Tag: marketing (page 1 of 2)

How I Sell Sky Photos to Make Video Games

May 25, 2017 / / 2 Comments

TLDR: 15 years ago I left AAA racing game developer, Ratbag, to form Hyperfocal Design, which sells only sky textures (hemispherical sky photos). I’ve since been able to develop indie games mostly full-time using the passive income. AMA!

From 3D in high school to race tracks in games

I was in high school when I began working with 3D software, and this new obsession eventually landed me a job at Ratbag. While there, I helped make tracks for the PC racing game Powerslide, and designed Dirt Track Racing. We made it part way toward an unreleased car combat game that looked a lot like GTA meets Mad Max, before I left to form my own company. I’d been inspired by reading Robert Kiyosaki’s book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad.

Leaving game development to start a business

With a little background in photography, and experience using textures in 3D, I somewhat blindly jumped ship with the thought to make some random texture maps and sell them on Turbosquid. I drifted towards doing skies, because no one looked at me like I was a big weirdo, as they would when I was taking photos for dirt textures! Plus I could go to the same location every time and get a different end product!

To fund the business, I sold my Nissan Silvia sports car and promptly ran out of money a year later(!).

After scraping the bottom of my bank balance for another year after that, Hyperfocal Design began making decent money, and since that point has been a fairly solid, reliable source of passive income, meaning I don’t have to actively work on the business to make money. That’s only partially true, of course, since the longer I neglect the business, the less it gets promoted, the less updates go out, the more competition comes in, and the less money I make.

The time-line

…went something like:

  • 5 years at Ratbag
  • 2 years of scraping through to get Hyperfocal off the ground
  • A few more years doing well (during this time, Ratbag ‘went under’ – closed by the publisher, Midway)
  • A year trying my hand at professional poker (I really love the game, but boy is this a stressful career choice!)
  • A few more years at Hyperfocal
  • After getting a real creative itch again, went back to developing games with Saxon Druce from Ratbag
  • A few years of making Zombie games with Saxon before parting ways
  • 1 year creating Unknown Orbit, solo (first Unity title)
  • 1 year back to Hyperfocal
  • 1 year making prototypes + vr prototypes
  • Now: Over a year working on Exo One

During this time, I very rarely ever worked on Hyperfocal every day, except for the latest 1-year stretch. Mostly I’d put in a few months here and there, which allowed me more time to do whatever else I liked – semi-professional poker, training for triathlons, traveling, surfing, bread making, and whatever else I was interested in at the time.

While I’ve been comfortable from Hyperfocal’s income, it doesn’t bring in the big dollars or allow me to hire employees or anything like that. But with a pretty low-key lifestyle I haven’t had to worry too much about money, while simultaneously not being chained to a desk 8 hrs a day. I’m also confident that if I had a higher income target, I could have certainly made it happen (as I did recently in 2015 where I dedicated the whole year full time).

When Ratbag went under, I was particularly glad that I’d gone and formed a business where no single entity (a publisher in this case) could ‘fire me’ or cut off my entire income stream. For Hyperfocal to die off, I need to lose every one of 100’s of customers a year, which isn’t likely.

Back to games

So since I began making games again with Saxon 8 years ago, I’ve been mostly making indie games while Hyperfocal pays the bills. If Hyperfocal ever started declining too much, I was perfectly free to take some time to prop it up. I wasn’t forced either way to do one or the other, and I was never at risk of sudden and complete income loss.

I’ve also been fortunate that the zombie games we worked on together contributed a little to some additional passive income, which has certainly been a nice additional safety net.

Setting up your own content creation/passive income streams

If you’re a game developer, or someone with skills in 2D/3D art, coding, sound, music, etc, there are good opportunities to create niche ‘content’, plugins, assets, etc that may help supplement your income, or fund your lifestyle entirely. Especially since so many game developers use Unity these days.

If this sounds interesting to you, I’d ask myself:

  • Where do my skills lie
  • What do developers need (in my case, choosing skies was a nice choice, since so many games take place outdoors!)
  • What niches are under served or don’t suffer as much from multiple, similar assets.
  • What could I teach? (unless you’re a complete beginner, there’s people out there who know less than you!)

I’d personally (as an artist type!) look at assets that tick one of these boxes:

  • Don’t require constant updating as new Unity versions come out (or even assets that are completely untied from any software)
  • Can be sold for a higher price. Lower prices typically = you dealing with more support issues.
  • Has a creative aspect that can’t be easily copied (so making yet more 3D, real-world gun models would probably be a poor choice! )

Since working on Exo One, here’s just a few things I’ve noticed, which may or may not be of interest:

  • Substances and procedurally generated textures are now pretty amazing, and there’s not enough of them
  • Despite already having music in the game, I get a deluge of emails from musicians wanting to help (good luck, musicians!)
  • But zero emails from voice actors, despite, as above, already having voice/story/narration in the game
  • “Sim-lish” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1_NVYPMmhE (voices that sound like a language, but are just gibberish, to go with text), is popular in games, but there’s zero libraries out there as far as I can see
  • Real time volumetric skies are starting to look rather awesome!
  • Having decent support and response time from plugin developers is incredibly important, especially when so many people like myself are solo or small teams that rely on that support to put a game out.
  • Ensuring plugins work with other plugins is pretty huge
  • Platforms like Patreon and Kickstarter can help you get things started

To end with, I’ll just say I’d encourage you to think about whether you have some skill that you can use to create products to help create your own passive income streams. As real-time graphics have gotten increasingly realistic, often a product or ‘content’ can also be sold to people in film/vfx and architectural visualization as well.

