Howdy.  My name is Shawn Halwes and I have been collaborating with the Ragtag crew on our “next project” since July.  For ten weeks we worked hard to prepare a playable prototype to demonstrate at IndieCade 2012 in Culver City at the beginning of October.  Chris already blogged about the IndieXchange event that we attended while at IndieCade, so I thought I would add some of my impressions about other aspects of IndieCade.

No Worries

The very first thing that strikes you about IndieCade is how the whole atmosphere of the conference is casual and laid back.  Snuggled into downtown Culver City the main “village” area is merely a series of open air tents.  There was one large tent provided by event sponsor Sony which displayed new and recent titles on their PS3 and Vita platforms.  There were two other large tents adjacent to Sony’s, one that housed displays of indie games and another setup for presentations by conference speakers.  On the periphery of this core group of tents were some smaller ones that had displays of some indie tabletop games.  As you walked through this area you could find stashes of snack foods and cold drinks to keep the attendants fueled and caffeinated.  The conference had a few other indoor locations accessible by walking a few blocks to attend more formal presentations that lend themselves to a quieter atmosphere.  They even had taken over the garage of the downtown firehouse to present all of the game submissions that had garnered critical recognition.  With the large garage doors open this provided a great open air environment to mingle with the indie developers and talk about their games.  I found this whole setup quite refreshing.

IndieCade Invader in downtown Culver City

As a twelve year industry veteran turned indie, I have been to a fair share of conferences in large convention center buildings all bombarding your visual and aural senses with their electronically enhanced booths.  These bombardments are broken up with the occasional keynote speaker presented in a dark, cavernous room with a droning voice and the glow of a slide deck projected behind them…nap time anyone?  So it was refreshing to be able to walk around in the beautiful California weather (I am based in Dallas so I found the escape from the Texas Summer heat quite refreshing) and walk up to a game demonstration and talk to the developer in a normal voice without having to shout over the aural chaos of a convention room floor.  I attended quite a few keynotes and panels as well.  There were some in your classic dark room with a projector, others in a well lit theatre with a stage, and a few more under a tent.  I cannot really put my finger on why these felt so different from your standard conference, but all I can say is that they felt more organic with a subtle buzz of energy in the audience.  Quite a few of these had audience participation either through question and answer exchanges or by having the audience act out a game demonstration to reinforce a speaker’s point.  Although I found the laid back atmosphere refreshing it was not all sunshine and rainbows.

It seems the people running IndieCade carried the laid back atmosphere into some of their preparations as well.  Chris already touched on areas that the IndieXchange event could be improved, so I will not rehash those here, but I do have some suggestions for the IndieCade event overall.  The first would be to have your registration area set up and ready to go on day one.  When I arrived to get my badge it was not ready.  They looked through the multiple unordered boxes of badges they had on the table.  They looked through their multiple paper lists of names.  They looked at me and said they could not find me.  To their credit they did have all elements on hand to create a badge for me on the spot.  It all worked out in the end, but when you spend what is a significant amount of money for an indie developer on a conference, you expect more than a “lets just wing it” type of preparation.  I would also recommend that they have all audio, video, and slides from their numerous presentations collected and posted somewhere on the internet for conference attendees.  I have been able to collect a handful of slide decks by contacting the speakers directly (which is great and thanks), but not having this kind of thing available in the age of free cloud storage is a bit frustrating.  I have tried to contact IndieCade via email about this just in case I missed something or was not on the right email list, but I have not heard back from them.  So, in general, I would advise next year they make sure they are properly prepared and provide a proper follow through after the event is over.  Like I said it all worked out in the end, so no worries.

Sony

As the major sponsor of IndieCade, Sony had quite a presence at the event with their large display tent, and as hosts of some of the social gatherings during the conference.  These kinds of things are all expected by such a large corporate entity, but I was not prepared for how embracing of the indie developers they were.  Ever since they announced their Sony Pub Fund initiative they have really followed through with expanding their portfolio to include games that explore pushing industry boundaries.  Whether it is through supporting a game like Papo & Yo with Pub Fund or a closer incubator type of relationship like they have with Giant Sparrow the developers of The Unfinished Swan they appear to be sincere in putting funding behind indies.  Although both these titles have a level of exclusivity with Sony, the relatively recent launch of Sony’s new mobile initiative provides some intriguing avenues for indies to pursue with lower barriers of entry than the opportunities available on the other console platforms.  The Sony representatives that attended IndieCade were approachable and open about Sony’s goals of cultivating new relationships with indie developers, as well as being friendly and passionate gamers.

