itch.io

Glad you found it useful! I'll answer your questions as best as I can.

1.) I market everywhere I can that isn't a place I would consider "toxic social media." I have an email list, post on Reddit, post to various Discords, post the build here, and post a trailer to YouTube. 

I generally avoid Twitter/X/Bluesky because I find the 140 character format costs me more than it's worth. It's too easy to get sucked into pointless debates about the reflecting pool or whatever, and everyone is just talking past each other.

2.) My first players are usually the people from our local playtest group in Charlottesville. We meet roughly every month, and they get to play it before the build ever goes public. It's a good way to catch obvious problems before anyone in public has to know about them. 

Outside of that, you would be surprised with how far you can get by simply posting the build here and contacting some of your online game developer friends. This site is designed to promote games that get updated frequently, and there are people looking to play your game.

3.) Make a high quality game in a genre that is appropriate for the PC gamer market. That's 90% of it. I'm paraphrasing Chris Zukowski, but it's basically games that are buildy-crafy-simulation-y. Make one of those. Post it to this site. Fill out the relevant tags (automation regularly brings in organic traffic for me). That's it. If the game is good and speaks to the right audience, people will find it and play it.

4.) Reddit is genuinely annoying but too useful to ignore. Most of the bigger more generic communities like Indie Games have these nauseating rules about flair and screenshots, and when you post I guarantee some moderator will nitpick it to death and remove it on the first try. So I avoid those. Not worth it.

That said, smaller more genre-specific sub-Reddits are great! I posted Cave Factory in the AutomationGames sub-Reddit, and the audience was highly receptive. A few of the people on that sub-Reddit played my game and wrote some long highly detailed feedback posts that will certainly make the game better.

I also post to r/DestroyMyGame because it's a good way to get the most negative feedback possible, and that's useful for finding chinks in your armor. Take it with a grain of salt. Some people in there are kinda masochistic and enjoy the takedown (self-included), so realize a few are being negative just to be negative.

With Discord, it's a mixed bag and kind of depends on the specific communities you're a part of. I was in Thinky Puzzle Games for a spell, and they welcome new puzzle game builds. I'm also in some local game developer Discords and post there too. 

Again, the smaller communities tend to be better and more focused. If you're posting in some big indie game developer Discord, your game is just going to get mixed in with all of the other self-promotion so with those it's basically pointless to post because nobody is playing those builds anyway.

I'm in another Discord that's purely focused on falling sand simulation games, and I have to imagine the people in that group will definitely want to play builds of my game when I put them out because we have similar interests.

That's why it's so important to pick a genre and niche down. It not only makes your game more discoverable to tag-based algorithms, it means you can post in specific sub-Reddits like r/AutomationGames and find people who want to play your game. If you have no clear genre, you have no clear audience, and you therefore have no communities you can join to find new players.

The more clear you are on what your game is (genre) and who it's for (audience), the easier it is to find people to playtest your game.