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[GeoffW]

I think developing a game is the easy part, marketing and everything else... not so much.

Well I'm not sure I strictly agree with this given how much time and effort we put into our development skills, game design, code, tools, art and polish ... but yes, marketing is a world most of us aren't very familiar with and to begin with it can feel like learning to walk all over again.

Good luck with your release - and do share your experiences!

[GeoffW]

There's been some discussion elsewhere and I feel it's time I posted an update about my various forms of paid advertising.

On Facebook, I've had some more success tweaking the wording of my ads, and adding new targets (like Ireland which I had completely forgotten).  However, visitors from Facebook ads don't seem to convert into paying customers as often as they should and do from other sources.  Facebook advertising seemed to work much better when I was just using free credit to attract people to my page!  Anyway, my current strategy is to leave my bids low so that I can still expect a profit, but I only get a tiny trickle of traffic as a result.

The Google Adwords Display Network is working best for me at the moment.  There's a tricky game to be played setting bids right for different countries - depending on the going rate and my conversion statistics.  Reaching the US is particularly expensive but I've had better luck finding customers in various parts of Europe.  I've also begun to find favourite sites and create manual placements based on them.

On the other hand, I haven't had much luck with the Google Adwords Search Network.  I set up some ads and keywords but they aren't being shown in many searches, even after attempting to tune my landing pages and upping the bids a couple of times.  I wonder if I'm doing something wrong or if this type of ad just isn't suitable for what I'm trying to do (it probably works much better if your product is something functional people know they want, like clothes or computer parts).

I haven't tried Reddit ads again.  They worked out a bit too expensive the first time and I don't have a clear idea of what I would do differently.

I am thinking of trying Project Wonderful at some point, possibly after releasing the expansion.  I'd love to hear your experiences with that!

[GeoffW]

Yesterday The Trouble With Robots finally launched on ArcadeTown.  I'm quite impressed with their reporting system and I'm really looking forward to comparing my sales on core stores vs casual portals. Incidentally, making a game that's somewhere between core/indie and casual is not a strategy I would recommend.  My audience seems to be a sort of mish-mash of indie gamers, CCG players, casual and family gamers which is great except that they don't really correspond to the traditional groupings - which unfortunately makes them harder to reach!

[GeoffW]

A couple of early screenshots from the new levels:



I'm trying to mix things up a bit in the new levels to keep experienced players interested.  For example the the following screen is from a level that's only three waves long, which is also quite difficult so you'll need to adapt your strategy:



Also the new music is in, thanks to Matt Javanshir once again!  It looks like you can listen to it on his site (the last track is the new one).

[GeoffW]

A couple more things that happened over the last few weeks:

Richard Garfield wrote about my game!  I don't know how well known he is to your average gamer, but in the Magic: The Gathering world he's pretty famous as the creator of, well, Magic: The Gathering.  It looks like he enjoyed The Trouble With Robots, I got a bit of traffic from his modest blog and a shiny new quote to put on my web site!

The Trouble With Robots was part of the Get Games Sci-Fi weekend sale.  This was very simple to do at my end, I got an e-mail about it on Friday and replied saying basically 'yep, go ahead'.  They sold the game at 50% off RRP, and along with 31 other games the sale was promoted on their front page and other places.  I don't have any sales figures yet but I noticed a recommendation for the game on reddit and on Sunday it hit #10 on their 'top 10 PC games' list!

Lessons learned:

• Don't be afraid to approach famous people like Richard Garfield (where appropriate)
• Weekend sales work

[GeoffW]

Over the last few days I've been working on card designs for the expansion.  This has been much more difficult than I expected because I feel each one of them has to really add something interesting to the game - just throwing together a new combination of existing abilities doesn't do it for me.  The new designs also have to play well with the old cards and be balanced at a similar power level.  I've probably prototyped something like 20 different designs before cutting to the 8 I now have, which I'm really happy with.  They just need a bit more polish now. Another thing I've done recently is tuning the difficulty in a few places (medium difficulty and a couple of the demo levels are now slightly harder) in response to feedback, and I've give the trolls better stats since I've come to believe they were a bit weak.

[GeoffW]

IGF submissions closed a few days ago with a whopping 589 submissions.  Having seen my entry on their site I decided to revise a few details so that everything fits together a bit better.  I'm looking forward to taking a look at some of the other entries over the weekend!

On the development side I've added a new challenge level to the expansion where you face random waves of enemies each time you play.  It turns out this design keeps you on your toes and is really fun.

[GeoffW]

I've spent most of the week working on new levels for the expansion, along with new baddies, story and humour to fill them.  For pretty much all of these I take the approach of designing (and implementing, to a point) more than I really need, then cutting back to just the best stuff.  You never know what's going to work until you try it!

The surprising part is that this is especially important for humour.  There really is no substitute for writing more material than you need, coming back in a few days time, showing it to other people etc and mercilously removing or rewriting anything that doesn't make you smile (I would love to hear about other people's writing processes!)

Oh, here's an early screenshot I used for the Screenshot Saturday thread.  It's from one of the new challenge levels, 'VR Lab':

[GeoffW]

I'm very nearly content complete for the expansion now.  All of the new levels and cards are in and I'm pleased with them.  Almost all of the new art work is in.  It's probably going to take another week to polish and test it all of course, and after that I'll find out if my patch creation process really works!



I'll have some card previews up soon.

[richie]

Wow, this has been a great read and incredibly informative!  Thanks so much.  We are starting marketing, PR and the ilk for our game.  There are some great insights here and I suggest anyone who skips to the end to take the time when you have it and read through the entire thread.

I am going to start a devlog, when I do I will certainly link to this.  Good luck and congrats on the Richard Garfield write up. (Pretty sweet)

[Schrompf]

Thank you for sharing this wealth of information! Good luck!