Matt Carter of Ragtag Studio playing The Unfinished Swan demo with a Giant Sparrow developer chatting with indies in the background

Eric Zimmerman

One of the reasons I decided to quit my job and go indie is so that I can have an opportunity to turn my own game ideas into a reality.  I am a programmer by trade and I recognize that to accomplish this goal I need to improve myself as a game designer.  At IndieCade I attended a presentation by Eric Zimmerman titled Being a Game Designer: 10 Principles for a Thoughtful Practice.  In this presentation he discussed his principles of approaching game design as a craft and how to continually improve that craft.  As he presented each principle, he would tape a large rectangle of cardboard with the principles written on them to a door like prop on the stage (apparently a prop left over from a play being rehearsed at the same theatre).  He would then break down the components of why that principle was important to game design.  I found his delivery to be quite engaging as he energetically walked back and forth on a brightly lit stage explaining the meaning of each of his ten principles with metaphors, pantomimes, and even pausing at one point so the audience could participate in a demonstration game with their neighbors. This presentation was a highlight of the conference for me as it helped me see some aspects of game design in a new light as well as being refreshingly entertaining.  I plan on reading one of Eric’s books in the future as I continue to educate myself on the craft of game design.

Eric Zimmerman standing in front of his 10 principles

Game Slam

At the end of the last day of IndieCade as part of the GameU series of presentations there was an hour long game slam.  This is where indie game developers were given two minutes to present their game to the audience as it was projected with audio onto a large screen behind them.  Chris and I were sitting in the audience from attending the previous presentation as this event was being announced.  We looked at each other and asked ourselves if we should do it.  After a long weekend of showing the prototype many times in more intimate settings with much longer than two minutes to present we were a little hesitant about presenting it in front of such a large audience in less than ideal conditions.  The game slam was being held in one of the large outdoor tents with a lot of ambient noise and the setting sun shining directly onto the screen washing out the projector.  In the end we decided to go for it since presenting our prototype was a core reason that we went to IndieCade, and at Ragtag we want to foster a culture of open development as much as possible.  So we scrambled to find Matt who was off somewhere at another part of the conference, and figure out how we could shrink what was usually a ten to fifteen minute prototype presentation down to a meaningful two minutes.  As we strategized and waited for Matt we watched the other indies go up and present their games.  There were some really great games that were shown and many cheers, and applauses from the crowd.  This caused my level of anxiety to rise as the reality of getting up in front of all those people showing what we had been working so hard on over the last ten weeks got closer and closer.  As the applause and cheers continued, the audience swelled to the point that there were no more available chairs and people were forced to stand outside the tent to see the presentations.  Matt arrived and we agreed that I would drive the prototype while Chris and Matt narrated over the top of the game play.  As we got up to wait in the “on deck” area it was announced that we would be the last presenters because the hour for the event was almost over.

A quick snap of the crowd right before we set up to present at the game slam

While we were setting up our rig to the projector and audio we ran into some issues with the compatibility of our build’s screen resolution with what the projector could support.  This was nerve racking considering all of the nervous energy built up inside of me up to this point.  Then we were faced with having to wrestle with the settings of an unfamiliar projector while a crowd of tech savvy gamers shouted technical advice and the emcee was reminding you that you were the last group and they needed to wrap it up (so this was probably only a minute, maybe two tops that we had to deal with this, but in my mind it felt like an eternity).  Eventually we got the game up on the projector, but part of the screen was cut off, and the sun was doing its best to wash out the projection, and the audio was barely audible, but we soldiered on.  As I drove through the prototype showing off game play mechanics we got a few bits of laughter and applauses from the crowd.  Chris and Matt were doing a good job of explaining the action as the emcee warned us we were at the thirty second mark, then the twenty second mark, then the ten second mark.  At this point Matt starts jumping up and down yelling for me to go for a secret part of the prototype.  As the emcee is counting down the last seconds of our allotted time I am able to activate one of the secret areas to a cheer and applause from the crowd.

