today I want to write about a more technical / marketing topic. I recently started to make a plan for marketing my games Timbertales and FlatFatCat. One of the first steps included in this plan was to message YouTubers, which actually covered similar games to mine.
First Steps
My first approach was quite simple: I thought about a fitting search term and searched on YouTube. On the results page I just clicked through the channels and gathered the most relevant informations: Name, Subscriber number, Link to channel and Email address if provided. After filling my excel sheet and having round about 40 entries I thought “Man this is kind a exhausting and there must be a better method”.
Using the YouTube Data API
After googling for some better methods I came across the YouTube Data API. Luckily I already have some projects, which could be used for the YouTube Data API. So I registered Timbertales for the API. I was able to find a library for NodeJs written and maintained by google itself called “googleapis“. So with a small setup I am now able to send requests to the YouTube API and gather the required data. Unfortunately I wasn’t yet able to fetch the email address out of the channel details and I am not even sure if it is possible at all. If someone knows more about it I would appreciate your comment a lot! Nevertheless even with taking care of the email address manually I am much faster now in gathering relevant YouTubers than ever before. I can just search for a specific game and my script will fill a file with all relevant informations. After that I just gather the email address, if provided, manually.
I hope I could give you a small insight and may be you are interested in the script itself, if this is the case just comment or leave a message and I will write another part with the script included.
for about 2 weeks I am now working for AboutYou in Hamburg / Germany. Who not knows this company it is a fashion web store, which is quite popular in Germany. The workspaces are very modern, the team and its structure is really nice. Unfortunately it hasn’t that much to do with games, but anyhow it is a paid project job for at least 3 months and it allows me to get some distance from my projects. The income will help a lot to push my projects further and having more options such as paid artists etc. The downside is of course, that within the next three months I can’t update very much, since I am working as a full time freelancer.
Rainware – How does it continue?
Nevertheless, today I would love to share at least some ideas I came up with. So even if I can’t spend much time on my projects I have the possibility to rethink and plan the further course of Rainware. First of all I want to continue making games for at least one more project. With all the gathered experience within the last two years I need to make another one. The question is what kind of project will be the next one and when I can start with it.
New game project idea
A 3D remake of the game “Mega lo mania” or “Tyrants“, which was the game name in the US. It was actual the first strategy game I ever played, even before hits like Dune II completely got me, and for me it was the game, which made me loving RTS games. As a tribute and of course because the game was fucking awesome I would like to make a newer version out of it. As a challenge and personal improvement I want to enter a new area: “3D”. I will stick to Unity as engine as far as I can tell you for now. The modelling will be done in Maya by myself. It won’t be an easy task at all, but I am very motivated and can’t wait to get started and keep you informed about the progress.
Soon …
But first things first I have to finish the freelance job to refocus completely on game development. This sets the start date for development to May, but there is actually already some work in progress. I am preparing the GDD and analyse the market, technologies etc. I will come up with more informations within the next blog post, which will focus around the new game project / idea.
today I want to write a bit about my mistakes in the last two years. Some things I know better today other things were known, but I ignored them somehow. At least I got a lot of experience in two years and I will try to improve in the future. So let’s start with my 5 biggest mistakes “by now”.
1. Timbertales was a way too big project to start with as Indie game developer
This one is very special. In general you will often read don’t start too big etc. I also read those lists before I started to become an Indie developer. Nevertheless my first project was too big. The reason for this is simple. I already had written the backend for Timbertales years ago. With those pieces of code and a whole working server my thoughts were “More than half of the project is already done” – It wasn’t. I didn’t even do proper project planing on my first title or estimations, because I wanted to start programming as soon as possible. Lots of the features were implemented while programming and without any planing. So today I would advice to everyone -> Do proper planing, have a game design document with all your features and stay focused!
2. I wanted to reach out for a too big audience
My reason to develop games with libGDX was to distribute my releases cross platform. Thats not a problem at all, but you should have in mind, that mobile players are different from pc gamers and the chances are very low, that you will create a game, which perfectly fits on both platforms. Also you shouldn’t underestimate the maintenance time for different versions, even if you are using cross platform frameworks. Especially things like Facebook Login or In App purchases working different on different platforms and you will have to implement them native or with a 3rd party lib. Then you have to build various release versions and maintain different store entries etc. I think you get the point as a single indie developer time is always a matter and waiting for reviews or upload 25 different screenshots with different resolutions (iPhone, iPad, android tablet 7″, 10″etc) will just cost you time without anything in return. For example on Timbertales I uploaded it to itch, Steam, Android, iOS and Amazon. I should have focused on 1 or 2 platforms, since the download numbers weren’t any good at Amazon for example.
