Over 150 Riot Games employees walked out in Monday protest |
- Over 150 Riot Games employees walked out in Monday protest
- How we managed a successful game launch with zero marketing budget (includes first month sales stats)
- Hopefully this is okay to share here, my 4 year old daughter surprised me withe her own UV/color maps.
- How many people actually use Godot? How many have tried it?
- I created my first C++ program, a 2D collision detector, wanna review and gimme all the shit?
- Hey guys, this is a short 'making of' of a cancelled game, total vaporware, way too big scope and horrible code since I was a beginner, animations are up on the store for sale if you're interested, let me know what u think :)
- If I don't think a project is being run well should I leave it?
- Joining an Indie Dev Team as a Newbie
- A couple of Manchester indie devs (myself included) feature in this article, covering our attempt to co-develop a game while also working on other projects. It's been a difficult and illuminating process and I fully expect more developers to try models like this as margins tighten further.
- Attempt to write a game, or specialise in an area of programming?
- Diligent Engine now supports GLTF2.0 and implements physically-based renderer with image-based lighting
- Game Attorneys Talk at GDC (Legal Battle Royale - Not Boring Edition)
- How should I go about this?
- Building Games Around Humor: Lessons from The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game
- How do you communicate 'Pinch Zoom'?
- Tips for coming up with a studio name?
- Making Mobile Game Promo Images with GIMP
- Lessons I've learned from setting up a 2D framework for level design(Article)
- Open source...?
- How do large scale games handle CI and Test Automation?
- Our fully modelled Forest Druid in Depths of Erendorn. We'd love to know what you all think!
| Over 150 Riot Games employees walked out in Monday protest Posted: 07 May 2019 06:20 AM PDT |
| Posted: 07 May 2019 05:23 AM PDT Hello! Miles here. I've been making or marketing games at Pixeljam (probably best known for Dino Run) for 14 years now, and I'm going to try and distill our latest launch experience (Nova Drift, a theory-crafting 2D arcade shooter) into a single article. I should mention though that only about 4 of those last 14 years have really been focused on marketing, and the other 10 were spent just making games and *not* marketing, which is also valuable because you get to feel firsthand the effects of doing nothing. The 3 main things I want to talk about are...
The first half of this article will be thoughts on marketing, and the second half will be what I actually did with those thoughts and what the outcomes were. 1) GROWING THE BUBBLE We all know that we live in our own bubbles, but from my experience everyone thinks their bubble is bigger than it actually is. This can be a real problem when putting together a marketing plan though... it's best to assume that 0.00001% of all gamers know about your project, because that's probably accurate unless you are getting published by a well-known company or have tons of marketing budget. My job is to expand the bubble as much as possible. Every time someone sees or mentions our game on social media, streams it, posts on Youtube, tells a friend, sees it in a digital store, etc, the bubble grows a tiny bit. If someone just saw that the game exists, that's good... it's unlikely that they will buy it right away, because we all know that's not how it works. They need to see it over and over. They need to think *it's a thing*. It needs to take up enough mindshare for them until they can't ignore it anymore... that wonderful moment when one's thought process goes from "I've been hearing about this a lot" to "I need to try it". Depending on the person this can take 5 seconds to 5 years. So how do we grow the bubble without a budget? Work, lots and lots of work. Full-time work, if you can swing it. But work is only part of the equation: BUBBLE GROWTH = MARKETABILITY * EFFORT * LUCK MARKETABILITY: this is the inherent potential of a game to sell based on its own merits, with zero marketing. It's not exactly "quality", but more like: Quality * Catchiness * Timing Quality: This is very hard to quantify, but one can get a good sense of this as more and more people play the game and give feedback. Catchiness: does it have a hook that will make people talk? Can you understand what's great about the game from a screenshot or short video? Is it "meme-y"? Does it stream well? Does it allow the player to have moments that youtubers and streamers will want to make multiple videos about? I'm not suggesting anyone make games that ARE catchy, but one should not be surprised if they don't think about this and then no one talks or posts about their game. Timing: Was the game released when