Back after the Holidays

Wow, we’re already over a week into the new year and we’ve not yet asked you all how you’ve been! How are you? We’ve been fine thank you, the Bzzz team have had a bit of a longer break and find ourselves in different countries than before so progress has been slower over the winter but still steady indeed!

We have altered the art for our main character slightly and Maciej has been working hard on structuring the levels within the app and realising the user interface in code. This means I am left with not much to show in terms of pretty pictures and colours, so here’s an attractive picture of a work in progress for the artwork on our menu screen.

It’s such a delight to see some of my earlier sketches being created and improved upon! I’m still creating more levels and I hope to share more of them with you in the coming weeks.

Here’s just a quick plug for our twitter account (see left) and tumblr page where we become slightly less professional and reblog interesting game or other related content.

Roll on 2013!

-MBo

Marketing Socially

I promised a future blog about how we will be using social media to market our game. Well, my friend, the future… is now.

As I have described in previous posts , making an independent game is done for the love of the creative process, sharing ideas and making a memorable experience for the end player. The game has already cost us a fair amount to make, but started out as a no-budget project. This calls for a strong social media strategy and an awareness that this technique will need to be taken up for the long game.

It’s like I leaned in event management classes. You do something quickly, cheaply or well. Pick two.

I have today set up a twitter account for Isaac the Jellyfish @IsaacJelly where you can send him a message. At the moment he’s trapped in a tank so please don’t tap on the glass as you’ll be likely to cause him distress. You can tweet at him though and let him know everything will be fine and that people are coming to rescue him. As players progress through the levels, they can notify Isaac straight from an option in the game and Isaac will reply.

The idea here is to be able to engage with the audience through the Isaac character and see how the community responds to the game. Building twitter into the game will make this easier to do.

Currently Isaac is not a tweetbot because I don’t like spam or insincerity. We’ll have to see how popular the feature is and review this position if it starts to take way too much time.

Many games have a ‘share this with friends’ feature built in, so in many ways this is nothing new. I really liked how the game Waking Mars used twitter. They allowed the player to tweet quotes from the game along with a screenshot on the hashtag #wakingmars. Their art (and game) was really cool and inspired conversations amongst groups of friends.

My original idea for our campaign was to tell the story to the player through twitter notifications using an automated tweet bot that unveiled Isaac’s thoughts during the level progression, but I quickly realised that this would be annoying and impractical for many reasons. Isaac is otherwise mute in the game and communicates with the player through a notifications-style system, sending secret messages. His presence on twitter means he can broadcast to the world, and he will be openly grateful to any players who complete the game, meaning a bit of gamer kudos from the community!

I will touch on storytelling in an upcoming post and discuss how this all ties together in a wonderful and (hopefully) successful social media campaign. In the meantime, please get in touch with me or Isaac and we’ll all be very social. Also you can claim to be friends with a Jellyfish.

-MBo