Let's Play My Own Game

For awhile now, I have become fascinated with the whole "Let's Play" phenomenon on YouTube.  For the uninitiated,, here's the gist: someone plays a game and records themselves doing it.  While they play the game, they give a running commentary on what they see and do.

When I first came across one of these videos, I couldn't believe it was for real.  But yes.  Apparently it is, indeed, a "thing."  There's thousands of them.  There are even several Let's Plays of my own games out there (and a special shout out must go to Resulka, who I think has Let's Played my entire catalog), which pleases me to no end.

Eventually it got into my head to try doing a Let's Play of my own, but instead of playing any random game I decided to play a game that I developed myself.

I chose Emerald City Confidential because, of all my games, I probably have the most to say about it.  It has an interesting genesis.  PlayFirst (a casual game developer) approached me (a old school point-and-click developer) to make a game for them.  Their goal?  To make a point-and-click style game for the casual audience.  We came from two totally different mindsets, and the road to finishing this game was an interesting one to say the least. 

Anyway, here's the first episode. In this first episode, we learn how to pick up and use a crowbar, why dialog options can be intimidating, and the story behind the quest gems.

(If the video is too small, click the "YouTube" button on the lower right to zap yourself to YouTube")

Please let me know in the comments if you find these interesting! I'll probably do more.

-Dave

Placeholder art: The big reveal!

Wow.  Has it been almost a year since I posted this placeholder art image from Blackwell Deception?

 

How awful of me to leave you hanging for so long.  You all must have been tearing your hair out trying to figure out what it was.  This could be a wedge of cheese, or a network of tunnels, or a box of bagels, or even...

A knotty pine wall! Can't you feel the excitement and pulse-pounding gameplay leaping off the image? Aren't you PSYCHED?  I know I am.

On another note, remember when I said on this blog that the game would come out in April?  Ha ha ho.  This is why I don't officially announce release dates anymore.  But, the game is almost finished and I can safely say that the game is coming very, very soon.  On September 14th, we will be making our official announcement, with a PR campaign and trailer and website and everything.  So set your calendars.

-Dave

Your game sucks! (and how to respond)

So did you hear about Duke Nukem Forever?  After twelve years of development hell, it finally arrived on store shelves to the fanfare of almost universally negative reviews.  And how did the PR firm behind the game spin this development?  By throwing a childish, angry hissy-fit.  Suffice to say, this was bad news for PR firm Redner Group, who was dropped like a hot potato by game publisher 2K Games.

It was a facepalm moment, but one that made me think about all the times I've been tempted to do the very same thing.  This might be shocking to hear, but there are people out there who don't like my games and will eagerly declare their feelings on reviews and public forums.  The desire to leap into the fray and defend your work is great, but is it a good thing to do so?  Well, it depends.

Keep your dignity

As an indie game developer, the best weapon in your arsenal is your reputation.  If you get the reputation of being a prima donna who can't take criticism, then you will never be taken seriously.  So if there's a nasty message on an internet forum (or negative review about your game) and you wonder if you should respond, think carefully about how it will effect your reputation.  Remember, once it's out there, you can't take it back. You don't want to be this guy.

You won't change their mind

Seriously.  Don't even try.  I know it's tempting.  Maybe they are playing it wrong, or they are approaching it with the wrong mindset, or they just don't "get it."  It doesn't matter.  Nobody likes being told what to do or what to think, and your customers are no exception.  Don't believe me?  Try debating politics sometime.  No matter how logical your response, no matter how well thought-out and persuasive you might be, it is not going to matter.  You're not going to make a person "see the light" and magically love your game.  It just won't happen.  If anything, it will just cement their belief further and make you look defensive and insecure.  And on a public forum, that is magnified tenfold.  So don't do it.

Reply when it benefits you

Here's a hypothetical example.  A customer buys your game, installs it, and gets an error.  Pissed off, the customer goes to their favorite game forum and rants about how your game doesn't work.  They call your game cheap and you a rip-off artist.  You, the developer, see this post.  The customer's problem is a very common one and you know exactly how to fix it.  So what should you do?

This is the only situation where I'd advocate responding publicly.  There is no better opportunity to show potential customers that you can remain dignified under pressure and give great customer service at the same time.  Keep cool, respond politely, and explain how to fix the problem.  Congratulations, you've kept a customer, and probably made a few more to boot.

As for reviews, the only time I'd advocate responding is when they get something factual wrong.  For me, this usually happens when they spell my company name wrong! (it's spelled with a J, darn it)

Remember, it's the internet

People who are otherwise normal, functional adults will say hurtful and stupid things simply because they can.  Folks who enjoy something aren't as inclined to jump on the internet and rave about it as those who hate something.  Remember that you can't please everybody, and you'll be fine.

-Dave

P.S. I know I said I'd write more about demos in this post, but with the whole Duke Nukem thing happening I wanted to remain topical!  Next time.  Promise.

Game Demos and How I've gotten them wrong

So when developers get together to make a game, their first priority is usually to get a demo out.  After several games and several demos, I have come to my own conclusions about demos and how most of them get it wrong.  I can say this with certainty, because I've gotten it wrong many many times. 

