Promote: short videos, Reddit posts and a posting schedule for your game

Shipping a game is the easy half. The hard half is getting a stranger to look at it, and on the internet that means short vertical videos, a Reddit post that doesn't get removed, and someone remembering to post the next thing on Thursday. The studio now has a Promote tab for that half. You say what the campaign is about and how long it runs, and the agent cuts the videos, writes the posts, researches which subreddits will actually let you post, and lays it all out as a day-by-day schedule.

This post shows what came out of it on its first day for four very different games (a bubble shooter, a roll-up cat game, an idle cultivation game and a physics merge puzzle), how the videos are made, what the agent checks before it suggests a subreddit, and the things it refuses to do on your behalf.

What is Promote?

Promote is the Marketing kit's younger sibling. The kit gets your store pages ready; Promote gets people to them. It lives in its own tab next to Publish, and a campaign takes four decisions:

• What it's about. A launch, an update (you say what changed, and the agent checks each change exists in the project before announcing it), or anything else in your own words: a Halloween event, a festival demo, a thousand players.
• How long it runs. Anything from one day to sixty, with buttons for 1, 2, 3, 7, 14 and 30. A one-to-three-day campaign is treated as a burst around a single moment; a month is a slow build.
• Where it goes. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts, a landscape YouTube video, Reddit and X, each a separate tick box.
• Two optional extras. A spoken voice-over, and an AI-generated opening shot before the gameplay starts. Both are off unless you tick them.

The campaign runs as a background turn, like a marketing kit, and builds on the game's newest kit when there is one: its trailer footage, screenshots, key art and listing copy. The four campaigns below took between 34 and 68 minutes each.

What comes out

Every campaign is the same shape: a set of videos, every post written out in full, a list of subreddits with notes on their rules, and a schedule that puts each post on a day and a time in your timezone. The studio shows it as a calendar you can work down. Each post has copy buttons for the title, caption, hashtags and body, the video it uses, a tick box for when you've posted it, and there's a button that adds the whole schedule to your calendar as reminders.

Under the hood that schedule is one machine-readable plan, which matters for the next part: with a post scheduler connected in Settings, you can tick the TikTok, Instagram and YouTube posts you approve, pick which of your accounts each goes to, and have the agent book them in at their planned times. Nothing is scheduled until you approve it, and Reddit and X stay manual. You post those yourself, which is how those communities prefer it anyway.

Four games, four campaigns

A bubble shooter, seven days

Dungeon Spin is an 8-bit bubble shooter where you fire monsters into a horde that spins around a rune. The owner's brief for the campaign was a joke: the dungeon's staff commuting to work. The agent ran with it. Each short opens on a photoreal version of one of the game's characters walking down a city street (a goblin, a barbarian, a wizard) with a caption like "Me going to work knowing the boss is in today", then cuts hard to the real game: the floor banner, the boss sitting inside the horde, the class finisher going off.

The plan is seven days and fifteen posts. Day one teases on TikTok and YouTube and posts a how-it-was-made thread in r/aigamedev; day two is launch day across every channel; days three to seven spotlight one class or boss at a time, one subreddit a day, and close with a thank-you. There is also a 41-second landscape cut for YouTube, made from the same recordings because the game had no trailer yet.

A cat game, two days

Cat Person is about a cat lady who rolls up every cat in the city until the ball swallows buildings and then the planet. Two days suited it: a launch day with the full trailer on YouTube at midday and the strongest short on TikTok and Shorts in the evening, then a second short on day two about how big the ball gets. The shorts reuse the gameplay from the game's own trailer, cropped for a phone, with the trailer's captions cut out so they don't fight the new ones.

An idle game, three days

Nine Heavens Ascent is a pixel-art idle cultivation game that is also on the App Store and Google Play, which is the hardest case for a short: idle games don't move much. The first short leans on the owner's joke (a future immortal who still has a commute, while his Qi grows offline), then shows breakthroughs and the lightning trial. The second has no AI opener at all and is pure gameplay: tap the lightning away, buy spirit sources, set the beast hunt running.

A merge puzzle, three days

Potion Pile is a cosy physics merge puzzle: drop ingredients into a cauldron, matching pairs merge into something better, and the pile mustn't cross the line. The campaign runs one joke for three days, a witch with a takeaway coffee on her way to her potion piling shift. Day one is the launch and the basic drop, merge and brew loop; day two is the danger line, a panic stir and an honest overflow ("...then I ran out of stirs"); day three closes on a real Moon Elixir merge. The owner asked for a realistic witch, so the intros are live action while the game is illustrated, and the agent's notes point out that the difference is deliberate.

One line from the idle game's notes to the owner is worth quoting, because it's the kind of thing we want the agent to catch: "The copy does not say the mobile apps are free, because no price was given. Only the browser version is called free."

How are the videos made?

