Gamedev Brain

KickStarter and Greenlight and Bears Oh My

Posted on November 19, 2015 by magicrat_larry

So it has been a bit since we launched both Greenlight and KickStarter . It has been interesting so far. I am encouraged by Greenlight and blown away by the severe lack of KickStarter wanting to make money.

Let’s start with Greenlight. We launched that thing and we blew up with traffic. We got votes by the bucket load. We unfortunately had some improvements to make and had a lower than what we had hoped yes percentage of 37%. It was still fantastic and that percentage is nothign to be sad about. Since then we fixed the wording on our page to better explain the game. So for the past 8 days our yes percentage is 62% on average which is more like where we thought we should be.

So Greenlight is rocking forward and people are really liking Violent Sol Worlds and would like to see it on Steam in the future. We have a lot more votes to go though, your vote would help greatly in promoting our title. Please head over to our Greenlight page and login to vote it up.

Now for KickStarter. We expected more from KickStarter than what they offered. I know you should not rely on somebody else to drive traffic to you, but the difference between Steam on launch day and KickStarter was like the difference between a Saturn V rocket and a rubber band. Both fly, but one gets somewhere substantial and quickly.

I’m just saying that They can make a ton more money if they actively improved their own traffic and pointed more people in an active way to new projects at least for a day or two to see if they catch or not. The truth that we did not know is that your first day will be the exact same as your sixth day. They did not seem to do what Steam did and drive people to you for a few days. They simply provide you a website and that is it.

Really we have learned a ton about game development in the past few months and have really gotten a ton more fired up about our Title Violent Sol Worlds. Mathematically all our current adventures are proving very good for us. All signs still point to people loving the idea of Violent Sol Worlds and the development is going forward full steam. With all that being said let’s go vote on the Greenlight and promote the KickStarter, let’s get this thing rolling.

Thank you all for your support.

Get ready for video content

Posted on November 13, 2015 by magicrat_larry

So, our team has made a decision to start interactions in a more personal way besides blogging. We are going to start doing videos to describe what we are making and thinking in a better way. We are also going to start streaming more twitch sessions to give you a first hand look at how some stuff gets done. I look forward to do this, even though I also dread the whole idea.

Now I am going to play Fallout 4 🙂

Come be a part of our Kickstarter – Violent Sol Worlds

Vote for Greenlight here

Check out more information on Violent Sol here

Follow me on Twitter @magicrat_larry

Steam Greenlight, It Can Be Fun

Posted on November 12, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I’ve been live with the Violent Sol Worlds team on Steam Greenlight for a few days now. It is fun, and stressful. We are really enjoying it so far. The first few days we hit hard and were at a great trajectory and traffic was massive. Now it is slowing down right as I expected it to. So now comes the slow climb to the top 100.

The thing is we really wanted to get to at least 50% of the way to top 100 in the first high traffic time, and we did. Now I would like to see about 2 percentage points a day go up, not sure exactly how hard that is to get. The amount of traffic after about 3 days on Steam Greenlight goes way down. You really need to drive traffic there yourself after that it seems.

So I am pushing a bit of Twitter today to see if I can get more voters there in that manner. It always boils down to marketing. If anyone tells you anything about indie game development it should be about marketing. Get good at it and you will be fine. If you are shy or think everything you do is not interesting you are doomed.

Anyway, Greenlight is going great so far I just hope it does not take 6 months to get there. One thing I noticed is a lot of people really want only completely or near finished games on Greenlight. This kinda stinks because that is the reason why a ton of games never even get to take advantage of things like Workshop, or acheivements etc. They get so far in to their design, then here comes valve 90% into their project, with awesome things to integrate that everyone wants and they are hard if not impossible to integrate in.

We want to be greenlit early, so we can have that working relationship with Valve and their APIs early as to have a tightly integrated experience on Steam as soon as we can and not have people having to wait on or never get things like Workshop mods. To get there We do need your vote so please do come by our greenlight page and join the cause to get Violent Sol Worlds Greenlit.

There are Milestones Nearby, Let’s Not Hang Out Here Long

Posted on November 11, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I’ve been doing indie game development for a long time now and what has contributed to my lack of finishing has been staying on a milestone for far too long. When you do this you tend to slowly lose steam. You need to keep moving and keep a pace that will allow for excitement in your development cycle.

You should setup goals and milestones because they setup victories. Remember though, there is nothing worse than never getting past one. If you set a milestone, those checkpoints are often the areas of your project where you will tend to bog down in details that might not matter. Dose everything need to be perfect to mark that off, no. Get to a point where the basics of a milestone are done and working and move on.