3. Creating games with revenue in mind
After I realised Timbertales will not cover my development costs. I had the problem, that I will run out of money within the next months. So I came up with FlatFatCat. The problem with the concept of FlatFatCat was, that it was created with revenue in mind. I wanted to create a game, which would cover my development costs and so I lost the biggest motivation for us Indies – Passion. An Indie game without passion can’t be successful at all, thats what indie game stands for!
4. Shifting to a platform without the knowledge to market your game
Somehow with FlatFatCat and Space Unicorns I targeted the mobile market, but I am not at home at the mobile market. I dislike to play on my smartphone in my spare time. I am a core pc and console gamer. Unfortunately FlatFatCat and Space Unicorns directed into a wrong direction and to a market, where I don’t have much knowledge and experience. I liked the development for mobile, but thats not enough to market a game successful. As a pc core gamer I should have sticked to the pc / console market, since you are your best customer! If you wouldn’t buy your game, why should anyone else do it?
5. A way to generell marketing without reaching the right audience
My approach here was to reach out for the biggest audience possible without making any thoughts about, who would play my games. I just went for the masses, but what I missed was: There are a lot of other games, which will do better than mine and you can’t compete with them. So try to place yourself in a niche and do the best marketing there. Marketing is always a hassle for me, but I think it is a lot better to hype your product in the right audiences instead of trying to reach to big presses or reviewers, which will just ignore you.
Thank you for reading! I am looking forward to your comments, questions and feedback. I hope you can avoid some of the mistakes, but I also think that mistakes are needed for improvement.
First of all as disclaimer: I just talk about my experience with the two games I have released. Nevertheless I spend quite a lot time and effort in these two games and I think my situation is suitable for a lot of other indie developers too. Of course there are success stories and there are exceptional cases, but for me mobile not paid out yet. I invested a lot of time lately into social features, user engagement and retention, but nothing showed great results yet.
So let us start and just judge this as a general advice from an indie developer, who made some first hand experience.
Motivation and Vision
Let me talk a bit about my vision and my both games I came up with first. I founded Rainware two years ago and I decided to stick to libGDX for game development. Distribution should happen on cross platforms, this includes Android, iOS, Amazon and Desktop (osx, windows, linux). My idea is to develop cross platform games to reach more players on different platforms. Today I am certain that focusing on a niche is much more rewarding as an indie, than trying to get the biggest audience possible. It is nearly impossible to create a game which fits mobile and pc, since both audiences are so different in behavior.
A fun fact: I focused with Flat Fat Cat Bounce on mobile devices and optimized it for mobile controls. I sold a lot more copies on steam than I had in app purchases on mobile. In the end I could say that my mobile version completely sucked and I wasted a lot of money and earned a lot less money than on steam, where I did not invest anything except the initial fee.
My mobile games
But first things first. My first game was Timbertales a turn based strategy game in a nature setting. Timbertales was planned as a pc game, but within the capabilities of libGDX to support mobile I switched during the development to make it work on mobile too and focused a lot on mobile controls. Afterwards I know that this was a crucial misstep, because I lost my focus on pc gamers, so they had less interest in the game at all. The game wasn’t initial designed for mobile so it lacks of an audience there. By that I mean it is more a core game than a casual game.
My second game was Flat Fat Cat Bounce it was planned as a much smaller project and it had a really strong mobile focus. I wanted to create a small game for mobile devices, which should be very addictive and generate some money. As you all know as an indie developer money is always a big issue. After the development of Timbertales I spent all my budget and I had to earn money somehow. In my foolishness I thought it would be an easy task to create a simple mobile game and earn from it. Today I know I shouldn’t have spend a single minute on any mobile related game at first.
So what is the problem with mobile stores?
