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Butts Level Designer?
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Aug 14, 2014 22:55
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Butts director. I like it!
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Aug 14, 2014 23:30
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I feel like I've been transported back to 2005 in Barrens Chat.
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Aug 14, 2014 23:53
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So the game I am a Space Butt Designer on was released for iOS and Android today. http://spelltorn.com/ We're in that "Well now that it's out we just gotta get hundreds of thousands of players to play it" phase, so... this oughta be fun. Regardless, it was a long development process and it's not over yet as hopefully this gets enough of a following for us to continue releasing content for it. I'm just taking the day or so off in celebration, sharing it everywhere that I personally can, and will probably start seriously thinking about getting it in front of as many faces as possible come Monday. Does anyone have any advice?
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Aug 15, 2014 00:22
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QA Butt Tester.
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Aug 15, 2014 00:51
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Superrodan posted:So the game I am a Space Butt Designer on was released for iOS and Android today. I looked at your website and the landing pages in both app stores and I have no idea what the game is. The screenshots don't give me much idea and the trailer had even less actual gameplay. Making that clear could help. That all being said, I'll continue to be the non-indie industry guy that I am or whatever and say: marketing. Buy people. If you need a critical mass of players to make your game successful, you either have to get them yourself ($$ on ads) or you need someone to get them for you (publishing). Both are viable on mobile and mostly depend on how much money or existing players you have lying around. Press and all that is nice but getting into the top free chart is key to getting a ton of installs, and it takes either a lot of ads or a perfect storm of luck and word of mouth to get there. If the development process was shorter/cheaper than you're making it sound then you don't need all that and can get away with other methods, but if you actually do need a hundred thousand people to play your game to make it work, I don't think there are many alternatives to user acquisition.
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Aug 15, 2014 00:56
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Superrodan posted:Does anyone have any advice? Super frank answer: "Is your LTV > CPI? If so, spend money! If not, fix it so it is and THEN spend money." That's every F2P learning boiled down into one pithy and VERY difficult piece of advice. This is a massive topic, but if you've already released in the US without a marketing/UA plan for a F2P game, you're going to have a very large hill to climb (it's not an impossible one, just a very hard one). Do you have your key metrics implemented (so you can see when people are churning out, retention, revenue, install tracking, and so on)? That's your first hurdle! Then you need people to stick around (retention). THEN you can worry about getting them to pay you. THEN you can figure out how to spend money to acquire more of them.
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Aug 15, 2014 02:04
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Butt Partner. Alternatively, Managing Butt.
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Aug 15, 2014 03:19
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Leif. posted:Butt Partner. For when you need a crack legal team.
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Aug 15, 2014 03:23
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Mega Shark posted:I feel like I've been transported back to 2005 in Barrens Chat. I bet Chuck Norris would beat all the other Space Programmers. chuck norris jokes and barrens chat are inexorably twined in my brain theflyingorc fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 03:30
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devilmouse posted:Super frank answer: "Is your LTV > CPI? If so, spend money! If not, fix it so it is and THEN spend money." That's every F2P learning boiled down into one pithy and VERY difficult piece of advice. This is a massive topic, but if you've already released in the US without a marketing/UA plan for a F2P game, you're going to have a very large hill to climb (it's not an impossible one, just a very hard one). After a soft launch in a few countries that did not go very well we sort of stepped back and realized some things weren't working and that there were flaws in retention. After a big revision to our onboarding process and a second soft launch in a few other countries we felt those issues were fixed hence the decision to go worldwide. We have a LOT of metrics and trackers and APIs and all that jazz (One thing we did right from the start so we had a good idea of our problem areas), and I'm confident that my bosses have the business plan down when it comes to spending money to make money. Honestly, I am looking to see if there are any things that I can do to help boost the number of hands it gets into. I personally spent a long time getting to this moment and am really close to the project. We're not a huge company by any means so I tend to wear a lot of hats and I guess I'm just looking for a hat to wear at the moment that helps me get people to play what I made. I thought about approaching reddit or trying to seek out review sites, or do anything else. Hell, posting it in the iOS thread would be a few more views than I had otherwise. I think it's just a case of "The game is out now how can I help make the numbers go up" because I don't want to feel like I didn't do everything I should have done. I watched Indie Game: The Movie for the first time last night and the thing that resonated with me the most was when one of the devs behind Super Meat Boy said something along the lines of "I don't want to check the numbers because if I check the numbers then I'll keep refreshing the numbers every few minutes". I guess I'm at that point. As for the advice from Zeryn about the trailer... We do also have a gameplay trailer that I put together... I made it rather than the professional guy we hired to do the game intro (which is the work we have on the site) so it's not as flashy. If it works better I can probably get the one on the website switched out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpngby33LQ8
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Aug 15, 2014 03:51
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Mega Shark posted:I feel like I've been transported back to 2005 in Barrens Chat. You're only just now realizing you never left. 