Iteration is the key to not stalling out at a major milestone in game development. Say you want character movement done. Set your first milestone for simplistic walking, not all of it including jump, crouch, climb, and crawling. See each one of those can be a small victory not just one. A lot of people tend to want to bundle large amounts of features in to one game.

Take time to think about the victory points in your project and make sure they are not too large. Break things down to smaller victories so you can have one every couple of days. Large milestones will slowly kill your momentum and make it mentally harder to continue to push on a project where you might not be getting paid to do it.

Come be a part of our Kickstarter – Violent Sol Worlds

Vote for Greenlight here

Check out more information on Violent Sol here

Follow me on Twitter @magicrat_larry

Stand up and Entertain With Me

Posted on November 10, 2015 by magicrat_larry

What most people cannot keep up with is the pace of entertainment. When you get into game development on your own as an indie game developer you have to become an entertainer. If you do not entertain at a high pace you basically go unnoticed and are simply a programmer. There are many programmers in the world, be something better, something more.

I call it the pace of entertainment. You have to be willing to do things at a pace that isn’t just on the weekends or when your favorite TV show isn’t on. It’s called sacrifice learn to love it. If you do not, you will just be a programmer. Why is being an indie game developer so high paced you ask? It isn’t if you don’t mind failing. You can just be a programmer and code a game that doesn’t sell. That is your choice. You can also entertain daily, if not hourly, and begin to reap rewards of sales later on.

I know it is not all about money, but do you like working at that grocery store, that bank, that oil change place? Probably not. Make it your life’s mission to entertain while coding your game. Blog about things, post on twitter even when there is nothing to sell. Don’t just wait until the last minute and hope for the best or lean on another to carry something forward. Be the one person that makes your dream come true, if you do not you will die without ever seeing it happen.

If you want to be a real indie game developer, not just a programmer of games, entertain at the pace of entertainment. Stop saying you are busy, stop being the same guy or girl as yesterday and make it happen. Start today, I know you think you are not entertaining, or this stuff is not my thing. Trust me, I hate doing it too, get over it. Stand up and entertain with me.

Come be a part of our Kickstarter – Violent Sol Worlds

Vote for Greenlight here

Check out more information on Violent Sol here

Follow me on Twitter @magicrat_larry

New on Kickstarter – Violent Sol Worlds

Posted on November 9, 2015 by magicrat_larry

We are proudly announcing Violent Sol Worlds has been launched on Kickstarter. Now everyone can see the top-down scifi survival shooter where you can craft cars, weapons, and buildings. You can help us increase the awareness of Violent Sol Worlds and help create the momentum it needs to become an amazing reality. If you find the game to be of interest please help us promote it by telling the world about it. Take a look and discover what we are so passionate about.

Violent Sol Worlds on Kickstarter – we need your support

Violent Sol Worlds on Steam Greenlight – we need your yes vote to get into the store

Violent Sol Homepage – keep informed about the Violent Sol Universe

I personally am so excited, freaked out, and a bit nervous all at the same time. It is by far one of the most interesting feelings to work on something this hard and then finally launch it to the public. For those who follow me on Twitter you already know that this process has taken a long time for our team. We have put a ton of work in to get to this point. We really look forward to the next phase of the project which is very exciting for me.

We have already began to design the final game so it can be expanded greatly over the next few years. This is truly a dream project to work on and I hope you will join me in my journey to bring it to the world. We are creating something magical here that I love and hope you will too. If you are a scifi fan and love a good survival game I am sure you will be pleased with what we are putting together.

Thank all of you who follow my blog and everything else I do. You are the best and I am truly grateful for each and every one of you.

If You Don’t Do It, I’ll Do It Myself

Posted on November 8, 2015 by magicrat_larry

A huge lesson that I have learned doing indie game development is that if you cannot pay a person to do some work chances are they will not do it. They can be the perfect talent for the job and be able to do it no problem, but if it is voluntary they probably won’t do it for you.

Nope, not even giving them a place in the future of your dream will make them do it for you. See most people are only driven by what they have now or what they can get now. So your dream means nothing to them personally until it can pay them. They are not bad people or anything, they are just motivated by their lives and their dreams. This makes it hard to rely on others while trying to start something new. You can throw tasks around as if people are getting paid but the truth is you will probably have to do them yourself.

I have a new rule in my life. If I am not paying for it and it is important I must be able to do it on my own. This does not stop me from handing tasks over, but I am my own safety net. For sure if it is important and there is a date attached to the task, just do it yourself. Don’t waste the time handing that task off to another person who has no skin in the game.