I read a lot about the mobile market before I developed Flat Fat Cat Bounce, but of course I thought I could do better than others. In the end I wasted a lot of time and money. I earned maybe around 40$ in half a year with in app purchases and spend months to develop the game and invested around 5.000$ into marketing without any success. Let me tell you why – The mobile market or better said the Google Play Store is such a hard business, where a very few earn money and a lot of devs invest money. In first place Google benefits the most of course. They earn from every ad you pay. They receive their percentage for every in app purchase and they don’t care about any of the games. I had a direct contact with Google Germany and they created a marketing plan with budget for me. I paid more money in 10 days than I would spend for living for 2-3 months and meanwhile all installs I received are gone. Of course a part of the problem is that my game isn’t good enough, but the point is Google doesn’t care about that they already have my money.
Another big problem on mobile is to generate a fan base or community. Mobile players differ a lot from pc gamers. They don’t care about you or your indie studio. If you do a match 3 game you have to compete with Candy Crush for example and the player don’t care if you work alone or have a big studio and a lot of budget. They just want to play games for free and if they are not funny enough after some minutes of gameplay they will delete it and play the next one. There are so much games to choose from, why should your game become the next hit? They don’t care about your time you invested into development nor your story you want to tell. The search rankings in Play Store or Apple Store is my next point. There are thousands of games in these stores. I don’t think I tell you something new here. You have to compete with all of those games, because as an indie without any marketing budget your only way to get seen is by being searched in the stores. That your game will have a good ranking is nearly impossible, because it depends on your ASO, which is hardly related to the success of your game. In the end this means if you have only a few downloads / reviews you can ASO your heart out – Nobody will find your game!
Exceptional cases and conclusion
So in my opinion you could have good reasons to enter the mobile market or just think what does he know about me, but you should think a lot about it. If you have a brand, a huge fan base / community or an already running pc game which is quite successful – it could be a good decision! Of course another exception would be if you have publisher and you are not publishing by yourself.
In mostly all other scenarios I would not try again to release something for mobile market and I will stick to pc / console market in future. PC gamers care a lot more about you as a person and the game. I think the biggest advantage of being indie is to sell yourself as a person. I talked a lot to other game developers or players and all of them where quite impressed that I did everything myself. Publishing, Development, Marketing etc. and with this story I have the possibility to build up a community on platforms like steam and they maybe become fans of my products.
Do you have any similar experience, comments or question? Please don’t hesitate to share your opinion
Lets get right into it with the new version of Flat Fat Cat Bounce I did a lot of changes. I want to introduce the major changes now and explain a little bit about the decisions.
1. Animated Menu
As a first step of a feature I planned for the future I animated the main menu. I know most of you won’t have spend too much time in the main menu, thats why we want to introduce another feature in the near future to set more focus to the main menu. Just as a little hint you will be able to feed your cat and customize the room 🙂
2. UI Remastered
The old windows and interface lack a bit of quality, animations and layouting. I wanted to improve the whole expierence while you are in the menu, on the shop or looking through the map. I improved nearly all dialogs, windows and other UI elements. There are plenty of new animations and new window layouts. I hope the effort worth it and you like the new design just as much as I do.
3. Watch your stars
Did you ever thought while accomplishing a level – Was I fast enough to reach 3 stars? To have a much better overview about how many time left or how fast I have to be to earn 3 stars. I introduced a new UI element in game. This will help you to track time and stars while playing through the levels.
4. New effects
To improve the contrast of different szenes I implemented a new sepia shader, which greys out the background if any dialog is shown. We also changed the matching effect of two cats from hearts to stars and make it a bit more visible.
5. Improved scolling
It is so annoying to scroll the whole map with the slow scroll speed. So I finally implemented the fling to scroll over the map how to should be since start of FlatFatCat. With this small feature navigation around the map should be much easier.
6. Graphics improved
I wasn’t very happy with the old dialogs and menu. So I came up with this new UI graphics. In my opinion they fit much better into the game and are really good looking. Nearly every UI element was touched and changed. There is a lot of new graphics to explore!
7. New sounds
Some sounds were a bit annoying or just not fitting into the game. I changed the dissolve sound from the meow to a more success based sound effect. Also the winning sound changed a bit to make it less annoying.
I hope you all enjoy the new features and appreciate them that much as I do. I really like Flat Fat Cat Bounce and would love to invest even more time into it and release a lot more new features! Nevertheless now the time for new players and a lot of marketing has come. Please leave your comments below and subscribe to this blog.
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