As we packed up our rig and the audience began to disperse we received quite a few positive comments from some of the attendants.  This was a great punctuated ending for our IndieCade experience as it provided some positive momentum for us to take back home and begin the long road of turning the prototype into the actual game.

Thanks for reading!

In early October, all members of Ragtag attended IndieCade in Culver City, CA.  This Blog post will focus on our experience with the IndieXchange, a day long event that takes place the day before IndieCade begins. IndieXchange is an event that allows developers to interact with other devs, along with members of the press, publishers, and investors.  Prior to the event, I had a hard time finding many details on exactly how the IndieXchange was structured.  So in this week’s post, I’ll attempt to fill that void by talking about our experience.

Preparing for IndieCade

First off, we decided to go to IndieCade quite a while ago, for a few reasons.  First, we have quickly learned the value of spreading our wings and meeting other like minded developers.  There were sure to be a plethora at this event.  Second, the timing of the convention served as a great checkpoint for the development of our new project.  We decided early that we would use IndieCade as our first milestone.  This worked out quite well for us, and as a result have decided to continue to use various conferences as timetables for reaching certain points in our projects.  In big game development, the various conferences always had to be catered to anyway, but it was never planned for.  So we’ve decided to, within reason, make them the driving force of our development cycle, effectively killing two birds with one stone.

In early July, we began what would be a rather hectic 3 month charge that would yield our proof of concept for our new game.  There were many ups and downs, but by the time October 3rd rolled around, we had something we were very proud to show.  Regardless of the fact the new project is very early, we decided that we wanted to begin to show the game to press and publishers.  PR is not something we’ve done a lot of, so we wanted to get the ball rolling early.

As part of the three month prototype development, I did what I could to set up appointments with members of the press and publishers that I thought would be interested in taking a look at our game.  From the people that were actually attending the show, the response in advance was great and we were excited for the appointments we made.

Also during this three month period, I researched what opportunities IndieCade itself offered for showing your game around.  The best candidate seemed like the IndieXchange. IndieXchange is something thats only available to developers that submit a game to the festival, but to be honest I’m not entirely sure why that is.  Regardless, we entered Unstoppable Fist in advance, largely so we would be granted access to IndieXchange.

This was the second year that IndieXchange had been offered, and I was able to find very little information on it in advance of the days before the event.  The word was there would be a variety of presentations relevant to small developers, along with the opportunity to network with other devs.  Most interesting to us, they would pair you up with press, publishers, and investors that had similar interests.

On paper, this sounded great, exactly what we were hoping for.  There were a few issues though.  I was concerned that the matchmaking process would be purely based on the game we entered into the IndieCade competition.  For us, this was a problem because Unstoppable Fist is an iOS game, and our new game will begin its life as a PC game.  The second problem, is that not only were we unable to see what press, publishers, and investors were attending IndieXchange, but we were never given the opportunity to indicate who we were interested in speaking with.

To be fair, we were able to fill out a survey in advance to express our expectations, but whether or not this information was actually taken into account is something I will never know.

In the end, it turned out that there were three publishers meeting up with developers at the event.  Those were Gamefly, Sony, and Activision.  A couple of days prior to the event, we were contacted by a gentleman representing Gamefly, offering available meeting times. Gamefly has an initiative to publish promising looking iOS games.  While we do plan to eventually publish our game on the larger tablets, it is not our initial focus.  Regardless, our primary motive for this conference was to talk to anyone and everyone, so this would prove to be our first, and only meeting planned in advance at the IndieXchange.

The Event Arrives

The Gamefly meeting time I chose was the first available time-slot.  This got a groan or two from my cohorts, but I had good reasons for doing so.  First, there were many other events planned during the day, and any other meeting time would have conflicted with at least one of those events.  Second, and most importantly, I wanted to quickly break the ice by getting our very first meeting over and done with.  For me, the anticipation leading up to something like this is far worse than actually doing it.  So presenting early in the day would lighten us up for everything else that was to come.

