Woah! What a scorcher. No, I’m not talking about the weather; I’m talking about our continued push on Project 2! Scorching progress is still being made, and we are VERY nearly ready to announce full details. Depending on progress over the next few days, I’m sure we will be ready to announce full details in next week’s diary. As ever with these things (us being a small team and all), things can change in a heartbeat, so it could be that by the time I’m finished writing this weeks entry we are ready…
Personally this week, I’ve been working on bits of the game that aren’t immediately apparent when you play it. A lot of background work has been done to enable quicker implementation of additional features in the future. It’s another great thing about object oriented programming which, until very recently, was something I had never dabbled with, let alone attempted to understand! It makes coding so much more fluid and simplistic to implement, rather than attempting to do what we are doing using a procedural system. I’ve noticed that I seem to bang on about this a lot lately, but it really is a revelation to me!
In addition to the coding side of things, I have also been looking into various distribution models and methods. It’s quite an intriguing area to explore actually. We have numerous avenues available to us, and its knowing and understanding which will work the best for us. We have Steam as a starting point. Now in order to get on Steam we need to impress them with a demo version of the game, give them ideas on pricing etc. Next, we have XBL Indy channel; cheap to do, but maybe not quite enough of a captive audience for us to be taken seriously? Having said that, even if the game just covers the cost of getting it on XBL then it’s got to be worth it! PSN. Hmm. I’m not entirely sure where we would start with that! I think that in order to get a “full” PSN release we’d have a lot of hoops to jump through; however the “minis” option is still a viable one… WiiWare/DSIware – again, not perhaps as straight forward as the other options and we’d have to seriously look at some past sales figures to see if any investment of time here would be worthwhile (from what I’ve read so far, sales figures aren’t great) having said that, the game would work really well on that platform!
The final model we are considering is that of self distribution via our website, maybe on a “pay what you want” sort of a basis. Whilst this would be the easiest way of working for us, the issue here is how on EARTH we would generate enough traffic to our website. I appreciate that word of mouth is a great way to generate a buzz about your product, however it’s getting that sort of buzz going in the first place. I would imagine that this would require some form of marketing budget (which we don’t have), so maybe that would be a better option for our next project, once people know who we are, what we can do and the like.
Whilst we are a good while away from releasing anything yet, once we are, things will move quickly so all this groundwork we are laying now will hopefully serve us well in the (hopefully) not too distant future!
Before I sign off, I would like to take the opportunity to thank those of you who supported our Tweetfest last week! It was really good to see tweets coming and going! However, I WANT MORE! Have a look at last week’s diary for details on what we want from you guys – REALLY want to get a #RoChain of tweets going – it links in nicely with the game and its mechanics! Fingers crossed and all being well, we will be ready to announce full details of Project 2 (maybe, just maybe) next week.
Just need to stay out of the sun, and in front of my desk (ahh, the life of a coder eh)!