I’ve written a couple of new articles today targeted at new or aspiring indie developers.
The first about the challenges of wearing multiple hats as well as some PR-related stuff. Essentially, many indie developers seem to struggle with balancing the business side of their work with the game-development side of their work. I know I do, and this post breaks down some of why this might be, as well as reasons and goals for overcoming these challenges.
Case in point: by any objective measure, I really messed up the PR for the release of Tidalis. We had far too little PR, and now that awesome reviews are coming in it’s still too late for the actual launch of the game. This has led to sales being about ten times lower than my minimum expectation for the game, even though the game has still been very successful compared to most indie games in its first two weeks. It certainly beats the pants off of what AI War did at first, and AI War went on to sell around 30,000 copies of itself and its expansion.
So what does that mean for Tidalis? Is it to be permanently harmed due to the lack of advanced press before initial release? Short answer: No. That certainly wasn’t the case for AI War, and the reviews are even more positive for Tidalis than they were for AI War. Longer answer: I wrote a second article about the secrets of Arcen’s success as an indie company, which outlines how we took AI War from a complete unknown to a cult classic. It’s worked for us, I suspect this is what worked for Dwarf Fortress, and I know this is what worked for the likes of Doodle Jump and similar on the iPhone. And best of all, it’s the sort of thing that big companies by and large would never do for their customers.
If you visited IndieOtaku late yesterday or earlier today you might have gotten an error and couldn’t access our site. Well it’s ok, one of our databases just needed repairing that’s all. I think our Web Host has been a bit slow off and on and something in the system just gliched, that’s a guess anyway. Everything is dandy now.
So about those updates…yea, they’re still updated.
Well…Updates again! ItBGames has a new site, and we got a lightbox. Click the image below:
We’ve needed one of those, and thanks to the Lightbox 2 plugin from wordpress we have one, now on to ItBGames.
ItBGames was really in need of an update. We changed things a bit. Like the original post states on ItBGames:
The store is gone as well, at least temporarily. And we have this handy little thing:
If you click that button on the sidebar on the right you will be redirected to a random indie game, so if you are in the mood for an indie game, just click there. We’ll be adding more games to the button as time goes on.
Oh, and one more thing…remember that old contact form where you had to go to ItBGames.com and use that to send emails to us at all? Even if you don’t, that’s gone now…
Yup, links are updated, our “About Us” and “Contact Us” are now updated. You can send direct emails to us from a form on our site, or email us directly. If you are looking to do that just click go to the Contact Us page. There’s a link in this post and on the side so I’m not going to re-link one here…hopefully you’re not that lazy…
We do post a few time lapses here, maybe we should make a category for them. Thanks to Samuel Cockedey (and others I think) for making them and Pink Tentacle for posting ‘em up on their blog. Well, as with the other time lapses we have posted here, this one is mesmerizing. If you want to see some of Samuel Cockedey’s other work, including his time lapses, check out his website: samuelcockedey.com
Well, IndieOtaku has gotten a much needed update. The skin is updated a bit as you can see and some things have been placed a little differently to make them easier to notice. We’ve updated our ads to accommodate our upcoming ad program. Also you may notice the links are now images, which we are also happy about.
Well…now it’s on to ItBGames’ new website. The new ItBGames and MangaPage sites will be up at the same time.
Well, everyone welcome Christopher M Park to IndieOtaku.
Everybody say Hi Chris.
(Image Googled)
Chris is a Indie Game developer and Lead of Arcen Games (website here). You might know some of their games like AI War. Chris has now joined Jonathan and I as Blog Authors, so look forward to his posts to be up here too.
Glen "ThaBonadingus" Reece Posted in News, Odd Stuff