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Aug 15, 2014 05:25
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Superrodan posted:I think it's just a case of "The game is out now how can I help make the numbers go up" because I don't want to feel like I didn't do everything I should have done. I watched Indie Game: The Movie for the first time last night and the thing that resonated with me the most was when one of the devs behind Super Meat Boy said something along the lines of "I don't want to check the numbers because if I check the numbers then I'll keep refreshing the numbers every few minutes". I guess I'm at that point. On mobile, for F2P? Effectively none of your target market will ever go near a forum. They don't read Touch Arcade. They barely know what reddit is. They go to YouTube exclusively for cat videos. They are not gamers in any traditional sense, and thinking of your customers as reachable as gamers is immediately damaging - if you try and optimize your acquisition processes to the sort of people you talk to here or anywhere else, you will lose. What devilmouse said earlier is it. Is your LTV > CPI? Then you buy installs. You buy advertising. For F2P mobile games, that's your strategy, period, full stop. Good reviews on TouchArcade matters a lot, but only because that's how you get an Apple featuring. So now your goal is: buy customers, glad-hand your way to an Apple contact and get in close with them for consistent featuring (ditto for GooglePlay, don't bother for the other markets). Nothing else is really going to matter for you.
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Aug 15, 2014 05:40
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Shalinor posted:You're in mobile F2P. Sorry to say, but none of that matters now. When you're in Premium space on desktop, all that stuff you see in Indie Game: The Movie applies, because of all the ways you have to access your customers, and the relationship gamers have with devs there. It works. I appreciate the honesty and advice. Like I said, my bosses have plans for how to spend the advertising money and such. I guess all I can do is sit back and wait.
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Aug 15, 2014 06:21
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Superrodan posted:I appreciate the honesty and advice. Like I said, my bosses have plans for how to spend the advertising money and such. I guess all I can do is sit back and wait. I'm dubious of your leadership's decisions to relaunch in new territories since that generally has a tendency to skew numbers one way or the other (depending on where you're going/what numbers) instead of just buying more users in the original territory to see how the updates changed things. On the upside, there have definitely been a few notable games that have "ground it out" and very slowly built up a user base after release over the course of months to years, and finally became successful. It's a long slog (that we're in the middle of at this very moment ourselves-- but we're happily staying in AU for a while.) most of the time, it's terrifying, but it's also super fun and gratifying. As for what you can do personally to push your numbers in the short term? Assuming you're small enough that you're the marketing department, you could be "optimizing your creatives" (barf) with your art team to get your CPIs to a good place, looking at your App Store Optimization (double barf), or starting to plan your roadmap now that you're released and figure out fixes/features to goose whatever your weakest metrics are.
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Aug 15, 2014 11:09
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waffledoodle posted:For when you need a crack legal team.  Somethin' about this post tickles me. edit - Didn't you work on an old Ratchet and Clank game  vvvvvvvv
Sion fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Aug 15, 2014 |
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Aug 15, 2014 11:38
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Butt Quest Designer. I work on a game with enough nudity that actually, yeah, some of my quests could be called "butt quests".
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Aug 15, 2014 13:37
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Being a Butt Junior Designer is even less glamorous than it sounds.
