Due to awesomeness, I think spring should create a 'promotion' document, maybe a wiki that lists ways how we can promote spring and when is a good time and make it more accessible. More players means easier to start a game, and easier to have other mods/games with more players as well.
Accessibility mostly means ease of finding the base download, ease of installation(fairly good, people still stumble sometimes?), ease of getting mods/games and maps and ease of learning the gameplay.(Depends on game, could be a lot better as far as i have seen.) Documentation can help, barely, users might just read a single page.
Of course, people should also be able to host(and that it works very easily), and the autohosts should work. (Maybe, or, if small autohosts can be used.) If we decide to promote, we need to make sure it doesn't co-incide with updates of the engine with possible bugs following it.(Or we could do the thing with the allowing of multiple executables playable from the lobby.)
Niceness of the websites i think the website of the spring engine is really good. However those of some the games themselves could be a lot better. The list of games could use icons/small screenshots? Maybe the order should change, i guess the makers deserve their games high up, maybe CA deserves to be higher up too. (And is it really still a mod?)
Before starting a promotion campaign, it is probably a good idea to update screenshots, and some of the promotion on youtube.(Many of which are very nice, can be linked to as well.) Also, it might be a good idea to replace the links from the games tab go directly to a good page instead of an (ok) intermediate one. Either that, or the pages themselves should be more elaborate. The CA website and how it is linked to from spring.clan-sy could certainly use improvement. The link from the games tab to XTA, starts with 'history', bad omen
, on the plus side, it does have some screenshots.The games themselves one thing to ask is, are the games ready? I think graphically, XTA and CA are ready. With the downloader, the fact that things are under development a lot does not necessarily constitute a problem. Are they learned easily enough? Maybe there should be mods/games tabs, with the games' tutorial and campaign.(As has been in mockups, and discussions, i guess.) Especially CA seems to me to be rather noob-unfriendly, with its gameplay. But also due to its smaller amount of moderately skilled players, and larger amount of fairly good players.(Although a large influx of players could fix that.)
How to promote one idea is reddit and digg, we could submit there (Wait for an oppertune time! Websites could still be a lot better.) i am willing to vote for the purpose once(contact me for it when needed), once is 'fair enough' more is gaming the system. Make sure we put good titles on them, and link to a good place on the website.
An other idea is to google bomb. Searching for spring engine gets you the right place. Maybe try getting spring on the list for other keywords too, like strategy or rts. Not sure if it is nice, though. Banners for websites, etc.
When to promote at a good time, of course.
What to promote which mod which game? A possibly contentious point.. Just promoting the engine might confuse the people coming, or diffuse them onto different mods/games and find that they don't find any games, draining their games. BA is currently most popular, and people will definitely find games, but it is also least good graphically.(And do we want to leave the older cpus behind?) I think we should not discuss what to promote at this point, because it might dominate the discussion.
Maybe we should get a list of reddit users to send a message to promote when the time comes.
So lets discuss the promotion document and what should be in it.