I know some of you are thinking, man this guy sounds like he has some bad experiences here. The response to that is, yes I do have experience here. I do not believe they are good or bad ones, but I have been in the places where I put things in the capable hands of another, or two, and they simply do nothing, or something terrible, for your vision or dream. Take it from somebody who’s been there, until money is involved make sure you can do it yourself and assume you will be doing it all.

@magicrat_larry – Join me on Twitter

Violent Sol Worlds home

IndieDB

Facebook – join the conversation

Validation, Get Your Validation Here

Posted on November 7, 2015 by magicrat_larry

Everyone has ton of ideas. Ideas come so often that it is mind blowing that there really isn’t a flooded market for games. The issue is really how do you refine those ideas down in to the one you want to make.

To do this my team has done a fairly simple process. We take a meeting or two and brainstorm all the crazy ideas out on the board. During this phase there are no dumb ideas. Throw everything on the board. Violent Sol Worlds came out of a combination of a destruction derby top-down game and a top-down survival game. You never know what saying one idea with another will do to your head and what will come out.

Once you have your list simply start eliminating, for now, the ones that either you don’t like or cannot do. The list should get smaller and smaller until you get down to a few. Talk about them, see what you love about them all. One will jump out at you as something that should be created. To me this is not enough. Just your idea is not enough to say it should be made.

You need opinions. So what I do is simply start marketing it. Go to social media and start talking about it. As you are creating your POCs, you should POC everything, be telling people about it. If they react well to the idea you will feel it. Show concept sketches, Show game-play POCs. Show everyone anywhere about the idea. The people of the internet will tell you if you can sell the game.

To me at this point you have the two vital questions answered. Do you love the idea, and will people respond to it. If the answer to both those questions is yes then your idea is validated and should be created. If one of those answers is no then go back to the brainstorming stage and find one that will work better. Remember if this current idea is not good there are 500 million more in your head waiting for you to get all excited about.

@magicrat_larry – Join me on Twitter

Violent Sol Worlds home

IndieDB

Facebook – join the conversation

Tutorial to Quickly Make Images for Twitter and Other Social Network Posts

Posted on November 6, 2015 by magicrat_larry

It is proven statistically that images improve viewing and interactions of social posts. So to help you get those images made there is a, completely amazing, and simple to use tool on the internet that will help you improve your social media footprint. Meet Pablo…

By default Pablo will load with a quote. So The first thing you will want to do is edit that. To do that you simply double click the text. You should then see that you have a few options to edit both your text itself and the formatting of it.

Here is an explanation of each of the functions that can be done when editing the text.

This is a drop-down that will allow you to select a font type
Choose to bold your text or not
choose to use italics or not
Select font size
Choose alignment of the text
Choose Font color

If you want to move the text around the image you can do that by simply placing the cursor over the text and not double clicking. You can then hold the left mouse button down and drag the text block around until you get it into the best position for your image.

On the left hand side of the page is a list of available stock photos along with an option to upload your own image. The stock images are nice but there is not a ton of them so using google images search to find great photos and such is a great option here to keep this tools life-span going far beyond the use of the stock photos.
Above the image you have chosen is an effects bar with a few options to make it even more unique. Contrast will help with some images to make the text standout even more. Blur is good if you simply want to get a good color behind the text with a blurred form. Black and white is just that, it will turn the image into a black and white image and give a dramatic feel to it.

On the right hand side there are even more options to customize your image. There is a shuffle Quote button to get another default quote populating the text. There is a secondary text toggle to turn on another text block on the image. Here is an example of the Secondary text in action.

The secondary text has similar options as the main text and can be drug around as well to get a great layout. The custom logo option allows you to turn on another image to overlay the current one with. You can see here that I put my profile photo in the corner of the image.

As you can see you can use the two sliders to change how the logo looks. One changes the size, the other rounds the corners. This allows you to make images that are very complicated and interesting looking without having to install any editing software at all. But wait, there is more!

At the bottom right there are option to choose different shapes for the different social networks that work best with different sized images. They are labeled well and are very much self explanatory. Really use these to your advantage, it will make the image look better for the social network you are posting it on.

There are also options to share your image right now, and download the image to your computer. Both are great. I tend to use both depending on if I want to do any more processing on an image or not. Usually Pablo produces images that are good to go right off this page so really feel free to post them from this page.

As you can see, Pablo makes creating images for your posts so easy that there is no reason to not have more images in your posts. It will help you look better and be seen more often. Good luck and happy posting.