KickStarter

Had a chat with some developer friends last night about my pre-KickStarter plans. The biggest hurdle, I feel, is getting a decent audience prior to launching the KS, so that I can get the important initial momentum.

Have also spoken with some PR/Marketing people briefly, and this is what I’m thinking:

1. Consult with a PR agency, perhaps focusing on audience building and planning leading up to a KS campaign. I’m told you can often do hourly consulting calls, so I’d hand them my plans + questions on audience building. I’d love to have someone on board full time for a few months, but that is bank balance breaking right now.
2. Do a trailer
3. Build an audience using magical PR advice + trailer
4. Get some professional feedback on my completed KickStarter page prior to launching
5. Launch successful KS (it’s that easy)
6. Use KS money for a variety of things from paying myself, to getting musicians, writers, concept artists, etc.

So I really just need to send some emails and see if some of these recommended PR people are available to work with me.

Task Planning

• PR emails. I’m sure I’ll obsess over these a while :P 1 hour.
• Clouds tweaking. Pretty important, 1 hr.
• Planet 2. 4 hrs.
  • Spend a little more time getting the clouds more “readable”. I think they just need to look a little more…clear. I’ll try and define my thoughts below
  • Planet 2 geometry, replacing the placeholder generic stuff with something unique and fun.

PR/Audience Building Thoughts

The reason I’m getting in touch with some PR people is all my tweets, animated gifs, blog posts, teaser videos have amounted to only a tiny following. I need 10x my current numbers at least, pre-KS.  Maybe when I share a build with press, and they start writing about it, plus I release the ‘main trailer’, I’ll suddenly gain tons of followers? Some PR consults will hopefully ease my mind a bit/confirm some of these thoughts, and give me some ideas for how to build that audience, among other things.

Actually perhaps instead of some direct emails to these PR people, I might go in a slightly round-about route of emailing some of these people’s clients, and ask what they thought first.

I’m also punching in all the listed games to check their sales on Steamspy and trying to get a feel for how well they’ve done. Hopefully, I’ll get some emails back from the developers, as it seems like a really wide range of success levels for these games.

Took 2 hours researching these people and researching/emailing their clients.

Getting Distracted

Spending too long braching off reading PR/Marketing articles. Spent maybe an hour doing this, whoops.

Planet 2 Clouds

Somehow it’s 4pm already and I’ve done pretty much nothing :/ A few more distractions today too.

Ok, clouds. They’re decent right now, but I’m going to Move Sliders TM and:

• Get a bit more depth (try tweaking cloud extinction/contrast) and perhaps just cloud height
• Tweak edge noise settings so it looks nicer when we are right inside clouds. Changing trueSky’s unit/scale might help here too.
• One of the least realistic looking things is how the clouds don’t appear to be affected by the terrain below them at all. This might be nigh on impossible to change, but I may also be able to cheat it a bit by maybe
  • increasing ‘churn’ of clouds
  • lowering clouds right onto the ground and increasing their height so you can’t tell as easily
  • make them more see-through(?)
• Right now the clouds are possibly also too ‘constant’ and I’d like there to be more variation so there’s peroids of more and less clouds
• Maybe a little more ‘distinct cloud formations’ which the player can recognise as they follow the clouds (to give more of a sense of where we are).

Progress:

Since turning lightning off I realise how broken my code is which auto-transforms us back into a glider if we are holding shift when entering clouds… Need to look at this soon-ish.

• Changed the sky units, so it’s effectively scaled down but more detailed.
• Can’t diffuse the clouds too much, leads to uncertainty as to whether we are actually in a cloud
• Softened cloud edges (better looking close up)
• Raised clouds off terrain a little so they didn’t look as odd not being affected by it
• Reduced cloud density (less clouds, more open space)
• Looking better in most ways, a little worse (legibility at certain angles) in others:

• Might remove certain monoliths that occasionally clash compositionally. Esp now with the reduced thickness/low altitude cloud.
• Going to call this good enough for now and try not to fiddle with it for many more hours.

1 hour

Quick Look at Gliding in Clouds Bug

While hardly noticeable in the last planet, it’s very annoying now, need to check this out.

Solution, EXO ONE wasn’t gaining enough energy to replace cost of gliding! 15 mins.

Removed a Couple Offensive Monoliths

And their compositionally breaking lines!

5 mins

Short Detour…

Realised I had overwritten my first planets terrain data with the new one, oops. Got it back pretty quick though, 15 mins.

More Detouring

I’m not quite sticking to plans here… Now messing with camera settings, because at night, the lens flares and stuff can look really overwhelming!! 20 mins

Planet 2 Terrain

Having some odd issues right now getting a simple 1 biome terrain working with Map Magic. Must be cos it’s late…! 30 mins.

Going to setup a screenshot for Made With Unity Friday and schedule that to go out, because it’s almost midnight. Will pick up the terrain again on Monday.

Whoring Up Some New Pluginzz!

uNature and Amplify’s screen space shadows look interesting! Might have a play :) Have a good weekend!

Fin!