Hello all! It’s been a week now since Melbourne International Games Week finished and I’d like to take some time to reflect on what I learnt this year from the “Christmas of games and game development”. Stay tuned for a future blog post on what game prototypes I’ve been working on over the last few months and my current project.
Before games week kicked off I took some time to set some goals for the game developers conferences. I had some general goals, like intentionally meeting as many other game developers as I could manage, partially with the hope that I might find an artist to collaborate with on a future project or game jam. More specifically though I wanted to understand how to market a game effectively when I am responsible for virtually every aspect of its creation. I wanted to get an idea of where games journalists find their content and what catches their eye as being newsworthy.
During Unite and GCAP, the developer conferences, I spent a significant amount of time in marketing and business related panels. One of the aspects of game dev that I haven’t learnt anything about yet is using in-game analytics to improve game design. There is some time investment in implementing the technology for any project, but presenters demoed some great examples such as using level progression info to adjust difficulty and identifying and rewarding different player styles which could greatly improve the flow of a game. One technique for identifying different player groups for analytics is using k-means clustering a data science and machine learning technique. I’m always looking for an opportunity to learn more about AI and machine learning, so I’m hoping I’ll have time to try that out for my own projects. Brackeys from Youtube has a good explanation of Unity Analytics which serves as a good introduction to analytics.
In terms of marketing, presenters really drove home that time and effort needs to be spent on trailers, store pages and the like. The reality is that thousands of people are going to be viewing this content, so it needs to be as good as it can be. These moments are also highly predictable. You know that potential players are going to view the game art, click through to a store page, watch a trailer and read the description. Each of these moments will determine click-through and ultimately whether the customer buys your game. Importantly click-through is tracked by Steam, Microsoft or whatever store you are listed on and they will promote whichever games have the best click-through rates. It’s highly important that you get this right so that you get maximum visibility from your store in your limited release window. None of this should be surprising, so the take away for me was to spend your marketing effort (and indeed your game design effort) where the most number of people will be viewing / playing.
I’ve never had to think about how to interact with journalists before and to be honest, the thought is kind of scary. A simple takeaway I learnt from games week was that stories promoting your game don’t actually have to be about the game, but rather about how or why you developed it, who *you* are (if you have some kind of interesting history) or how your game ties into a current news event. For example, MsMinotaur used to program satellites before she worked on games, Hyper Light Drifter has themes that mirror its creator’s own illness. There are lots of these stories that don’t directly tie into the games, but journalists and the general public are interested in the greater context of the game.
These takeaways feel super obvious, but it’s stuff that I haven’t consciously had to think about before. It’s all part of the process of becoming a real developer though, I guess.
There were also some great games that I played at PAX AUS. Some of the standouts narrative games were Necrobarista – a playable Visual Novel and Rumu – a sentient vacuum cleaner investigating the house it lives in. There was also Regular Human Basketball – a comedic team sport about controlling a robot co-operatively to shoot a basketball. I’m also eagerly awaiting the release of The Adventure Pals which was on show again this year and which I pre-ordered last year.
So, what did you learn this games week? What games are you excited for?