Depending on your skills, products could include art assets, sound/music libraries, plugins, a course where you teach something, etc.

Market your stuff!!

Perhaps the biggest challenge these days with almost anything, is that everyone is doing it – you will absolutely need to do some marketing and promotion! I also encourage you to put your face and name behind your business, to give it a personal angle.

Throughout Hyperfocal Design’s life, I’ve rarely put much if anything into promotion for my products, outside of sending an email to my newsletter. “Back in the day”, I got by with newsletters + Google search, but you can no longer guarantee a good Google placing. In 2015 when I finally decided to stop being a wuss-bag and actually market Hyperfocal’s latest product, I had my best year ever! It is hard, and your ego is on the line, but power through!

Tell me your experiences

If you’re currently selling on the Unity asset store, I’m curious to know your experiences as well!

I’m happy to answer any questions you have in the comments. 

I’m currently Kickstarting Exo One, and the campaign is now in its final days. If you like the look of it, please consider spreading the word, thanks!

EXO ONE Reveal Trailer + Kickstarter is LIVE!

May 1, 2017 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE Reveal Trailer + Kickstarter is LIVE!
EXO ONE’s Kickstarter just went live! You can view the campaign here.

What is EXO ONE?

EXO ONE is a momentum-based, exoplanetary exploration game being developed mostly by myself (Jay Weston) in Unity. Players pilot a strange, spherical alien craft that can manipulate the laws of gravity, on mankind’s first ill-fated mission outside the solar system. The gameplay mechanics are inspired by games like Tiny Wings (iOS), Journey (PS3), and Tribes Ascend (PC). Every aspect of the game is laser focussed towards delivering an entrancing, flowing and exhilarating feeling of movement across a range of alien exoplanets.

EXOONEKSTrailer

EXO ONE at EGX Rezzed

After being selected to show the game in the EGX Rezzed: Leftfield Collection in London, EXO ONE received praise from a range of media at the event, going on to be named among the events top games by Eurogamer and The Guardian (among others!).

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Edge-y

This month, Edge magazine, in a 2-page preview, said, “Tiny Wings, Journey and Kubrick collide in this sci-fi delight”.

edge magazine exo one

This is a real career highlight for me, I can’t say I ever expected to see my name or my game in its pages. And yes, it’ll be framed on my wall for alllll timmmeee! Now all I have to do is live up to the hype! Eep!

The New Reveal Trailer

You can watch the Reveal Trailer, launching today to coincide with the Kickstarter:

The trailer shows for the first time substantially more gameplay, as well as the future-historian narrator that features throughout the game.

Kickstarter

So after over a year of development on the game, I decided to move forward with the Kickstarter launch to raise the quality bar, and help fund the remaining 8-9 months of development. Myself, along with Rhys Lindsay (our musician) and Tim Mcburnie (artist) will be looking for $35,000 AUD (or $26,000 USD) to complete all 12 planets, record music, develop concept art, record the voice overs and optimize the game. The campaign focuses on almost entirely digital rewards to keep overhead low when fulfilling rewards, with the sole physical reward being a limited run of one of Tim’s posters, signed by the team. The campaign will run until the end of the month.
Here’s the reward grid:
rewardGrid2

Hyping

A week ago I began sending out preview builds to press in the hopes for some launch day coverage of the campaign. The preview build, which will be similar to the Backer Alpha build reward, contains a quick tutorial scene and 2 planets. I’ve also beamed out a press release, which you can check out here if you’re curious. And I’ll be all over the rest of the internet as well, on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc!

Helping

As you perhaps know, the first 48 hrs of a Kickstarter are super important, so if you’re thinking of backing EXO ONE, I’d love if you considered backing it on day one to help drive momentum and help the campaign become a success! Otherwise, I’d be super grateful if you could help out in the following ways!
After a long crunch period working up to EGX Rezzed, and then without much pause to get this campaign ready, I feel like I have done all I can to try and make the Kickstarter a success. With a little luck and your support, hopefully, the campaign will reach its goal!
Thanks for following along.
Regards,
Jay

EXO ONE’s EGX Rezzed Wrap-Up

April 10, 2017 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE’s EGX Rezzed Wrap-Up

Earlier this year I got a rather excellent email notifying me that I’d been selected to show EXO ONE in EGX Rezzed’s Leftfield collection, a curated selection of indie games. I had set my expectations and hopes for Rezzed to go something like this:

  • Have some fun at the event
  • Meet some cool new people
  • Hopefully appear in at least 1 or 2 articles
  • See old friends and family

All of those things happened + more!

