Gameport
The Horror at MS Aurora – Press Release
4 weeks ago
by 12OClockStudios
in Gameport
At long last, it’s time for us to emerge out of our lair and show you what we’ve been up to all this time.
First up, we’re really proud to have signed a deal with the great people at Epic Games to license Unreal® Engine 3, and we’ll be using their technology for years to come. This is great news for us. We’re very comfortable with the tools and we can leverage a lot of power. Indeed, it packs a lot of punch! The tools encourage us to find our own style and enable us to experiment with our aesthetics quick and without fuzz.
Second piece of great news; we’ve got a trailer for The Horror at MS Aurora up on YouTube. See it with your own eyes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZzgOwYN81k
What’s the plan now? We still have a couple of weeks before Aurora is ready to set sail for PC and Mac. We’re stomping out some unwanted bugs in the cargo, polishing the deck, and making sure she’s as waterproof as, eh, maybe I should stop with the boat gags… Needless to say, we’re so close we can taste it!
We’re going to fill you in on more specific information, along with more visual and auditory terror during these last weeks.
Expect us to make noise.
// Calle Leppäjoki – Producer
Nimbus race!
So, a while back we were very surprised to learn that the mighty fine people over at SpeedRunsLive had been racing nimbus a bit over the last couple months or so. One thing lead to another and now we’re very excited to announce that we’re collaborating on a race event, taking place two weeks from now on the 23rd of march, where the winner will get to collaborate on designing a piece of content for Nimbus+!
SpeedRunsLive uses a really nifty irc-based system to set up races, hook up streams and what not, so in order to participate in the race in the first place you will need to connect to their irc server ( irc.speedrunslive.com ) and join the #nimbus channel. For more details about this, check out the FAQ on their site. It should cover most things you need to get your stuff up and running.
The prize will be a piece of content for our current project (Nimbus+) designed by the winner. The winner gets to chose between designing a level or designing a massive statue to be placed somewhere in the game. It’s possible to suggest something entirely different, but due to time constraints it is likely to not happen. Still worth a try though. Also be mindful of copyright infringement and obscene stuff, we want to avoid being chased by someones legal team or put a giant penis in the game!
Race rules:
- The race will be an Any% run
- The race starts by entering the Intro-level
- The race ends when you clear the Credits-level
- You are required to stream your race
- You are required clear your game progress before the race
When:
- March 23, 19:00 GMT / 2PM EST
Where:
- irc.speedrunslive.com
- #nimbus
If you don’t want lose your progress you can find your save file in …Steamuserdatayour user ID50000remoteleveldata.dat and copy it to another location before you clear it.
Also Due to a massive spam problem we’ve disabled the commenting on our site (that and a lot of other stuff will be fixed sooner or later) so if you have any questions about the race, ask away in the #nimbus channel on the srl irc. People there can fill you in and I usually lurk there as “Kval” as well.
I will update this post with further info if anything comes up.
Good luck!
Article source: http://noumenongames.com/?p=299
Engage & Play – Caspar Strandbygaard
Caspar Strandbygaard (Multiverse Aps., DK): Experiences from the trenches: How to bring players to your online game (almost) without a marketing budget!
I attended the Engage and Play conference in Copenhagen and was very pleased with all the lectures and have tried to capture the essence of each one and will publish them here one by one as soon as I find time to transform my cryptic notes into actual text!
Casper and his team is building the game Kogama, a block game were you not just alter the gameworld but also the rules that define the gameplay.
He talked about how you can market your game to attract more players and started out by busting a myth, the myth that marketing should be easy, that’s not even plausible.
If you’re about to embark on the quest of DIY marketing you should know that you will need money, a budget is required. To do marketing is a full time job that is really challenging but it works!
User acquisition is an action that requires three steps, Acquisition -> Retention -> Monetization (or Get ‘em, keep ’em, rip ‘em). First you need to get your new players, then keep them and at last make them pay. In all these steps you should always measure EVERYTHING. Measure what methods gives you the highest amount of paying customers to the lowest price, pretty basic if you think about it.