From the game. When there's a trailer from the marketing kit, the agent cuts the shorts from its footage. When there isn't, it records the game itself, using the engine's own movie-maker mode on a scratch copy of the project, at a fixed 30 frames per second with the game's real sound, while a script plays it. It records a library of shots once and cuts every short from that library, because rendering is the slow part and recuts are cheap.

A short is structured for a phone, not a cinema: the hook is on screen in the first second, two to four fast beats follow with big burned-in captions (most people watch muted), the best moment comes last, and the final frame cuts cleanly back to the first so it loops. Everything sits inside the part of the screen the apps don't cover with their own buttons.

One video file serves every platform. The same 1080x1920 short goes to TikTok, Reels, Shorts, X and Reddit; only the caption, title and hashtags change per post. That rule is in the agent's instructions because the obvious alternative, a separate render per platform, is how a forty-minute turn becomes a three-hour one.

Is the opening shot AI?

When you tick it, yes, and it says so. The optional hook is a generated clip of up to five seconds, built around the game's own characters and usually started from its key art, and it's never more than about a third of the short. Then it cuts to real gameplay. The agent isn't allowed to make it look like play: no interface, no mechanics the game doesn't have, no fake footage passed off as the game. In the bubble shooter's case the intros are deliberately photoreal, a live-action goblin rather than a pixel sprite, so nobody mistakes them for the game.

Every post that uses one carries a note telling you to switch on the platform's AI-content label when you post it. TikTok, YouTube and Instagram each have one. The voice-over is synthetic speech, and the notes say that too. The captions the agent wrote disclose it without being asked: "Intro is AI, the rest is the real game."

How does it choose subreddits?

It reads the rules. The agent searches for communities that fit the game (its genre, how it's played, where it runs, general indie showcases), then pulls each candidate's subscriber count, activity, rules and posting requirements from Reddit's own API, and reads them. A subreddit that bans self-promotion or AI-made games is dropped, and the dropped ones are listed so you don't try them. Where it can't read the rules, it keeps the subreddit only if it's confident and marks it "Check rules" in the studio.

For the bubble shooter it kept eleven, all with their rules checked, and the schedule posts to seven of them, one a day. The notes are the useful part. r/playmygame allows exactly this kind of post, but only if the game is free to play now, and its "be truthful" rule covers claiming hand-made art. r/aigamedev welcomes it, as long as the post talks about how the game was made rather than just linking it. r/SoloDevelopment wants genuinely solo projects. That's the difference between a post that stays up and one that gets removed in ten minutes.

What does it write for Reddit and X?

Maker posts, in the first person, that say who made the thing. The launch post for r/playmygame is titled "I made Dungeon Spin, a free browser bubble shooter where every hit spins the horde", and the first comment ends: "I read every comment and I am fixing things this week, so bugs and 'this felt unfair' notes are very welcome." Where a subreddit wants links in the comments rather than the post, that's where the link goes, and where it forbids links the post doesn't have one.

It won't write the other kind. No pretending to be a player who stumbled on the game, no suggestion of alternate accounts or vote swaps, no invented player counts, ratings or quotes, no hype words. Two posts to the same subreddit on the same day, or the same post to several subreddits at once, fail the plan's own checks before you ever see them.

Changing a campaign

Press Revise and say what should change, for the whole campaign or for one thing in it. Every video and image has a Change this button, and every post has one for feedback, so "make the hook text bigger on this one" or "drop r/roguelites" goes to exactly that asset. The agent makes the smallest change that does it, keeps the same file names so every post that uses a video picks up the new version, and saves the previous plan in the campaign's files. Posts already booked into your scheduler are left alone.

Dates move too, at any time. Move this post changes one post's day or time, Move this day sends everything on a crowded day to another date, and Move the schedule shifts the whole campaign. Posts already booked into your scheduler move there as well, and one that has already gone out is left where it is and named.

Promoting a collection

A collection on your arcade can be promoted too. The campaign builds from each game's newest marketing kit: a montage short across the games leads, then a spotlight for each one that links the game's own page. Games without a kit are left out by default, and the panel suggests making one first, because a kit gives the campaign real trailer footage. You can include them anyway, in which case the agent records a clip of the live web build in a browser. That footage is rougher (no game audio, browser frame pacing), and the campaign's notes say so.

What it won't do

• Post for you without asking. Nothing goes out until you approve it, and Reddit and X are always yours to post.
• Fake the game. Every gameplay frame comes from the game rendering itself, and every claim in every post has to be true of the current build.
• Hide the AI. Generated intros and voices are marked in the plan, in the post notes and, as often as not, in the caption.
• Guess at posting times as if they were facts. The times are sensible starting points for the audience, and the campaign's README says that in as many words.

Promote is in the studio now, in the tab next to Publish. It works best on a game that already has a marketing kit, and best of all on one with a trailer.