Initiative for joint advertising of XBLIG
XBOXHornet has posted news of his Initiative for joint advertising of XBLIG.
"We have taken the bold step of booking advertising on the Official Xbox Magazinewebsite for the month of March ‘10.
The costs of the advertising are being shared by the developers, the advertising spots are being split into six day blocks in which the games featured will have twenty thousand impressions on OXM at a fraction of the cost of advertising a single game."
You can read the full article here
Post Mortem: Kissy Poo
Looks like Friday is Post Mortem day in XNA land. After the previous Space Pirates from Tomorrow post mortem now comes in the one George W. Clingerman with his Post Mortem of Kissy Poo. Writes that George:
A short while ago I became a REAL game developer with the release of an XBLIG I helped create called “Kissy Poo”. Overall this game has been a huge success. It has far exceeded my original expectations of sales and was just a really fun project to work on. (In case you were wondering I was expecting to sell around 500 copies and we’re right now hanging around 1200 copies sold!). Now though, I want to take some time to reflect a bit and share what went well and what I would have done differently. I think it’s good for any project to take that time and who knows, maybe it will be useful for someone else besides me!
Read the whole drama at the source.
Post Mortem: Space Pirates from Tomorrow
DrMisty published a post mortem for Space Pirates from Tomorrow over at the Mstar Games blog. Here’s a teaser to fill this post:
Wowsers. What a month. After about 6 months of continuous development, testing and tweaking and one aborted launch, Space Pirates has finally made it out in to the real world. It's considered "best practice" in a lot of Indie circles to examine exactly what happened, what went well, and what went badly. I'd like to think I've conducted myself pretty well throughout the experience, but every aspect of our work is up for questioning in this post mortem process. So we'll go back to the very beginning, consider the viability of the overall idea of Space Pirates, our ability to implement it and get it to market in a playable and reliable form, the impact of the various things we have to do on the XNA Creator's Club, our pre- and post- release media management, how we related to our customers and the impact on the MStar Games "brand".
Making an Xbox LIVE Indie Game
George "not focused on anything today" Clingerman just shared his thoughts on what it takes to make a quality XBLIG Game. It looks like he's planning to continually add stuff to the list, so repeatedly tap your finger on F5 for a while, until a stable state is reached.
P.S. Shameless free ads: If you have little kids, or are a little kid, make sure to take a look at George's (and ZMan's) game Kissy Poo.
About That Publicity Thingy Dingy
They say “Any publicity is good publicity” and P.T. Barnum is quoted to have said “I don't care what they say about me as long as they spell my name right.”
With this introduction I present you the comments thread on Pondering Indie Spirit: Derek Yu Speaks (the interview itself is worth reading). In the words of Michael Rose: “This thread went from irritating to epic in a matter of hours, and two things are definitely clear: (1) Spelunky is awesome and (2) Adam Coate should have his own chat show, as watching train-wrecks is fun”
“Flytrap” (no link yet as it is behind closed bars and there’s no webpage, video or anything else to link to…) is back in peer review now.
And to have a clearly positive take away in this post and the let’s-call-it-reputation-building of a XNA GS fellow: The Idiot's Guide to Marketing Your Indie Game by Michael Rose.
(Hat tip to Ben Baird)
XBlig-UK 2009 Speaker Notes
Over at the XNA UK User Group site Vera Shackle posted a quick write-up on the recent XBlig-UK 2009 event:
This is the quickest way to get links up from the speakers from the day. I’ll also add some prettier pages to the XBlig-UK site in due course. In the meantime, to hear more about XBlig-UK 2009, including interviews with some of the speakers mentioned below (not to mention my own dulcet tones), listen to the NxtGenUG Podcast right here.
So, without further ado, we had a wicked day with the following top presenters:
XBLIG on giantbomb.com
Giantbomb.com takes a 42 minutes look at several Xbox Live Indie Games. Go hear what they have to say!
The XBLIG Community vs. Time Trials & a Facebook App
This is the first of a (hopefully) infinite number of MVP Watch posts, in which we will cover the community work of the Direct/XNA MVPs.
It started with the usual and quickly locked whining thread, causing a reasonable reply in a new thread by Daniel Hanson, leading to a connect issue, gathering various levels of MVP support: Nick Gravelyn supports it full heartily (even by unlocking the “good” thread again!), while George Clingerman tries to bring forum reputation into the length of the time limit (not sure if he just tries to be sarcastic there, though…).
After long hours of hard and exhausting journalistic investigations (yes, in these ages watching a stream of tweet is considered such…) it could be uncovered that the very same Nick “If I do not do it no one else will” Gravelyn will release his Xbox Indies Facebook app soon.