After years toiling away on our first major video game release under relative secrecy, we finally have something we are proud to share with the public. The only question for our team was: “How?”

We are all big fans of imgur, and felt an imgur album would be a great format to display information about our game, and perhaps a good way to get more exposure for our game. In the end we had to make two albums which will be explained below.

Our first album: http://imgur.com/gallery/a0WIB/

Our second album: http://imgur.com/a/sRQ3s

Here is what we learned

Here are some of the things we have learned from our experience with imgur and using albums…

 
1) Pictures are shared between albums. This means if you want to reuse the same picture in multiple albums, if you were to change the caption for that picture in one album, it changes the caption for that picture in all albums. This makes A|B testing and making revisions with our team nearly impossible using the imgur website; Your best bet is to figure out all of the pictures you want to use and the caption offline first, then upload everything to imgur.

2) Before publishing an album you can make all the changes you want, so you have a chance to make sure everything looks the way that you want, but once you publish it, you’re pretty much done. You can’t add, remove, or change pictures with out taking down the album, which will erase all of your views and give you a new URL. Furthermore imgur will use your old URL for new posts to imgur, so if you had posted a link to your album anywhere on the internet that link will now show someone else’s content.

3) Imgur can break. We didn’t realize how common this was, but Imgur can break pretty badly. After publishing our album, the imgur website went up and down all day showing all sorts of errors.

 
4) Do not rely on captions. Your results may vary, but for us, about an hour or two after publishing our album, imgur removed all of our captions from the album! Try as we might, there was nothing we could do to get them back, our pictures were now captionless and there was nothing we could do to fix it! We tried contacting imgur to see if they could fix this issue or if there was anything we could do to help, but unfortunately we were unable to start a conversation with them. We also made another album using captions, but this time we removed all URL’s as a test to see if that was the issue. Imgur again deleted the captions within a few minutes of posting it, so for us it seemed consistent.

5) Consider putting all needed text into images. This worked for us in the end, but of course there is no hyperlinks and the formatting can look a little strange.

6) A lot of users really appreciated the amount of content we posted, in this case it seemed more was better.

7) Imgur is still very much a viable option. Even with the website up and down all day, and with no captions on any of our pictures, we still got a bunch of people to see it and give us great feedback!!

Huge Success!

We had well more exposure than we could ever have expected! Posting it in the morning, by the end of the day we had something over quarter of a million views!! This is absolutely mind-blowing

Consider that we accomplished this almost entirely through imgur, only posting a few links around the internet. Looking at the statistics, over 90+% of all of the views came from Imgurians.

Not only did a lot of people see our creation, but we got TONS of feedback. It’s been a few weeks and we are still sorting through all of the responses we got from excited and passionate gamers!

Our number one response was from people that wanted to help us test CURE, so we opened up a way to have people sign up for a chance to help us test it. The amount of people that signed up was truly inspiring.

Gamers are crafty!!

Even with most of our captions not visible to the public at large, people found and helped direct other users to our social media pages, blog, website. Some even found some of the secrets that are hidden around our website. Never underestimate the cunning and resourcefulness of passionate gamers!

A second attempt

Our post was a success, but we still wanted people to see our captions, to give people a better sense of what the game is, and where it is going. So we created a second album replacing all of the caption text with images of our posts. This album did not do nearly as well as our first one. Even with a link to the new album on the original album the traffic just did not transfer across.

Do as we say, Not as we do…

If you consider posting your creations on imgur and sharing them with the world, we suggest making your posts personal… imgur is not an advertising avenue, and people will quickly assume you are spamming your game or service. Our goal was to show our project as a DIY/Awesome-hobby post, mainly by use of captions that introduced our team telling everyone about what we have been were working on and how. Which leads us into our major bit of advice… don’t count on captions as they apparently can break. I would recommend putting any major links or contact information in a picture, so if the captions do break, people can still have a way to contact you.

To everyone that gave us so much glowing support and so many kind words about our project, and especially all of the creative and constructive feedback: Thank you!!!!