This is the moment every development team awaits for: Your newborn child is out in the wild and now you’re going to see the results of your many hours of work!

Time to forget all the difficulties of development (Jorl himself faced LOTS of dangers in the real world before release…) and focus in your Marketing skills.

But how exactly we make that promotion? In fact is really easy and can be resumed in three words GO! GO! GO!

Spreading the word in blogs,  gaming websites and everyplace you can get is essential. But is also essential to make friends while at it. You may think your game will finally be the revolution of gaming, but letting others know about your game and giving attention to their replies is the way to success.

Commnity management is one of the most important tasks, and most indies know we’re nothing without the support of a fanbase. So, apart from sending emails like crazy to get your game known, try to spend lots of time in forums, replying to emails and taking notes about your players’ suggestions. The best option is to have someone in your team dedicated to this delicate task, because is one of the most time-consuming jobs in the game development industry.

If your game is good, your fans will spread the word just a little further and they will help you a lot. And if your game gets some bad reviews, don’t try to justify with “they’re just trolls” or “they didn’t understood the game concept”. Think about their critics, some of them will surely have a point, and you’ll need to correct them if you want to save your game.

]]> http://articomedia.wordpress.com/2010/06/05/dd-postmortem/feed/ 0 Dwair Jorl waiting for adventure! http://articomedia.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/more-jorls-journey-screenshots/ http://articomedia.wordpress.com/2010/05/26/more-jorls-journey-screenshots/#comments Wed, 26 May 2010 16:40:31 +0000 Dwair http://articomedia.wordpress.com/?p=386 ]]> Finally here, some screenshots of Jorl’s Journey, coming in the next weeks for iPhone/iPod Touch.

In this game you will use gesture-based controls to help our hungry caveman Jorl survive in a hideous cave. Bats, falling rocks and treacherous winds will be some of the dangers in our prehistoric hero’s journey.

To make things more interesting, both scenario and dangers are dinamically generated, so you won’t be playing in the same cave twice. Jorl’s journey will be a nice casual iPhone/iPod game we hope you like it.

We are right now working on some  other cool features, so expect Jorl´s Journey to be out in the wild in the next weeks.

Also, we are working in some updates for our previous games: Ice Bullet and Road to mudness, so expect more news soon.

In essence, Artico media is alive and working hard as always ;P

Essentially, the 7 pillars that hold up this new version are:

1. Multi-tasking
2. Folders
3. Enhanced Mail
4. iBooks
5. Enterprise
6. Game Center
7. iAd

Multitasking is finally here. Jobs says “Now we weren’t the first to this party, but we’re gonna be the best. Just like cut and paste.” Indeed, Apple has a history of releasing features ‘when they’re ready’ and they’ve done it here. Multitasking works like everyone pretty much was hoping it would — you leave an App like a GPS or Pandora, and they both run at the same time. Pandora plays your music, the GPS app keeps you from getting lost. Same idea applies to any app, but most notably VoIP stuff. Now you can be on a Skype call and check your e-mail too. And how do you implement it? You just double click the home button and a small ‘dock’ of running apps pop up. Swipe to your running app, tap, and go. It’s really easy. But Jobs stressed that they took a while to do this because they wanted to do it without sacrificing performance or battery life. No details on the magic behind the scenes, but it here, finally.

Folders, as you’d might imagine, is pretty self explanatory. When you move your iPhone icons around — when they get ‘wiggly — you can now ’stack’ icons on top of each other, and bam! Instant folder. Name the folder what you want, or simply let the iPhone figure it out, based on the types of apps you drop together (e.g. Games). I like organization. This makes me happy. Nothing is more distracting than a home screen messy with apps.

The Game Center. It is — you guessed it — a center for games, but really more of a leaderboard. Apple is flexing their new-found gaming muscle, and they did so by boasting the iPhone has 50K games, while the Nintendo DS and PSP merely have 2-4K games. That 50K is an awfully inflated figure. Anyone with half a brain knows that just because there’s 100 developers with solitaire apps, doesn’t mean there are truly 50K distinct ‘games’ in the App Store. Tisk tisk. But, none the less, make no mistake; Jobs is after causal / handheld gaming market with this comparison. But I digress — the Game Center is the ‘Facebook’ of mobile gaming, letting you compare and contrast trophies, achievements and high scores with other iPhone toting friends. Could be fun, and shows Apple is serious about games.

