So, as you may be aware, I launched a Kickstarter campaign for my upcoming space trading game Drifter a little over a week ago and it’s gone quite well indeed. As of the writing of this post, it’s nearly 70% of the way to its $50,000 goal, and while it’s not over yet, I’m cautiously optimistic that it will meet that goal by the end of the campaign. Even so, a few people have expressed some surprise about the campaign’s performance, and with only 45% of all campaigns succeeding and just 25% of video game campaigns meeting their goals, who would blame them? To be honest, I wasn’t even sure how well it was going to do! Pleasantly surprising performance aside, I must admit this is something I’ve been planning to do since late last year, and a lot of thought and preparation has gone into it which is why I’d like to share some of those thoughts here.

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I’m really excited to unveil something that I’ve wanted to have for Drifter for a while now. An official poster, done in a retro sci-fi novel cover/movie poster style. It’s been created by the incredibly talented illustrator Steve Courtney, and I can honestly say I couldn’t be more pleased with how it turned out.

I’m making a very (very) limited run of 18″x24″ archival-quality wide-format prints to take with me to GDC 2012 (in less than two weeks!). I’ll have to think of some clever way to distribute them, assuming anyone actually wants one Chances are you won’t be able to get one of these, however, I have something special in store to announce sometime after GDC which should see them get a wider distribution.

Edit: Steve has blogged about the poster as well.

Anyway, without further ado, here you go:

The other day I rediscovered a cookie recipe my mother used to make often when I was a small child, but I distinctly remember not liking them or at least thinking I didn’t like them so I never actually really had one until a few weeks ago. When I bit into the first one I briefly toyed with the idea of building a time machine for the sole purpose of hitting my younger self upside the head for being so picky and missing out on a lifetime of enjoying what is surely the Cookie of the Gods.

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I was talking briefly on Twitter the other day about how I was using polymorphism in C++ to handle different types of AI in Drifter and someone suggested I should make a blog post about it. As I’ve been wanting to post something new for a while, I figured why not!

I apologize in advance if this is not the Right Way to do this, but it works, and that’s the main thing. Also I reference C++ but any object-oriented language that supports sub-classing should be able to implement something similar.
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I posted a tweet yesterday which offered some advice concerning finishing games:

How to finish a game: get part way through a project, get an awesome idea for another game, ignore it and finish the one you’re working on.

It ended up getting retweeted quite a few times, so I guess it kind of struck a chord with people. With that in mind I got to thinking about other barriers to completing games I’ve encountered over the years and figured it would make a good blog post.

Having tried to start this whole game development thing once before in the late 90′s, I’ve done quite a few things that have derailed me from actually completing a game. When I started again in 2009, I knew I had to avoid all of these pitfalls in order to actually get a game out the door, so that was my biggest priority, actually finishing a game. I’ve finished 2 games since then, and I’m on my way to completing my 3rd, so hopefully this advice may prove useful to you as well.

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Business oriented people that mostly care about money have discovered that the videogame industry generates a lot of money. They have embraced this concept with gusto, creating games that effectively amount to nothing more than psychologically engineered treadmills disguised as toys that force game players to pay money to keep playing. This is upsetting to many people, and understandably so. But instead of realizing that this is an inevitable, if unfortunate, evolution in any popular medium quite a few vocal individuals are wringing their hands and shaking their heads, proclaiming that this is surely the death of videogames as we know them.

Frankly, this line of thought is a festering load of dingo’s kidneys. The videogame is a medium, not entirely unlike the motion picture, and just because Michael Bay is releasing Explosions 4: Revenge of Explosions next summer doesn’t mean that Francis Ford Coppola will never be able to direct a movie again in his life.

Yes it kinda sucks, and yes people have a right and even duty to point out that it sucks, why it sucks, and how they think they can make things better, but it’s not going away and neither are the kinds of videogames that helped to define and continue to define this industry. That is unless we stop making them, but whose fault would that be?

Addendum: Just to clarify, there’s nothing inherently wrong with making games as a business (I mean, that’s what I’m trying to do after all) and there’s nothing particularly wrong with the free-to-play business model. Just like everything else in life, this is not a black and white issue. All I’m ranting against here is this idea that videogames are all of a sudden dead because a certain (tiny) subset of the industry is carrying out business in a way that people find questionable.