no other games like it were available? Was the genre on the rise or decline by the time it was released? Chances are we think the marketability of our game is higher than it actually is, since we made it. One gets gets a better sense of this once the game is thrust in front of people who don't care about our feelings, aka the people *outside* of our bubble. Here is my (obviously biased) evaluation of the game we released: Quality: High. I didn't make the game, so that helps me be more realistic. The dev is a good friend of mine, so that counts against my opinion though. Total strangers tell us it's great and we have a 99% positive review ratio on Steam (as of writing this article), so that's a good sign we're on the right track. Catchiness: Medium. The game does have surprising and delightful moments that stream well, but it can't compete with games that consistently produce meme-worthy comedic or crazy moments that celebrity youtubers will post about. There are no jump scares, you can't really insert your own personality into it, it rarely has any laugh-out-loud moments. It's just solid arcade action with a very high degree of weapon customization, which is where most of the catchiness comes from. People find that it "surprises" them with how deep it actually is, which actually means we need to adjust our marketing strategy - they should realize how deep it is BEFORE they play it... Timing: Games with this control scheme (rotate & thrust, like Asteroids) and degree of weapon choices are pretty rare, so we didn't really have much competition in that regard. Risk of Rain 2 surprise-launched the day after we did, so that probably dinged us a bit, but there's no way to avoid something like that. There are 100 other games launching on any given day, so you really just have to pick a date based on your best guess and hope for the best. Okay, back to the larger equation: EFFORT: This is the time one actually spends thinking and acting to get people aware of their game. Every game is different and therefore needs to be marketed differently. A good marketing effort involves knowing why your game is different and how to talk about those differences to various types of people. Most of this work is probably going to be reaching out to Streamers, Youtubers and Infuencers, which I will collectively call content creators. LUCK: The L-word! The one factor that can make or break a project. It truly sucks that this is enough of a factor to put into the equation, but it has to be in there. If you don't have a major indie publisher or some other muscle, you have an extreme uphill battle ahead and you are going to have to get lucky. The nice thing is that the more you grow your bubble with EFFORT, the more likely you are to get LUCKY. 2) CONTENT CREATORS ARE OUR FRIENDS You can spend a lot of time trying to get the most popular streamers and youtubers to play your game, and it's worthwhile for sure, but only up to a certain point. There are probably only a few thousand mega-influencers and then there are 1 million other people you haven't heard of that are much more likely to respond to your emails / DMs / unsolicited key distributions. We focus on both and cover all our bases, but you we spend much more time focusing on the lesser-known ones. Here is what the marketing portion of my day / week / month looks like for Nova Drift:
Finding new people: you can never stop doing this. New people are entering the arena faster than you can find and contact them. If possible, someone on your team should be doing this at least a few hours a day, for months leading up to your release and then indefinitely afterwards. Celebrity streamers are not ignoring you on purpose, they just get pinged hundreds of times a day by other devs that want the exact same thing you do. They might actually play your game, but it's probably going to take them seeing some of their other friends playing it to convince them its worth their time. So who are their friends? Well... All the other streamers. ones just starting out, ones that are hustling every day to reach affiliate or partner, ones that do it for a living and have 500+ concurrent viewers: these are the people that are MUCH more likely to respond to you and play your game. You cannot possibly ever run out of these people - there are simply too many of them, and the only reason you think they don't exist is because you haven't heard of them YET. So back to my daily grind : I spend a few hours each day finding new people to send keys to. I do this by: - Searching for content created about similar popular games (on Twitter & Youtube) and then hunting down the emails or twitter DMs for the people that make that content. I find that Twitter DM's have a much higher response rate than email, but your mileage may vary. - Checking sullygnome.com often for complete