Yes it’s that day at last! Hurrah! Grab your tommy gun and climb out of that trench because it’s time to take the battle to the enemy and go grab yourself a copy of Gratuitous Tank Battles.

You can buy GTB direct from the developer (me!) here, or from…

Steam

http://store.steampowered.com/app/205530/

Gamersgate

http://www.gamersgate.co.uk/DD-GTB/gratuitous-tank-battles

Impulse

http://www.impulsedriven.com/grattankbat

If you buy direct, you will find details on how to grab your free steam code in the purchase email. If you pre-ordered and thus already have your copy, I’ll be emailing you details about grabbing your steam code. If you know a friend who wants the game, you can get a second copy direct at 50% off.

Even though the game is now officially released, there will be updates, patches and improvements. I’m already working my way through tests of the first post-release patch, which concentrates on mod support for the game. I want the mod support to be ‘at least’ as good as the Gratuitous Space Battles modding, which was incredibly popular.

If you took part in the beta, you will notice today marks the release of the 1.008 patch, which is the first full release build of the game. The game can take up to 24 hours to trigger an update check and grab the latest version, but the differences between 1.007 and 1.008 are not huge.

To any hugely influential games journalists who have been holding off on covering the game until release date, please contact me at cliff@positech.co.uk.

And anyone who can find space in their hearts to tweet, blog or facebook like or other trendy social things, to ensure a few more people out there know about the game, it is all very much appreciated. Thankyou!

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Over the course of a loooong time, me and Nicholas Lovell from gamesbrief, argued about whether or not free to play games are the bright new future of gaming. I am traditionally against the current implementation of F2P gaming (although I’ve softened on this a bit). Nicholas is traditionally very pro. See who you found most persuasive in our little debate…

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Nicholas,

FreeToPlay is not the future of games, or at least I hope it isn’t. The entire business model is built upon cynicism, mainly the idea that players will think they can play game A for free, as opposed to game B which costs $30. We both know that someone, somewhere has to pay for the game’s development, and for that idea to work out, you either need to hook some ‘whales’ who pay out a fortune and subsidise everyone else, or you have to constantly nag all of the players to pay for in-game items.

Either way, the business model will lead to design compromises that do not exist in any other artistic medium. A writer or movie director can compose a piece of entertainment safe in the knowledge that the customer has bought into the idea of the entire work. Imagine the impact if the audience were asked every chapter or scene to pay a few pennies to access the next part of the story.

We wouldn’t tolerate free-plus-microtransactions in other media, why should we tolerate it in gaming? Free to play is nothing more than the new version of a very old idea, the free demo. The difference is that with a free demo, the understanding is you then make an honest pitch for the player to purchase the game at the end of the demo. The F2P model seems to rely on interrupting the player mid-game to constantly pester them for a few pennies.

How is this a better business model?

Cliff Harris, Positech Games

* * *

Cliff,

You start by making the mistake of thinking that all users love your work equally.

The idea that all users should pay the same price for a piece of entertainment, however little or much they enjoy it, is a bizarre concept born out of the limitations of physical media. In the old days, when there were no bits and distribution was exclusively by atoms, content creators had
no choice but to fix the price. It was the only way to sell an entertainment product via retail stores. The consequence was that a superfan who loved that game would get hours of incredibly cheap value. A user who found after a few hours of play that it wasn’t for them was, in effect, subsidising the heavy players.

Free to play changes all of that. It lowers barriers to entry, which means people can play and enjoy the game while they work out if they want to spend money on it. It enables people to play the game for ever, for free. As long as the player is playing, the creator has the chance to say “hey, you’re
enjoying my game. Here are ways that you could enjoy it for more, by spending some money with me.”

It’s more honest (because it allows players spend according to their level of engagement with the game), it is cheaper (because you build a title for continued play, you don’t have to spend all of the development and marketing budget prior to launch) and it is more profitable (because you let those who don’t want to pay play for free, while allowing those who love the title to spend much more than the initial price).

What’s not to like?

PRESS SPACE TO TAKE YOUR TURN

Nicholas Lovell, www.gamesbrief.com

* * *

Nicholas,
I accept people are prepared to pay different prices for games, but this is why we have collectors editions and DLC. I don’t accept that we are just being shackled by the physical properties of the medium, because that also applies to books and movies. They capture the whole audience by having
hardback or signed copies, and DVD specials with extras.