The things as they happened

Day 0

The day before Rezzed, things started off super rocky. As I arrived to set up and test the game, it was rendering with a pure black sky. I had backup builds, but this appeared to be more a bug or incompatibility with a graphics card. Luckily, I checked the build logs and pasted the error line into Google and one other person reported the same issue, solved by downloading the 2010 Direct X SDK.

The phew’ing was deafening. Almost paid $1500 for a ticket to Rezzed to look at some other people’s games! Hard to know if I should have brought the entire project over somehow, incase this was a problem I needed to fix in Unity, then rebuild. I’d of had to fix it on the PC that was running the game (remember I flew to London from Australia), download Unity, etc, then only have a few hours to get it working before the show.

Hard to know if I should have brought the entire project over somehow, incase this was a problem I needed to fix in Unity, then rebuild. It’d be awkward to fix it on the PC that was running the game (remember I flew to London from Australia), download Unity, etc, then only have a few hours to get it working before the show.

I put my poster up, chatted with a few people from Leftfield and grabbed food with Jai from FINIFUGU.

Here’s the poster at my station, drawn by Tim McBurnie:

IMG_0612[1]

Day 1

Used my London coffee app to find ONLY THE BEST coffee, in this case, the closest was LMNH Kitchen (look mum no hands). Truly an important step that cannot be overlooked!

IMG_0646[1]

Bumped into Andreas of Promoter app fame, who thought I was the event organizer, David Hayward (this seemed to happen to numerous, different people throughout the event, which was odd). Andreas was also showing his game, Future Unfolding.  I had some really amazing moments after playing it for just 10 minutes. His description goes like, “Future Unfolding is an action adventure that is all about exploration. Your goal is to unfold the mysteries and solve the puzzles hidden in the beautiful landscapes around you. There are no tutorials, and no one is telling you what to do.” I definitely advise not to look at trailers or anything before playing.

We had breakfast/coffee here on all three days and I really enjoyed chatting game dev, promoter app/biz stuff and events in general. It was nice to start each day at Rezzed with such great food, coffee and company! Andreas is a real dude, and his app looks quite good too, I’ll probably try it on the lead up to EXO ONE’s release.

This was just one of many real-dude encounters I had during the show. I’m not sure what it was about all the people in Leftfield, but I seemed to get along really well with everyone. In particular, since they shared my wall/opposite wall, I got to chat a lot with Jai, the guys from Alpixels (A Place for the Unwilling) , Joe from Four Last Things, Richard Boeser from Chalo Chalo , the PjamaLlamians who are making Flotsam, and the girls from Oniri Islands. Some of these peeps I felt an instant connection with, and it makes me kinda sad they’re now on the opposite side of the world.

This first day was kinda quiet, and there was occasionally some down time, but it was nice to be able to ease into things.

I had one press meeting that went well and resulted in me appearing in this:

After the first day I went and met an old Londonian friend for drinks, but I was so dead from not taking a break all day that I had to return to home base and eat, immediately followed by sleep. Didn’t seem to get much in the way of jet lag, luckily.

Day 2

This was a little busier than Day 1, got lots of good feedback, ideas, etc, all of which I wrote down during the day. Had another press meet up today which resulted in EXO ONE being included in this article, which painted the game in quite a glowing light!

Then this happened:

IMG_0623[1]

This is the Outside Xtra trio who came and hooked up their gear to do a bit of an impromptu Let’s Play of the game. The video isn’t out yet (and there was some sound technical issues) but I can’t wait to see it. Outside Xtra have quite a fan following, and during a ‘meet’ event at Rezzed I heard they had a line that stretched half of the building.

After the day was over, there was the The Rock Paper Shotgun drinks night, and a bunch of the Leftfieldians went out for dinner beforehand, which was at an old pub overlooking the Thames. Then I met and hung out with another old friend from when I used to live in London, who introduced me to some cool people. I didn’t do much in the way of networking with press, though.  I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’m trying to befriend them partly to improve my chances of them writing about my game. Maybe a missed opportunity, I dunno. I seemed to do fine regardless.

Day 3

This was the busiest day, and I’d often be standing a couple rows deep behind my game. I’m still told Rezzed is a pretty quiet event in the scheme of things. Again, nice to just ease into my first big event instead of DIVE in the deep end.

Met up with and hung out with a couple more friends and contacts on this day as well. Despite the larger numbers of people, I possibly talked to players less because I was just pushed back (or wanted to get out the way so others could watch). So it wasn’t manic or anything.

Had dinner after with some Leftfielders again then I was convinced to attend the after party, which was good fun with yet more games in every room. Checked out some of the retro games and played a bit of Joe Bain’s new game, Yucatan, which was super madness fun! There was some crowd based game in another room I think, but didn’t get to see it!