Another audio-related mini-post!

I had mentioned on Twitter earlier how I had written a script to convert all the WAV assets in Red Nova from unnecessarily large 32-bit floating point 44 kHz format to a space and memory saving 16-bit integer 22 kHz format. This basically cut the size of the files to less than half, which is pretty fantastic when you’re dealing with a hand-held device with memory constraints like the iPhone. Hell, it will also improve loading times!

Anyway someone asked me to share the script I made, which is a fairly simple Bash script. Just create a file somewhere, call it something like convertwavs.sh, and paste the following into it:

#!/bin/sh
mkdir oldwavs
for f in *.wav
do
   cp $f oldwavs/$f
   afconvert -f WAVE -d LEI16@22050 $f $f
done

Run chmod +x convertwavs.sh from the terminal to make it executable, then change to the folder containing the WAV files you want to convert and run the script like so:

/path/to/convertwavs.sh

It will make a sub-folder called oldwavs and copy the originals there in case anything goes wrong and then convert the files in place. That’s it!

It’s been a while since I last posted something to Ye Olde Blog, so time to fix that.

A few days ago someone linked to the low-poly work of Kenneth Fejer on Google+ and apart from being awesome it gave me the idea to try and play around with the style. Not only was it low poly work, but the textures had an almost pixel-art appeal to them which I found intriguing.

You see, I’m a programmer most of the time but I do enjoy doing arty things, which some may say is unusual for a programmer, but when you’re making all of this stuff on your own it certainly helps. I don’t think my models are the best by any stretch of the imagination, but they’re certainly passable, but one thing that I’ve always never been satisfied with is my ability to texture them. This is why this pixel-art style appeals to me, because it’s a lot easier (at least for me) to create pixel-art. Read more…

This is just a quick post aimed at iOS developers covering the incredibly easy command-line method to convert your music files to AAC format. The reason you might want to do this is because MP3 is encumbered with a patent which covers the distribution of MP3′s commercially, even as part of a game (see here). It should also be noted that Apple’s license for their hardware MP3 decoder does not in any way cover your distribution of MP3′s in your game.

You could convert to OGG Vorbis, which is of course free and clear to distribute as you please, however many devices (including iOS devices) do not support hardware accelerated decoding of OGG Vorbis files so you are losing some of your CPU cycles for your music decoding. Luckily, there is a third option: The Advanced Audio Coding or AAC format, which of course is supported in hardware by all of Apple’s portable devices. There are patents surrounding AAC but none of them restrict the distribution or streaming of files encoded in AAC.

Anyway now that I’ve spent all that time leading up to a single command, here it is…

afconvert -f m4af infile.mp3 outfile.m4a

And that’s it! As far as I’m aware you can use any of the iOS SDK methods for music playback with this new file.

I’ve been meaning to do a post for a little while now about some of the more common mistakes I see a lot of indie devs make when they release on the App Store. I am more than guilty myself of making these and I didn’t want to really say anything until I had actually gotten a more successful release under my belt, as otherwise I’d just be all talk and no walk as they say. I’m sure I’ll keep making mistakes and I don’t claim to have all the answers, but hopefully the answers I have are somewhere in the neighborhood of the right ones.

This post is geared somewhat towards the App Store, which is what I have the most experience in, but I’m sure a lot of this advice could be applied to any game on any platform.

The biggest reason I am posting this is because I see a lot of really fantastic games coming out all the time and many of them get lost in the shuffle because of one or more reasons which I’ll hopefully address below. It hurts me to see so much blood, sweat and tears go into the development of a game only to have it thrown to the wolves and eventually fall into obscurity. That being said, not every game is going to be a success, but for the love of all that is good in the world if you care at all about your game try and give it the launch it deserves.

First of all, I just want to get it out of the way and say that I believe that the “gold rush” on the App Store, if it even existed, is long since over. That’s not to say that there aren’t any opportunities to be successful on the App Store, it’s just that it requires a lot more effort or a lot more luck to achieve that success. To continue the analogy, if what we had before was a gold rush where any crazy old prospector with a goofy hat, a straggly beard and a fart app could dip a pan in a river and come up rich now we have a gold mine where anyone with the right tools can get even more gold out of the cold, cold earth of the App Store.