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Aug 16, 2014 00:52
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I feel like butts gotta go in the middle - Lead Butt Developer sounds like I'm working on some seriously next-gen beach volleyball tech.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:02
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Lieutenant Dan posted:Being a Butt Junior Designer is even less glamorous than it sounds. Junior Butt Designer.
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Aug 16, 2014 01:21
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I left the games industry close to a year ago. I wondered if I'd regret the choice after my romance period wore off. A year later, no longer jaded or burnt out, I know the answer: I can't believe I stayed in the industry for so long. I worked at what's considered a pretty good games company, but now that I work with professionals, tripled my income, and work reasonable hours... ... well, I have a huge amount of respect for the folks that are still doing it every day. I'm sure there were better companies than mine, but I have no idea how your grizzled veterans find the endurance to keep working in such a lovely industry. 12 Twelve Twelved fucked around with this message at 08:14 on Aug 16, 2014 |
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Aug 16, 2014 07:43
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I work with professionals, have a decent income, and work reasonable hours... Sorry you had such a junk experience. It's definitely not for everybody.
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Aug 16, 2014 07:53
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12 are you a programmer? As an artist I'm not sure what else I'd do!
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Aug 16, 2014 08:29
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I was a Producer in AAA for about 5 years, so thankfully I could pack up my skills and use them somewhere else. As an artist once you're in it's gotta be extra tough getting out.
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Aug 16, 2014 09:07
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concerned mom posted:12 are you a programmer? As an artist I'm not sure what else I'd do! As an environment artist, this actually terrifies me a little bit. I love working in this industry and my current job role, but I worry about the sustainability of it as a career. It's hard to picture myself still doing this at sixty five. My skills don't exactly transfer into anything outside of the industry though, so I'm kind of stuck.
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Aug 16, 2014 09:14
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Kitten Kisses posted:As an environment artist, this actually terrifies me a little bit. I love working in this industry and my current job role, but I worry about the sustainability of it as a career. It's hard to picture myself still doing this at sixty five. My skills don't exactly transfer into anything outside of the industry though, so I'm kind of stuck. My game plan has always been hit 50 or so, become a lecturer, hopefully that'll still be viable!
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Aug 16, 2014 09:15
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Kitten Kisses posted:As an environment artist, this actually terrifies me a little bit. I love working in this industry and my current job role, but I worry about the sustainability of it as a career. It's hard to picture myself still doing this at sixty five. My skills don't exactly transfer into anything outside of the industry though, so I'm kind of stuck. That's one of the reasons I got out. Even if I found a good games company, I'm not sure I could have a family and enough time + money to support them as I got older. At 30? Sure. At 40? 50? There are easier ways to make a living.
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Aug 16, 2014 09:23
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That's one of the many reasons why I balk whenever someone pushes me towards specialization. As an artist, I'm interested in creating visual stories and experiences, and this can be done in many mediums. As far as art goes, I see games as a medium. Graphic design is another medium. Drawing, painting, comics, film are all other mediums that I'm interested in, and I try to cultivate base skills that are applicable to as wide a range of different visual mediums as possible. Things like color, light, composition, appeal, communication of ideas and storytelling are all higher-level concepts that are applicable every where. From this point of view, technical knowledge like proper uv layout, texel densities or draw calls equate to proper ways to use the medium, the same way that holding the paintbrush correctly and mixing pigments are things you should know when working with paint. I try to maintain a decent knowledge of a few different mediums and all that work helps develop those higher-level skills that apply to ALL visual fields. I also try to keep up a couple different portfolios that feed into different fields: Games: http://www.worthdayley.com Art and Design: http://design.mutatedjellyfish.net After all, looking at emerging tech like 3d scanning and photogrammetry and material scanning and hdr/pbr rendering, is it really that smart of me to assume that 3d modeling will even be a thing in 10 years? "Inbetweener" was a position that existed at Disney for 80 years until Pixar changed everything and that job literally disappeared over the course of 6 months or so... I remember when sculpting was a thing fine artists did and then suddenly Zbrush... etc. How long until tasks that take up 80% of my day-to-day work are just automated? Games are my passion right now because I like making them and I love folding in gameplay and game design on top of my work, but I just look at it like I'm an artist FIRST and everything else comes after that. mutata fucked around with this message at 09:50 on Aug 16, 2014 |
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Aug 16, 2014 09:47
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I agree with everything you said Mutata. I was a world builder/environment artist for a long time, But when I went back to a studio I purposefully chose a small studio so I could do evironments, characters, illustrations, UI, etc. and not be stuck in a single role that might not always be around. And now I pretty much spend my spare time doing 2d art only because not only does it help my 3d art, but it widens my options. I know a few industry friends whose sole job is working as an architect setting up gameplay mechanics inside their studios in-house software that is completely unique to any other industry standard. If that job ever goes away it's going to be difficult landing somewhere else with such specialization to one specific in-house software. Don't get stuck in that trap.