We arrived on time and immediately sought out the location of the Gamefly meeting room. We had a relatively elaborate set up, and I wanted to make sure we had time to properly get situated.  It may not look terribly elaborate in the photo below, but you wouldn’t believe how many complements we received for having an actual monitor!  I believe strongly in creating a comfortable environment to demo your game, and having someone sit on your lap while you demo your game on your laptop is the opposite of comfortable, in my opinion.  Anyway, we got all set up, and in walks someone I’m a big fan of, Mr. Garnett Lee, to speak with us on behalf of Gamefly.

Meeting with Mr. Lee

Our first meeting went off without a hitch.  Garnett was great to talk with, and our nerves were calmed for the rest of the show.  I won’t get into the details of the meeting, but we felt we were off to a good start.

From there, we took a look at what the rest of the day held for us.  To give you an idea, here is the schedule for the day:

• 9-10am   Opening Coffee hosted by EEDAR
• 10-11am  Pitch Clinic
• 11am – noon PlayStation Q & A Session
• noon – 1PM Activision Q & A Session
• 1pm – 2pm Lunch Break
• 2-3pm – Icebreaker – Hosted by GameFly
• 3-5pm – Meet & Greet
• 3-4pm – PR Clinic
• 4-5pm – Legal Clinic
• 5-6pm – Game Tasting/Reception
• 6-7:30pm – Reception co-hosted by the City of Culver City

In order to keep this concise, I’ll give a general synopsis of what most of the day held.  It was a very slow paced day.  One issue we had with the IndieXchange setup is that if you weren’t interested in the presentation that was taking place, there wasn’t a whole lot else to do.  Or, in our case, if you had three people as part of your group, and it was plenty for one person to check out each presentation, the others mostly lingered around.  Even so, at least one of us attended all of the various presentations, and some good knowledge was dropped.

The Sony Presentation

We did make the most of our downtime though, and whenever we could we would chat up some of the other devs.  We were pleasantly surprised how open everyone was to conversation with strangers.  There was no pretense whatsoever, and I can honestly say everyone we met this day is someone I would like to see again and have a beer with. Really great, talented people.

The Game Tasting

Part way through the day we turned our focus to the Game Tasting.  Not really sure what to expect, we went ahead and signed up for it.  I’m not sure what the need for signing up was, as it turned out it was just a chunk of time where everyone gathered in the main room for beers, and everyone wandered around and checked out each others games.

Shawn demoing like a champ.

The game tasting was another great opportunity for us to practice demoing our new game to a variety of people with a variety of interests.  Especially at this early stage in the games development, its always interesting to hear the things that occur to people.

Perhaps the most encouraging words we heard were people commenting on how they weren’t happy with certain aspects of the game.  For example, one gentleman commented that he didn’t feel the AI were as responsive as they should be.  The reason I take this as a huge compliment, because this is a game thats only in development for 3 months!  The fact that people were taking a look at it and getting the impression that its close to being done is a huge compliment.  The reality is that we have about a year of development left… and there isn’t any “real” AI in the game at all yet!

I talk with the Vice-Mayor of Culver City about our game.

In summary, IndieXchange did a lot of great things for us.  I see it as a great icebreaker for what was to come over the next three days at IndieCade.  We met with a lot of devs, who we would continue to meet up with over the next few days, and ironed out any issues we had with our presentation.

That said, there are a lot of things that could be better about IndieXchange.  There was a substantial amount of down time.  The organization left a lot to be desired, and the promise of matching everyone up with press, devs, and investors was certainly not what I’d hoped it would be.  Even so, the event is only in its second year, and their heart is in the right place.  I’m sure they’ll get the kinks worked out.  I was hoping there would have been some sort of follow up where they ask for opinions, but I’ve yet to receive anything.

Wow, this ended up much longer than I intended, and I didn’t even talk about the Indiecade portion of the conference as I intended to.  I’ll have to save that for a later blog post.  If anyone has any questions about the IndieXchange, please post them in the comments, I’ll be happy to answer.

Thanks for reading!

Hey there friends!

Really sorry for the long gap in blog posts, we’ve been very busy here at Ragtag HQ.  We put a hard three months of work into the prototype for our new game, finishing just in time for our trip to Indiecade.  That will be the focus of our next blog post, which will hit shortly after this.