When you are about to set up Google adwords campaigns, talk to Google and make them help you with it.
Casper tried Facebook ads as well and it work on a small scale although he didn’t managed to get it to scale up, he said that the new sponsored posts on Facebook looked like they worked but he hadn’t tried them yet.
When you post things on Youtube, Twitter, Facebook you need to have great content and in some perspective the ultimate win is to have your marketing material go viral.
Another protip is that when you work with a marketing company, always make sure that there is a way for you to terminate the contract if they underperform.
Final words: Make a presskit – be ready for publicity!
Engage & Play – Nadja Bastawi
Nadja Bastawi (Two Pi, Germany): Two Pi Team
I attended the Engage and Play conference i
n Copenhagen and was very pleased with all the lectures and have tried to capture the essence of each one and will publish them here one by one as soon as I find time to transform my cryptic notes into actual text!
Nadja began with explaining why you need someone who manages your community. In the same manner no one could really answer the question why you needed a company facebook-page or twitter account a couple of years ago the answer is; “Everyone has it!”
You need someone who can protect your community from bad mood and make sure they feel comfortable wherever they discuss your product. You need someone who makes everyone feel noticed and make them feel that someone cares about their opinions and feelings about your product.
I think it was here somewhere that Nadja talked about turning obvious trolls into super valued fans. When you tackle a troll early and in the right way by showing that you care about what the troll feels (without feeding it) you can gain the trolls loyalty. (That part really felt like something out of a D&D mission)
Unlike marketing people who can spice up the truth about the game to make it catch your interest, community managers must tell the truth. Since they tell the truth to the players the players in return can be honest and tell the community manager what he/she really thinks about the game.
It’s very important to locate your key players that actually are so engaged in playing your games that they want to let you know about things they like / don’t like so that you can improve your product.
I know I’m missing some parts of this lecture about how you can’t disguise an ugly game like something beautiful because people aren’t stupid, and something about magical fairies sprinkling magic dust over your game and make it loved, some wizard references to the all mighty community manager that solves everything, a knight in shine armor and trolls burning flowers. Note to Nadja: Awesome art in the presentation but it might have stolen my focus from what you were saying ;).
Final words of wisdom: Create your community rules, enforce them and follow them yourself.
Engage & Play – Jonas Væver & Ali Emek
I attended the Engage and Play conference in Copenhagen and was very pleased with all the lectures and have tried to capture the essence of each one and will publish them here one by one as soon as I find time to transform my cryptic notes into actual text!
Jonas Væver & Ali Emek (Logic Artists, DK): Kickstarter > Money
Logic Artists are one out of two companies in Denmark that have had successful Kickstarter campaigns (Betadwarf being the other one), they started out with the most important question, a bald move, something that could have been a neat cliffhanger throughout the presentation… How could a Danish company set up a Kickstarter campaign? Don’t you need to have an American citizenship, own an American flag, sing the American national anthem each morning, and on top of that have access to an American bank account? I think I’ll use that as the cliffhanger of this post so promise me not to scroll down before you have read the whole post, promise!
Their game is Expeditions:Conquistador and here I will share some of their wisdom when it comes to crowd funding.
Content wise Ali and Jones says that the most important thing to show is that you know what you’re doing. If it’s a video game you seek funding for, why shouldn’t you have a playable demo that shows the backers that you in fact CAN make a game. If think that captures the essence of what they said about the content of your campaign.
Furthermore they said that the $15-$30 backers are the backbone of your campaign, this is the large mass that will bring in the most cash and what they really want is access to your game. Save physical rewards to higher tiers ($100+) and do your math! The production and shipment of physical goods is expensive and you set up the campaign to gain funding, not to sell t-shirts without profit.
They divided their backers into three categories, The three Fs (trademark Logic Artist), RPG Codex / RPG Watch, and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. More generally we can call them:
- The three Fs (Friends, Family and Fools)
- Hardcore fans
- Mainstream backers
To get people to notice your campaign, they highly recommend you to use a dedicated PR-agency. And the main thing is that a Kickstarter campaign can give you so much more than the money from the backers, it is a great way to build awareness of your game and your company, and to plants seeds that will harvest as fully grown fans. Your fans can even help you in production by providing Beta-tests and QA for free.
