I made it in C# and XNA. Hm, maybe I will post it to Xbox!

Here is a link to my entry, Run Escape. You may need the XNA, C#, or DirectX redistributables.

You need a Windows PC. Sorry Linux and Mac I [...]]]> I have finished my first Ludum Dare game.

I made it in C# and XNA. Hm, maybe I will post it to Xbox!

Here is a link to my entry, Run Escape. You may need the XNA, C#, or DirectX redistributables.

You need a Windows PC. Sorry Linux and Mac I am learning PyGame to make this a non-issue in the future.

Here is my bitbucket page if you want to look at the ugly mess of code it is.

Here is the Ludum Dare page.

Here is a video and some pictures.

Escape from the Ludum Dare monster!

About to land on some birds.

No dice! The birds got away.

Missed the platform.

Firstly, I quit my full time job to do this (yay!). My plans are to try this for as long as I can. I might do some contractor work to keep funds [...]]]> There has been plenty to post on. I just don’t give myself the time. Maybe I am just not a blogger at heart.

Firstly, I quit my full time job to do this (yay!). My plans are to try this for as long as I can. I might do some contractor work to keep funds up until I get enough money from games. I haven’t come to that yet though.

Secondly, I have been working on a zombie shmup for XBLIG. I had a few reasons that I wanted to do this. I wanted to make another game that wouldn’t take too long to make. I figured it would help with motivation and maybe mitigate risk around not currently having an income stream. I also wanted to do some procedural generation stuff on a smallish scale so that I can take that knowledge going forward into new endeavors. Anything that I have had to do in this game that was in Tug of Four would take generally minutes to implement in the new game where it might have taken days in Tug of Four. Also, my XBLIG subscription is still good until September so I thought I would try to squeeze this game in by then. It won’t make it in time now. That is alright though. The first game made enough to cover the cost.

I have a video of some SUPER early gameplay with place holder graphics. My artist buddy Tim has been prettying up the art. I want to have another gameplay video in the next week or two.

I plan on participating in Ludum Dare this weekend! This will be my first one. I plan on using C# and XNA since I am most familiar with creating games in that so far. I hope to do future Ludum Dare’s in something  that is more natively cross platform like Python and Pygame.

tl;dr: The game costs [...]]]> Today I’m posting data collected during the first couple of Tug of Four’s release. The follow information includes downloads (sales and demos) per day and totals, ratings (1-5 stars on the game’s sale page), the placement for the game on XBLIG’s “Best Selling Today” page, and the results of my advertising.

tl;dr: The game costs a dollar and the split is 70/30 (I get the 70%) with Microsoft. There were a total of 382 sales and 6,324 demos from April 10th through April 30th which comes out to $267.40 for me

But before that, I would like to say I was extremely happy to get the game released.

One of the Happiest Moments of My Life

My main objective for this project was releasing a game. I wanted to create one from start to finish that was manageable and without scope creep, which I feel I’ve accomplished.

The secondary goal was to get 1,000 sales. While working on the game I wanted to make it enjoyable to play, but was also cognizant that this game would be pretty niche;  it was a party game designed for three or four people sitting together, which really takes out a large chunk of the market. Even with that understanding, I aimed to release something unique even if it wouldn’t have a large audience. Perhaps there’s a decent market for college parties but I am not sure if I want to actively pursue that market at this point.

Anyway, here are the numbers in chart form.

There is a blue line near the bottom of the graph...

The image above displays the number of sales compared to demos. There is about a 6% purchase to trial ratio.

A better look at the sales slope

Test caption, please ignore.

Now you can see some blue

I had 54 sales the first day and 47 sales the second day (you can view all of the exact numbers in spreadsheets below). I believe those sales came from a combination of being the front page of r/gaming and r/indiegaming (where it received a lot of positive feedback) and having a position at the front of the Xbox indie queue.

I tried advertising on Reddit’s r/gaming page. I paid $60 to advertise on April 22 and 23. If anyone remembers 4/22  well, that was the day Reddit was in the process of recovering from Amazon’s web service outage. I don’t know if it affected my ad, but thought it was worth mentioning.

I had 10 purchases on 4/22 and 11 on 4/23. I think it’s safe to say that the advertising didn’t help. I had 107,741 impressions and 246 clicks. (If I understand correctly, impressions are how many times the ad was displayed in the banner, and clicks is the number of times the ad was clicked.)

I have been averaging 3.5 stars.

The ratings changed throughout the day and I didn’t get to check them the same time every day.  I  wanted to document them to figure out if there was a correlation between people rating and total downloads, but if there was it isn’t what I anticipated. I figured that about 10% of the people that purchased the game rated it based on some of the indie games documented numbers. My experience did not have that outcome, at least not yet.

