Someone tipped me off yesterday about #screenshotsaturday, so I put three new screenshots of The Trouble With Robots up today on my web site and Facebook page.

http://www.digitalchestnut.com/trouble/gallery.html
http://www.facebook.com/TheTroubleWithRobots

I posted about one of them on twitter with the #screenshotsaturday tag, and it appeared on http://screenshotsaturday.com/ as planned!  However the site seems a bit high traffic so I'm not holding my breath.

So I'm aware that I should probably be doing more stuff in the real world to promote my game, The Trouble With Robots (www.digitalchestnut.com/trouble/).  I'm thinking about going to events, perhaps talking at them, showing off my game, handing out stuff ... or simply networking.  I'm not really sure what the best thing to do is, or when (my game comes out on the 23rd of August).  I also have a very limited budget for this kind of thing.

Another question is which events are most worthwhile for an indie PC developer.  I'm in the UK, so the most realistic possibilities coming up might be:

Edinburgh Interactive (09/08/12 - 11/08/12, Edinburgh) - very soon, quite a way to travel
EuroGamer Expo (27/09/12 - 30/09/12, London) - easy to get to
GameCity (20/10/12 - 27/10/12, Nottingham)

Please share your experiences!

I found this concept art among stacks of old playtesting notes!



Here are some frames of the finished unit:



(more in the gallery http://www.digitalchestnut.com/trouble/gallery.html)

I'm still getting some success from the facebook ad campaign, but it's been mixed.  I set a low maximum bid (because I want value for money), which seems to mean that on some days I just don't win any impressions, whereas other days it's fine.  At least I'm not paying anything when I don't get any impressions!

Unreal Planet is a 2D platform shooter inspired by games like Motherload, Spelunky, and Cave Story.  It takes place on an uncharted planet filled with monsters, valuable metals, and remnants of an ancient civilization.

Cool.  I hope there will be a story of this ancient civilization to uncover!

Items in the inventory don't go to their proper slots, making it impossible to select certain items.  This seems to be caused by using different consumable items multiple times but I have not found a way to replicate this bug consistently.  Cause:  Unknown

Look for differences in the inventory state before and after picking up and using a consumable.  It should be identical, but I bet something changes!

Songs don't loop very well.  Need to find a way to make it skip the intro when a song loops.

My solution to this has been to have two .ogg files, one for the intro (about 3 seconds long) and one for the looping component of my music.  I play the intro once, then loop the loop.  Of course, this depends on your engine being able to stream one file after another seamlessly.

i do not know anybody with such a box

Well, you can get a large collection by going to draft events and shelling out hundreds of dollars for boosters... actually if you do, don't forget to ask the more experienced players for 'junk' commons, as many players with large collections have enough copies of them already and will happily give them away for nothing more than a thankyou.

BTW, I'm working on a customizable card video game, check out the link in my sig!

The plan was to release in 2-3 weeks for first playable alpha, but every time I play the game, I just find more shit I want to add, so I dont know - find out in 3 weeks I guess.

It's incredibly difficult to make accurate estimates, isn't it?  Even when you think you've thought of everything you're going to do...

Oh and this has probably been said a million times before on this thread, but I love the graphics style - very bold use of colour!

Yesterday I picked a release date and price for The Trouble With Robots.  The plan, since I've initially not been accepted onto Steam, is to sell directly from my web site using FastSpring to handle payments.  I also hope to get on some of the other game portals / shops as a secondary strategy.

Choosing the release date was simply a matter of picking a date a few weeks in the future, giving me plenty of time to prepare, reviewers to write etc, and avoiding major games industry events like GDC, PAX and Christmas.  I also decided to release on a Thursday, to give news sites time to write about the game's launch before the weekend.

It wasn't too difficult to come up with Thursday 23rd of August 2012.


Pricing turned out to be rather more difficult as there are plenty of opinions on the matter (http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-big-list-of-pricing-resources/), but pretty much zero public data to back any of them up.  There is a general consensus that many indie's charge too little, forgetting that profit per unit is just as important as the number of units sold (iPhone may be an exception here due to the overwhelming importance of the top apps list; and Steam may be a partial exception due to a large customer base willing to impulse purchase cheap games).  Having said that I should also keep my price down because this is my first game and customers will perceive this as a risk (though strictly speaking I released a 7 day roguelike a couple of years ago - http://www.randomstuff.org.uk/~geoffrey/roguelikes/aquesttoofar.html).

Another issue with pricing is currencies.  FastSpring supports many different currencies, each of which can either have a set price or be calculated from the main price using current exchange rates.  I decided to set fixed prices in what I consider to be the three major currencies as this is friendlier and more predictable to the customer.  However it also means I had to look up exchange rates, try to work out the consequences of VAT and sales tax, and perform dubious rounding.

The price will be £12.99 / €16.50 / $18.99.  Let me know what you think!

Finally I announced the release date and price in a press release, which has already yielded a couple of people asking to do reviews.

The Facebook campaign's going well.  I've now spent £10.72, I have about 40 new fans on Facebook and probably a few more followers on twitter as well.  More importantly, these seem to be genuinely interested people who have already started a couple of discussions on the page and I feel some of them might well go on to buy the game.  This is probably because I targeted the ads very narrowly towards fans of similar games, and the ad is designed to describe the game to potential fans rather than to trick any old person into clicking.

