Apart from promotion of Hangry Giants, I'm hard at work in my spare time on a new game prototype. The concept is coming together really nicely! Not that it looks like much yet :-)
As I learn the fine art of game promotion for Hangry Giants, I'm having a blast figuring out all the different avenues. The latest on my list is video. First, a promo video to go with the screenshots in the app store. Something to show the game in action. But here's a little known fact: making videos is actually pretty tricky! Still, with time and grit and effort, I've found the perfect tool to get me started and I don't mind promoting it: HitFilm 4 Express. If you're at all interested in learning the basics of editing with easy to use and free software, give it a go. So, after only a single day with HitFilm 4, I'm proud to present the first (still a bit rough!) trailer for Hangry Giants: I'm looking forward to many weeks of fun playing around with new videos!!
Just because Hangry Giants is in the App Store, doesn't mean it's done. There are many improvements, both small and large, aesthetic and technical, that I'd like to make. I'm aiming to continue making these improvements and launching a new update every 2 weeks or so. So what's coming up? Mostly some tweaks to the graphics, based on my own experience and feedback. Some of the colours will be toned down. The dialog boxes (when the King is speaking to you) are a considerably less...dark purple. The background behind the matching area is much darker, which I find is easier on the eyes and helps to distinguish it visually from the giants approaching. What I'm more excited about is the new icon, a whole new set screenshots, and a gameplay video! I really like the new icon - it's more expressive, captures more emotion. It's not done. Getting close, just a few more iterations. This is what it looks like now: Icons are very important. The right icon can make a big difference in whether someone will click that GET button the App Store. Therefore, the "right" icon is the one that results in the most installs. And the only way to determine that is with some classic A/B testing! Now that I've had a month with my existing icon, I've got solid data on how well the conversion funnel is working: 16.7% of people who view the product page are tapping GET. That's pretty good. Really good, in fact, since most games do around 5%. What I need to keep in mind is that many of these product page views are not people organically discovering my game. They're click-throughs from the press release, postings on Touch Arcade, Reddit, and so on, and therefore more motivated to try my game out. I'm okay with that, because the next months will likely see more of the same traffic. Game promotion is a long, uphill climb! As with any scientific experiment, you need to understand the biases at play. Here's the thing: I have no idea why icons are so important. Perhaps I've been unconsciously swayed to install or avoid an app because of its icon. It's certainly never been something I thought about. I do know I'm a wordy thinker rather than a visual one, so I wonder if there's more to it that I'll never fully understand? I've seen it in others though. Long before launching Hangry Giants, I was telling my 13 year old son about how it would be in the App Store, just like a Real Game! His first question was, "What's the picture going to look like?" He wasn't able to explain why it mattered to him. But it really mattered to him. And that means it matters to me. A sort of "Law of Halves" applies to all decisions in game design. In other words, as you design your game, you need to assume that for every game mechanic you fail to teach well, you'll lose 50% of your players (or maybe 10% or 95%, depending on the mechanic and how motivated the player is to learn your game). In other words, if you want your game to appeal to vast numbers of people, it must be initially simple, with complexity introduced slowly, and taught well.
Let's start with simple. All successful mobile games share this trait. What does simplicity look like? In short, there's one thing the player needs to do. Angry Birds: pull a slingshot. Candy Crush: slide candies. Crossy Road: move the chicken. Cut the Rope: well, you get it. It isn't so much a learning curve as a learning squiggle. Next, complexity is folded in slowly. In Angry Birds, you get different birds that need additional interaction, such as tapping the screen to make the yellow bird fly faster. Candy Crush has power-ups and special combos that you start to look for and make use of. And so on. New concepts are introduced one at a time, paced out gently so the player can master each one in isolation. Last, complexity needs to be taught well. This is an area that some games struggle with. I remember the first time I played Angry Birds in 2009, and being very confused about how to use the birds that dropped eggs. The game uses pictograms to instruct you rather than words (a smart choice to reach an international audience), but I just didn't get what it was trying to teach me. I'm sure they've improved it since then. I'll leave the subject of tutorial design aside for now, although I plan to write about in future in regards to Hangry Giants. This idea of a Law of Halves was a huge influence in the design of Hangry Giants. The simple mechanic is that the player needs to match two lines of symbols. Anyone can understand that and you're given a few levels to master it. Then, the idea of trades is introduced. But, only single trades are allowed at first. I realized that trying to teach single trades and super trades at the same time was too much. So super trades come later. By Dream 9, the player has learned everything they need to know about the game. The only change in mechanics after that are new spells and new ways the giants can attack. Hangry Giants is more complex than, say, Angry Birds. And I know that means my potential player base is smaller because of it. In the end, this was a concious choice. I was aware of the trade-offs, and I did my best to introduce complexity slowly and to teach it well by spacing out the tutorials and keeping the tone light. There's no way to tell if the best decisions were made. In the end, I got a game that I love and I have done my best to make it easy for others to love it too. What more can you aim for? The development of Hangry Giants has been a loooong road. Check this out: This screenshot is from the prototype I built in the first week of development. It looks nothing like the final game. It seems to involve apples, salt, and different kinds of sugar. This is because the art is simply placeholders from an earlier project.