I only kept track of the placement for the first 15 days.

The last image is much more hectic looking than the rest, but entails the best information. This shows my placement on the “Best Selling Today” list compared to how many sales I had for the day (not total, yes I used a bar graph for the other daily sales but I thought this looked nicer). The higher the blue, the more sales, the lower the red, the better placed I am on the sales page. The first two days of zero do not count. I did not see my placement on the first or second day but  finally remembered to start checking the third day. Based on what I think is the case, I don’t think I was on the list the second day anyway.

If you notice, the first six days in sales are 14, 54, 47, 33, 31, and 27 but, the placement on the page is as such: 0?, 0?, 55th, 6th, 10th. The only sales day worth putting me in 6th would be the second day (4/11).

I think there are two things to take away from this:

1)  The “Best Selling Today” page lags two days behind. This makes sense because at best, I didn’t know my sales until at least a day later.

2) You can get a rough idea of what someone is making per day based on their position in the queue. For example, when I was in 6th place, I had 54 purchases two days prior. However, when you get to the first few places, it would be unrealistic to have any prediction.

While reviewing the numbers, I do notice a small problem with my train of thought. I had 33 sales on the 13th. Two days later I was in 14th place. I also had 33 sales on the 17th. I was in 49th place two days after that. I have a thought on why that may be. It might include demos even though it says “Best SELLING Today.” They already lied about the today part (it seems) so why not do the same for the word selling?

This post has been speculation based on my own experiences and the data I encounter. If anyone has seen different or has data they would like to contribute, please post a comment below!

Below are the links to the data I have been referencing,  this way you can ignore anything I have to say and just look at the cold hard facts if you choose.

Here are the links of the data in Google docs (no sign-in required):
Sales Data for April
Total Sales and Ratings
Total Sales and Demos
Sales, Demos, and Placement per Day
Reddit Promotion Traffic

Honey Hotwheels was sporting my logo at the match.

www.southbendrollergirls.com

I have not released a game on any other platform where you needed permission (or any other game for that matter ), so I’ll talk about my experience in the [...]]]> I am currently finishing up the review process in Xbox LIVE Indie Games. As of writing this, I need one more person to pass it.

I have not released a game on any other platform where you needed permission (or any other game for that matter ), so I’ll talk about my experience in the review process.

I was done with the all of the coding (minus any issues that might arise during review) by February 27th, which was also the day I first uploaded the files to XBLIG for review. A few days later I went to show some coworkers my game. They hadn’t played it yet so I thought it would be a good chance to see how they responded to what I was hoping would be a polished product. While watching them play it was apparent to me that there were some usability issues that weren’t revealed in previous play tests.

I decided to pull the game from review and fix the problems. They were simple problems but it wasn’t clear to people who had the item and what it was or how to use it. Also, on the “wheel of death,” it was not apparent to people when to press A to try to maximize their chance of getting an item. This was easily fixed by just adding a little text to the screen. I was trying to have a minimalistic look to the game so I had left text out where I could, but I felt that had gimped usability in the process and one of my goals for the game was to make sure that anyone could just pick it up and understand the game mechanics.

So, after I pulled the game, I immediately noticed I could not resubmit for a week. I had known a lot about what I could and could not do on the indie game marketplace, but I missed that rule. So I quickly resolved the issue and waited a week to resubmit the game.

When you submit a game for the first time, it’s given its own forum post on a board that is locked down to premium members only. The post shows the box art, game name, description, any notes you want to leave for the reviewers, and a link to play the game to review it. Every time the game is resubmitted, it goes to this same thread. Some games had a history going back a few months from when they first tried to release it, found issues, and held off releasing.

So there my game was, second try as of March 10th. There was a rule as part of the indie gaming section stating that the game couldn’t be free. For example, the entire game should not be playable in the trial. I knew that rule but I wasn’t sure how it would affect my game since the game isn’t a game to be beaten. Well, the first person to respond, on the 14th, failed it for that reason. So I asked him for advice and came to the conclusion that the trial mode would only allow up to two players. So I pulled it the next day.

I put the fixes in and re-released on March 23rd. The game went a week without any responses. Because it was reviewed via forum, I asked if anyone had seen the game and mentioned that I made the fixes, effectively bumping the post to the front to give it more visibility. I could not find any rules against bumping in the forums but I didn’t want to flood the post. But because I had bumped it, the next day (the 31st), two people posted that they passed the game.