For Blackwell Legacy, I didn't even consider creating a demo.  I just wanted to make a game, and surely the game would be so awesome that people were going to buy it sight unseen, yes?  Well, duh.  Of course not.  People wanted to try it before they bought it.  Perfectly understandable, but I was faced with a problem.  The draw of the game was the emerging relationship between Rosa and Joey, but Joey doesn't actually show up until you've played through a decent chunk of the game.  I could have started the demo there, but the events that followed wouldn't have made any sense. 

So, I hemmed and hawed and I patched together a demo that that was a heavily edited version of the first fourth of the game. It did the job, barely, but many people have told me that it doesn't sell the game terribly well.  I have to agree.  So from then on, I always planned my demos alongside the actual design of the game.  And for Blackwell Convergence, I thought I got it nailed.

From the Blackwell Convergence demo.

I had a brilliant idea.  I would start the game off with a stand-alone story - a ghost in an abandoned office that you had to save.  It had nothing to do with the rest of the game, but it would serve as an introduction to the Blackwell world for newcomers and a refresher for everybody else.  And the bonus?  I could break it off and release it for free as a demo.  Win-win.

But no.  I realize in retrospect that it was a mistake.  I'd forgotten the purpose of a demo, which is to encourage people to buy my game.  By releasing a demo with a stand alone story -  with a definite beginning, middle, and end - I utterly failed to leave you wanting more.  There was no reason for you to come back.  You had already left perfectly satisfied, and got it for free to boot.

So what's my plan for the Deception demo?  To leave you hanging as much as possible.  You're welcome, everybody.

-Dave

On headset microphones and my own damn stubbornness

I mentioned in my last post that, until recently, I have been using a headset mic to record all the voice acting for my games.

Rebecca Whittaker, as "Astrid" from Puzzle Bots.

It's always surprised me that I've gotten away with this setup as long as I have.  Back in the dark ages of 2006, when I was making The Shivah, I decided to give the voice acting thing a whirl.  I only had one problem - I knew nothing about audio or voice over production.  Not knowing any better, I downloaded a free audio recording program called Audacity, clipped a headset mic to the actors' heads, then handed them the script and let them go to town. I didn't even adjust the levels, which is obvious when you get to the scenes with Joe DeMarco.

When the game came out and reviews started popping up, there were ranging opinions about the voice actors but nobody seemed to notice or care that it wasn't recorded in a full-fledged studio.  So since the system seemed to work, I didn't bother fixing it and used the headset mic again in Blackwell Legacy.

Abe Goldfarb as "Joey" in Blackwell Legacy

As time went on, I learned a bit more about audio editing and voice directing in general - a common complaint was the constant breath pops, which I eventually I got the hang of removing - but the core method remained unchanged. I was still using a freeware audio program and a $20 headset mic from Radio Shack. 

A few games later and I got a publishing deal with PlayFirst for Emerald City Confidential.  Suddenly, I was flown out to San Francisco to direct voice actors in a real, high-end studio.  An audio engineer sat behind a complicated piece of equipment while the actor sat in a separate room behind sound-proof glass.  We'd press a button to speak to them directly and direct them as we needed.  It was all very slick.  The studio was bigger than my apartment and the cost of the whole thing was higher than the budget of all my games combined, but it was worth it.  For a week we recorded, and I admit - the sound quality was awesome. 

But there was a snag.  PlayFirst guidelines stated that the filesize of the game had to be under 80MB. The only way to do that?  Compress the VO files as far as they would go, and then compress them some more.  The end result of all that money and high-end equipment was VO footage that sounded like it was underwater. 

Suffice to say, this experience embittered me just a tad. After ECC wrapped up, I went back to Blackwell Convergence and back to my headset mic.  This setup - ghetto though it was - became a badge of pride.  Sure it was cheap, but I could create VO footage that sounded infinitely better than what ended up in ECC.  So I kept using it.  Blackwell Convergence used it, then Puzzle Bots, and most recently Gemini Rue.  The only ones who noticed were professional audio people who already have an ear for that kind of thing.  But most people? Nobody cared.

Then, finally, my headset mic decided enough was enough.  The sound quality became staticky and finally crapped out altogether.  I went to Radio Shack to buy another one, but they no longer carried the same brand in stock.  Deciding it was time to bite the bullet, I bought a Blue Yeti microphone at the recommendation of an audio buddy of mine who was extremely vocal in getting me to make the switch.

After spending some time figuring out how to put the thing together (and after being told that I had positioned the microphone the wrong way around), it was ready to go.  I scheduled Abe Goldfarb and Rebecca Whittaker (the actors behind Joey and Rosa) to come over.  After they were done, I had a listen.

