How to play JS Joust Hide and Seek

3 01 2013

joust hide n seek1) Wait until night time
2) Turn out all the lights
3) Everyone go and find a room to hide in
4) Activate your Move controller
5) Decide whether you think your hiding place is so good that it’s worth staying there, or whether you might as well go looking for other people
6a) If you chose to hide:
- Attempt to shield your Move controller as well as possible such that the ball isn’t lighting the room up and giving away your position
- Wait until someone enters the room and is sufficiently jump-prone, then leap from your hiding space (making sure not to set off your own controller in the process) and make a huge noise of your choosing
- If that doesn’t do it, engage is regular Joust battle
6b) If you chose to hunt:
- Move slowly but surely around the house, entering rooms by either flinging the door open or by batting the door back and forth, just in case combatant is hiding behind the door
- When you discover someone, make sure not to drop your controller in fright, then use your positional advantage to box them into their hiding place and slap the Move controller out of their hand
- Once opponent is beaten, move on to next room

Tips:
- Use items around the room to your advantage. Because it’s dark, your hunter won’t notice a book hitting them in the face until it’s too late.
- Sometimes the best hiding places are right out in the open. If it’s dark enough and you can hide your Move controller under your top, suddenly throwing an arm out in someone’s eyeline can have great effect.
- 3 on 3 team games can work just as well: 3 people have 20 seconds to hide, then the other 3 go looking for them, preferably splitting up such that team-mates hear them screaming from various places around the house as a game progresses.

(Tom took the photo)


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Categories : Indie Game

Starting (or kickstarting) a career in video games journalism

23 03 2012

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I don’t usually do full written responses to pieces that I read – that’s what a few badly thought-out tweets are for. But after catching up on the kerfuffle Christian Higley’s Bitmob posts caused this week, I can’t really help myself. I’m still going to keep this short and sweet, as it’s late and I have a looong drive tomorrow, but I need to get some points out so that I don’t end up stewing over all this instead of sleeping.

I’ve already written at length before regarding how to go about doing games journalism, but there are certain key points that some people still aren’t getting. I’m not going to repeat the obvious ones that everyone else keeps throwing out (write lots, pitch lots, love writing, etc), but rather, highlight areas that I don’t feel are brought up enough.

1) Holy hell, will you please get on Twitter? Not to call Christian out, but he says in his follow-up post on Bitmob that he realised people were talking about him and his piece on Twitter well after the conversation was over, and everything had already been said and done. If that had been me, I would have been checking Twitter constantly after I posted it to see reactions, and then getting involved in the discussion from the moment it started.

I think he believes games journalism is some sort of elitist club because he hasn’t actually tried hard enough to be a part of discussions, laughs, controversy et al that appears on Twitter daily. I certainly have never received a tweet from him on Twitter, nor have I seen anyone else talking to him. When I first started on Twitter, I talked and talked and talked and talked and oh my God I would not stop talking, and I still don’t. Your Twitter presence is so, so incredibly important.

In fact, I would go as far as to say that my presence on Twitter (and let me note at this point that I’m incredibly small fry on Twitter) is a huge part of what got me jobs. When I applied for jobs, I made sure to supply people with a link to my Twitter. They click it, they see I have 1000+ followers, they think “Hmm he must have something interesting to say then” and they then go and check me out more.

To any aspiring journalist (including Christian) I say get on Twitter, follow every games journalist going, and talk talk talk to people! If people know who you are, they are more likely to hire you for work than someone else who comes completely out of the blue.

2) In the summer of 2010, I decided to apply for freelance work at every single games website I could find. Have a guess how many websites I emailed. 30? 50? No, in fact I emailed over 100 websites over the course of 2 days. From that, I received around 10 responses, and 3 acceptances. For the next few months I worked like the clappers for those 3 websites (they were DIYGamer, Gamezebo and Strategy Informer, if you’re interested), and then once again I emailed all 100 websites again. This time I got another 3 jobs. By Christmas, I was earning a decent wage, and in January I got my full time job with Gamasutra.