The primary, and perhaps unfortunate, conclusion I’ve come to when it comes to the secret to success on the App Store I can sum up in two words, but I’ll use four for emphasis, and mild swearing:

Hard God Damned Work.

Sure luck still plays a big factor, but you aren’t doing yourself any favors by not taking advantage of the fact that you yourself can (and should!) do everything in your power to give your game the best possible chance at being successful. Yes people often deride the App Store as a “lottery” of sorts, usually in a somewhat dismissive tone because you know, only fools play the lottery, however it is the only lottery I know of where you can stack the odds in your favor.

So without further ado, in no particular order, are some things to help improve your chances on the App Store. But remember, it’s going to be a tough slog and your first game may not be successful but if you don’t give up and learn from your mistakes you’ll be bound to succeed.

If You Build It, Will They Come?

There seems to be an attitude that is prevalent in a lot of people that if they make something amazing it’ll automatically sell like crazy. The fact of the matter is, this is generally not going to happen and statistically speaking your chances of getting noticed at release without any marketing work are so small you might as well put your game on a USB drive and throw it in a dumpster. I don’t know if this attitude has a name or anything, but I want to be clever and scholarly and call it The Field of Dreams Fallacy, it has a nice ring to it don’t you think?

Even if your game really is so awesome that the entire world will be clamoring to get it on release day, you should still take some time and effort to try and get the word out about it beforehand. Many indie devs take advantage of the open development process to help get people interested in their game early, sharing stories about how the game is being developed, showing work in progress screenshots and generally talking about the game. There are many forums out there geared towards showing off your stuff. Take advantage of them!

While there are some who are concerned that someone may steal your game idea, just remember that it’s not necessarily the idea that’s important, but how you execute that idea. Also you may run the risk of being criticized which will hurt, or ignored which might also hurt, but if you’re not out there trying to find a potential audience for your game then it’s going to hurt even more when nobody buys it. Also if you do get feedback/criticism take all of it in and evaluate whether or not it is valid and/or worthwhile to heed. Yes it’s your baby and your creative vision, but it is for that reason very easy to ignore the flaws in something you are emotionally attached to.

Another important thing you can be doing at this stage is attempting to find people in the games journalism space who may be interested in giving you early coverage. These people are often very busy, so don’t become a broken record and annoy the hell out of them, but they do need content for their sites and that content includes news of up and coming games like yours! You may not find someone right away, but don’t worry and don’t give up, you may have to find a less busy site which is in need of new things or a big scoop, just remember these smaller sites and writers may and do go on to become bigger players in the industry so don’t ignore them, they need you as much as you need them.

Also when you do decide to pitch your game to them, just don’t parrot the usual “It’s addictive!” or “A unique twist on <genre>!” (Note: I am guilty of having done this in the past, I am not proud of it) These journos are sick of getting PR like this in their inboxes and even if they overlook your liberal use of hyperbole-filled content-free language it certainly isn’t helping your chances of them actually paying attention to your game. So here your best bet is to be succinct: Tell them why your game is awesome in plain english and make it very easy for them to see either screenshots, or even better, a video of your game in action. The key here is do not waste their time, they get dozens of new game pitches every day so you need to stand out!

At this time it would also be a good idea to start building a list of sites that you think might be a good fit for covering your game, both generic to the gaming platform you’re on or for indie games in general as well as genre specific sites. It would also be a good idea to use a site like Alexa so you can sort these sites by how much traffic they get. Don’t use it to exclude smaller sites, because you need all the coverage you can get, but it is good to know if a site is worth spending more time, effort and resources on or not.

To sum this one up, let’s just say that I spent about half my time working on what I would call marketing aspects of Red Nova during it’s approximately 7 month development period.

Failure to Amaze and Delight

Another relatively common problem a lot of indies seem to encounter is they release a game that is technically good but is either visually and/or aurally dull, an uninspired genre clone, interesting but frustrating to play, or any other combination of reasons that prevent users from becoming interested in and eventually falling in love with your game. Or at least falling in like with your game, anyway.