While it may seem more like Egyptian hieroglyphics for an apple pie recipe, you can see how the basic structure of the final game is already there. There are two lines of symbols. The top line shows the symbols you want while the bottom line shows the symbols you have. The bunch of apples on the left is selected. The basic idea was the same as in the final game. Only the appearance changed, and the surrounding fiction of why you're trying to match these lines of symbols. The core mechanic, which basically means "what the player spends most of their time doing", is well established. Yet it worked a little differently in some ways back then. For example, the available trades in this prototype scrolled across the bottom (they're the boxes with question marks). You had to select 1, 2, or 3 symbols and tap a corresponding number of trades. It added tension because sometimes you didn't have the correct number of trades available and had to wait for one to appear. Why didn't this make the cut? Well, it was a bit too complicated. Even after reading the previous paragraph, you might still not get it. It's hard to explain. So it was neat in practice, and was easy to play once you "got" it. But I quickly came to realize that every single thing your player needs to "get" means fewer people will play your game. That's a whole topic I'll explore in a future entry (maybe tomorrow?). For now, let's just say, the fewer rules the better. It's less for your player to understand, and it's less for you to teach them. Another big difference is how you selected the symbols. If two or more identical symbols were beside each other, like a pair or three-of-a-kind, it automatically selected them all. That meant you had to break up these pairs or groups if you only wanted to trade one of them. This, too, was a pretty nifty approach with its own problems. Unlike the trade mechanic, it wasn't confusing. It was just laborious and annoying. So it got chopped. I've always found the evolution of ideas really cool. It may not be your cup of tea. That's fine. For me, seeing ideas get scrutinized, crushed, refined, and polished - watching them get better and better - is nirvanic (is that a word? Yes.) Sanding off the hard edges. Nurturing an idea for days or weeks, only to throw it away because it's just not right. That's the hard, painful process of creating that leads to real abiding love for your creation. If you just knocked out any old thing, well, why would you care about it? With Hangry Giants, there's a ton of stuff I might do differently given a second chance at it. But I guarantee you, there isn't a single part of it that didn't face fierce scrutiny and probably several tough decisions. The last two weeks have been tremendously exciting. It started with the worldwide launch of our first game, Hangry Giants, in the Apple App Store!
What that really marks is the end of game development and the beginning of game promotion. And, trust me, that's a much harder job. If I were more than one person - as I often try to be - I would have started promoting right from Day One. But I have the fierce heart of a full-blooded Indie Warrior, which is basically an ego-protecting way to say that I'm just one guy doing what I do. And I can't do two things at once very effectively. So I set my expectations accordingly. Everyone in gaming tells the truth - making the game is easy, getting anyone to actually try it is hard. I often told Mrs. Unidonk before the launch that my expectation was to see it sink like a small, round stone in a pool of dark water, scarecly a ripple to be seen. Wow, bleak, huh? But not unrealistic. And realistic is where I like to be. I made a game because I always wanted to. It's been a dream all my life. Having actually done it, and loved the entire process of it, my one sincere hope is that I make enough money to do it again. That's it. Hangry Giants is not a cynical money grab, or a lottery ticket that I hope wins big. It's something I worked hard on and that I love. Anyone who creates or designs or builds will understand. My biggest hope for Hangry Giants is not money. It's simply the hope that others might play it and love it as I do. Money can come later. |