After they passed the game, I noticed in my game details a progress bar that was 50% filled. I did a little research and found that I need eight people total to pass the game and that the progress bar filled as so: 0% 25% 50% 58% 66% 75% 83% 91% %100

It reminded me of this xkcd comic. It also fills differently if you have multiple language localizations. However, releasing in a bunch of countries does not affect how many reviews you need.

So there I was with two reviews. I waited until the second review and then thanked them for posting their input. This had the secondary effect of bumping my post to the front page again. I basically followed this pattern until the point I am at now, sitting here fervently refreshing my forum page, waiting to see a new name show up as the last post.

So the game was done (minus usability and trial mode changes, both minor) by February 27th, but the game is still not released yet. The games only quality issue was a usability issue that would not have prevented the game from being released. There were no crashes or anything of the sort, just the one review failure because of the trial mode. It is a little sad that the game has been done for close to a month and a half and unreleased. However, now I have a better understanding for what to do in trial mode if I make a similar game.

Staying focused is hard. I find it much harder than any other facets of developing a game (I have not yet dealt with advertising or other business aspects). I had thought “Oh, I just need to get done with [...]]]> Today, I want to talk about the largest issue I’ve encountered while creating my first game.

Staying focused is hard. I find it much harder than any other facets of developing a game (I have not yet dealt with advertising or other business aspects). I had thought “Oh, I just need to get done with these menial tasks and then when I get to the meat of the project, then I won’t want to put it down.”

I failed big time at giving myself “line in the sand” type deadlines. For example, at one point I said to myself “I will have this done by Thanksgiving.” That was three months ago now! After that deadline slipped by, I told myself early December. It wasn’t that I had forgotten about the game either; I think about it every single day and it bothers me every day I don’t work on it. Yet, on those days, I still don’t work on it.

I did have a few good moments of concentrated work throughout this project, there were two important deadlines that I gave myself that I did meet.

Early on in the project I wasn’t sure if the game would be fun at all. I had a clever idea but wasn’t sure if it would entertaining. I decided early on that I wanted the game in a playable state early so I could have parties where people could test it out.

That went extremely well. I focused on getting the essence of the game out. I made sure the all of the powerups were in place that I wanted for the game.

I feel I have done well at giving myself small manageable goals to keep myself focused. The biggest problem has been actually sitting down and working on it. I think as I do it more though, I will keep myself motivated. I have been working on the game all week without having much trouble staying focused.

My initial goals would be stuff like “Render a texture” or “Create basic movement controls for the game object”. Almost every goal I gave myself was something that could be done in an evening by myself. When my friend asked to help with the art, he recomended tadalist. It’s a super basic website to utilize. You give a small description of what you would like to do and then put the list in an order. So we would have one-liners and put them in order of what needed to be done first.

For example, the top two are:
Revise Help Screen Text – T
Evaluate Rematch screen. – C & T

Neither will take much time, but that briefly explains what needs to get done. I think that helps keeping focus on what is important. During my day job, we have used tools like Quality Center, Version1, and Pivotal Tracker. I hated Quality Center and Version1. They were very cluttered and did not help. I spent more time in those tools than I would like to admit. I haven’t used Pivotal Tracker much yet to say what I think (so far it seems alright). Some of the functionality out of those tools was clearly geared towards larger groups. Even though I disliked those tools, I felt that what they do is necessary for a team. I feel I get a similar experience using tadalist because we have only a couple people using it for this project.

Now I will start switching gears and try to work on some marketing aspects. I am going to try to create my first commercial for the game (and probably the only one). I will then start to switch gears and start a new game. While this game is for XNA and the XBLIG section, I think my next game will be for the mobile devices and flash. I am trying to test the different waters. It isn’t ideal to focus on one platform for one game and then completely disregard it afterwards for the next game but I really just want to try a bunch of different things at this point.

The idea of the game is that you and three of your friends control a single ball.  You manipulate your friends into scoring on each other while leaving your goal alone.  There are some items you can pick [...]]]> I am working on a party game for four players for the Xbox Live Indie Gaming section.

The idea of the game is that you and three of your friends control a single ball.  You manipulate your friends into scoring on each other while leaving your goal alone.  There are some items you can pick up that will change game play.

I have been been coding it on and off for a few months now and  have had a few play testing parties with friends to show off the game and get feedback.  After one party, a friend of mine who is really good with art, design, and general user experience asked if he could help work on those aspects of the game.  I was pretty happy because  up until that point I was mostly using developer art.  I feel he was able give the game a level of polish I would not have been able to do on my own.

I hope to explain more about my process of creating the game, and show off the game itself in the future.