Jonas and Ali also said that due to the attention they got through the campaign traditional investors have expressed their interest in investing in upcoming projects from the studio.
How could they set up a Kickstarter campaign? They had a friend in the US that they trusted with all their money, as easy as that!
Engage & Play – Lau Korsgaard
I attended the Engage and Play conference in Copenhagen and was very pleased with all the lectures and have tried to capture the essence of each one and will publish them here one by one as soon as I find time to transform my cryptic notes into actual text!
Lau Korsgaard (KnapNok Games, DK): How drinking beers and hanging out with cool people makes you popular and sells your games (maybe?)
I was really bad at taking notes during Laus talk but I scribbled down some of the things I think he nailed perfectly!
His talk was a bit schizophrenic and he divided his slides into black and white, white were the happy indie slides where you can pay your rent indiecred and retweets and the black ones were the more bitter realistic ones.
Laus first move was to define indie as a scene, just a bunch of people that; talk about games, produce the games that people will talk about, buy the games that people are talking about, judging the games in competitions and throw parties to celebrate the games and their creators. There is an established indie scene worldwide but you can just as well start a new indiescene wherever whenever and include whomever, there is no indie authority that hands out indie licenses.
KnapNok specialize in making party games with high social interactions and don’t care very much about that a computer must decide if you play a game right or not. One of those games is B.U.T.T.O.N. – Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally Okey Now. B.U.T.T.O.N. is game that made a trip in the global indie scene and ended up on one of the biggest commercial platforms for PC, Steam. But how did it get there?
The game was produced, now people had to start talking about the game and buy the game, so given the indie scene formula the natural next step was to submit the game to competitions judged by high profile indie scene people. KnapNok first submitted the game to Gamma IV, then to IndieCade and then entered the dragons den of the global indie scene, the Independent Games Festival, all those competitions gave the game enough traction to eventually land on Steam.
The thing with the indie scene is that it consists of actual people that have an open dialogue, this is why personal recommendations are so important, if your friend tells you that you should try or buy a game you probably will. This is why your peers are so important for you.
A reflection during Laus lecture was “What is the goal, and what are the means?”, is the goal to drink beer with awesome people and the means to make awesome games or is the goal to make awesome games and the means to drink beer with awesome people? In either way Lau consider himself a winner!
The final words, Meet people, get drunk, share stuff!
Engage & Play – Catherine Warren
I attended the Engage and Play conference in Copenhagen and was very pleased with all the lectures and have tried to capture the essence of each one and will publish them here one by one as soon as I find time to transform my cryptic notes into actual text!
Catherine Warren (FanTrust, Canada): A Long Engagem
ent: Commit Early and Build Fans for Life
Catherines lecture was about fans and all the different kinds of fans that exist. Fans have become a huge part of game creation/movie productions etc. Fans even move towards investors when it comes to crowdfunding. Her statement that your fans and your community build your game is true in many cases, because what is your game if no one is around to play it?
On a bit of a side note she namedropped the value of some social media interactions, a twitter follow is worth $2, a retweet $5, a facebook like $8 and the most valuable thing is the epic facebook share with a value of a whopping $14!
I have a note about slim customer segments, I can’t remember what that was about exactly but I think it had to do with finding your niche, even something that is targeting 1% of the global gamer community can be a financial success if it’s done right, this is something Nathan Vella stressed during his talk at GDC 2012.
Some fans fall into the category of co-creators and I hope I got it right in my notes here, the Transformers, the Creators and the Catalysts. Transformers are people who make remixes of your original work and fan fiction etc. The Creators make podcast and youtube shows about your game and the Catalysts are the people who hang out in the comments sections and forums and give you feedback.
She also thinks that you should have a facebook page/twitter account for all your products ready in case the fans start finding your work. Related to that is to have a list of all your pages/accounts/forums/channels that you have a presence on.