I *hate hate hate* reading how games journalists sent a pitch to one or two websites, waited a day or two, then got rejected and felt down about it. Here’s why you didn’t get it – there are people like me who are emailing every site under the sun, and getting the jobs. It’s basic maths really – the more websites you email, the more chance you have of finding a job. APPLY APPLY APPLY and then apply some more.

I have more points to make, but it’s late and I think I managed to get out most of what has rubbed me up the wrong way. What I’m saying is, if you feel like you’re not getting anywhere, don’t give up for Christ sake – just try something different! Talk to other journos online, email them, ask for advice – I myself always try to email back with advice, for example, as I’m sure the majority of other journos do too.

There is no club. There’s just you and a wall you need to break through, as there is in the majority of careers. Make some friends, make a name for yourself, break that wall.


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Categories : Indie Game

New Jobs, A Minecraft Trip and My Upcoming Book

3 03 2011

Plenty has happened since my last update, so I thought it was about time I talked about it. First up, I’ve got a couple of big writing gigs at the moment – I’m the UK editor for Gamasutra, and the Handheld editor for Pocket Gamer. I hold both in the highest regards, so it’s pretty exciting times.

I’m continuing on with all my freelancing stuff too, writing AAA reviews for Strategy Informer and casual gaming reviews for Gamezebo. And of course, I’m still the editor at IndieGames.com. I probably will be for, like, ever.

Talking of indie games, I took an exciting trip last month to the Mojang headquarters in Sweden. Apart from interviewing Notch about the wonderful Minecraft (and getting some free stuff, as the accompanying photo suggests!), and I was also there to find out about their next game, the now-revealed Scrolls. I did an exclusive interview for Gamasutra that can be found here.

Finally, I’ve got something veeery awesome on the way – a book! I’ve spent the last 3 months writing “250 Indie Games You Must Play”, and have hopefully outlined some of the best indie releases to date. My hope is that people who aren’t familiar with indie gaming can pick up the book on a whim, and become fully acquainted with the scene. Those people already knowledgeable on the topic will hopefully want to pick up a copy as a momento too!

The book is due for release on April 7th, and can already be pre-ordered from Amazon (although I believe the price is going to drop a fair bit!). I’m going to set-up a standalone page on this site for the book, so I can keep track of what’s going on with it, how it’s doing, who is talking about it etc.

That’s your lot for now!


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Categories : Indie Game

My ‘Sleep is Death’ Session With Jason Rohrer

6 04 2010

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[This preview of Jason Rohrer's Sleep is Death was originally posted on IndieGames and Gamasutra.]

I’m a little girl. A moment before, I made a bet with a boy (that I’ve kinda got the hots for) that I could pull a fish from a pond with my bare hands. The boy sounded a little taken aback by my absurb wager, but egged me on regardless.

True to my word I dived in, grabbed the nearest fish, and returned to the boy’s side, prize in hand. Then we got naked and jumped in an open grave to talk about marriage.

An excerpt from my recent playthrough of Sleep Is Death (Geisterfahrer) with creator Jason Rohrer at the reins. You can view the entire story we produced in flipbook form here.

Before I continue, a quick recap on what Sleep Is Death is about: Essentially, it’s a storybook weaver in which two players develop stories together. Here’s the catch – one player is telling the story, while the other player is IN the story.

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Remember those old Looney Tunes episodes when the artist would start erasing the world around Daffy and Bugs, and they’d try furiously to stay in control? Perhaps they’d do something completely out of the ordinary to catch the artist off guard, or just play along with him to see where it led.

This pretty much encapsulates how I felt as ‘the player’, although I had a hunch this may simply have been to do with who my master was. This is Jason’s baby, after all, and over time he’s tuned his game so that he can keep his victim wrapped around his finger.

Not that I didn’t try, of course. After the first few minutes, and with a clearer understanding of my role, I decided I did NOT want to go exploring. I wanted to grab a rock and throw it at my dog. Quite why, I have no idea, but with a 30 second time limit to make your move, a variety of strange ideas go through your head, and as the timer reaches 10, you make a snap decision.