And... well, it sounded good.  Damn good.  In fact, I'd go far as to say it was much better than the headset mic.  It sounded cleaner, fuller.  The actors also preferred standing up to deliver their lines into a microphone that wasn't an inch away from their mouths.  Plus, I could plug my headphones into the microphone itself and get a much clearer representation of what was being recorded.  I could listen more closely for breath pops and mouth clicks.  The quality of both the sound and the performances were much improved. Here, compare for yourself:

Joey from Convergence

Joey from the upcoming Deception

The difference is subtle, but it's definitely there.  Once the audio gets mastered, it will sound even better.  So... I guess I feel kinda silly.  It took me almost five years to make the switch to a "real" microphone.  But now I'm never going back.  I am extremely microphone proud.  VO wise, I think Blackwell Deception will have the highest quality of anything we've done.  I can't wait for you to hear the results.

Oh right, this is here.

Hello wayward web wanderers!

With all the twittering and facebooking I do, it's very easy to neglect this little chunk of cyberspace.  Here's what we've been up to in the last few months since I updated:

• Gemini Rue was released, and is still selling very well (at least 3x higher than was predicted in the last post).
• The next game in the Blackwell series (Deception) has hit alpha, and we're beta testing.
• We've also started recording the voiceovers for Deception.  Abe and Rebecca are back as Rosa and Joey.

Speaking of VO, I got a fancy new microphone!

Rebecca Whittaker voicing Rosa at the mic

For years I've been using a Radio Shack headset microphone, which has always done the job and - oddly enough - very few people noticed that it wasn't a professional setup.  But recently an audio buddy of mine recommended this Blue Yeti microphone and I finally made the plunge.  I have to say, I love the thing.  I'll write more about that - among other things! - soonish.

-Dave

Seeing the future - with charts!

Here is where I pretend to actually know what I am doing and look like a real businessman.

So you might have noticed that I announced a new game a few weeks ago.  It's called Gemini Rue and it's a neo-noir, sci-fi adventure game set in a dystopian future with lots of rain and gangsters and moody jazz music.  There's more to it than that, but you don't come to my blog for my marketing spiels.

(Or DO you?!  Hey, this *is* my blog, so I will just say that if you pre-order the game you'll get a nicely printed disc edition with DVD-style case and everything  It won't be available after the game launches, so be sure and nab it before February 24th.  There's a reason why I'm doing this, but that's a subject for another blog.)

Aaanyway.

This is the first game that I've thrown a lot of PR muscle behind, and it seems to be really working. As I wrote in an earlier post, I hired someone to do that for me because, well, I suck at it.  As a result, lots more gaming press than usual has picked up on the story.  So it's been quite exciting.  However, if I've learned anything it's that great press doesn't always translate into great sales, so I decided to take a look at my previous games and see how well Gemini Rue is measuring up.

Lots of indie devs are stat hounds, keeping track of every spike and valley of traffic.  I do have software in place that does that, but I never really studied it until now.  I decided to take some numbers and stack them up in certain ways and see if I could come to any interesting conclusions.  What I'm about to show you seems very logical and straightforward to me, although I'm sure you accounting types will probably laugh.

The bad news is that I no longer have the original sales information for Shivah and Blackwell Legacy.  I sold those games through a small service back in 2006 which went bust, taking all my sales information with it.  I now use a mainstream service called Plimus which everybody uses and doesn't seem to be going anywhere.  So I had all the information for Unbound, Convergence and Puzzle Bots.  I would have preferred to take data from all my games, but it was good enough.

Anyway, what I wanted to do was track how well each game did at specific points in the sales cycle.  Each game had a pre-order period before they launched, so checking the stats for both pre-order and launch seemed like good places to start.  Some games have been out much longer than others, so I figured the first month of sales for each was a good sample to take.

I divided up the sales cycles up like this:

1 day of pre-order
1 week of pre-order
Day before release
1 day after launch
1 week after launch
1 month after launch

I plugged in the numbers for the three games and I came up with this graph.  I am not comfortable with giving exact sales numbers so I removed those, but I see no problem with showing how the games sold when compared to each other:

Looking at this graph was an interesting trip down memory lane.  Unbound undoubtedly did the worst in its first month, but I was very green at the time with only one other game to my credit.  I barely did any marketing or PR at all and that obviously shows in this graph.  Puzzle Bots had very strong pre-order sales, but tapered off quickly after launch day.  Convergence is the most interesting, as it had very weak pre-order sales but then shot up like a rocket once it launched. 

What might account for Puzzle Bots' strong pre-order sales is that it had a very strong pre-order incentive - a limited-edition CD-ROM that you could only buy during the pre-order period.  Convergence didn't have that.  Convergence didn't have any pre-order incentives at all, which might account for the pre-order sales being kinda weak.

Anyway, I had three games worth of data over various points so I averaged them all out.  Then I calculated the average percentage increase of sales from one point to the next.   So based on the "Day 1" and "Week 1" pre-order sales figures of Gemini Rue, I was able to plug them into the graph and come up with this projection:

So, hey!  Check out that purple line.  Not bad. Using the sales figures of my previous games, I was able to create a reasonable projection of how I think Gemini Rue will perform, and it's looking pretty good. Of course, this is all theoretical and could end up being completely wrong, but it's a nice barometer.  Once the game has been out for a month, I'll be able to say for sure whether it sold above or below expectations. 

-Dave