Albatross Game devblog

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#gamedev PR   (post 3 of 3)

So where do we stand now, 8 months into our social campaign?

Twitter: 6364 followers Instagram: 5134 followers Facebook: 72 Fans

We see Twitter as a huge success story. And we don’t consider Facebook a failure, even with those very low numbers, as it seems to take the longest to grow that network. Part of the rationale for starting this blog in fact, is to have higher quality content to share on Facebook, as we continue working.

Our social strategy is on its way to becoming a success. And a large part of WHY is how enthusiastic the Indie Game community is! They are also very clearly defined on social channels - when someone hashtags #gamedev, you know an ENORMOUS amount about who that person is (far more than hashtags like “#photography or “#writers, both communities which are just as enthusiastic, but seem to be less clearly demarcated by a handful of hashtags).

Of course the actual hard work is a large part of why we have any results. As I said in Part 1, I dedicate at minimum 30 minutes every day (with very occasional gap days when traveling) to our social strategy. So 8 months in, that looks like: 240 days… multiplied by 30 minutes, equaling 7,200 minutes of work, or 120 hours. Thankfully, work in = results out. So far.

Of course, the true test will come closer to when we make moves to launch a Kickstarter and our eventual release date. How many of these followers are interested enough to not just observe, but participate/purchase? How many people will risk putting their money were their likes are? And what about…… THE PRESS? That’s the next giant mystery to us. Hoping to unravel that one a little bit quicker :)

We’ll know so much more in the coming months. Until then, onwards!

[albatrossgamedevblog]

#gamedev PR   (post 2 of 3)

Here’s what we’ve learned so far:

1) Facebook is the hardest platform on which to build a following virtually (not at festivals/meet-ups). There’s not as simple a mechanism in place to connect up with people who may be fans beyond your already existing social circles, aside from paid advertising.

2) Twitter is spammier than Facebook, but also grows organically. While we’ve just cracked 6k followers (following 2.7k people as of this posting), and met some stellar fellow Devs, there are bots, a few spammers, and then people who have only marginal engagement in what we’re doing. I look at e-mail newsletter sign-ups on our website as a good indicator of how much true interest we’re getting from real fans of our work. Right now only 3% of the twitter followers have signed up for the newsletter.

3) Instagram is NOT used by Indie Devs. Period. This shocked me… I’d thought of Instagram as the perfect place to showcase work and drum up excitement. But no other indie devs think so. We discovered this because of a spreadsheet. Let me explain:

I am obsessive when answering questions. If I don’t grock something, I start from zero, and work my way through as much of the landscape of the problem as possible, before drawing conclusions or forming strong opinions. Slow, but thankfully we have that luxury while still early in the development cycle. And for our PR campaign, I decided to make one big ol’ spreadsheet.

3 months ago, I begun compiling a list of games in our space in the market (puzzle platformer titles). What were they doing which we weren’t? What had they done, which we’d want to avoid? I was tracking everything from social media follower counts, to Kickstarter campaign stats, Steam release ratings, all the data I could find. And while everyone had Twitter, and almost everybody had Facebook, NO ONE used Instagram.

As newbies to the community, maybe someone could have just told me this - but I’m happy we learned it on our own eventually; we still have the Instagram account, still prioritize posting content to it, but one action that’s a direct result of this finding is that we’ve removed the Insta Social logo from our website - when someone is on our homepage and we can give them the choice of social platform to link to… it makes NO sense to allow Instagram to be an option over Twitter or Facebook. Lesson learned. And it only took 3 months :)

Speaking of lessons learned, we’re THRILLED with where all this work has gotten us so far!

— Finale (part 3) coming soon! —

[albatrossgamedevblog]

#gamedev PR   (post 1 of 3)

When Chad and I began work on Albatross in 2014, we knew eventually there’d be some amount of our time devoted to publicity. My mental checklist looked like this:

A) Need a STRONG game mechanic (check)

B) Need a profoundly interesting game STORY (check)

C) Need to tell as many people as possible about our game (big question mark)

I’ve found that as a newbie game developer, my day-to-day is chock full of big question marks. But what I lack in known-how, I make up for in SHEER FORCE OF WILL. So in November of 2015 (a year later than we should have started), I began my “social media strategy” across what I assumed were the big three: Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. So we set up an account for each platform: @DeeperMagicCo, facebook.com/AlbatrossGame, and @AlbatrossGameFeed, respectively.

I used Keyhole.co (a paid service, but the first couple of days are free!) to determine the relevant hashtags (off the top of my head I knew #gamedev and #indiedev, but I had never heard of #screenshotsaturday, among many others). I planned to tag every single post with as many pertinent hashtags as would fit, to get us maximum exposure within the indie gaming community. Then, there was a lot of hoping and praying…

…AND every day, and I mean EVERY single day, whether we posted anything or not, I went to work on following/favoriting/liking any relevant user/tweet/post from fellow Devs. I still spend roughly 30 minutes every single day, on liking/following/messaging the social channels (I’m not including the Reddit or MadeWithUnity groups, because those are harder to quantify, and I like talking about big shiny quantifiable NUMBERS.  