But first things first, we owe you a follow up on how the Unstoppable Fist FAAD campaign went for us.  The short answer:  Nothing changed in the land of Fist.  Now for the long answer…

So just to catch you back up without asking you to read the previous post, the promise of FAAD is as follows:  You make your app free at the same time they feature it on the front page of their site, along with shooting out a notification to those that have the FAAD app installed.  The app gets tens of thousands of downloads, and the momentum continues after the app is reverted from FREE to PAID.

Fist was downloaded something like 20k times in the first day.  It dropped approximately by half each day following.  We left it free for about 4 days before setting it back to a paid app.

The theory, as I understand it, is that your app rises in the charts, then once you set the app to paid again, the app remains high in the charts, remains highly visible, and people continue to buy it.  Well, this certainly wasn’t the case for us!  The app rose quite high in a few countries.  Most notably, here in the US, France, and the UK.  Particularly France, which was the country that came the closest to breaking into the top ten free apps.

On the bright side, the reviews didn’t take quite as much of a beating as we expected.  In the last post, I theorized that the 4.5 star rating we had prior to the campaign would take a serious beating.  It did go down a bit, but not as much as we expected.  It was constantly teetering between 4 and 4.5 stars, ultimately landing at 4.  This actually made Matt and I very happy.  We believed that the original high ratings we from people that actively sought out the game and purchased it… people that are far more likely to actually enjoy the game.  People that discover the app through FAAD, we felt, were far less likely to appreciate it, as they were simply trying out the free game of the day they were being served, and there was no reason to believe they would be predisposed to liking it.  The fact that the reviews didn’t take much of a beating is a great source of pride for us!

The sales though, didn’t move one inch.  In fact, we haven’t been asked to pay FAAD any money, because our sales were just a touch lower after the campaign than they were before the campaign.  The day after the campaign ended, it was like nothing ever happened… right back to 8 to 10 sales a day.

After going through this process, we realized that the only real way your app can benefit from this is if it has great word of mouth.  Which is actually fine, as this is how word travels with all of the successful apps.  But the theory that your app gets additional sales because its high in the ranks at the point that its switched from free to paid was, in our case, simply not true.  The reason for this is the app moves from the FREE category, to the PAID category.  Over the course of one hour, your game completely drops off the face of the free app listing, because it is no longer free.  At the same time, it reenters the paid category, and in our case, entered it right at the bottom.

So all in all, no harm done, but no real gains either.  It didn’t drum up any attention from the media, didn’t drive attention to our other apps, didn’t increase sales.  As you may remember from the previous post, we didn’t believe that our app was the type of app that would benefit from the FAAD campaign in the first place, and it was also a big mistake on our part not to have any in app purchases in the app.

So no tears we’re dropped.  We were happy to have the opportunity to go through the process and experience it for ourselves.  If this ever comes up again, we’ll be able to make more informed decisions regarding whether or not our app is the right fit for this type of campaign.  So in that respect, the greatest outcome from this experience is that we leveled up our exp in free app experimentation.

Hey all!

On Sunday, August 12th, 2012, Unstoppable Fist will be the featured app on FAAD.  We thought long and hard about the pros and cons of taking a chance with this, and ultimately we decided to go ahead and give it a shot.  The promise of FAAD is that they take quality apps that are not getting enough exposure, making them free for a day, then blasting that news out to their 8 million plus installed app user base.  The app then shoots up the charts, at which point you make the app paid again, then hope it sticks around a while, lingering by word of mouth, and making buckets of money in the meantime.

Truthfully, we believe that this strategy can work, but only with a very specific type of app, and we don’t believe that Unstoppable Fist is one of those apps.

This is something we actually sought out for our other app, Puppy Panic.  Puppy Panic has in app purchases, so it stands to benefit in a big way from something like this.  However, when I inquired with FAAD about featuring it, it was not deemed worthy of the main feature, so the only option was to pay 6k to have it featured on the ‘side bar’.  It was easy to say no to.

They contacted us shortly after Fist released, and initially my reply was ‘hell no’.  Not only were we riding high on good initial sales, but I wasn’t about to pay 6k to make our game free.  After saying no, I was told that Fist had been selected as a contender for their main feature, where they do not charge anything in advance.  Instead, they take 40% of sales for 30 days after the campaign.  And they only take 40% of sales that are above and beyond what you were already making prior to the campaign.  After sales of Fist slowed to a crawl, this intrigued us enough to give it a shot.

