading.

The translation was a bit rough and I didn't understand all of the comments, but despite some snarky users they did seem to like it! Here's my favorite excerpt from the comments: (Some context - Compiz is an older Linux desktop environment that had lots of fun effects)

I remember when I was a teenager, things like Compiz were in fashion, and then they went missing somewhere.

People have stopped appreciating the beautiful. The plastic world has won.

Poetic, and true. At least we still have wobbly windows. *starts shaking window violently*

With new-found confidence (and ego - let's be honest), I've decided to repost my project to Hackernews. I hoped the outage would be a good enough reason and nobody would call me out on it. Luckily, nobody did!

My Hackernews post quickly got a lot of attention. Within 30 minutes, my post was #1 on Hackernews! Surprisingly, it managed to stay the top post for almost 6 hours! People really enjoyed the concept, and the thread managed to spark great discussions on the viability of Godot for GUI development. I recommend browsing the comments if you're interested.

Above all the seriousness: A gamedev project for fun.

With the popularity of the post, I got a bunch of comments raising valid points and concerns. This sudden popularity was stressing me out a bit. Not because the comments are bad or anything, but rather because I wasn't used to this much attention and having to address a lot of people. After a bit of pacing around the room, I sat down and started responding.

Here's one excerpt, where someone has concerns over me calling it GodotOS and adding a warning that I'm not affiliated with Godot:

iosonofuturista: Popcar2 , a note on your disclaimer that you are not affiliated with the Godot foundation. Is that usual in projects using an engine? Or is it because of your , IMHO, poor naming choice.

Think of this way, if the tagline of the project was “EstragonOS, a fake os made in godot”, would the disclaimer be so proeminent in the page?

I think you know you are playing with fire, to make the disclaimer a larger font. It’s not too late, consider a rename.

popcar2: Thank you for the concern, I did indeed add it preemptively because of the project's name. The reason I chose "GodotOS" is because the project was initially intended to be a sort of tech demo for Godot's UI systems, and I spent most of my time in the official Godot Discord showcasing its development and getting lots of feedback. One of the contributors of the engine itself gave me the thumbs up.

Of course, if anyone officially from Godot wants me to change the name and general branding I'll do so quickly. Right now, I think it should be fine.

Sure enough, it was fine. The people on Hackernews can be a bit intimidating, but they're often very supportive. Between obsessing over my thread in Hackernews, I was also checking my posts elsewhere and replying to some of the comments there.

Meanwhile, I was notified that my project was also making the rounds on Mastodon and Twitter (presently known as the cross button). It was posted by nixCraft, and later boosted by the GodotEngine account itself!

So they *do* like the name!

I'll stop tooting my own horn now. My point is, I've been working in gaming professionally for about 1.5 years, and I've had it as a hobby for way longer. This is the first project I've made to get much attention at all, and suddenly my most starred project went from ~30 to well over 500. It took time and some effort, but it turns out it is possible to put yourself out there without paying for ads or playing tedious social media management games.

Conclusion

Aside from documenting cool stuff that happened in my personal blog, what I'd like you to take away from this is that, if you think you've made something cool, you should put yourself out there. Make a trailer. Post on various social medias. Show it to others if you can.

I've seen many cool and interesting projects that have so much effort put into them, but little effort in advertising them. Some people don't put a screenshot in the GitHub ReadMe. Many others don't make a video showing the project in action, or post it in only niche communities, like once on Reddit, then call it a day. If you've put months into a project, what's one or two more days?

I hope to see your cool stuff one day too. Whether it's a project, some blog post, an art piece or so on, I'm sure there's an audience for it out there somewhere.