lists of streamers that play games similar to ours, then hunting down their contact info (usually on Twitter). - Using an automated service to find these people - personally I use Keymailer but there are multiple options here. Using one of these automated services is a good way to find out about the marketability of your game. If you send 5000 keys out, how many people redeem them? I promoted another game last year (Cheap Golf) and got about a 1-2% key activation rate. Nova Drift was more like 20-30%. What does that tell me about the marketability of both games? And then I look at the outcomes of sending out these keys: - For the posts that people make about our game on Twitter, I look at every like and RT on each of those posts, and if those people are streamers or youtubers, I send them a key as well if their DMs are open. I also give keys to streamers to give to *their* streamer friends. There are very few degrees of separation between the entire community of content creators - I use this to my advantage and get creative with new ways to get keys to people that will like the game. - I keep a huge spreadsheet of almost everyone that has streamed or posted a youtube vid of our game, or expressed interest it, or said they would stream it but have not yet. This sheet also has the names and contacts of everyone that I *want* to play the game, but has not responded to my key offer yet. I put in time every week to connect with the people on this list, if not just to keep Nova Drift on their radar. Streamers play tons of games and you can't expect them to only think about yours. So healthy relationship and communication are key - discord is really useful for this! We have a server that has about 1K members, and about 100 of them are streamers with their own special role and channels that I post messages to on a regular basis. And then of course this all gets old, so I am always thinking of new ways to find new streamers and keep the existing ones engaged / happy. This is mainly so I don't go insane doing the same thing over and over for months. It can get tedious, but it's worth it. And then we come to the last major point: 3) YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE You simply have to believe in your game's quality and ability to sell. If you don't, it will come through in all of your communication about the game, and that won't end well. Many times in the past I have launched a game and been so disappointed with the launch sales that I simply wasn't motivated to do any more marketing after that. And if I did, it was half-hearted. That's why marketing effort in the months prior to launch is key - to ensure a launch solid enough to keep you motivated for the eternal slog that waits you afterward. Here are some things you can try for keeping motivation up (aka keep believing):
OUTCOMES OF THE MARKETING EFFORT Nova Drift was in development for over 4 years, but we really only started marketing it about 6 months before Early Access launch. Before that we had a small successful Kickstarter that established the community and it kept growing from there. I cranked up the effort on Twitter and Twitch about 2 months before launch, and we managed to get some solid streams of the game going (including our top streamers Celerity and Wanderbots) which really helped our wishlist numbers. By the time launch came around (March 27), we had about 4000 wishlists, which really isn't that much, and not even enough to show up on the "popular upcoming" list on Steam. No matter, we knew the game was really good, and we knew a lot of those people that wishlisted it would buy it in the first week. By launch day there were a few hundred streamers that had already played it, and I personally asked them to stream it on our actual launch day, and most of them did! Providing a giveaway key also helped grease the wheels :) The numbers: Day one sales: 800 units Week one sales: 3000 units Month one sales: 5000 units Wishlists after 1 month: 10,000 This was at a price point of 14.99 with no launch discount. By no means was the game a "hit" - it never went viral, no huge youtuber or streamer ever picked it up, but that's okay... it manages to still sell 50-100 units a day now mainly thanks to the constant influx of smaller streamers that discover it organically or I send keys to. The Steam discovery queue also amplifies our exposure in proportion to the external page views we bring in from various sources. These numbers are good, considering the size of our team (1 full time coder/artist, 1 part-time coder and 1 marketer/publisher) and the fact that we will be making major updates to the game over the next year, leading up to the full release. Here is a chart that shows how streamer activity influenced sales over the last 30 days. The path to full release will look like the path we already took - finding new content creators to play it, releasing new content so content creators have something new to talk about, holding tournaments & contests, and of course always trying to re-invent our strategies, listening to the growing community and staying positive. That's it! I hope this was useful and informative. Thanks for reading. PS - I have a lot more thoughts on specific aspects of this article (Wishlists and how to spike the long tail, "Catchiness", etc) - let me know if you'd like to hear more stuff about those in future writings :) [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 May 2019 01:07 AM PDT |
