Having put our head depth down into the development of Aztaka for the last three years, we simply forgot to do something important : talked about what we were doing and listen to what was going on. Getting back in touch with the industry was easily done in the last few weeks.

Now, I'm “trying” to create some buzz/noise/awareness about Aztaka – something that should have been done before. Any idea on how to do this, without spending a fortune?

Any genius out there to help me with that ?

Hey,

Sorry, this thread is a little old. But it's the latest in this particular category and it hasn't had any responses.

I purchased this game yesterday and I must say this game is pretty invisible. I found it when I was browsing thru the list of the 2009 IGF entrants.

So, trying to increase the awareness of this game:

First obvious solution is have it distributed on more portals. That seems like a no-brainer to me so you've probably already thought of this.

A second thing I notice was on Bit Blot's website, well specifically Aquaria's website, they have an "Indie" section: http://www.bit-blot.com/aquaria/indiegames.html
There they have a bit on other indie game companies/games. Now it's up to them if they want to do that for you, but maybe you could do that for them and build a connection with other indie developers. Both of you would benefit from each others traffic.

We are going to be on Steam (Crossing my fingers) soon (we are currently beta testing) so this should help us a lot.
As for bit blot -great idea, I'll contact them over the weekend.

Aztaka is a great game, don't get me wrong, but it has some pacing problems. It might be a good thing that aztaka has gotten very little attention at this point. You might consider holding on pushing publicity until after you've ironed out some of the game's issues.

It will be a lot harder to come back and say "hey we've made it a lot better" after folks have already written reviews and it gets a "metascore".

True. I don't know where we're at with the patches now, but we can say that there definitely were several improvements made to the game, and many are still to come as far as I understand. I'm sure Aztaka deserves an even better rating that it did after release, and having some kind of relaunch event (now or later, when more fixes are made) could be both an advertising boost in itself and a center piece of sorts for a bigger, better-organized campaign.

I really don't know what has been done regarding new quests and extensions, and what lies ahead, but releasing something like a Gold version or an Aztaka Collection (not necessarily more expensive (although you could definitely justify it in this case)) could help renew the whole thing and create new momentum for advertising.