Ah yes, that time limit. Opinions are rife on the topic, and after release they will continue to be. Initially I found it difficult to read the situation presented to me, come up with a suitable follow-up, then present my scene all the space of 30 seconds.

Yet as the session progressed, I came to rather enjoy the frantic stop-start of it all. With only a short space of time to think, ideas get compressed and I found myself blurting out the most weird and, as I later discovered, most wonderful stuff. See, at the time I’d hammer a line in, then as the timer ran out, look at what I’d written and mind-slap myself for being so dumb, boring or tedious.

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The end product, however, was far from it. The overall story Jason presented me with had a serious tone to it, yet my anxious and awkward off-the-cuff comebacks added a silly, sometimes dark tone to it all, creating a wonderfully confused yet charming tale.

Some of my mistakes even gave the story a moment of accidental hilarity – for example, as the scene changed to a time in the past, I assumed I was still in the role of the little boy. However, my control had now passed to that of the mother when she was younger, and so the girl spoke the line which the boy was meant to have said. Seemingly unfazed by this, Jason pulled the dialogue into the main script flawlessly.

An interesting point to consider – since the controller always has the ‘first go’, it falls to the player to end each scene. Jason explained that whenever he comes to the end of a set piece and wants to move on to the next screen, he throws in some dialogue which he hopes to move the story on with.

However, since the player then has their turn, it can lead to some odd moments if the player doesn’t realise it’s time to move on. Two such moments happened during my playthrough, the second time the most poignant – Jason attempted to end the story on a light note, and I misread this and proceeded to have a conversation with my dog, which was cut short by THE END.

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What I’ve said up to now can be pretty much summed up as ‘I like game’. Flaws, then. After playing a few more games through with my brother, it quickly became apparent that the whole thing relies heavily on the controller’s imagination and quick-thinking. That’s not to say my dear sibling is devoid of such things – his tale started off strong, putting me in the role of a policeman interrogating a suspected murderer.

But after just 10 minutes of play, his envisioning had been played out, and he then proceeded to fill the screen with cops and naked women, each exclaiming ‘PARTIIIIE’. Like I said, the strangest stuff pops into your head when you’ve got that time limit hanging over you, but in this case the ‘stuff’ put quite a downer on a potentially interesting story.

What I’m saying is that the problem Sleep is Death has is the exact thing the entire experience is based around – imagination. I had a fantastic time playing against (was it against? I’m really not sure) Jason, but I reckon if it had been the other way around and he’d played out something from the mind of Michael Rose, it may not have gone down so well, simply because I don’t rate my story-telling abilities.

As previously mentioned, the entire storyboard for my session can be found here on Indiegames. After each playthrough, your story is saved as png files, along with the necessary php files so you can upload any story to your own personal site with ease. You’ll notice one of my flipbook pages is blank somewhere near the beginning – unfortunately, this was due to me minimizing the game. The dog gave me a puzzled look, in case you were wondering.

Enough about my role as the player – time to tinker with the inner workings of being the controller. I’m not going to explain in depth how every part of the scene editor works, as I don’t want to spoil your inevitable fun, but I’ll provide an overview and whether it’s actually any good.

5.PNG

The action takes up a good portion of the screen,and the controller can select and drag any object anywhere on the playing grid. Objects can then be made to say something. One prop is different to all the rest, and that’s the one which the player controls, marked with a big pointy arrow.

Objects and scenes are selected from the panels on the right, and are word-searchable. Type ‘cop’ into the search box and behold, a whole bunch of rozzer-related material appears. Once a scene has been put together, it can be saved and then recalled at any point, making transitions from scene-to-scene in-game quick and simple.

There’s a whole bunch of other stuff you can do, too. Pretty much everything has its own special editor which can be pulled up at any time, ranging from drawing and editing objects on the fly to even editing and choosing music samples.