The next 8 months have been quite the adventure. And we’ve learned something shocking along the way.

— Stay tuned for PART 2! —

[albatrossgamedevblog]

Today we discuss the central puzzle mechanic of Albatross. As an example, I will use one of the first difficult puzzles you encounter in-game.

Imagine a large cement slab blocking your way down a corridor. It’s on tracks, so you can slide it forward or backward along a single axis along the corridor, but you can’t topple it over or damage it in any way. Although moveable, it is an impassable wall.

Now, imagine you can time travel. To make it simple, your travel is restricted to 24 hours into the future and back again to the present.

You will have already used this skill for navigating around simple obstacles at the beginning of game. You'll have avoided collapsed floors by traveling to the past where they are still intact (see above GIF). You'll have jumped between platforms that are offset in past and future. But this slab puzzle is the first time the obstacle is in the same position and completely intact in both present and future. Not so easy to get around.

To solve it, you need to understand causality. Assuming a closed system (read: no one else is interfering with your actions in between now and tomorrow) when you move an object in the PRESENT, it will also have moved in the FUTURE. If I slide the cement slab forward down the corridor, then sit on the floor and wait 24 hours, it will still be resting where I left it.

But some really cool stuff happens when you travel to the future and back again. If after I sit on the floor for those 24 hours, I stand up and then slide the cement slab backwards, to the beginning of the hallway… and then TIME TRAVEL BACK TO YESTERDAY, the slab will no longer be at the beginning of the hallway, but at the end: it hasn’t been moved backwards yet. That doesn’t happen for another 24 hours.

And now, since you have the power to hop instantly between today and tomorrow… if you time travel from the future back to the PRESENT, where the cement slab is near the end of the hallway, walk right up to it, then time swap for the final time… the cement slab will now be behind you, and you are free to go on your way.

I know, I know, it’s insanely hard to visualize; an image would definitely be better. But I don't want to completely spoil the puzzle for you :)

That is the very FIRST puzzle dealing with causality. They get much more complex. We have over 100 of them.

Be sure to head over to AlbatrossGame.com to sign up for the mail list - lots of exciting news coming this year!

[albatrossgamedevblog]

Prototyping Albatross

It all started with a one-level prototype almost two years ago. We built it out using basic 3D assets with the idea that it would be a first person puzzle platformer in the ilk of Portal or Swapper or Talos principle (all amazing games we love). The primary gameplay mechanic was there from the beginning: you're a time traveler who can swap between two time periods and you solve puzzles based around causal changes you make in the past or future. But, as play testing showed, the prototype itself needed a lot of work before it was ready for players.

First off we needed a way to simplify the game so that we could actually finish it with a 2-person team. So we made the hard decision to move from 1st person to 3rd person sidescroller. It's just a lot easier to make assets when you only need to build a set instead of a fully articulated world. But it actually ended up improving our initial gameplay concept for a number of reasons:

1) precision platforming usually works better when you can see your player and where his feet are. That's why the vast majority of platformers are 3rd person.

2) restricting movement to two dimensions actually opened up more puzzle ideas that weren't easily identifiable in 3D.

3) the game is a ton easier to grok when you have a third person view. This is especially true when you're working through complex multi-part puzzles that really benefit from a bird's-eye view. And the fact that every level has two versions, past and future, makes the bird's-eye view even more desirable.

Even though the sidescroller decision was pragmatic, it ended up helping gameplay immensely. So we threw away prototype #1 and moved onto #2. The next piece to tackle in making prototype #2 was the difficulty of our gameplay concept. We greatly underestimated how challenging our first puzzle design was. We initially thought it could be one of the first levels you encounter, but after a lot of testing we found it needed to be placed almost halfway through the game. Before that puzzle we had to introduce a lot of "teaching levels," which are really just easier levels with fewer moving parts (see this link for a great analysis of this technique https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/09/20/untold-riches-an-analysis-of-portals-expressive-level-design/ ), wherein the player learns time-travel and causality in the context of our game. We started with one tutorial puzzle, hoping that would help the learning curve. By the end, we added a dozen more at various difficulties before players truly understood the mechanic.

Our final prototype #2 was an hour-long game that most players could finish. And more importantly, they had fun doing it! At that point, we decided we could make a full game out of this kernel of an idea and began planning out the story and art. Which will be topics for a next post...

[albatrossgamedevblog]

Introducing… Albatross.

We (Chad Voss and Jonathan Coleman) have been working part-time since 2014 on project Albatross. You may have seen some screen caps of it. Really that’s all you could have seen so far, because it wasn’t until TODAY that we wrote a single thing about it.

Today that changes. Today… we blog!