Press

I think my press strategy was pretty ‘normal’. I suppose I often thought I needed to be doing some secret tricks or ‘know people’ or something special to really get noticed and stand out, etc. But now that the event is over and I got basically the best response I could have ever hoped for, I guess the basics worked pretty well.

Before the event, I made the following Rezzed trailer that I pinned to my Twitter, saying I’d be at Rezzed, along with my email address (no it wasn’t even spammed):

I emailed around 20 writers/game sites/YouTubers with somewhat personalized emails (more so if I knew more about them) saying essentially, “come play EXO ONE at Rezzed Leftfield”, and included the above, very short video. Got 2 solid meeting times, maybe 2-3 “I’ll come over at some point, whenevzies” and a bunch of ignores. Some ignores ended up turning up regardless, but I don’t know whether that was from my email or just because they happened to be in Leftfield. I talked to a handful of other developers in Leftfield about their press outreach efforts, and most did nothing at all, so if that was common within Leftfield or Rezzed in general, then contacting the press potentially puts you a step ahead just by pressing send.

I ordered 3 t-shirts online which I could have spent too much time on, but ended up just using my EXO ONE logo on the front and back, with “developer” written on the back, so if anyone was looking to chat with the developer, they could easily spot me.

JayAtRezzed

Press Stealth Abilities

Something I noticed about press at the event was that almost all of them (unless I’d set up a meeting) liked to fly in under the radar and play without me spotting/recognizing them. That worked for a few people who I saw write/tweet about the game afterward, but otherwise, if I recognized someone I just said so. Otherwise, I’d risk being weird (sorry, person I was totally weird to!). I imagine this is done so the developer doesn’t bug them too much or affect their play experience any more than it should. Generally, I just said something like, “the tutorial is kinda bad right now, so if you need any help lemme know”, then I left them to it.

I definitely felt that fan-boy factor a little with some people I met, but I had some great chats with press, gamers and devs alike. For the most part, with press, they’d come play the game, ask between 0 and a dozen questions then take off pretty quickly. Wasn’t overly hard, and while I practiced a bunch of practice answers to questions, many never came up.

After the event, I wrote and thanked anyone who wrote about EXO ONE, if I had their email address/Twitter.

Tweets ‘n Articles

Here’s most of the press/tweets I got during the event and after:

Damn it, I didn’t meet Terry! Terry is one of these darned people who don’t use a photo on their Twitter profile, I didn’t recognise him! I do recall seeing he was showing his game before flying over, but slipped my mind once I was there. I may have met him or Ruari as I recall one of the State Machine (his game) devs chatting to me. Tried to go play before open one day but someone was on it. Huge fan of Super Hexagon, so would have liked to have gone and been a weird fanboy/say hi briefly :P

Not bad!

Biz Cards

Ordered about 500 and used a quarter of them, mostly taken by gamers. I put a screenshot on the front and some words (game name, my name, contact details) on the back.

Newsletter

One small error perhaps I could have improved would have been some way to sign people up to the newsletter at the event. The Flotsam guys had some kinda small iPad with a sign-up form on it, others went for the handwritten method. I guess the handwritten way stands out as being a mailing list quite obviously due to the email addresses on it, while the iPad kinda requires prompting (“hey you, sign up for our newsletter?”).

I’m not sure how many people went home then signed up for the EXO ONE mailing list, but over the entire event I added about 80 people to my list. Really don’t know if this is “good” or not.

Resources I Used

I’m a big fan of both Thomas Reisenegger’s games PR/Marketing videos on GDCVault, and Indie Game Girl, who did a specific games event article/slide show.

Maybe just search for Thomas on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=thomas+reisenegger

Emmy’s site is http://www.indiegamegirl.com

General Help

Before the event, I asked everyone I knew for advice, including some people I didn’t know. This resulted in a couple of meetings that might not have otherwise happened, various tips/tricks for events, who to look out for (I hadn’t heard of OutsideXtra for example), introductions to press, how to keep my expectations realistic for a single, small-ish event and more.

What did I learn about EXO ONE?

The biggest stand out problem with the game was the first tutorial level, which is going to be getting some major love and redesigning soon. The camera I’m using hates the kinds of movement you can do in the starting level, and I throw a bunch of controls at the player and pray they remember (they never do). So this resulted in many players not ‘getting’ the game as they were missing pieces of the puzzle. Most people that I helped out ended up getting the hang of it, and luckily all press did too.

I got mixed feedback on the story, but I’d say fairly overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the story as-is, but also some very convincing “you should make it less literal” arguments.

Also received a handful of comments that there were too many controls. Mentioned this to some other Leftfielders and of course heard the opposite, “I had no problem with the controls”. Simpler is definitely better, but I feel like I might be able to remove at least one control combo (like holding two things to glide up for example).

Thankfully most of the feedback hit exactly the mark I was going for, with comments like:

  • That was super relaxing
  • It was mesmerizing
  • The sense of speed and feeling you get when you reach the clouds is amazing
  • I could just watch it all day

Like the Adelaide games event before (AVCON), people sat to play and didn’t want to get off. I should have forced an end timer on the demo as people had to wait ages to play in some cases. I was lucky the musician, Rhys, told me to shorten the first level, since even after doing so, people sometimes asked me if they could ever reach the transport structures in the distance. A classic example of the game developer being too good (fast) at their own game.