It’s a really nice system. Simple enough for casual players to dabble with, but with enough underlying features for master storytellers to have a field day with. After playing around with it for around half an hour, I was able to present a short story and keep it going relatively well. There’s definitely a sense that, with time and experience, some more patient souls will be able to do wonderful things with this equipment.

Sleep Is Death (Geisterfahrer) is now available for pre-order and will set you back $9.00 and give you access starting from April 9th. After this date, the game will then cost $14.00, with the main release happening on April 16th. Remember as well that one purchase equals two copies of the game delivered to your inbox – one for you, and one for your unsuspecting victim.

If any of the above rambling sounded like your kind of thing, head over to SleepIsDeath.net for more details.


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Categories : Indie Game

My Experience as an IGF Judge

7 01 2010

[This opinion piece is part of a Gamasutra article. This below article is the original full piece.]

This week the finalists of the Independent Games Festival 2010 were announced. I was one of the 150+ judges asked to score just over a dozen of the 301 indie games entered into the competition. I’ve been asked by quite a number of people – both developers and gamers – how exactly it all happens, so I decided writing up my experience of the process and how I felt about it all might be interesting reading. Maybe even enlightening? Either way, my thoughts are below!

This was my first time judging the competition, so everything was pretty new to me. The contest is split into two rounds – the first selects all the finalists, while the second reveals the winners in each category. In round one, each judge is given 7 weeks to play through just over a dozen randomly-picked entries. I was assigned quite a variety, with a mixture of puzzlers, platformers, shmups and first-person shooters, as well as some… oddities.

I remember looking down my list for the first time and spotting some names I recognised and others I had not a clue about. I decided at that point that the only way I was going to judge this list of games fairly was if I played them from top to bottom, not picking out the ones I had already come across or was previously excited to play. More on my own personal methods of judging later, though.

For each game, there were 5 scores out of 100 to give in each of the following categories:
Excellence In Design – game mechanics, level design, difficulty balancing
Excellence In Audio – music and sound effects
Excellence In Visual Art – appearance, visual effects
Technical Excellence – Technical aspects e.g. game engine use and code base
Overall Rating – based on overall impressions of the game

Each of these individual scores then translate into the different award categories of the same names (except ‘Overall Rating’ of course, which becomes the coveted Seumas McNally Grand Prize).

Scoring is as you’d expect. 0 is abysmal, 50 is an average experience and 100 is perfect execution. Of course, individual perceptions of worth out of 100 will range from person to person – I may consider a game to be average and give it a 60, while someone else might feel the very same as me yet give the same game a 40 – and so a sort of Idiot’s Guide to Scoring is helpfully supplied, so judges can try to match their thoughts up with a specific scoring range.

So, back to my scoring. The first obstacle to overcome is having misgivings about a game before even playing it. We’ve all done it at some point – be it a screenshot, or a clumsy game description or maybe a trailer of suspect quality, it’s easy to conclude that you’re not going to enjoy a game before even installing it. Obviously in these circumstances this isn’t fair in the slightest, so personally for myself, it was very important to leave all these kinds of thoughts well alone.

My range of titles turned out to be quite the mixed bag, with a number of superb gaming experiences slotted in between some other not-so-fantastic. My personal means of scoring each game was with a pen and paper at the ready, noting good and bad points as I went along, and using them to come to a conclusion at the end.

Along with the scoring, there was also ‘Anonymous Feedback‘ to be given – obligatory for the first time since the competition began. This, I felt, was incredibly important. To understand how important the feedback was, I put myself in the shoes of a developer. I’ve just submitted what I believe is my best work ever. More than anything now, I want to know what people think. I don’t just want a string of numbers thrown back at me with no explanation as to what they mean. If I’m scoring low in the Audio section, I want to know why!

With this in mind, I made sure to give each of my entries a decent amount of feedback, be it praise or constructive criticism. I didn’t dance around the subject though – if something was good I said so, and if something was bad I made sure the developer understood that I didn’t enjoy that specific area as much as I would have liked.