[GeoffW]

Wow, this has been a great read and incredibly informative!  Thanks so much.  We are starting marketing, PR and the ilk for our game.  There are some great insights here and I suggest anyone who skips to the end to take the time when you have it and read through the entire thread.

I am going to start a devlog, when I do I will certainly link to this.  Good luck and congrats on the Richard Garfield write up. (Pretty sweet)

Thanks, I'm glad you've found my DevLog useful.  Something I haven't really talked about much is how making and releasing an indie game is an absolute emotional roller coaster - Richard Garfield's write up was definitely one of the high points for me!

I definitely recommend you write a DevLog, it doesn't take much time and it may generate a little buzz, lead to some useful comments and perhaps help you to reflect on what you're doing as well.  Send me a message when you start it!

edit: I've found your DevLog!

[richie]

Thanks, I'm glad you've found my DevLog useful.  Something I haven't really talked about much is how making and releasing an indie game is an absolute emotional roller coaster - Richard Garfield's write up was definitely one of the high points for me!

We released our game on XBLIG back in May.  It is our first game and man has it been an emotional roller coaster for us as well!  I think getting praise from Richard Garfield is awesome!  Mark that on your "cool stuff achieved in life" list.

I definitely recommend you write a DevLog, it doesn't take much time and it may generate a little buzz, lead to some useful comments and perhaps help you to reflect on what you're doing as well.  Send me a message when you start it!

edit: I've found your DevLog!

Yeah I was inspired

I looked at your Greenlight page a bit, I am going to check it out and your game more this evening.  Looking forward to it.

[richie]

Just finished the demo.  It has a very polished feel about it. Very nice game! 

[amidos2006]

Woooow this game is my dream game :D Its amazing when it will be finished can't wait to play full version :D I am going to buy I copy I think

[GeoffW]

Woooow this game is my dream game :D Its amazing when it will be finished can't wait to play full version :D I am going to buy I copy I think

Thanks, the game is actually already available, click here for the demo!  What I'm currently working on is an expansion that will add more cards and levels and will be free for everybody who's bought the game.

Speaking of new cards, here's the first card preview as promised:

[GeoffW]

I've previewed two more cards on the Facebook page:


The expansion card previews have been quite well received, much better than the ones I did before launching the game itself.  That's probably because people understand the context now and are much more interested to see what the cards will do.

---

I had hoped the expansion would be ready to go nowish, but my beta testers (a couple of friends) found an evil crash bug and it took several days to narrow it down ... plus about 30 minutes to actually fix it.  It turns out it's not a good idea to pass uninitialized floats into std::sort as it (occasionally) gets into trouble with strange floating point values such as NaN.  Anyway the expansions still needs a few tweaks, a bit more testing and an installer so I hope to have it done this week.

[GeoffW]

The Megamort expansion is now finished, I actually have the installer and patch sitting on my hard disk ready to go.  However I'm delaying release until next Wednesday (the 28th of November) for a couple of reasons:

• I've got plans for the weekend, if I released now I wouldn't be able to properly support it
• I don't really want to compete for eyeballs with the Steam Autumn / Thanksgiving sale (which looks pretty awesome)

The upshot of this is that I get a little bit more time for some final testing and preparation.  I'd like to make a new video for example.

I have gone ahead and reduced the price from $14.99 / €12.50 / £9.99 to $9.99 / €8.50 / £6.99 today.  I didn't really want to sell this cheap, but more than a few reviewers have said that they like the game but aren't really sure it's great value for money.  One of my goals with this expansion is to utterly crush this idea by simultaneously adding more content and reducing the price.  By my calculations it will be 2.18 times better value for money, based on total levels / price!



Right, I'd better go and get this press release done before someone notices that I announced the release date on TIG first!

[GeoffW]

Phew!  It's been a busy couple of days with the Megamort expansion out, as I've been promoting it nearly as hard as the original game launch.  But I think it's been worth it - there's a renewed interest in the game and my direct sales (at least) are higher than they've been for months.

I also think the price drop was a good move.  In recent years indie gamers seem to have become quite price sensitive, so it's probably correct to set prices in line with consumer expectations in most cases.  That means it doesn't matter what you think your game is worth, and it certainly doesn't matter how much it cost to develop or how many copies you expect to sell.  What matters is that the price roughly matches competing games of a similar size and quality so that consumers don't have to think too hard about the money.  In my case that means Steam indie games at around £6.99 / $9.99.  But I suspect this rule works just as well if you're selling the latest Call of Duty.

Both gamers and the media are also quite conscious of what they're getting (i.e. expected hours of entertainment) for their money and they love getting something for nothing (like a free expansion).

[amidos2006]

Phew!  It's been a busy couple of days with the Megamort expansion out, as I've been promoting it nearly as hard as the original game launch.  But I think it's been worth it - there's a renewed interest in the game and my direct sales (at least) are higher than they've been for months.

I also think the price drop was a good move.  In recent years indie gamers seem to have become quite price sensitive, so it's probably correct to set prices in line with consumer expectations in most cases.  That means it doesn't matter what you think your game is worth, and it certainly doesn't matter how much it cost to develop or how many copies you expect to sell.  What matters is that the price roughly matches competing games of a similar size and quality so that consumers don't have to think too hard about the money.  In my case that means Steam indie games at around £6.99 / $9.99.  But I suspect this rule works just as well if you're selling the latest Call of Duty.

Both gamers and the media are also quite conscious of what they're getting (i.e. expected hours of entertainment) for their money and they love getting something for nothing (like a free expansion).

That's nice I hope sales are quite higher than my commercial shoot'em up game (Clean'Em Up) Hope sales go higher as its an amazing game