Fledgling Videogame Developer

We got couple of weeks ago new idea: We ordered a few t-shirts with our own designs from one large European print-by-demand service, and started thinking if we could also sell clothes with our own designs for larger audience. We thought that by buying products, our fans (I guess we have some?) could support our operations and at the same time these unique products would act as advertisements for our games. After familiarization to the topic we came to the conclusion that it is worth at least trying it. The risk is quite small because there is no own warehouse and the on-demand vendor takes care of all practical matters (orders, payments, printing, logistics, etc.). It took me approx one evening to set up the account for WestSloth Games, create some initial designs (Flamingos, mostly), and then decide the appearance of the online shop. After that we were ready to go and now we have Fan Product shops up and running world-wide. One shop in EU and one shop at US. Links to both...

The original logo of WestSloth Games was created by me for several years ago. Basically, it was a hanging sloth that was built using voxels. I guess MagicaVoxel was the tool used to create it. In the beginning logo looked pretty ok. But over time it started to look confusing and not so good anymore. So there was a clear need to draw a new logo. But what kind of a logo is good one? Some views can be found for example from this  article concerning logo design : " A good logo is distinctive, appropriate, practical, graphic and simple in form, and it conveys the owner’s intended message.   " So yes, logo must be at least appropriate, practical and simple. Those were the words I thought I understood.  Additionally, there was also a short list of characteristics of good logo: 1. Simple 2. Memorable 3. Timeless 4. Versatile 5. Appropriate So, I tried to follow these guidelines and started drawing with Inkscape. After 30 minutes of fiddling logo looked like this: ...

Since there has not been too many downloads for " Del Gibbon's Mad Maths " for Android, I started to investigate if there is something to improve app visibility at Play Store. To begin with something, I decided to get familiar with App Store Optimization (ASO). That is a process to improve app visibility at app store in a similar way than SEO for webpages. This was just to see if that helps at all in this case. In reality it might be that no one wants to play this game, but at least I have to try. :) After taking a short ASO training from Udemy course selection, I used a keyword tool (whose name I will not mention here) to find out primary keyword for my app. This keyword is now used as my app title at Google Play. Also, I tried to tune app description using the secondary keywords to maximize visibility. I am not too sure how I succeeded, but I guess the result can be seen during next weeks (or months). Who knows. My plan is to report the result of this ASO trial...

Today I decided to create an introduction video for Westsloth Games Youtube channel   (or rather, I practiced to do some kind of a marketing video). The work was done using the proven quick&dirty method, meaning that I dug out some old gameplay videos and screenshots of our previously published games, and edited the video using the Kdenlive software.  Resulting video can be found below: There is a feature called "Fan Finder" ("Fanimagneetti", in Finnish) available at Youtube. It enables you to display your video as a trueview ad for no extra cost. I added the video above to this service, so let's see how this works...I don't have any big expectations at this point.  -Jussi.

"No matter what you publish, as long as you publish something" . I have tried this strategy for a while when learning game development and released several flash games (or equivalent) without much self-criticism.  There are many hobby game developers who start a project, work passionately on it for some time, and finally dump it to the trashcan or leave to the drawer to wait for better times. And this is repeated over and over again, for every game project. Basically, there is nothing wrong with this approach: sometimes project has to be terminated for some reason. And there is always something to learn from each project, even if it was left unfinished and never shown to anyone else.  For most game developers the funniest and most interesting parts are concept creation and actual development of the game. Who would not like creating game assets and mechanics, or sketching characters and new worlds? Bug-hunting, game polishing and balancing are also tolerable tasks for most...

Since we are beginners in the field of game development, we have been learning game creation process, tools and production the hard way. During the process, we have noticed that making any game to the public distribution requires quite much: mechanics should be well planned and implemented, gameplay should be optimized, and game itself must be fun. Also, you should not forget the importance of visual appearance. To get all of this to one package requires lot of time and effort, but it is certainly possible and, ultimately, rewarding. But even if your upcoming game would be the first-class product, there is still one tricky question left: How you are going to get players to your glorious game? Do you just put the game to the distribution and then wait for success? I would guess this method works only for the very few games (or alternatively you are a famous game industry veteran with solid fan base). In most cases, getting large number of players for a game will require advertisin...

It's been months since my latest post to this blog, even though I have done something related to game development too. My day job related to semiconductors keeps me busy at daytime (and sometimes evenings also). I have got new responsibilities and at the moment I am very happy to my job. However, I started semi-seriously game development activities with my brother about 5 months ago. Our target was to learn how to develop and publish games, and even make some money besides that. To date, we have published seven small and simple flash games via Mochimedia ( edit: Mochimedia does not exist anymore ).  I can honestly tell you that only 2-3 of our games meet the characteristics of proper game. Rest of them are more or less stupid demos, but almost all of them work as originally planned. Every game has been better than the previous one, both from technical and visual point of view.  There has been thousands of players for our games, but still the ad revenue from Mochimed...