“If I was Google, I’d be worried. I think the iPad in particular is quite groundbreaking and will lead to a step change in the way people download publications,”

iAd is perhaps the most different and intriguing tentpole of them all. Jobs noted that he was unhappy with the state of ads in apps. With iAd, Apple is looking to help the developer do the advertising, but wants a cut. Only 40%. Never the less, Apple is going to give you something for taking that percentage. The iAd is designed to be an interactive app-ad of sorts. Jobs showed off a “Toy Story 3″ ad, that unfolds into an app with a few teaser videos, pictures and a quick mini-game. There’s no need to click on an app and have Safari load — everything is self contained. And this is the future of advertising, according to Jobs anyway. It’s quite a good idea, and something that might change the way annoying ads in free apps become fun distractions.

Via | thevarguy
Via | engadge

Artico Media has a very standard procedure, we have fun developing games and at the same time we alsoget paid. How? We use the App Store for digital distribution.

The age of selling boxed games  in stores such as GameStop, HMV or GAME is gone, or at least is certainly not an option for indies. There are also online megastores such as Amazon or EBGames, but here we face the same problem – we don´t have a damn box to sell! Our alternative to sell our game is to focus on digital distribution. Good examples of digital distribution platforms are the online stores of Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo. In addition, there are direct-to-consumer services available on PC, such as Valve Software´s Steam and Metaboli. These platforms offer direct downloads for games already on their service. Another well-known example is of course the application store on the iPhone/iPod from Apple. Digital distribution is just the beginning, however, what interests us the most is how many different ways we can monetize our products. All strategies must be studied in detail at the beginning of each project, paying attention not only to the platforms where the game will be released, but also aspects such as the target demographics, the gameplay, game mechanics, consumer trends and so on.

So here I´m listing few ways to monetize games, other than the usual box products and digital distribution methods:

For example, one of the most common ideas on the indie scene  is Advert-gaming. The idea of a game being one big advertisement is not particularly new – see Yo! Noid (1990), Mc Kids (1991), Cool Spot (1997) or Pepsiman (1999). Lots of people bought and played those games without being overly concerned by their advertising messages. For example, the reason Cool Spot was successful as an advertgame was because it was successful as a game. More recently, the U.S. Army created American´s Army (2002-2007) as a recruiting tool, but once again, the game is actually very well done, so it stands on its own merits.

Not every advertgame is going to be original or good, but in some cases, such as the Flash games you find on company websites these days, the quality or originality doesn´t matter: If it´s just another clone of Bejeweled<, such as Bewitched and it is still fun to play it gets its message across for a affordable price.

Finally, it is not always necessary to create a new game. If you have something that can be re-purposed for an advertiser, it´s often very quick and easy to modify some assets and provide a specific custom version of an existing game to serve an advertiser´s purpose.

OK, do you see the point?

Next week I will bring more ideas to make money with your game.

Furthermore, developing games is a complex issue, regarding all kind of abilities regarding narrative skill, technical knowledge and aesthetic sense, among many others.

If that’s it, and we are a very small team, how on earth can we make games? (“Impossible I tell you!” chorus please start shouting now, thanks!)

Fear not! you only need to have a well balanced team everyone gifted with the best of skills: LEARNING. Also helps being able to improvise and of course strong enough to put that abilities they’ve learned into actual use.

All of you will need to know all kinds of stuff, so learning new things and experimenting is a must. When not engaged in crunch, take time to learn new things useful in other areas: Maybe your team lacks some PR to do the marketing stuff, or you have a really good 2D artist, but with no knowledge of unwrapping 3D textures. If there is some job to do, and the only person who knows is busy/Missing In Action, you’ll have a big problem.

This golden rule has an exception: if any of you have God-like guru (or only really good anyway ) skills on any area, TEACH your mates what you’ve learned when not working! That way your MVP will have support in the middle of the battle-crunch, it won’t be so tiring for him/her during large or near-deadline projects and your MVP will be 120% operative when needed.