Quick Notes on Other Games

Since this post is getting long… Quick bullets on other games (I mentioned Future Unfolding above) that were near me and I played in Leftfield.

  • Oniri Islands
    • Great multiplayer iPad game that uses physical chess-like pieces (cute little figures) to move characters around on screen. Great for playing with kids.
  • Flotsam
    • While seeming pretty early days, I’m super pumped to see where this ‘floating base builder’ goes.
  • Four Last Things
    • Very charming, funny writing and simple point n click adventure, using classical/famous artworks.
  • A Place for the Unwilling
    • Intriguing ‘mini-society’ and village full of characters whom you interact with and have influence over/effects on during ‘end times’. Great spooky vibes!
  • Chalo Chalo
    • Super fun party multiplayer game that isn’t instantly recognizable as being hilarious fun, but totally is!
  • Everything
    • Those rolling quadrupeds… I saw some really, really weird stuff happen in this game during the event! I jumped on for 2 minutes, but think I need to have a proper go and hear the narration/music to really get into it.

Special Thanks

…to David Hayward for organizing the event, it went off without a hitch! And thanks to SEGA for sponsoring Leftfield.

It really was an amazing event, surrounded by awesome people and great games! With any luck, I’ll bump into some of my new friends again at another games event… *sniff*!

Edge

I’ve left the best till last! I’m wildly excited to announce that next month (May) EXO ONE is getting a 2-page preview in Edge magazine! So pumped! I’m not a huge games magazine reader, but whenever I do pick one up, it’s always Edge!

Next – Kickstarter

I’ve increasingly gone from ‘maybe doing a Kickstarter’ to ‘probably doing one’ to ‘doing one’ to ‘most likely doing one in May’. It takes time to build up the courage, you see. I’m going to get some advice on exact dates, but that’s my current thoughts. I’ll be announcing an exact date soon, so if this is something you’re interested in, you can sign up to my newsletter below:

Subscribe to EXO ONE’s mailing list

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Weekly EXO ONE Dev Log 3-3-2017

March 3, 2017 / / Comments Off on Weekly EXO ONE Dev Log 3-3-2017

So the big completed tasks last week were the story (for Rezzed anyway), voice acting, wormhole art, flights booked for Rezzed and accommodation sorted. Inserting the narration should be pretty straightforward, my biggest task will just be getting the wormholes integrated properly. This might take a couple hours or a couple days!

Planned Tasks This Week

  • Wormhole transitions ~1 day
  • PR leading up to Rezzed ~2 days
  • Integrating new voice over narration ~  1 day
  • Submit game to some upcoming game events/competitions
  • More tweaks to second planet ~ 1 day

Monday

  • Engage crunch mode for 30th March event submissions :/
  • Wormhole transitions completed ~3 hrs
  • Wormhole narration based on current progression, complete ~30 mins
  • New demo end point complete ~30 mins
  • Testing latest build ~30 mins
    • shared with musician, Rhys Lindsay for second planet music score
  • Planet 2 ~ 2hrs
    • Unique intro
    • Optimizing biomes
    • New music added
  • New narration in ~2 hrs
  • Build testing ~1hr

Pretty great day!

 

Tuesday

  • Final push before submission to Amaze and Momocon
  • Changed music from endless looping to play, then silence, then play once more 2 minutes later. Also removed music from tutorial.
  • Tweaks to planet 2 as it was somewhat repetitive and flat
  • Shortened both levels for Rezzed and event submissions. Unsure how long to have each planet go for! I think ‘good’ players will knock off a level in 5 minutes, while maybe new players will take 2x that.
  • Testing ~2 hrs
  • Various other tweaks… all day :P
  • Submitted to both events

Wednesday

  • Boring tax hell ~3 hrs
  • PR stuff ~4 hrs

In gross hot weather. Worst day ever!

Thursday

  • More PR stuff!
  • Some poster planning for Rezzed
  • Redoing higher rez logo
  • Updated presskit

Friday

  • PR… …. stuff! (not my favorite week ever) ~2 hrs
  • New, short trailer for Rezzed ~3 hrs (just gotta think about when to time release on this)
  • Returning to work on the Rezzed build ~2 hrs

Kinda boring week in general with so much time spent just emailing people, organising Rezzed, tax, etc. And the Amaze/Monocon applications kinda killed me as I stayed up really late finishing them. Would have been nice to have a new screenshot or gif to share at least! Hopefully next week I’ll have that poster or trailer or new music to share.

 

EXO ONE Weekly Dev Log 27-2-2017

February 27, 2017 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE Weekly Dev Log 27-2-2017

Some news – I’m flying to Rezzed in London, boom! With some help from a very gracious family member, I’ll be heading over for the event and will be making the most of it while I’m there, and hope to meet some new friends, players, developers and press. I lived in London for a year (a few years back) and kinda only made a couple of contacts, but it’s amazing how much help just a couple of people can be. Especially when they have some experience under their belt.