Her final words PUT YOUR FANS FIRST!If you put out things on the internet people will be able to express their opinions and not everyone might love what you have done, in fact some people might hate it. Fans is something that you need to have a constant dialogue with especially when you get negative feedback, negative feedback should be handled in realtime because fans have strong feelings and opinions but they’re also very forgiving.
Engage & Play – Kellee Santiago
I attended the Engage and Play conference in Copenhagen and was very pleased with all the lectures and have tried to capture the essence of each one and will publish them here one by one as soon as I find time to transform my cryptic notes into actual text!
Kellee Santiago (IndieFund, US): PR: The Sixth Phase of Development
Kellee begins with defining PR (public relations) as things that generally are free, you travel around, meet people and talk to the press and Marketing as things that costs money, showing ads on site etc.
Tradeshows fall into both categories as you both have to pay to attend/exhibit but you also meet people.
Onbe thing she stresses as very important is to have an origin story, who are you and why do you do what you do. This is to have marketing coming from the inside, instead of flashing with “This is the product we are doing right now, it has 50 levels and machineguns!” you could take the approach of saying “We are huge fans of shooters and believe that everyone has that urge to blow things up every once in a while”. Everybody knows what you do, you do games, but what you should tell them is why you do it.
Apple is a great example of this kind of marketing with their statement “Think different”, they push lifestyle more than hardware.
An important thing when it comes to talking about your product is not to follow a template, do your own thing tell your own story and your games own story.
Kellee also talk about a products x-statement, a single sentence that describes your game. The x-statement could be something that you only use internally to make sure everyone on the team get the feel of the game or it could be used when you communicate what your game is about to others. As an example the x-statement for Journey was “We all walk the path, every journey is different”.
She also said that you can have x-statements for you as a person, for your company as well as for your game, kind of a way to stay true to yourself.
You could also break down your game into multiple x-statements depending on who you communicate with, three categories that you should have an x-statement in is Tech, Gameplay, Content.
Back to PR, tradeshows are great for meeting people and practice those x-statements. When you plan to attend a tradeshow it is important to schedule meetings early, her tip is to book meetings as early as two months before the tradeshow because peoples agendas fill up very fast.
When you talk to people you should always communicate a couple of things; What, When, Where, Who, How much. What is your game, When will it be released, Where will it be released, Who are the people behind the game and finally how much will it cost. This information should also be easy to access through your website.
When you meet all this journalists start from the beginning to put together a press contact list so that you can reach people you’ve met easily.
And the final word of wisdom MAKE AN AWESOME GAME!
Aurora On Her Way
6 months ago
by 12OClockStudios
in Gameport
It’s been a very long time since MS Aurora weighed anchor from Bergen, Norway (and, simultaneously, from Karlshamn, Sweden). We here at 12 O’clock Studios have worked long and hard on the game, overcoming obstacles and finding new ways to solve issues that have cropped up (because they always do).
This is just a small update to inform you that the ship is still sailing. We are still working just as hard and the only reason why we haven’t shown you anything substantial yet is because we want to wait just a little bit longer until we’re ready. It’s all about showing you the best we have, and we are so very close to that goal now that we can almost taste it. Soon enough you will be able to see what we’ve been working on.
This update is also our way of telling you that we will be posting more information very, very soon. We have many interesting tidbits of information to share with you and it’s all very exciting, but for various reasons we can’t actually talk about any of it yet.
So, hang on! We’re still on our way, and so is MS Aurora.
Heading for certain trouble… but in a good way!
Article source: http://twelveoclockstudios.com/2012/11/16/aurora-on-her-way/
Das Hungerspiel iOS and more
7 months ago
by Coastalbyte
in Gameport
Das Hungerspiel is now available on iOS. You can get it here for $1.
We have also released a free version of the game on Google Play which can be downloaded here. We have also patched the game so you can select how long a round should be. The update and free version will also be available on iOS in about a week.
Article source: http://www.coastalbyte.com/wordpress/?p=884