This is all fine. I have no problem with extra content being made available after a product is complete. The difference is that you are advocating designing the game around such a business model from the start, which I think makes for an inferior product. Books may come as hardback/paperback, but you don’t have to pay extra to get all the characters, that would be mad, yet it’s how F2P games are being designed.

The other problem is that the game is no longer a shared experience or level playing field. I can now be shot by someone with a gun I didn’t buy, or outrun by a car with engines I haven’t bought. Games are about fantasy and adventure and getting away from the rat-race and treadmill of real life. Is
it not bad enough that MMOs feel like a second job, without importing all the envy and unfair competition from the real world too? Real world games would never allow this. Football teams don’t get more players if their team has more money, we accept that when it comes to games, it should be about skill, not bank balances. And as for barriers to entry, there are already none when the game has a free demo

Cliff Harris, Positech Games.

* * *

Dear Cliff

I think that we are coming at this issue from two different directions. I care about players, but I also care about the businesses that make games. After all, if it is hard or impossible to make a living from making games, fewer talented people will make fewer great games.

So I start from the premise that if the market is being changed by digital distribution and the immutable economic law that if the costs of making another copy of something trends towards zero, so does the amount that people will pay for that copy. In that environment, I think it will be very hard to keep the price that an end user will pay for a gamer at anything above very low (meaning iOS style prices). It is very hard to make a living at a price point of £0.69 for all but the very lucky. Even Rovio, often shown as the posterchild of iOS development, needed commitment and luck: Angry Birds was their 52nd game.

You’ve argued that you need to gross £100,000 (I think) to make a living. That means selling 145,000 copies of the game if the price is £0.69. You would need to sell 20,000 copies at £4.99.

There is another way. What if you can find a business model that allows people who love your game to spend more? If you design the game to allow those people who love what you do to spend a day’s wages over the course of a year of playing? In the UK, a day’s wages is £100. That would mean you
would only need to have 1,000 players who loved what you do to make enough money to live on.

Isn’t that easier and more attractive than trying to appeal to everyone in the same way.

How would that business model work? You make the game entirely available for free, so that people can play, explore and experiment in your world. You offer a way for people to spend £1. They may be able to buy aesthetic changes like personalised outfits, new skins or new buildings that don’t
affect gameplay. They may be able to level up faster, unlock items earlier than someone who plays the standard mode. They may even buy additional content (although in my mind, it is better to sell personalisation than content).

Then you need to make it *possible* to spend £100 per month. Not because people will (although some might), but because you want your biggest fans to have choice – about the personalisation, the status, the progress, whatever it is that excites them – and if they are *able* to spend £100 a month,
maybe they’ll spend £10.

A thousand true fans, out of perhaps 100,000 playing your free game, and you have an exciting business that is all about making cool new stuff that your biggest fans will love – and want to pay for.

That seems to me to be the best of all possible worlds.

Love

Nicholas Lovell, www.gamesbrief.com

* * *

Cliff says:

“Ah but here is the fundamental contradiction. You suggest that because stuff can be copied, it’s natural price is zero, but then you also talk extensively about ways to get money from people for games by other means.

Ultimately, it’s just a shuffling of payment from all gamers equally to a few wealthy ones, but the same amount of money is being generated. The ‘free to play’ games are clearly nothing of the sort, they are more like ‘patronage’ games, where some wealthy people who suffer from gaming addiction subsidise everyone else’s leisure time. An interesting way to do it, but not something that is being done in the interests of making games better. If your business strategy relies on milking a core group of hardcore wealthy addicts, then it means games get designed effectively for a small hardcore subset.

Besides, the popular ‘thousand true fans’ model doesn’t require micro-transactions and free-to-play, they are unrelated. You can have your thousand true fans who buy the game, without requiring them to be a subset of 100,000 casual players who value their playing time at zero.

 I could just about get by with a thousand true fans by selling them $30 games, and many people do exactly this, like spiderweb software and the guys making hex-based WW2 strategy games. There are many people out there happy to pay $20-40 for a game that they really like. It’s a myth that gamers will only pay $0.99 for a game, it’s just that those gamers are a very loud, shouty minority.

