I recently got a new piano sound, and after messing around with the opening chords of Erik Satié's famous Gymnopédie No. 1 (probably my favorite piano composition ever) for awhile, came up with this song:

Gymnopedie No. 1 (Wet)

I also have a dry version (no reverb) with a closer, more intimate feel here.

It's been awhile; will be checking out some of the recently posted songs soon!

I'm a fan!

Played a bit of the beta last night. Quite lovely, I'll comment on your Desura first impressions thread soon.

I love OOP because OOP is fun. It's like what Spore is meant to be.

Come again?

owwwwww

I'm not sure.

I'd keep the extra level only for those who asked. Wait until you're comfortable with it, then include it in another press release later.

It's better to get the press in bumps. They've already decided to look/not-look. Save extra content to justify trying to get their attention again.

yeah, good idea. we have a few more to email, then some following up, then finishing the game...

yeah, you can always do more work.

..

Are you saying you're giving out different builds to different people to show off different parts of the game? Or are you just sending them videos? Or are you updating the demo everyone gets?

What did your original demo have and what did the requests want to see more of?

I made a single demo for public release.

then this one youtube channel asked for another stage, so I  polished it up a bit. i'm still not comfortable with that level havinga public release, so i'm not sending it off to everyone unless they specifically ask so (didn't want to bloat the press emails with "well, if you play past this point...") allthough mabe that's a good idea? who knows...

thanks, graham toast L trip! the link things are a good idea but that's so much more work...it would be very good idea though, if i could figure out a way to manage them with the query strings at the end (using numbers for each person I email). eh. might be worth it for the full release!

and yep I'm updating the press thing as I get them.

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Got a few more today. One person is putting a video up. Two people said they'd do writeups and I'm waiting on them, and one super big youtube channel asked for a build with some extra content they could show. i hope they show it!!! would bring a lot of people in

which is why i'm kind of flustered. we have a number of dungeons that are basically ready for human consumption, so I first had to pick which of those I was even going to show...I picked it, and basically crunched to polish and bugtest it a little more. jon had to do somet things to and he has classes...anyways, we got it done, I added it to the secret press demo...it has my memory architecture fixes too from yesterday night...god, so many awful bugs.

then john polson from indiegames.com mentioned a bug I had. oh god. luckily I had fixed it earlier today, but I just pushed out a fix for it. john's really nice and that was a great thing for him to have done.

Things seem okay. all public download links are updated, I emailed that one big site back..

got a few more articles today. http://www.anodynegame.com/#press even a brazilian site! pretty neat-o.

even though this is fucking stressful.

I also emailed maybe 10-15 other people yesterday. I have 15 or so left today, but I really want to play the secrets of grindea beta fora  little bit.

do we have a sticky for threads like this that pop up occasionally?  it would probably help a lot of people out.


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yeah, it's the right choice to start with flixel or flashpunk if you want to get into coding.

1. I vote for flixel, but i'm totally biased since I use it. Maybe someone intimate with both could comment? it's been more than competent enough for my current game. For a beginner it might just be comfort. Try the tutorials for both and see which you like better. If you don't really have a preference, stick to one.

2. you need to know how to code AS3. the syntax is not very hard, and to be honest if you're working on a game alone, you don't need a majority of the OOP concepts anyways...those will come into play as you grow more experienced and the project reaches a codebase scale where you need to do stuff like that.

My recommendation: start with Flixel. Work through the EZPlatformer, and then Invaders tutorials. If you get stuck, post on the flixel forums. there is always a small community that is very helpful!

i think i half-assedly replied to this on twitter but with regards to the igf, you might as well give it a shot. just have one small level and that shadow mechanic will do a lot, probably...i remember fez only had a rotaty-mechanic sort of, and in one of the 2007 or 08 igf videos, you were collecting little fez hat tokens - something silly and small.

basically you have a cool design thing so submit whatever cmonnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn i'm pressuring you kind of.

congratulations and good luck in the future

hey, so here's how it's going so far:

I e-mailed/PMd/"submit form'd" about 35 people/sites since yesterday night and this morning. I tried to find specific people for most of them, but a few ended up being totally cold calls since I couldn't find e-mails or anything. Sometimes I ended up having to use those weird forms, or even tweet.

My messages all were a sentence or two about why I thought it might be appropriate (although sometimes I couldn't figure out one...), and then pretty much the same text - short description, why we're making it, then a buttload of links. I couldn't really personalize those because they are totally straight to the point. Then a friendly goodbye, because well, of course I'm grateful if they even take the time to get that far!


About 15 or so were youtube channels which I sent PMs with. One of the smaller ones said they would do an LP.

Out of the other messages, one person responded quickly and did an article (hookshot inc). Another person that I can't remember if I emailed did an article as well (wraithkal). IndieRPGs also covered the game on Saturday and again today.

I think I'll wait until wednesday and thursday, and then follow up, and perhaps e-mail a few more people too. I'm kind of just tired of doing this and want to write some music/make more content.