SGT. Squeaks fucked around with this message at 14:21 on Aug 16, 2014 |
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Aug 16, 2014 14:17
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12 Twelve Twelved posted:I left the games industry close to a year ago. I wondered if I'd regret the choice after my romance period wore off. A year later, no longer jaded or burnt out, I know the answer: I can't believe I stayed in the industry for so long. I worked at what's considered a pretty good games company, but now that I work with professionals, tripled my income, and work reasonable hours... If you literally tripled your salary, you were being exploited by the company you worked for. Games pays less, but not that much!
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Aug 16, 2014 15:05
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Interesting blog post today about a team swapping from Unity to Unreal. Kind of mimics my experiences and desires http://martiancraft.com/blog/2014/08/an-unreal-decision/
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Aug 16, 2014 15:37
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Hughlander posted:Interesting blog post today about a team swapping from Unity to Unreal. Kind of mimics my experiences and desires http://martiancraft.com/blog/2014/08/an-unreal-decision/ Yeah, we are currently evaluating both Unreal and Unity for our game's engine, and this article is reflecting a lot of my personal experience and what you guys have told me here. As an aside, regarding the mobile market conversation earlier, what does it mean to "buy users" in that context?
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Aug 16, 2014 16:49
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Brackhar posted:Yeah, we are currently evaluating both Unreal and Unity for our game's engine, and this article is reflecting a lot of my personal experience and what you guys have told me here. Can you link that previous conversation? User acquisition and retention is a little bit of a ~passion~ of mine. edit - oh, wow it was right there in the middle of the butt chat. Right. In that context I've heard people refer to 'buying users' to mean you pay for a certain level of exposure and expect a certain level of user return on that. If you donate a grand to a website to have your title put in their editors choice bucket for a week, you can expect to have a number of people download your app. If you have concrete numbers on that you can more or less buy users based on time in editors choice for a certain amount of return on investment. This stuff is really reliant on having a good bounce rate on your app and having a good monetisation rate to make it worth your while I've found. Sion fucked around with this message at 17:12 on Aug 16, 2014 |
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Aug 16, 2014 17:03
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mutata posted:That's one of the many reasons why I balk whenever someone pushes me towards specialization. As an artist, I'm interested in creating visual stories and experiences, and this can be done in many mediums. As far as art goes, I see games as a medium. Graphic design is another medium. Drawing, painting, comics, film are all other mediums that I'm interested in, and I try to cultivate base skills that are applicable to as wide a range of different visual mediums as possible. Things like color, light, composition, appeal, communication of ideas and storytelling are all higher-level concepts that are applicable every where. This is a good post. That line of thinking is roughly what led me to major in art rather than a technical field, even though it was basically an even split. Passion for art, but also knowledge that what I'd be learning could be applied to everything, and the core skillset wouldn't become obsolete. I do sometimes feel like I'm in "jack of all trades" territory from eclectic jobs and hobbies, but almost everything creative cross-pollinates, and I guess it's better to think in terms of being adaptable and going through phases of specialization.