In essence, when working in small teams, knowing each other’s work would be a lifesaver for the entire team. If any of your teammates refuses to learn some needed tool, all your team will be a lot more stressed out in the hardest days of crunch.

Even Murphy’s laws didn’t prepare you for what’s coming, heh.

When the time of crunch comes, you’ll be taking hard decisions. You face total failure everytime testing fails, or a feature doesn’t get implemented soon enough. If you didn’t make your homework, your homework will eat you: Maybe the design has a critical flaw and now you have to redesign most of your game, or realize you missed some feature.

Your objective is to prevent the most common “vaporware” (Endless projects) symptoms.

Redesign: You need to redesign the entire game? you lost. Try to save whatever you can and make enough changes to be playable, sleek and simple designs are the best vaccines to this disease. If you keep redesigning the entire game everytime, you’ll end like Duke Nukem Forever.

Adding features: Eyecandy features are cool, but if not implemented and tested before crunch, they can be troublesome if other features need some redesign. If your team didn’t make in time, try to get the work done by critical priority order. And for Holy monkey God of developing’s sake, if someone thinks some nice feature just before deadline, DON’T implement it unless is REAL awesome (and easy enough to make while the rest of the team finishes the project).

Anti-patterns: Programming is not alchemy, so you can recognize possible flaws in the structure before coding them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-pattern

We are very excited with the lastest news: Unity 3.0 will be available for iPad, Android, PS3 and Xbox 360! Our main monkey coder nearly broke a hole in the ceiling while celebrating!

We are now researching iPad/Android possibilities, so let’s explain a little about possible iPad/android porting of our current and future apps:

Apple helped developers when it all started because iPhone and iPod touch were alike, with only little performance and feature changes. When 3GS came, things started to get interesting: We would need to keep performance in both first iPhone models and iPhone 3GS, but still anyone can make games for both platforms without any serious changes in our workflow.

But if we want to make games in a new platform, like iPad or Android, we’ll need to change our developing workflow and, of course, being more careful while designing our new games.

What if our target platform has larget screen, like iPad? GUI and touch controls will need to be rethought, and probably many new ideas and features can be adapted to an existing game…

Will performance and/or GPU capabilities differ much between platforms, like in Android case? probably, and that worries me, because we will need to restrict our games to specific android models or something…

So, in essence, various platforms will mean much trouble, and more time to spend on development. But rest assured, we are really excited about making games for other platforms too, and we will always try our best to keep our games fun ;P

After announcing finalists and honorable mentions late last month, the 2010 Independent Games Festival Mobile has named the category winners that will show their games at GDC and battle for the Best IGF Mobile Game prize.

After battling it out from a field of 170 top-notch entries, titles including Secret Exit’s physics-heavy Stair Dismount for iPhone, Powerhead Games’ cunning color-based puzzle game Glow Artisan for DSi, and Tiger Style’s acclaimed action game Spider for Apple’s handheld.

The category winners for the 2010 IGF Mobile competition — an event that celebrates excellence in games for the iPhone, other cellphone and smartphone OSes, Nintendo DS, Sony PSP, and other handheld devices — are:

Best Mobile Game Design: Glow Artisan (Powerhead Games, DSi)

Achievement In Art Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP (superbrothers + capy + jim guthrie, iPhone/iPod Touch)

Technical Achievement Stair Dismount (Secret Exit, iPhone/iPod Touch)

Audio Achievement Lilt Line (different cloth, iPhone/iPod Touch)

Best iPhone Game Spider: The Secret Of Bryce Manor (Tiger Style, iPhone/iPod Touch)

These five outstanding independent handheld games will each win $500 in travel stipends, in addition to their already-awarded Game Developers Conference 2010 All-Access pass for being a finalist.

In addition, their games will also each be playable in a special area at the Independent Games Festival Pavilion on the GDC Expo floor alongside the 30 Main and Student competition finalists, and one of them will win the $2,500 Best Mobile Game award at the IGF Awards during the March 9th-13th event.



Key areas to be covered at State of Independence will be:

• Different routes to market and new business models.
• Funding your game – including access to investors.
• Learning from current success stories.
• Marketing your own games – including PR, viral marketing and customer service.

DATE: Thursday 8th April 2010
PLACE: York Racecourse, York, UK