An area that I felt mildly confused about was the topic of length. I had games in my list which were over in a matter of minutes, then I had other titles which went on and on for hours. Now clearly these shorter games weren’t short due to the developers being lazy or running out of ideas – this is just how the developer chose to express him or herself. But then if a developer has put, say, a month of work in, and produced something short but sweet – but then another developer has slaved away for a whole year, crafting something wonderful with a good few hours of play to explore, should one get precedence over another? It’s a tricky one, I believe.

The other feature for judges to indulge in a bit of was the ‘Judge Notes‘. At the bottom of each game page was a comment box, allowing judges to discuss said game. This was an area with which I had a bit of an issue with. See, my belief was that these notes were for discussing technical issues – for example, if a particular judge couldn’t get the game to run, he/she could post in the notes with their difficulties, and other judges could jump in and try to help them out.

However, judges were also encouraged to discuss gameplay, strengths and weaknesses of the game et al. This is the part I had a problem with. If say, the tenth game I came to judge already had a bunch of comments of it saying ‘erugh this is horrible’, ‘really poor gameplay’ etc, that would automatically put bias in my mind before I’d even booted the game up. Of course the answer to this is to simply not read the comments until I’d played the game, but since they are situated right beneath the game description, it was a little difficult not to! Maybe I was in the minority, but I would much rather the judges’ conversing was strictly for helping each other out and that was it.

Other than that, however, I felt that every game had as much chance as any other, which really is a remarkable achievement considering there were 300+ games and 150+ judges to co-ordinate. The judging was a very painless experience, meaning it was easy to slot playing through my games in with the rest of my work.

So that’s where the whole process is up to right now. The next step, which begins soon, will involve each judge scoring around 20 of the finalists (using the same categories as before), with these scores eventually being tallied up and the winners announced in March. Exciting stuff – and good luck to all the finalists!

[Part of this article can be found at Gamasutra, IGF.com and on the Indie Games Blog.]


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The Idiot’s Guide to Marketing Your Indie Game

13 12 2009

There are already a bunch of articles on how to get your indie game out there. Kieron Gillen banged on about it. Rob Fearon put a sarcastic twist on it. Rodain Joubert 4-paged the sucker. Yet while each is giving it to the masses straight, it would appear that’s just not straight enough.

I’m one of the editors at Indiegames.com, a sister site of Gamasutra and one dedicated to covering all the latest independent gaming news. I receive roughly between ten and twenty emails a day, ranging from indie press releases to reminders about games to follow-ups on past correspondence. The misconception that gaming sites won’t want to cover your game because it’s ‘not important enough’ is slowly being lifted, and independent developers in general are beginning to realize that PR is actually a huge factor in selling your product.

This, however, doesn’t mean that developers are marketing their games correctly. I receive a good number of emails a day which, quite frankly, go straight in the virtual bin, bouncing off the rim in the process. It’s all well and good throwing me some information regarding your latest venture, but there are right ways to go about it, and then there are not-so-right ways. Which got me thinking – while all the previously mentioned guides do a great job of pointing developers in the right direction, none of them really get right down to the nitty gritty and just simply spell it out.

Hence! Nitty gritty time it is. In this guide, I’ll be explaining exactly what it is you, the budding games developer, should be providing me, the eager games journalist, with. Before I start, however, please be very much aware that certain aspects of this are going to be personal preference. Clearly I cannot vouch for the entire games journalism industry, however I do believe that following these rules will at least give you a basis for which to build on. And if all else fails, at least you’ll know how to contact IndieGames.com in future!

1: The essentials

Before you even begin to think about spreading your news, there are certain bases you need covered. The following may sound painfully obvious to some, yet I still constantly come across developers who haven’t laid the foundations properly. Said foundations are:

A website – either a developer site containing all your projects in one place, or a dedicated site for a single game. Regarding whether or not it’s worth purchasing a real .com address or simply opting for a Blogger or WordPress, my advice is get the .com. It costs $15 a year and gives your outfit a sense of professionalism. Of course, you can then go ahead and link a WordPress blog to it.