Well, after a slow one last week, my weekly task list isn’t dissimilar to last!

Planned Tasks

  • Schedule out Rezzed, buy flights, book accommodation, contact people I’ll be meeting over there. 1 day.
  • Finishing touches to story. Might actually add a day to this to get some final feedback. 1 day.
    • Send story off to voice actor.
  • Wormhole transitions. This will take as long as I kinda want it to… So far there’s just a super simple wormhole effect, and for time’s sake I might keep it this way for now and just make sure it works 100%. Currently it is quite janky. 1 day.
  • Contacting some games press pre-Rezzed.
  • If all goes well, finishing Planet 2 (art/level design) 2 days.

Monday

Wot I did:

Tuesday

  • Press and PR company emails ~1hr
  • Story fine tuning + contacting voice actor ~ 2.5 hrs
  • Changing the tutorial level slightly due to story reasons! ~2 hrs
  • Booking flights, AirBNB, etc. 1 hr

Wednesday

  • Hugely blown out task rearranging the story slightly in the tutorial level (all day + night…!)

Thursday

  • Submitted @RhysLindsay’s music for EXO ONE to IndieCade’s soundwall ~1hr

  • More tweaks to narration/story in tutorial level ~ 2hrs
  • Wormhole FX ~1hr
    • Wormhole video to Twitter ~15 mins
    • Sound effects ~30 mins
    • Integrating with existing level loading system ~

  • Meeting ~1hr

Friday

  • Rezzed PR prep work ~3hrs
  • Rezzed planning ~1hr
  • Biz card design/ordering ~1hr
  • T-Shirt time wasting I mean design (I did some stuff I didn’t like then just went with the EXO ONE logo…) ~1.5hrs
  • More wormhole sounds ~30mins
  • Integrating wormholes into level transitions ~1hr

Rezzed related planning took up a bit of my head space this week but made some decent progress. My nerves leading up to Rezzed will be calmed just as soon as you can play the game through to the second planet, wormholes, narration and all. Hoping this week will be the week, then I can just tweak things!

Rezzed Goals, PR/Marketing, Story

February 17, 2017 / / Comments Off on Rezzed Goals, PR/Marketing, Story

I’m going to work towards making this blog more interesting for people to read, which means:

a) less updates (some days not much happens, or boring things!)

b) more in each post, with the fluff cut out. Or, all the same fluff in, but perhaps I’ll reduce the text/bullet size or make it expandable if you care.

c) more time spent editing/crafting less posts = a better read.

I’ll therefore edit this post as I go from Monday morning and it’ll come out near the end of the week.

Pre-Rezzed Goalz

  • My terrible stand-in voice to be replaced with a voice actor’s (2-3 days of back and forths perhaps)
  • Some story/narrative tweaks (2-3 days). Will see if I can get any ‘quick wins’. Story will most likely change more after Rezzed so I’m not going to go crazy with this now.
  • Improve tutorial level somewhat. Probably greatly increase its size so it more closely matches the planets (right now it’s one small room). Add a skip tutorial button, incase people wanna get on with it. 3-4 days.
  • Finish Planet 2. 4-5 days.
  • Planet 1 to Planet 2 transition (wormhole). 3-4 days.
  • Sort out what I’ll be doing for PR for Rezzed Leftfield. Shouldn’t be a huge amount of my time… 1-2 days?
  • Final testing. 2-3 days.

This all comes out to about 4-5 weeks. Rezzed is in 9 weeks, which lets me do the classic doubling of my time estimates ‘because game development’. The weakest point of the game (my voice over) will be brought wayyy up, and the second planet introduced, which are the two main things. If I get the rest done, that’s a bonus.

This week’s EXO ONE Goalz

  • I’ve been lining up meetings with some PR people/companies and will be chatting with them this/next week.
  • I’ve also seen a couple of publishers who I think might be a good fit. However, I’m not totally sold on the concept of having one, but I think I need to chat with them and see if they can change my mind. So I’ll try and line up chats with them.
  • Since I’ll be working with a voice actor, I’ll work first on the story/lines of dialog (2 days) before handing those over. Then, while I wait to get the audio back (and maybe revisions) I can carry on with:
  • Planet 1 to 2 transition. Since I’d be happy-ish showing Planet 2 in its current state, I’ll first make sure the planet 1 to 2 wormhole works. That might take me the rest of the week, interspersed with the above + pr related stuff. If I get it done quickly, then I improve Planet 2.