Basically, the more interesting your game or some aspect of your game is, the easier time you will have getting players, and more importantly, the lovely games journos mentioned previously talking about your game. You can address this in two different ways: polish and features.

As emphasized in a recent blog post by Noel Llopis, polish is a very important aspect of making a game. I won’t try and repeat everything he said here but the upshot is extra time spent polishing your game is always time well spent. Little things like the right sound effects, visual effects, extra animation, more explosions and so on can take a good game and make it truly great. It really is amazing how much more complete a very simple game can feel if you go that extra mile. It’s all about psychology, and people definitely notice these things.

Another way you can help differentiate your game from the competition is by concentrating on features that make it unique or better than most of your competition. These features don’t necessarily need to be complicated to implement but every novel or interesting thing your game does that the other games don’t increases your chances of getting noticed. Take some time to think about this and go that extra mile, trust me it will be worth it in the end.

Finally, always take time to make your game pleasant or at least not frustrating to play. If your game is annoying to play because the player is frustrated by the controls, then they are not going to enjoy the game at all. I learned this lesson well with the constantly fiddly controls for Chromodyne and hope I have managed to serve my penance with my improvement of the rather poor state of action touch controls with Red Nova. In the end, it turned out that I could promote this improvement as a feature, which ultimately helped earn the game a lot of good press.

A Launch Day is a Terrible Thing to Waste

This is probably the biggest and most common mistake indie iOS developers make, and that is the failure to recognize how important it is to take advantage of the control they have over the release date of their game. I realize the desire to put your game on sale immediately after you get the notification that your app is “Ready For Sale” is a strong one, I have felt it myself. DON’T DO IT! Keep that release date set to some point in the future and pick a day for your release date, change the release date in iTC to that date and stick to it. The idea here is to try and maximize the amount of buzz surrounding your game over a short period of time to generate a spike in sales, hopefully getting you into the charts.

If you have been doing everything right, by now you have gotten some game reviewers at least somewhat interested in your game. If not, especially if this is your first release, don’t panic too much, but you will have your work cut out for you. You see at this point you have 50 promo codes you can give out for your game even though it isn’t available for sale. The idea here is to get those codes into the hands of reviewers so they can write up a review and hopefully if things go well, have it ready for the release day. You can use the list of sites I mentioned you should make earlier to figure out who best to give promo codes to. If you have already gotten coverage earlier in the development cycle, it’s a good bet to give those sites promo codes for sure.

Use this time to create a press release as well. There are a number of press release services online that can get news of your game to a huge number of news services that cover different aspects of the games industry and you’d be wise to take advantage of them. You never know who might pick up the news. Also much like your pre-release pitches, keep the hyperbole and marketing-speak to a minimum. The easier you make it for someone who has to pour through dozens if not hundreds of press releases a day to see that your game is interesting and awesome the better.

Another thing you might want to consider, as a small and relatively unknown indie game developer, is the actual day you release your game on. For some reason it has become “common knowledge” in the iOS world that the best day to release your game is on Thursday. I’m not sure how this got started but for a number of reasons it’s actually now the worst day for a small and relatively unknown indie game developer to release their game. This is because practically everyone is now releasing their games on Thursday, from the crazy old prospector with his fart app to all of the big publishers and everyone in between. This means that it is going to be that much harder to get attention for your game seeing as it’s basically going toe-to-toe with the game release equivalent of the God King. I don’t know if any other particular day is better, but the rest of the week is quieter and you stand a better chance of getting more coverage from more sites because they need content every day of the week, not just Thursday.

One last piece of advice here, that I of course learned the hard way, is it’s probably a bad idea to launch close to the Christmas holiday if you don’t have a huge name for yourself or a lot of pre-release buzz surrounding your game. There is going to be a massive amount of noise from new releases and massive amounts of sales and even though there are going to be a lot of new device owners looking for games, chances are they probably won’t be buying yours.

Conclusion

The upshot of all this advice is that you have more control over the path to success that your game can take than you think. Yes luck is a massive factor in how successful a game is, but you should still do everything in your power to give your game the best possible environment for that success.

Most important of all: don’t give up, learn from your mistakes, learn from other people’s mistakes, and eventually you will get rewarded for your patience and hard god damn work.