Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Knowing where to aim : The PR conundrum

Posted on April 23, 2012

PR and marketing for indies is not easy. I would suggest there are a number of factors determining how tricky they find it:

  • Your age (young hip trendy kids know a lot of people through school./college etc, probably wider game-playing circle).
  • Your time in the industry (I know a lot of people who I’ve met voer the years at conferences, meetups etc).
  • Your personality (shyness sucks here. outgoing people make more contacts).
  • Your attitdue to PR (If you hate self-promotion, that will count against you a bit).
  • Your numbers. (4 people teams have 4 times the time, the friends and the contacts).

Of course, this can all be adjusted and overcome, but it’s worth realising not everyone starts from the same position. I guess I win on time in industry and attitude, and outgoigness, but suck on numbers and age.

Given that it’s not an equal game, there is also the issue of where to concentrate your limited PR/Marketing firepower. Here are a number of alternate strategies.

  1. Make the game so awesome everyone just HAS to tell everyone about it. Forget about PR. (this *can* work. ever seen dwarf fortress get promoted?).
  2. Blog like crazy, Build up a huge blog following who will buy and promote the game for you.
  3. Social network! run a popular facebook page or twitter feed you promote everywhere. Hope the virality works for you.
  4. Advertise! Actually spend money on banner ads. (This works, everyone says it doesn’t but they don’t stick with it. I *know* it works.)
  5. Reviews! Be and grovel for coverage from every journalist in the universe. Hope reviews drive traffic to your site.
  6. Sales channels! Make your game available from everywhere, and hope people see it enough, and check it out.
  7. Press-the-flesh! Go to conferences and shows like E3, PAX and so on, and actually talk to real-life gamers about your game!
  8. Forums – Talk about your game on any indie-friendly forums you can find, try to encourage discussion of your game on all the big name web forums, and sites like reddit etc.
  9. PR-firm. Hire someone professional to do all this for you.
  10. Youtube. Try to get those influential lets-play style video-bloggers to talk about your game.
  11. Cross-promote. Work with other indies to do guest blog posts or stuff like showmethegames

All these methods have advantages and disadvantages. I’ve tried them all (except hiring), to a greater or lesser extent. I wish I could tell you I knew which ones really work the best, and it depends on your personality in some ways. I am paranoid about being called a shill if I mention my own game on a forum. I live in the Uk and am an eco-geek so don’t fly to E3, Pax etc. The semi-autistic bit of me enjoys the number crunching of running ad campaigns. Your mileage will vary.

In general I think it makes sense to focus your PC on a specific area, otherwise you are going to just ‘bounce off’ and get no measurable results, like most indies do with advertising. I am time-limited, and work on code-heavy games, so my time is super-limited. Plus it’s just me. As a result, I’m thinking the time-intensive (social networking/conferences) stuff may not work for me. One of the main sources of PR for my stuff is actually this blog. If you scan the archives you’ll know I’ve blogged a LONG time, and this blog is surprisingly popular. of course, the blog predates the social-networking and youtube-videos explosion, so that’s not to say those aren’t better channels. I have facebook pages for gratuitous space battles gratuitous tank battles and redshirt, but I don’t have the time to really promote them as much as I should (feel free to like em!). I’m always re-assessing my priorities, but the answer keeps changing.

What do you use (if you are a dev) and as a gamer, where do you first hear about new games?

 

 

Gratuitous Patch Battles 1.006

Posted on April 21, 2012

Ok, so patch 1.006 for Gratuitous Tank Battles is now live. There are, as usual a bunch of minor tweaks and improvements, but here is the stuff that you will notice more than the rest:

  • Airstrikes are in! You only get them as defender, and be warned they can damage your units too, so aim carefully :D You need to unlock them before they are usable:

  • There are some new augmentations available that work on defensive capabilities, such as boosting armor and shields etc.
  • Defensive AI now takes into account attacking unit movement and tries to build ahead of the enemy, not just right on top of them (which often means they built turrets too late, and were useless by the time they were built).
  • The tab key now cycles through all your divisions, if you have multiple ones set up, shift+tab reverses it.
  • New progress bars in the UI to show supplies and victory progress.

Hopefully this all improves the game and makes it more polished. It’s funny how adding stuff such as the supplies / victory progress bars and the tab-button stuff makes it so much easier to play, but I hadn’t realised they were needed all this time. Nothing beats just playing & playing & playing your supposedly finished game :D

Existing buyers should get their game auto-patching today or tomorrow. Make sure you have entered your serial code and picked a username or it won’t happen. New buyers get a ready-patched 1.006.

Tempted to pre-order now? Here you go.