Above, I mentioned that we don’t believe Fist will benefit much from this.  In fact, it could even have a negative impact.  Because Fist doesn’t have in app purchases, we have no way to extract money from those that download the game.  The only real chance these people can benefit us in a monetary way, is if they like the app enough to spread news of it by word of mouth, preferably after the app is no longer free.  However, while there are many that enjoy Unstoppable Fist, it is certainly a game that caters to a specific taste, and its not a taste that is common amongst those that play mobile games.  (It’s really challenging!)

Because its so challenging, there is a good chance that a lot of the people that download it for free will be unaware of what they are getting themselves into, and react negatively to it.  While our game does currently carry a 4.5 star rating, and has many positive reviews from gaming websites, we do expect our user ratings to take a hit.  It stands to reason that anyone that made the decision to purchase the game up to this point, did so with the belief that they would enjoy the game.  It had one characteristic or another that appealed to them, so they gave it a shot.  Once the app is available for anyone to download for free, with think the likelihood that the percentage of people that don’t like it as much will be quite a bit higher.

So that being the case, why do this?  Well, when we set out to make both Unstoppable Fist and Puppy Panic, we looked at them primarily as experiments.  Experiments to see what kind of apps we could make in our spare time. (we worked other full time jobs while making these apps) They would allow us to go through the process of release apps on the appstore, and they would also allow us to feel good about experimenting with different pricing models, and marketing methods.  And we think having the opportunity to try out FAAD with no cost is worth trying out.

At this point, our apps have nearly fulfilled their purpose.  In addition to accomplishing all of the above, they have allowed us to establish great contacts with many members of the media, along with fellow developers.  Also, they serve as a respectable foundation for what will one day be the history of our companies catalog of games.

I’ll post an update back here in a couple of weeks to let you know how it went!

Chris

I wanted to spend some words talking about some things I feel we did right, and some things we did wrong surrounding the release of Unstoppable Fist.  Fist is only our second release, and we are far from what I would consider ‘skilled’ at releasing games, so take what you read with a grain of salt.  We are learning a lot though, and we wanted to share what we’ve learned with you.

Unstoppable Fist is a game that was darn close to two years in the making.  I won’t go into the reasons why it took so long, but it was long overdue.  Needless to say, by the time it was ready, we were super anxious to get it out the door.  Though patience isn’t a strength of mine, we realized it was important to take a deep breath, think things through, and give Fist a proper release.

For us, this meant allowing a week of time between the day the game was approved by Apple, and when we chose to release it to the appstore.  A week of time solely devoted to preparing everything we needed for its release.  We needed time to send emails to the media, and ideally allow them time to play the game with the hope of receiving some press on the day the game was to be released.  There was both good and bad, leading up to, and during that chunk of time.

What we did right.

Make a kick-ass trailer.  Man how this makes things easier!  Matt did a hell of a job on the trailer.  We gave it to Touch Arcade as an exclusive, and they had it up on the front page within hours of receiving our email.  From there, it was picked up by most of the major iOS gaming sites, and even was grabbed and branded by IGN.  We couldn’t have been happier with the reception of the trailer, and it undoubtedly opened a lot of doors for us.

Ask those that have gone before you for advice.  It may sound obvious, but when you have your nose to the grindstone for so long, sometimes you can forget how important it is to establish and maintain strong social connections within your industry.  No man is an island and all that.  We made a couple of very important relationships, just before, and because of the release of Fist, that proved to be incredibly valuable.  One helped educate us on how to properly engage the media, and the other gave us great access to the media.

Properly engage the media.  This has proven to be critically important to us, and its something I think we did very well.  We agonized for weeks on how to word our email to the press.  After advice from our new friend, reading numerous articles, and lots of back and forth between Matt and I, we came up with a good game plan.

There were more things to consider than we initially realized.  While it was important to us to get the word out about Fist, we decided it was even more important to think long term.  We needed to establish a relationship with the media, to start Ragtag off with a favorable impression in the minds of anyone we came in contact with.  The best way to do that, is to release a good game.  We knew we had a good game, but we were concerned that the trailer had set expectations quite high.