You can have your thousand true fans who buy the game, without requiring them to be a subset of 100,000 casual players who value their playing time at zero.”

Cliff Harris, Positech Games

* * *

Dear Cliff,

Of course you can get by with 1,000 true fans paying $30 for your games. The difficulty is in finding them.

Free-to-play games suffer from this discoverability problem too: they need to spend to acquire customers in the same way that traditional games companies have to market their games. The difference is that, because their games are free, they can get many more people into the game to discover if they enjoy it. They can play the game for longer – often forever – before the paywall comes slamming down. They can get their friends playing without having to persuade them to shell out $30. And when they find a true fan, they can make a lot more than $30, while offering things that the true fan values.

There will still be companies making money from games that are single upfront payments for quite some time. Most of them will have established reputations, while new businesses are more likely to start by assuming the free is the optimum price point for consumers AND for the company.

The important thing is that a wider variety of good games will have a chance to get developed than ever got developed before. I think that is something that we can both agree is a very good thing.

Nicholas Lovell, www.gamesbrief.com

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So who won? TELL US NOW!!!

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I hurt my back chopping wood, how tragic. This means I am a) in agony and b) not able to talk about gamecamp in London, because I couldn’t go

Instead, I shall waffle on about advertising!

I’m one of the few indie devs that actually believes in advertising. Everyone else seems to think it does not work on a small scale, as in <$500,000. It does. Even spending $1 on ads will make a difference, the problem is, that it’s a difference too tiny to measure. Measuring ad results is a minefield I’ve blogged about a lot in the past.

One thing I like about ads is that it’s truly remote and spontaneous spreading of news about your game. Most indies don’t get spontaneous website coverage unless they actively find a reviewer, send him a copy and pester him/her for a review. By definition, that narrows the circle of publicity about your game. Who knows how many Ukrainian gaming blogs have readers who are oblivious to Gratuitous Tank Battles, because I don’t know those blogs exist?

I rely heavily on hard evidence and stats to pick the best advert designs, but here are some GTB ads. Let me know what is good / bad about them, or if you have any cool ideas for them. I tend to use static, not animated ads, as I find animated ones have little real difference to CTR, and frankly, I don’t like being associated with cheesy flashing things.

I’m planning on using these on google adwords, but maybe project wonderful and game-advertising online. I like the way google lets me target certain countries and restrict it to PC’s rather than macs/phones, but I hate the complexity and approval delays for their campaigns. I wish many more gaming sites would investigate using project wonderful instead. They are really good.

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Ok, so after hurriedly yanking a slightly buggy version of GSB from the apple app-store, the IPAD version of GSB is back on sale and you can all go rush out and throw money at it right now. Hurrah! Here it is:

http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/gratuitous-space-battles/id517457294?mt=8

(The expansion packs in the PC version will end up being added at some stage. The campaign add-on won’t make it to ipad, it’s just insanely big and complex and involved and not pad-friendly)

Here are a few lessons learned from the ipad experience thus far:

1) The ipad has hardly any memory. Developing on PC, then squeezing it onto ipad is seriously hard!

2) A game where you zoom in and out and drag stuff around is really cool to play on the ipad. It feels very l33t.

3) There seems to be basically no way to get any attention on the app store unless apple chooses you. Admit it, you all only found GSB by searching.  Even the category search function seems broken on my ipad 2. It’s a trainwreck, compared to other portals.

4) Everyone who insists that nobody buys ipad games > $0.99 is just wrong. They do.

If you are a high-powered famous and influential mac-blog-owner or reviewer with a bazillion readers, and you have NOT got a press-review copy of GSB on ipad, just email me, and I will see what I can do.

In other news…. very close to setting the GTB release date now. It will also be on GamersGate, Impulse and Steam. Yay!

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So why haven’t I patched the game lately? when is the release date? Here goes…

The release date is basically any day now. The final build of the game is done, tested, built and ready for distribution. That doesn’t mean it’s the ‘lat’ build. I intend to update the game later with a number of improvements, not least to enable easy mod-support for the game, and a bunch of graphical improvements, speedups and GUI tweaks etc…

But at some point you declare the game officially launched so people who would not preview it, get to review it.