Gratuitous Air Strikes

Posted on April 20, 2012

It’s taken me a while, but I have air strikes in the game, although they still need balancing. Here is a brief demo video:

Air strikes currently come in 2 flavours (although it’s all controllable by text files so modders should have fun). And are presented to the player just like a deployable unit from the deployment bar. I might have to fiddle with that a bit later, because currently they ignore divisions, which might annoy some people?

Air strikes last for a set duration and then drop fairly high damage blasts onto random 9and not-so-random) locations within the given radius over that time. Balancing them will be a pain, but currently my thinking is relatively low cost, high-impact and long recharge times, so that you use just 3 or four of them (max) during a battle.

The difficult bit, as ever, is the knowing you have balanced them right, but I’m sure people will let em know if I haven’t. This is probably the last pre-release added feature for the game, the rest will be mod support, bug fixing and minor tweaks and refinements.

 

Better AI on the way

Posted on April 11, 2012

There are a bunch of things that could be added to Gratuitous Tank Battles, all of which takes time, and lots of tweaking and balancing, and may or may not add to the gameplay. My pet idea is a ‘safe zone’ extending some distance behind heavy tanks, which gave infantry in that area a cover bonus against fire. Theoretically easy, but might it look a little weird? if there is obviously clear line-of-sight from enemy turret to infantry, how can I justify the bonus?

One thing that I have started on, because it was bugging me, is improving the defensive AI. A lot of people have been complimentary about the AI in GTB, which is very nice, as I am, in my heart a bit of an AI coder, but I see so many battles when the AI does dumb things. The two dumb things that really bugged me (but NOBODY has mentioned it) were as follows:

The Ai building turrets next to attacking units, rather than ahead of them, so they don’t stride past during construction

The AI not effectively demolishing and rebuilding units in the last minute or so of battle

The first problem is hopefully now fixed (The second has always been coded, but obviously needs more work), but it’s actually one of those coding problems that annoys AI people, because management will never understand the complexity (and think you are crap/slacking). In theory, the solution is simple – Don’t analyze the path next to each potential unit-build location, analyze the paths that are 5-10 path tiles ahead of them, so you can know what will be in range when a unit is built, rather than right now. Easy, job done, 10 minutes!

But in practice much harder. There are maps with branching paths, and worse, some with paths that flip back between two tiles (making for some interesting recursive gotchas), so that means that identifying which path squares to keep an eye on and calculate ‘urgency’ for becomes a bit of a pain. It’s also horrendously slow, but thankfully way way faster in release build, and only happens on map load anyway. (Theoretically it could be saved out and rebuilt only on edits, but it turned out to be fast enough not to bother). To code all that, test it, optimise it and debug it (with a debug overlay to check it worked) , took the best part of a day, but I think it’s worth doing.

So today, one thing on the list is the demolishing/endgame stuff for the defensive AI. No reviewer has yet criticised the AI for the game, but I guess I should be aiming at them praising it, and hopefully I’m nudging in that direction.

Gratuitous Tank Battles 1.005 released

Posted on April 8, 2012

So I’ve finally released patch 1.005 for Gratuitous Tank Battles, and I’ve been trying to get a patch a week released between beta and eventual final release. This patch might seem to have less stuff than the last, mostly due to one of the items taking a lot of re-working.

Here is a forum thread showing the full changelist:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=7210

And here are the highlights:

There is now a direct association between the flames and damage textures on a unit, and it’s current state of health, rather than the semi-random system there seemed to be before! That means that a unit that looks undamaged probably is (although shields and armor may be reduced), and a unit with several plumes of smoke streaming from it is probably in trouble. Of course, for player-units toggling ‘H’ or the health button will let you see the details (or select that unit). This took a lot of fairly tedious re-jigging.

On a similar note, shields now flicker in a strobey-way if they are below 33%. You probably won’t notice on units without big chunky shields, because once down to 33%, they are probably under attack and close to failure, but hopefully this makes things a bit clearer.

There is a gratuitous new visual effect for laser guidance. Previously, those red laser beams were on a lot of units, mostly mechs, semi-randomly. Now, they only appear if that unit is equipped with the top (VI) targeting system. They also swish across and illuminate some smoke, and pulse a bit and generally look pretty cool at night. Expect to see less of them, but for them to look better :D

There is a new campaign map (Tanks for the memories!) added at the end of the campaign. It’s another evening map, this time very trench-heavy, hopefully you will all enjoy it :D

There are some changes and improvements to the explosions, after a LOT of work on the explosion editor. I expect them to be better still in the next patch, now I have seriously tided up my particle & explosion editing code!

Enjoy the new version, and as usual, anyone pre-ordering the game right now gets the very latest version automagically (you won’t need a patch). Don’t forget to tell friends, family members and total strangers if you have played the game and enjoy it, it’s all much appreciated. There is an official patch 1.005 comments thread here:

http://positech.co.uk/forums/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=7225