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Aug 16, 2014 17:05
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Brackhar posted:As an aside, regarding the mobile market conversation earlier, what does it mean to "buy users" in that context? As far as I know, charting is more complex than that - I think Apple keeps changing those equations - but the big F2P players all know the game, and know what they need to do to peg a game anywhere in the charts they care to. Backflip, for instance, can peg a new release precisely into slot 100 in the top 100 lists and hold it there for as long as it likes. It does that for every one of its new releases, and artificially holds it there for about a week, to see if it has traction. Then it lets it go, and it plummets or whatever on its own. EDIT: (as far as I know, it boils down down to "ramp ad dollars up, ramp them down as target approaches desired ranking, ramp ad push down to just the level required to sustain") Shalinor fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Aug 16, 2014 |
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Aug 16, 2014 17:26
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Brackhar posted:Yeah, we are currently evaluating both Unreal and Unity for our game's engine, and this article is reflecting a lot of my personal experience and what you guys have told me here. ^^^ Shalinor's got it better and uses more of the for-real terms. I guess it's a good sign for myself that I'm forgetting these terms now that I've been out of the mobile games industry for a year. Mobile advertising and development has hit the point where they have a strong idea of how many dollars spent on advertising and other forms of user acquisition = new users. A more recent trend in the last year has evolved that to "quality users" (this isn't the official industry term, I forgot what it is because I've been out of mobile development a while), which each studio defines differently but is generally the type of user who plays for at least few hours. With how much data collection exists nowadays, a lot of game companies even have data for tracking user acquisition to see how much it costs to acquire a user who spends above a certain amount a month. The analytics guys on a given team are going to be pretty much spending their time doing that: adjusting gameplay elements to reduce friction on user acquisition and retention balanced against making deals and finding newer, less expensive user acquisition services. Eventually they hit a point where they can acquire high value users for less than those users will spend. I think this is one of the reasons why people kind of went cold on certain services like Tapjoy (Apple getting upset at the service didn't help). Their pricing model didn't keep up with what developers wanted, I think they were charging just a rate per-user acquired, but developers were wanting (and finding new services) that was charging per "quality" user. Maybe it's "engaged" user? Tapjoy also didn't adjust their costs as users began to min-max the service, and for a while it quickly became a larger and larger source of players who would just install the app, open it, and immediately close it, so they could get their Tapjoy coins. This meant actual meaningful user acqusition costs were going up instead of down.
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Aug 16, 2014 17:30
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For unintended consequences, a lot of those install for coins would also low rate an app if prompted. So not only did you pay for an install that spent no money, but it also lowered your position on the charts. In general though regardless of anything else if ARPU > CPI then you are making money and it's just a matter of keeping that CPI low and the ARPU as high as possible.
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Aug 16, 2014 21:29
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SGT. Squeaks posted:I agree with everything you said Mutata. I was a world builder/environment artist for a long time, But when I went back to a studio I purposefully chose a small studio so I could do evironments, characters, illustrations, UI, etc. and not be stuck in a single role that might not always be around. And now I pretty much spend my spare time doing 2d art only because not only does it help my 3d art, but it widens my options. I know a few industry friends whose sole job is working as an architect setting up gameplay mechanics inside their studios in-house software that is completely unique to any other industry standard. If that job ever goes away it's going to be difficult landing somewhere else with such specialization to one specific in-house software. Don't get stuck in that trap. Learning 3d and working in 3d helped my 2d art immensely as well. It helps me visualize what I want to draw/paint. I think about painting similarly to render passes now(local color, material, texture, lighting, etc). Using multiple mediums really strengthens your knowledge of those fundamentals and makes you think about them in different ways. I think every 2d artist should do some 3d work whether it's digital or sculpture or whatever.
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Aug 17, 2014 19:54
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I don't like to hear "Learn X before Y" for that reason specifically. You should learn as many mediums as you can, but what is most important is the foundations for each one, and they all compliment each other whether it's 2D or 3D. You should learn the foundations of form, anatomy, volume, gravity, proportion, etc in whatever medium you like. As long as you practice them, and not procrastinate learning them, you'll be on the right track whether you decide to do 2D or 3D.
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Aug 17, 2014 20:53
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| # ? May 29, 2024 11:19 |
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This article showed up on my news feed today and I thought you guys would find it interesting: http://www.puppygames.net/blog/?p=1574 Summary: Because of the spread of sales and bundles, individual customers are worthless.
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Aug 18, 2014 18:57
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