Adventures in marketing: How not to market a game

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Adventures in marketing: How not to market a game

I first became involved with SeeThrough Studios before it existed. I was originally asked by Paul to help with game writing for Particulars (which will have an alpha release available soon! Finally! We mean it this time!) but then life and mostly a thesis got in the way.

I rejoined SeeThrough at the beginning of this year to work as a game writer and somehow* wound up as Social Media and Marketing Coordinator**. While I have worked in marketing and client-side relations before, I had never actually marketed a video game, and just to add more pressure into the mix, the Unstoppabot launch was less than two weeks away!

So check below the cut for a 17 step process on how not to market a game during your first two weeks in a job.

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 Disclaimer: My marketing was not as poorly thought out as this

*I noticed our online presence was lacking and offered to help. Things kind of snowballed from there.

**I may or may not have given myself a fancy title, fancy titles are the best.

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Coming soon – a breath of fresh cake

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Coming soon - a breath of fresh cake

Okay. Hmm. I’m not quite sure where to start. This has not traditionally been our problem. We’re good at starts – it’s the finishing that has been eluding us.

So I’ll start with that, and try and keep this brief. Following our latest Flatland “refocus” (as described in the previous blog post) we found ourselves in a difficult position. We knew that the changes we were making were necessary, but it also became apparent that they were killing team morale. No-one felt good about scrapping work they’d been doing for the last however-many weeks, and energy levels quickly sank through the floor.

There were any number of things we could have tried to combat this, so the first thing we did was get together for a brainstorming session, where we came up with a hundred ideas for things we could do to improve everyone’s experience at the company. These ranged from abstract morale-boosters like “go on a helicopter ride” or “get an office plant”, to more practical measures like which projects we actually wanted to pursue. (more…)

Prototype Fortnight: Combating the Issues 3

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Prototype Fortnight: Combating the Issues

Hello! I’m Thomas Bowker, and while this is my first post here, I’ve been at SeeThrough since the beginning of Fallen Angle.

This is a prototype that I finished last week. It’s all about combat.  Basing a game or prototype on just the word Combat allowed for plenty of freedom, but I wanted use Fallen Angle’s combat as a starting point and try to fix some of the problems players were encountering while playing.

One of the main problems with Fallen Angle’s combat was that because the player is playing a video game, they expect to have to defeat enemies rather than run away. Another major problem was that player death felt extremely random or unfair, just because how the mechanics of the splitting worked.

So for this prototype, I somewhat reworked how the splitting happens so that it is easier to understand on our side. I also simplified the rules that dictate when shapes should split. All this along with a change suggested by Saul: that shapes only die when they are hit directly at their core. I think this gives us a good starting point for a more satisfying combat system!

Click through for a look at the actual prototype.

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Prototype Fortnight: Emotional Sandbox 3

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Prototype Fortnight: Emotional Sandbox

Another day, another prototype. This time, it’s an Emotional Sandbox: a very basic test for the concept: “The Incredible Machine, but with Emotions”.

The idea is that each of the people in the simulation have an inner emotion (which they hide) and outer emotion (which they display), and that they interact based on this. From here, you can create puzzles to disrupt the normal path and make the characters do something else.

This prototype pretty much gives you an open sandbox within which to make combinations of characters and to have them interact: almost a level builder for this kind of game. I’m really interested to see what you guys make and how you find the interactions.

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Experiment 0: The SCIENCE! Method (it works, bitches) 1

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Experiment 0: The SCIENCE! Method (it works, bitches)

One of the things we’ve been looking at recently is our project methodology, and we’ve decided to create our own (for a number of reasons, detailed below). The method we’ve come up with is called SCIENCE!, and below is the methodology as it currently stands.

As we continue development of Particulars, we’ll be posting experiments that we’re running (usually after completion) and updating you on the details of the SCIENCE! Method.

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