| How many people actually use Godot? How many have tried it? Posted: 07 May 2019 07:06 AM PDT I read recently that Godot ends up being used by a bunch of developers, who then go back and ultimately use UE4 or Unity once they run up against the limitations of it. I don't want to make a formal poll or something, but anecdotally, have you used Godot and then moved on? Do you have friends who have done that? What frustrated you about it enough to use something else? [link] [comments]  |
| I created my first C++ program, a 2D collision detector, wanna review and gimme all the shit? Posted: 07 May 2019 10:32 AM PDT |
| Posted: 07 May 2019 05:22 AM PDT |
| If I don't think a project is being run well should I leave it? Posted: 07 May 2019 11:42 AM PDT So context, since basically early 2017 I've been helping out on a pokemon fan game, kinda. There was like a year where I didn't do anything for the project. We don't really have anything other than a few fakemon front sprites (basically recolored regular pokemon) and like two towns that have no NPCs or anything. We don't even have the starters. I just don't think the guy running it is running it that good, his scope is way too big. At the same time, it's not really hard or time consuming for me to do what I do when I contribute to it, it's actually kinda relaxing for me. It's just I know this game is basically never going to be fully made with the way it's running. Also if I did leave, do I just not say anything? Do I announce it? What should I say as to not be rude if I do leave? Idk just some help in this situation would be nice. [link] [comments]  |
| Joining an Indie Dev Team as a Newbie Posted: 07 May 2019 04:41 AM PDT So, I've been slowly delving into game development on my own through my minimal C++ and Python knowledge, but have been struggling to find myself engaged because I can't think of ideas very well on my own. I was wondering if I could possibly join any groups in their development of a game to take it as a learning experience. I tend to work a lot better with groups because I have more of a drive to work harder so I don't let others down. Working on my own I just tend to let myself down and then further put myself down because of it. TLDR- I'd like to join a dev team to work on my lacking skills in C++ and Python. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 May 2019 09:09 AM PDT |
| Attempt to write a game, or specialise in an area of programming? Posted: 07 May 2019 05:47 AM PDT Hi, I'm relatively new (and thus inexperienced) in gamedev. I work full time as a systems engineer, so I'm well-versed in C++11 and a variety of libraries. Background out of the way, gamedev has always been a passion of mine. I've dabbled a bit in OpenGL renderers, physics engines, writing primitive mapmakers and i've always been interested in the struggles of competent netcode. My issue is I've never written a game. I have loads of gameplay ideas. I'm always so tunnel-visioned on one technical feature that I never get anywhere. So I'm wondering if it's time to just go balls-to-the-walls and attempt to really specialise in an area (like netcode). Maybe gameplay programming? Has anyone else gone down this path? Would you recommend it? I appreciate any thoughts on the matter. Cheers! [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 May 2019 08:19 AM PDT |
| Game Attorneys Talk at GDC (Legal Battle Royale - Not Boring Edition) Posted: 07 May 2019 09:57 AM PDT Thought you guys might like this! Here is the recorded legal talk from this year's GDC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbaIIWWsxa8 It's me, Chris Reid, Mona Ibrahim, and Greg Boyd. [link] [comments]  |