A development blog – having a place where I can keep track of all the latest work on your title makes all the difference. Provide screenshots, WIP videos, insights – it’s all good. Just make sure it has a working RSS feed!

A trailer – once your game is good to go, you need a quality trailer to show it off in motion. If you think you have the skills to do this yourself, by all means go ahead. Just please, for the sake of everyone, follow these simple guidelines:

a. Do not accompany the action with generic dance/house/metal/screech music. Find something which creates a satisfying atmosphere for what the viewee is witnessing. You may even want to find someone to create an original soundtrack for your trailer. For example, if 8-bit sound and chiptune is your port of call, the 8-bit Collective community are more than willing to help out games developers.
b. Do not spam the trailer with inane titles and movie-style narration. I’m watching your trailer to see the game, not a story about ‘ONE MAN, ONE MISSION, THOSE HE LOVES ALWAYS LEAVE HIM’.
c. Give it some style. Don’t just record yourself running around one room in the game for three minutes – that is bound to be incredibly boring. Show off the game’s best features, best puzzles, best effects.
d. Do not make it too long (or too short, for that matter). My personal attention span begins to wane around the two minute mark, so you may want to aim round about there.

(Optional) A Twitter account – this one isn’t exactly an essential, but it definitely can’t hurt matters. Many indie developers have taken to announcing big news about their various games on Twitter even before posting to their website, and Twitter has really come into its own as the source of independent gaming news over the last six months.
2: Locate your points of attack

It’s time to storm the media battlefield. There are a plethora of sites out there that cover indie games, including the likes of:
RockPaperShotgun
IndieGames
TIGSource
Play This Thing
Pixel Prospector
XNPlay (for Xbox Live Indie Games)

Your best plan of attack? Be prepared to contact everyone. If your game really is ‘all that’, then someone is bound to bite, right?
3: Write the email

Many developers get to this hurdle and end up with their face in the mud. Writing a good email is the most tricky aspect of marketing your indie game. It’s a minefield, and you will most definitely trip some of those explosives. Hopefully, however, you can also cause some good explosions.

This is the part at which I have to humbly remind you again – what I’m about to detail is, to my knowledge, personal preference. I’m going to give it to you straight regarding the format of your press release, and what I would like to receive. This may or may not be what, say, John Walker at RockPaperShotgun wants, or Derek Yu at TIG deems suitable reading. Yet I’m going to go out on a limb and state that it really can’t be that far from what others expect.

Let’s get started.

a. The subject line – Make this plain and simple, containing exactly what I need to know. You can go for ‘New Indie Game: MyGame’ or ‘Indie Game Submission: MyGame’ or ‘MyGame: a physics-based puzzler’. Do NOT, however, use lines like ‘FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: AN INCREDIBLE NEW INDIE GAMING EXPERIENCE’ or ‘Badass Entertainment Press Release: MyGame Is Here’. You are not a robot, stop acting like one.

b. Say hi – some may say it’s not essential, but I beg to differ. If I open up an email and it begins with ‘Yada Interactive have teamed up with Blabla to bring you a gaming experience…’, I’m immediately put off. Yet, if a message begins with a friendly ‘Hey Mike, my name is Name Here and I just recently released MyGame’, I’m much more likely to take an interest. Again, be a real human being!

c. Say your piece – now that you’ve got the reader’s attention, tell them what it is you came to say quickly and to the point. There are a number of different methods that work for me. Some send a single paragraph which simply explains the point of the game. Others opt for writing a few paragraphs and going into a little more details. Both are perfectly reasonable as long as you explain exactly what kind of game you’re promoting, what the general idea behind the experience is and how exactly I can go about playing it, be it a link to a flash game or an Xbox redeem code. When it comes to the question ‘Should I ask whether they’d like to receive my game or just send it straight away?’, a quote from Rob Fearon will do nicely here: ‘Don’t hold off on review copies. Don’t ask “would you like one?” just bloody send it.’