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It's kind of odd - I spent a lot of hours doing this mini-research and e-mailing, and then when you step outside and go do some errand you feel totally removed from the entire realm of the internet and the fact you're working on a game - like you could have just sent rude messages, and it wouldn't even matter, since you're off somewhere else buying groceries or whatever. Just a weird thought.

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As for analytics...we've had 5-15 visitors on the site constantly since the morning or so. I am not entirely sure how since there are only a few articles at small sites and I my FB/Twitter aren't that popular. Possibly from the Reddit posts I made on zelda, indiegames, and gaming?

Anyways, 3 or 4 press things are much better than 0! So it's going fine, I'd say. We'll see how the week plays out.

You don't want to be disingenuous. I think a sentence is better than not.

My recommendation, find a single quality about the person/site that would attract them to your game. Then introduce with that.

Yeah that seems like a good idea. Iguess I'll be doing that for the majority of tomorrow. the demo seems fine so i'm linking it up now.


For those who missed it, put out the songs from the demo for free on my bandcamp
http://seagaia.bandcamp.com/

and you can get the demo here
http://www.anodynegame.com/

**edit**

this is so exhausting

I worked twice at companies that marketed through the web. They didn't make games, but some rules apply.

What I learned:
  1. Extremely clean "press releases." This is what potential consumers/press see. They can understand what they need in a flash and dig as deep into it as they want.
  2. Regular updates. If they don't bite today, you keep updating regularly - collecting user comments/feedback, finding what press materials attract the most people - then do another press round at demo version 0.2, then 0.3, and 0.4 etc. _Eventually_ they give.
  3. When writing an email, or creating any press material, get to the point really fucking fast.

What I've read:
  4. Customize your emails to:
       . the individual you are writing to
       . the publication he/she writes for

You probably already know:
  http://www.gamespress.com/about.asp
  -> don't know how useful to new indies
and
  http://dopresskit.com/

And read:
http://gamasutra.com/view/news/167706/Ask_Gamasutra_How_to_annoy_a_games_journalist_with_a_press_release.php#.UFZzLbJlRcc

Yeah, I've been working on making the generic parts of the e-mail very organized and straight to the point.

By being the actual creator of the game, I've managed to naturally avoid most of the don't-do-things (corporate bullshit, totally impersonal crap) - (just read that gamasutra article you linked to). The only thing really left is to have some personal message. It feels a little disingenuous to say a sentence or two just to make the thing seem more personal... But I guess even taking the time to write that extra sentence is better than not doing it at all? hm hm..


And yeah, I more or less duplicated presskit() for my website. It's a good organizational layout.

Ah. So they aren't on the hook yet?

Post how it goes. There's little talk among indies about this part of the process that I've seen. Or it's just light.

Nope. I deliberately pulled playable things a few weeks ago (whatever you played was the most recent) and around then I started doing more "PR"-type stuff.  We decided to hold off on contacting press till we had something really polished to show.  Also gave me some time to rework parts of that first dungeon!

I'm definitely going to post on how it goes with the demo. I wonder if anyone at all will cover us. If not, there's a Dairy Queen near my home so I'll probably go drown my sorrows and then cry or something. I don't know...

you're sharing your demo with the press?

(sorry, I may have missed that)

Yes, tomorrow. It's pretty much final for those first areas of the game. I am fixing little things tonight and tomorrow will be an absolutely miserable day of lots of messaging. I hope it works out...

hey i know you know!

yeaaaaaaaaaaaaah it's done i had to do screen resolution shit in the past hour and fix things with music but it's overnow i'm gonna eat some chicken wings

Hm, the rest of yesterday I hashed some future design things out. Today I broke my laptop fan by using compressed air and not holding the fan in place. I am an idiot. Thanks to my 1,000,000 and abuse of version control, it's all okay. Well, all of my music settings were fine except for the soundfonts not being correctly picked...thankfully I only use a few so it wasn't too hard. Except for reinstalling Native Instruments Reaktor which I used in one place. You have to reinstall everything and the presets break because they embed some data specific to the computer. I don't know. It just wasn't an easy process, gah.

Made some refactoring fixes to help reduce memory allocation, but I won't put those into place until post-demo.

Did a lot of collecting press e-mails. Gee whiz, is tomorrow going to be fun...

Anyways, you can download the music from the demo version, which will be going up tomorrow, for free. Or you can give me a dollar and it'll be the first cent I make off of music...

http://seagaia.bandcamp.com/

Ooh I saw this over at reddit! Pretty neat! I'll try to check out the alpha..

hue play hi yo


where can play

thaaaaaaaaat is a train.

Just wanted to drop in to say this is looking splendid! Keep up the good work!

Also, I like that new song!

thanks sam!


today i showed the game to some people at a meetup, albeit very flustered. some cool games there as well - octodad, organ trail. a few tigsourcers as well - craig stern and...I can't remember the name but his profile picture is an elephant!


the demo's coming on monday. this weekend we are doing a sanity check with some friends.

here's a picture of the todo list for the demo, which is FUCKING DONE. AGH