| Posted: 07 May 2019 09:54 AM PDT Hi I've never made a game before, and never done anything much like this. So basically I wanna make a 2d rpg game. It's going to be very much linear but with freedom to explore major areas. I can code and on a scale of 1 to 10, Im probably a 4-5, but I am devoting more and more time each day to learning how to do it better and add more mechanics. So basically this is where the problem starts. I wanna code it, not because of my ego but because I want to take it as a personal project and something to better myself and just to be proud of something I have made. I've also written a good part of the story, just because I absolutely enjoy writing stories and according to school and grading standards are very good. Of course I'd be glad if people gave me additional story ideas, and looked at my basic plot structure and characterizations etc. But the one thing I cant do is draw, I ABSOLUTELY cannot draw. Even as a kid I had hard time drawing things as I felt my skill nowhere near what I actually wanted to make and it frustrated me. I really dont want the same to happen for this project, and therefore I lie at a crossroads. Should I spend however much time it will take me to learn how to make sprites and stuff or look for external help? Some might say I should use already existing art, but I have some specific landmarks in mind that are very important to the story. Mostly backgrounds and stuff, but some specific animations for the character 3 to be exact. I honestly have no clue what to do. I dont wanna be a brat, who wants everything handed but this is something that is just impossible for me in the time frame I wanna do this in. Note: I am a 17 year old student so basically, I have got like no budget most of the work is just me doing it on my own so yeah that's another thing to take into consideration. All comments are appreciated. [link] [comments]  |
| Building Games Around Humor: Lessons from The Haunted Island, a Frog Detective Game Posted: 07 May 2019 09:39 AM PDT |
| How do you communicate 'Pinch Zoom'? Posted: 07 May 2019 06:19 AM PDT So I recently installed Unity Analytics in my game, and I'm finding that a distressing number of people are getting stopped at the first stage of my tutorial. One of the first things is to learn how to control the camera so I'm having them zoom into the screen all the way before continuing. It's important on a small screen to zoom in on the map. I instruct them to 'pinch zoom or use the mouse wheel', and I'm thinking that this is not clear enough. Do you find that a lot of people don't know what pinch zoom is? My game is free to play with ads on Android, but the ads don't start until after the first tutorial is finished. The game is called Forward Line on the Google Play store. If you have time, tell me if the initial tutorial steps are confusing, or if you think a typical user would be confused. My users are silent on the matter. [link] [comments]  |
| Tips for coming up with a studio name? Posted: 07 May 2019 12:02 PM PDT I am wondering what tips you guys have for coming up with studio names, how you chose what you did, etc. I am having trouble finding one that isn't used by some other business or website. I don't fully understand copyright legality, Ill probably look into that immediately. Can your indie studio have the same name as some big name company in another country that doesn't make games? I want to register an LLC. [link] [comments]  |
| Making Mobile Game Promo Images with GIMP Posted: 07 May 2019 07:53 AM PDT |
| Lessons I've learned from setting up a 2D framework for level design(Article) Posted: 07 May 2019 11:32 AM PDT |
| Posted: 07 May 2019 11:31 AM PDT Hi community, I've been working for some time on a hobby project and I think want to make its code open-source. However I've also created some assets myself that I don't want to be stolen into some asset-flip. But I still would like to make it possible for this project to be 'forkable' by others (just without art) How can I handle license of such project? Do I have to split it into two separate projects? [link] [comments]  |
| How do large scale games handle CI and Test Automation? Posted: 06 May 2019 09:47 PM PDT I'm a Software Development Manager looking to make the transition into the Gaming industry. I'm currently overseeing the development of 9 applications across Mobile, Web, and Desktop platforms. My team has integrated CI pipelines and test automation suites for every one of our products. Automated testing is pretty easily done with event driven software, but I'm curious about large scale games. I can imagine there is a layer of testing that can be done against things like the HUD, or inventory systems, but what about an open world? Are there automated checks to detect corrupt audio files, texture maps, or 3D models? Or are these things done predominately by hand? I'd love to hear some stories about how your may have tackled these issues, or what a "perfect" pipeline would look like! Keep being awesome! [link] [comments]  |
| Our fully modelled Forest Druid in Depths of Erendorn. We'd love to know what you all think! Posted: 07 May 2019 06:50 AM PDT |
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/bube1opkyqw21.jpg){kind=link}
![[link]](https://i.redd.it/vmjguwcsmsw21.jpg){kind=link}
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