BuzzKill continues to exceed my expectations thanks to a link nod from PC Gamer.

I recently wrote about BuzzKill getting a positive response from people who have played it. That was mostly via Twitter and the Pico-8 forums. Just this past weekend I found out PC Gamer magazine gave the game a nod on their Free Games of the Week blog. I was shocked.

From PC Gamer:

Once you’re suitably relaxed, reintroduce some tension into your life with superb arcade game BuzzKill, which is pretty much Breakout, mixed with Space Invaders, but with bees. Your job is to eliminate all the honeycombs, bees and bee hives, and you do this by shooting fireballs and blowing big balls of smoke. The smoke temporarily weakens the honeycombs, allowing you to destroy them, while the industrious insects will do their best to reconstruct their colony. Some real thought has gone into this, and it shows.

It’s not much but I’ll take it. I’ll take it because a) it’s PC Gamer, a known name in gaming, and b) out of all the thousands of games there are to play each week out there on the web, they picked mine to be one. Amazing.

Like I said, I was shocked. I didn’t expect BuzzKill to get any traction beyond the forums and my own promotion among friends.

Twitter still matters

BuzzKill

This whole episode with BuzzKill has shown me that Twitter still has a lot of power. I was heavy into Twitter several years ago but it died down for me as friends left and I wasn’t really doing anything worth promoting.

Then Pico-8 comes along and I find that it’s community is super active on Twitter. I thank Twitter for getting BuzzKill the extra attention. A few retweets can go a long way, I guess.

But I’ll also give blame to the one thing I did this time that I don’t usually do…I showed my progress.

Showing your work

I’m not one that usually shares works in progress. I like to keep things under wraps and then “launch” it with a big bang and promotion. But with BuzzKill, I tweeted out screenshots as the game was getting made. I not only got feedback that way, but I think it built a little…wait for it…buzz about the game.

I’m just glad the game lived up to whatever hype those tweets had made for itself. Apparently it did. If nothing else, the PC Gamer link validates that process is worth doing every time.