Mid Week Progress

Talking Rezzed

I haven’t been super productive with a whole lot of uncertainty surrounding if/how I’ll be going to Rezzed. I’ve ended up contacting not only a couple of existing contacts in the UK, but also PR and other people who have been to Rezzed in the past, to try and get their thoughts. A sampling of advice I’ve received and things I’ve learned:

  • Don’t go to events if it’s a huge chunk of your budget, but
  • It’s super important for building relationships with press, developers and publishers.
  • You’ll never make a return on investment by going to events.
  • There’s far less chance your game will be covered if you aren’t there and you aren’t lining up meetings.
  • Press probably won’t talk or meet with you if you haven’t built relationships with them already.
  • You can just pull in press who walk by!
  • OMG PR is so expensive.
  • PR was totally worth it
  • PR did nothing for us
  • Advice is super conflicting :)

EXO ONE Story

In between emailing people, I’ve been looking at the story and trying not to rewrite it ‘completely’ and just tweak some stuff. I’m not a super experienced writer, and I have a good idea what kinda story I want, but feel a bit of a gap between where the story is and where I want it to be. I’ve gone two days over schedule already working on this, so I definitely have to move on tomorrow.

I’ve had some interesting new ideas, which is good. Also tightened up and fixed a bunch of stuff which was far more obvious after having time away.

End of Week Wrap

Well, this week was unfortunately not among my most productive. Again as I’m not a writer, I wonder how normal it is to spend long amounts of time just in thought, not actively doing much, just thinking/trying to come up with stuff. The story for EXO ONE is highly restrictive in some ways but unlimited in others, and I find it hard to reach good solutions for certain problems. Having said that, I feel like I’ve just come up with some decent stuff this Friday afternoon. A re-read tomorrow/Monday will determine if I still like it, though.

Didn’t even start on the wormhole/planet transition stuff as I’m still not quite happy with the story. If I like it on Monday, I’ll polish it a little more and send it to my voice actor, then move onto wormholes for realz!

Have a good weekend!

EXO ONE end of week update – 10 Feb 2017

February 10, 2017 / / Comments Off on EXO ONE end of week update – 10 Feb 2017

Have been scrambling about doing all sorts of stuff this week after hearing EXO ONE would be at Rezzed. Partially getting over excited maybe, but also wanting to maximize the opportunity and make the game look its best for the end of March. So to that effect I’ve been:

  • Sweating in the 40C heat here in Adelaide with no air con in my office
  • Improving both planets
  • Finalizing the height map for Planet 2
  • Working on final details/grass/rocks etc for Planet 2
  • Had a ‘breakthrough’ realisation of how we can more easily see through clouds and keep our bearings at the same time
  • Emailing a swathe of people I know in game dev, generally asking for their thoughts about the whole Rezzed thing and how I should handle it (since I probably won’t be flying over)
  • Turning up my PR/Marketing efforts. Mostly feels like to no effect whatsoever, lol. Either I’m bad at it or it just takes a far bigger, longer concerted effort than I think! Made me think of Jacob Leichty’s (from Astroneer)Tweet:

I’m pretty sure people care about your game Jacob, stop complaining, omggg!! :)

For my marketing troubles last week (I probably spent almost 2 solid days doing nothing but…) I gained 3 newsletter subscribers and a handful of Twitter followers. Boom! It also seems that Reddit somehow dislikes me about as much as I dislike it…! I’m joking, I love Reddit, I just hate posting anything to it, because I get downvoted and comments like this:

redditshit

Somehow nothing I ever post there gets any love at all. I feel like Reddit is like this:

“You did something great? You’re personally telling us about it? Go away!!”

However… if…

“My friend did this and now that happened and OMG isn’t that amazing?!” Upvote!!!

Ok, end of rant. Back to work. I officially abandon all Reddit hope lol.

Thanks for following!

Morning Promotion + More Planet 2 + Twitch Streamers

February 6, 2017 / / Comments Off on Morning Promotion + More Planet 2 + Twitch Streamers

Planned Tasks:

  • PR/Marketing (half the day)
    • I’ve made a couple EXO ONE planet making-of videos but not really promoted them much.
    • Post both on IndieDB
    • Post a newsletter informing subscribers that new daily dev logs exist, + new videos
    • (On the weekend I also posted the vids to the Map Magic unity forum)
    • Force self to post them on Reddit (Reddit scares me, prob just cos of all the rules and all the touchy self-promo haters)
  • I’m thinking of also pinning a new post to my Twitter, which is something like, “here’s exo one (animated gif/video?), subscribe to the newsletter here”.
  • Continuing Planet 2 (the other half of the day)

Wot I did

  • Shared the youtube vids around on everything from StumbleUpon to IndieDB
  • Wrote this Twitter post about Pinned Tweets from Top Developers.

  • “Wasted” lots of time getting the above image in my tweet to actually show up…! As well as adding Yoast and a few other sorely needed things to the blog.
  • Went down a marketing rabbit hole that took half a day in research
    • Updated my PR/Marketing docs with a few things learned on my rabbit hole journey
  • BTW, promoting and sharing even the shortest article takes a lot of time, omg! Also, I hate pressing submit/send/share every single time.
  • Signed up for some game dev Slack groups to see what they were about
  • Since it’s now late I’m just going to do some Twitch ‘research’ and watch some game devs I noted down last time I was on William Chyr’s stream
  • Lol at the title of this blog post

Twitch Streamers

In case you’d like to check these people out, I’ve been recommended all these guys:

https://www.twitch.tv/williamchyr

https://www.twitch.tv/xra_

https://www.twitch.tv/qazitv

https://www.twitch.tv/lachhhandfriends

https://www.twitch.tv/nonplayercat (no videos here, hmmm. They don’t want people watching after the stream ends?)