d. Plant your links – it sounds so simple, but you’d be surprised by the number of developers who don’t provide links to their games in promotional emails. The fact is, if I’ve read what you have to say and feel interested in exploring more, I’m going to go trigger-happy with my mouse on whatever you provide. Links to your developer/company website, the game’s website, your development blog and the Xbox Marketplace page (if it’s an XBLIG/XBLA title) are all essentials. Of course, it goes without saying that you should make sure that all links are relevant!

e. Video and screenshots – as a general rule, I would always go with embedded images over attached. It means the reader definitely sees them, and also adds a little colour to the email. Another ‘well duh’ moment, but make sure all screenies are hi-res! Regarding your trailer, make sure you provide a link to either a page containing your video, or a direct link to it on Youtube/Vimeo etc.
Just to make this even easier to understand, I’m now going to use the above guidelines to create a mock email. Let’s say my name is Hank Scorpio, and I’ve created a game called ‘Be the Villain’ under the developer name Globex. My email may go something like this:

From: hank@globex.com

To: editors@indiegames.com

Subject: Indie Game Submission: Be the Villain

Hey Tim and Mike,

my name is Hank Scorpio and I create independent games under the name Globex. I’ve just released my latest indie title and I’d love if you’d check it out and consider featuring it on the IndieGames Blog.

The game is called ‘Be the Villain‘ and it’s a spy vs spy real time strategy. Featuring a single player campaign with over 50 missions, it’s set in a world similar to that of James Bond, but with a twist – for you control the enemy, plotting to take over the world! The game is solely developed by myself, and features a full musical score and a unique 16-bit graphical style.

A trailer can be found via Youtube here. If you’re interested, the game can be found on my website under the Games tab.

Thanks for your time and I look forward to hearing from you!

Hank Scorpio

Globex
Simple, no?

4: Don’t give up, but don’t be a broken record either

So you’ve sent your email off to various sites, and after a week no-one has responded. Clearly they all hate your game, right? Unfortunately, your game may be well worth promoting, but for reasons unknown to you, the recipients just didn’t spend the time checking it out enough. That’s right – you may have done absolutely nothing wrong whatsoever, yet you’ve STILL been given the cold shoulder.

The problem is this – real life. Everyone is part of it. Sometimes it makes you happy, and other times not so. The truth is that the reader’s mood has quite a part in determining whether or not they’ll receive your gaming news in good spirits or not. Catch them on a good day, and they may just want to take your game and put it on their site. Contact them while they’re hungover, feeling irritated or just in a general bad mood and your chances become more slim. It’s a horrible fact, and one which is completely out of your control. Or is it?

The key is to brush yourself off and give it one more try. Don’t just resend the original email again, though. Rewrite it ever so slightly, change the subject line, then power it back out there. Maybe, just maybe, this time someone will be feeling good about life and give you a look-in.

Of course, if you hear nothing back a second time, it’s probably fair to say that people simply are not interested. At this point you’re going to need different assistance. Good luck with that.

Hopefully this guide has given you ideas on how to propel your project into the limelight. A final note – never be disheartened. Assuming you’re making games because it’s a passion of yours, it really shouldn’t matter to you whether your game is received with praise or not, as long as you’re creating exactly what you want to create. After all, that’s the point of being ‘indie’, right?

[This article can also be found on Gamasutra.]


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Categories : Indie Game

Proof That I’m a Very Backwards Being: qmuHS

21 06 2009

qmuhS

I made a game :) It was for the Klik of the Month Klub. You can find it over on Glorious Trainwrecks.

It’s called qmuHS, because it’s a backwards Shump. Clever eh?… no, not really.

You start at the end of the game and make your way back to the beginning. Everything is backwards – you’re flying backwards, enemies are dead and become alive when you shoot them, your lazers come from afar and plant themselves in your guns, all the music and samples are backwards, score and health are backwards… everything!

Arrow keys to move, Space to ‘shoot’. Have fun :)

(BTW: If you don’t have the dll file that it needs, just go to http://www.dll-files.com/ and find it there :) It’s because I used The Games Factory rather than KNP)

DIRECT LINK: http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/files/qmuHS.zip


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Categories : Indie Game

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