So in addition to properly introducing ourselves, and properly introducing the game, we also decided it was important to manage expectations.  We did so by clearly explaining what the game was about, and by making it clear that Fist isn’t intended to be a BIG game.  Its a little game, that does very specific things, but it does those things very well.  The majority of the reviewers seemed to really get what it is Fist was going for, and reviews have been largely positive, so I feel we did a good job with that.

As a bonus, a couple of the people we emailed our press kit to, replied with blush-inducing complements on the email itself.  We were beaming with pride.

Release on Thursday.  The day you choose to release your game may vary depending on your goals, but our goal was to get featured on the appstore.  I would imagine that’s the goal of just about everyone that releases a game.  Anyway, we received some last minute Intel that games that are released on a Thursday are infinitely more likely to make an appearance in the New and Noteworthy section, because Thursday is the day they update it.  To verify this, I looked at the release dates of the games that were currently in the N&N section, and sure enough, most of them were released the previous Thursday.

So we bumped up our release by a day to release on Thursday.  And while we didn’t make the front page, we did make New and Noteworthy on the Games page.  So I see that as a positive thing.

What we did so very wrong.

Failed coordinated assets attack.  From what those that have gone before us have told us, the release of a game on the appstore is most effective when its a very tightly choreographed attack on all fronts.  The goal is to have as many different opportunities for news surrounding the release of your game as possible.  This can be a variety of different things, but for us it meant releasing the game, getting positive press surrounding the release from as many outlets as possible, and making our other iOS title, Puppy Panic, free for three days to celebrate the release.

Which brings me to our first mistake.  That list should have included the announcement of our game a couple of days prior to its release.  What ended up being about three weeks prior to the release of our game, we submitted our trailer to Touch Arcade, giving them the exclusive on it.  They literally had it up on their front page within two hours of receiving our email.  We were thrilled at the time, as the trailer went over very well and generated quite a lot of buzz.  And that buzz would have served us much better had it been fully in place when the game was actually available to buy.

Premature release date announcement.  Yeah we KNEW better and we still did it.  We announced a release date before the game was done.  We thought it would serve to motivate and make everyone involved damn sure that the game would be done in time.  But life happens and we didn’t make our release date.

This really just serves as an exclamation point on the trailer issue above.  The appstore doesn’t lend itself to having users with a long attention span.  Games are cheap and disposable, allowing the customer to inexpensively and frequently move onto the next thing.  Asking someone to wait three weeks for your game will likely result in your game being nothing more than a faded memory by the time its released.

Free Soundtrack.  Matt may disagree with me for putting this in the what went wrong section, but that’s how I feel, he can debate it in a future blog post if he likes.  Its not a major wrong, just something I wish we would have taken back.

I really really love the soundtrack for this game, and I think its worth money.  We were hoping that releasing a good soundtrack for free would get a lot of attention on its own, and drive lots of people to the game.  We also thought that a fair number of people that downloaded the soundtrack would also willingly kick in a bit of cash for it, but to date that’s only been about 7 people, a couple of which were friends of ours.

Its impossible to put into numbers how many of the sales of the game were a direct result of a free soundtrack, but I don’t feel like its many.  Its also hard to say how many of the people that downloaded the soundtrack, would have downloaded it, if they were forced to pay for it.

Neither of those things keep me up at night.  But what I do think we could have done, if we had charged for the soundtrack, is use it for other methods of promotion.  For example, the possibility of including it in a future Indie Game Music Bundle would have been exciting.  Or, we could have used it for giveaways and contests.  Many websites still ask us for promocodes for contests, but we are long out of those.

At any rate, we didn’t clearly do something wrong with it, I just feel like its a great asset that could have been better utilized.

Closing

No doubt that we have leveled up our game release skills quite a lot with Fist.  It was featured on iTunes, given largely very flattering reviews by nearly every major mobile site.  We had requests pouring in from all over the world asking for review copies, and offers from publishers overseas to publish the game locally.

Most importantly, we have a great list of contacts from the media that we will continue to nurture, and have earned enough respect from them that they are anxious to hear about what we have coming in the future.

In that respect, Unstoppable Fist has been a great success for us.