….

Night night!

How top game devs Pin their Tweets

February 6, 2017 / / Comments Off on How top game devs Pin their Tweets

pinnedTweets

As I have marketing on the brain for EXO ONE, I’m simply looking at a range of Twitter accounts I follow to see how they take full advantage of anyone arriving at their Twitter profile.

Da Pinz

William Chyr pins Manifold Garden’s Steam store page with a video. Call to action? “Add it to your wishlist” so you’re notified when it comes out.

Team Cherry totally copies William Chyr, OMG!:

Astroneer delivers a space-themed “out now, go buy it!” pin, showing the game name, what the game is about, and where to get it, boom!

While Tom Francis is so attractively successful he promotes Ubisoft instead of his games:

Ooblets prompts you to sign up to their newsletter/mailing list, linking to their home page, which features the sign-up form top/center. They also throw in the games logo/screenshot + one line description, nice!:

Finji, loving their political Tweets lately, pins this one up front and center (P.S. how long till a politically inspired game? Or is Overland “post-Trump America?!”)

Mr William Pugh (OMG, look at that amazing hair!) blams a Youtube video to the top of his Twitter account, featuring their cray-cray VR game, in collab with @squanchtendo. I wish *I* could be told by the Rick and Morty creator to fuck off in VR, but I lack the Vive! These guys have so much marketing punch they can name their game the complete opposite of what it is, nice! Kinda like me with EXO ONE eh?!

OK I need some variety to finish this off…

Lawl, here’s Luke Muscat’s. Again, perhaps only doable/recommended if you have a big name like his:

Mr Nicoll “The Beard” Hunt shares some wisdom only possible through beardedness, earning him a hefty 1800 retweets for his efforts. I’m going to totally copy him and pin this article and see what happenz. On Twitter, so often your followers are other game developers, so this is certainly a nice way to corral support, by helping your fellow devs/offering advice/tips.

Now, to actually finish this post… Pin all your updates and give them a fancy ‘update name’ + subtle animated gif. So classy!

Anyone got any they think are particularly clever? Or your own? Comment or something!

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More PR + Ice Planet Making-Of Video

February 2, 2017 / / Comments Off on More PR + Ice Planet Making-Of Video

Planned Tasks

  • Continue through Game to Market eBook and ensure I have a well-rounded plan to take to my consultant. 4 hrs
  • Upload teaser for EXO ONE to Facebook (mostly to see how many views it might generate) 15 mins
  • Begin Planet 2 terrain (replacing placeholder terrain). Possibly film for Youtube. 3 hrs

PR/Marketing

After going off on wayyy too much of a Kickstarter tangent (though not entirely unrelated to EXO ONE’s marketing), I covered some of the following:

  • Communication channels (ie Facebook, email, Twitter, etc)
    • What to post, when, topic ideas
    • Earned vs free coverage options
  • Kickstarter marketing
  • Read a crap load of stuff that took ages.
  • Watched this video:

Which was in this excellent article by IndieWolverine on Kickstarters: http://indiewolverine.com/2016/02/01/video-game-kickstarter-tips/

Planet 2 Terrain

I’m going to try recording a video of this just to see what it’s like, but may not actually share it (will see!).

Here’s some reference for this planet’s terrain:

I’m going to try essentially replacing this water with ice for this cold world. I think long half-pipe like river structures should work well in combination with the fast moving clouds, especially if they mostly somehow orient themselves to match the cloud direction.

River Heightfields

Ok so I spent an hour making a video and it’s not too bad. Pretty slow, and I’m rusty, and mumbly and so on, but that’s what 2x youtube speed is for ya’ll!

Here’s some screens from it, showing the node setup, the resulting heightfield, scene view and in-game. Again, this was only an hour of work, so it has a little way to go still.

MakingOfPlanet2Height01

Above: River heightmap, created using a simple noise texture, but isolating one small strip of grey value and then applying a curve that turns that grey value strip into a river bed cross section.

MakingOfPlanet2Nodes01

Here’s the very simple node network used to create the river, with the cross section I mentioned above.

MakingOfPlanet2Height02

The heightfield, represented as green for low altitude, red for high (which… is kinda backwards…) :)

MakingOfPlanet2Scene01

The heightfield with a muddy/rocky texture, and snow layered over the top to make it more obvious where the river bed is/isn’t.

MakingOfPlanet2InGame

Much more lighting and material work required to make the river stand out properly, but here’s a quick in-game screenshot anyways.

The Videoening

Wow, I’m famous, there I am, on Youtubes! Listen to me mumble! And don’t forget to 2x me!!

Cya next time!

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