I've also started to experiment with multiple ads and evolve a more effective strategy (by tuning the picture, text and target audience).

Incidentally, despite promising $25 it appears Facebook have given me £25 of free credit.  That's nearly £10 more!  Even so, I expect to put in some money of my own as I scale up my efforts near to release.

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Does anybody have any experience with ads on other social networks, google, youtube etc?

I got an e-mail from Facebook offering me $25 of free credit if I create a Facebook ad account.  Try as I might, I couldn't think of a good reason to turn this down so I've created an account and authorized an epic 7-day advertising campaign for The Trouble With Robots ... with a $25 limit.  Lets call this an experiment.

So far I've had one click, costing £0.08p, and I've got one new fan as a result (on Facebook).  That seems pretty good value actually, but we'll see what happens over the next 7 days.

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Incidentally, the youtube trailer's at 241 views and still growing.

Thanks for all the extra voting.  Obviously Steam is winning, but GOG.com is surprisingly close so I went and made an account yesterday.  It's refreshingly consumer friendly!

green man gaming should be on there

Ah, I missed that one, sorry!

"gfwl" (wrong terminology btw. gfwl is equivalent of steamworks)

Thanks for the clarification, ever since .NET I've really struggled with Microsoft branding!

Thanks everyone, not a huge number of voters but the results are pretty clear.

• Only count PC games.
• Free games and trials don't count.
• Digital downloads only, ordering a boxed game doesn't count.

I'm trying to work out which are the most popular digital shops for buying PC game downloads.  I'm fairly sure I know what's going to come first, but I want to see how the others stack up (though perhaps there will be something of an indie bias on this site!)

Please comment if I've missed any!

Simple art style but I love it!

So last Thursday I put out my first trailer video:




I did a lot of research and sent a press release to over 100 industry news sites of all sizes (mostly via bulk BCC e-mails, a few were individually tailored).  I also put up a page of press resources (http://www.digitalchestnut.com/trouble/press.html).

I uploaded the video onto facebook (http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?v=10150901747277805), and posted links to it on twitter, reddit (twice) and gamedev.net.  And I've embedded it prominently in the game's own web site: http://www.digitalchestnut.com/trouble/index.html

Naturally I got a few e-mail bounces, some 'out of office' replies and one person demanding never to be e-mailed again (sorry!).  And I'm sure many of the rest have ignored me, journalists are busy people and have plenty of news stories to choose from.  Also, I get the impression a few would have like to see a publisher and release date in my press release!  Still, I've had considerable success:

• video on on the front page of PC Gamers World and Gamershell
• press release appeared in GamaSutra's press release feed and numerous others
• a modest game entry in GameSpot's database and various others
• a glowing report of my trailer on 'Armless Octopus' (http://www.armlessoctopus.com/)
• quite a few mentions on twitter

The posts on reddit didn't get any love this time - I suspect because they looked more 'commercial' than my previous post.  It's been fine on Facebook and GameDev though.

The video has been watched 176 times on youtube so far, and I believe many more times elsewhere as the video has been copied around and rehosted on other sites.  I wish there was a better estimate!

Finally, IndieDB got back to me and pointed out that their site is developer driven, so I could add the news about the game myself rather than e-mailing my press releases to them.  Oops!  I've done that now: http://www.indiedb.com/games/the-trouble-with-robots


Incidentally, I do still have a couple of people writing previews of the game, but that seems to be a much slower process than distributing trailers and press releases.

Yesterday I went to the Steam indie meetup in London.  I haven't done anything quite like this before so it was very exciting, and interesting for two reasons:

• meeting and talking with lots of other UK indies (over 100!)
• Steam announced a new community driven submission process, Greenlight (http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight/)

From my point of view Greenlight is actually quite helpful, because even though I've already submitted to Steam through the current process I'm still allowed to use Greenlight when it launches (30th of August), which means I have two chances to get on Steam.  But this is a temporary situation, it's long term effect is less clear.

Meeting all the other indies was great, we swapped stories, advice and e-mails.  It sounds like Rezzed (http://www.rezzed.com/) was really good and I should make an effort to go to things like that and EuroGamer Expo (http://www.eurogamer.net/expo/) in future.

Looking good ... it would look even better if you find a way to break up the repeating rock pattern.

Good luck!

I mean deepen the control system.  Don't get me wrong I love simple controls, but I think I would like to pick up new abilities, or learn new ways to use phasing as the game progresses.  Like how in Portal you gradually learn more and more tricks with your portal gun, using momentum, directing objects through your portals etc.

Don't take this the wrong way though, your game looks very cool already!

Cool video, but I agree with the post above.  After a couple of levels like this I think you're going to need to deepen the mechanic.

If I might make one critique of your approach so far: you don't seem to have actually said anywhere what the game plays like.

Good point, your critique is very welcome.  I've added a few more words about gameplay to the web site, perhaps it still isn't really enough but I plan to release the video very soon.  A demo is also in the works.

Other things I would recommend: submitting your game/website to Reddit.

OK, I've joined reddit and posted here:

http://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/w6clc/i_love_collectible_card_games_games_so_im_making/

This seems to have been quite well received so far and I definitely plan to use reddit more now.