Also, that’s the point at which third parties like steam etc get to sell the game…

And that’s currently the slight delay. Setting things up with third party portals is taking a little while. I have some minor tech issues with setting it up for one portal, another is frankly not getting the final build until I see last months royalties actually arrive in my bank account (god I hate this hassle…), and a few more I shall contact today and see if they want to stock the game.

while we wait..here is a tank made from balloons…

Previously I’ve launched on my site first, and the portals later, but I was hoping for a simultaneous release this time.

The good news is that I’ve written a web-based front-end for people who have bought the game direct, which tells them what their steam-key is, for when the game launches on steam. They will get an email from me on launch day.

So don’t think I’ve stopped working on GTB, far from it, it would just complicate stuff a LOT if I released a new patch now, and then portals started selling a version slightly older. Hopefully the first post-release patch will be bigger than normal and have more fixes as a result (or more important ones).

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One thing that a lot of companies don’t get is the importance of frictionless feedback.
All companies perpetuate the myth that they want to hear from customers. They pretend to value their feedback, and want to hear from them, regardless whether or not the feedback is good or bad. In very few cases is this really true. I’m not referring to actually abusive or threatening feedback, which obviously just gets binned.

Negative, but non-abusive feedback is good stuff to have, and so is positive feedback obviously. Any developer who has sat down and watched a ‘lets-play’ video of their game, or better still, observed strangers playing their game for the first time in real-life, can tell you that NO amount of brainstorming, agonizing or debating over design features is as good as watching people play…

Sometimes, people think that the only feedback worth having is the long and analytical email or forum post dissecting the games design and deliberating it’s strengths and weakeness, alongside constructuive suggestions as to how to improve things. Obviously this feedback is awesome, and much appreciated but it is not the only form worth having, because it’s delivery method implies some self-selection on the part of the player.

In other words, only a certain subset of hardcore, analytical thoughtful and time-rich gamers will ever commit their thoughts to keyboard in such an effective and clear manner.
What you really need to capture is the gamers who can’t be bothered to spend more than 10 seconds giving you feedback on your game, but nevertheless are buyers/potential buyers and have a viewpoint. they are gamings 99%
To do this, you need to reduce any ‘friction’ involved in that process. Is it easy to get feedback from your customers. Here is how I try to make it easy.

1) you can email me at cliff@positech.co.uk, and I will read it. I acknowledge almost all feedback, and I read all of it. Even if it’s a one-line email “The mechs are overpowered”, it still gets filed away and noted.
2) You can post on my forums at www.positech.co.uk. This is probably my best source of feedback.
3) You can comment on blog posts here
4) You can direct-message or just quote @cliffski on twitter. I read all that too.
5) You can comment on the facebook page for the game.

Ideally, I’d make it even easier, but true anonymous frictionless feedback is just open to spam. I experimented with anonymous guest posting on forums, but it’s a spam headache unfortunately. I guess the best thing to do is just make it really clear that feedback is welcome, good or bad and you can email me your thoughts on the game, and they will get read. Indies are lucky because people actually believe us when we say you can email the lead designer, rather than a customer service person.

I always wish when I read a comment on my games on some foum, that the person typing it knew that they could just copy and paste that opinion and throw it at me by email, and it would have 100x the effect on getting the game changed and refined than a post on a foumr (although such posts are to be encouraged too, anything that gets people discussing your game is clearly a good thing)
Any game developer hiding their email address behind a captcha or sign-up account is just throwing away a free source of honest feedback. Don’t do it. get better spam filters. It can be done, how else can I constantly type cliff@positech.co.uk on my blog and get away with it?

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Another, and possibly the final pre-release patch has been released for Gratuitous Tank Battles. I put more emphasis this time on the whole topic of stability and performance, rather than squeezing in new features. The full list of changes in 1.007 are as follows:

version 1.007
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1) Fixed bug where the deployment icons on the battle screen were no longer showing their popup windows.
2) Fixed crash bug when using very high amounts of muzzle smoke.
3) Increased minimum range of missile modules.
4) Fixed bug in displaying certain bonus effects on the design screen, notably for missile launchers.
5) Replaced 'gratuitous shaders' option with a toggle for the distortion effect.
6) Sped up the drawing of unit shadows.
7) Fixed yellow-screen corruption bug
  Fixed bug where the progress bar for the score would not always draw correctly.
9) Performance improvements allow for higher quality visuals when zoomed out on higher spec PCs.
10) Infantry do not now talk as frequently when onscreen in large numbers.
11) Some variety introduced in the placement of tiny props next to certain turrets
12) All turrets now have surrounding 'splats' to merge slightly with the terrain.
13) Special props can now be hidden from the editor.
14) Fixed bug which displayed an empty unlock dialog on certain occasions.
15) Some optimisations to speed up drawing of drifting smoke, and reduce particle effects when framerate drops.
16) Fixed unit design bug preventing ammo loaders being selected if a rate of fire aug was already fitted.
17) Fixed bug where a map would not tolerate starting supplies being higher than the mid-game supply cap.

The ones that really matter are 5,7,17 and 17 which were pretty critical functionality related things. I still have a bunch of purely aesthetic improvements I’d theoretically like to make, but they can wait. I am hooping that what is currently in the game represents a big list of features to attract buyers, and at the same time is also pretty fast and stable. Modding support is the next big thing to get my teeth into, but that is all under-the-hood stuff which won’t really affect 90% of the players.

The only thing (barring reported major bugs) between now and release is going to be making a new launch trailer that shows stuff like the extra maps and the airstrikes etc. Making trailers always takes an absolute age, and I’m never happy with them, but I should put some time into it because GTB looks so much better moving than as still images. I plan to capture and record a fairly high res trailer this time so it looks as good as possible. the trouble is Fraps can only record so big before it slows down the actual game and makes performance look bad when it really isn’t. That, plus the nightmare of uploading and rendering out massive video files.

I might try and take half a day off tomorrow. Yay!

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(Guest Blog Post by Chris Park)

Just what is this game “A Valley Without Wind” from indie studio Arcen Games all about?  Read on to find out.

Procedural World Filled With Choice And Customization
At first glance it looks like your average 2D Metroidvania title, just with magic instead of guns.  The difference is choice: except for a brief linear intro mission, this is all a procedural open world.

Rather than linear levels, the emphasis here is on tactical combat and strategic planning.  The overlord is strong, you’re weak, and you need to figure out how to fix that and go kick his or her butt.  In a lot of respects the mentality is that of a strategy game (makes sense given our past games, eh?), but rather than it being an army of characters you control, it’s just one character at a time.

The amount of customization is pretty crazy.  There are “only” something like 40 spells you can directly craft at the moment, but there are also passive enchant buffs that you can apply to yourself.  Enchants change anything from how you move; to how your spells behave; to how you light your way, or if you can breathe underwater, etc.  Enchants are procedurally generated like loot in Borderlands or Diablo, and there are a few hundred thousand unique combinations possible at this point.  Various items can be scavenged out in the world, too, such as magic scrolls to turn yourself into a bat, heatsuits that make lava easier to deal with, and so on.  Figuring out how to best customize your character to match your skills as a gamer is one of the cooler aspects of the game.

The Community Vs The Self, Permadeath, And Thinking Outside The Box
When you choose your first character, the game warns you not to get too attached.  It’s not a question of IF your character is going to die, but WHEN.  Upon death, the character is gone forever — and most of the time, a vengeful ghost arises from their corpse and makes the area you died in even harder.  So, uh, tactical retreats aren’t just for the faint of heart in this game.

It’s not like permadeath in a roguelike, though, where the mechanics are overtly punitive — we’re not out to punish the player.  When you die you get to choose a new character immediately, and you keep all your inventory, enchants, and general progress in the game.  There are some minor character-specific things that are lost, but it’s nothing remotely heart-breaking.

We’ve also tried to emphasize choice with “community focus versus focus on self.”  There’s a lot more that we want to do in that area in the future, but what is there is pretty nifty already.  You can rescue NPCs and construct buildings for them, and in return those NPCs can help you out via long-range magic scrolls, for instance.

I really love games where players get an opportunity to show their cleverness, rather than just jumping through a set of hoops the developer set out.  In your average Metroidvania title, each challenge has one solution (see red door in Metroid = shoot with missiles), and that can be really fun in its own right.  But in AVWW each challenge tends to have four or five solutions (at least), each with their own pros and cons.  If you play as a bat you don’t have to worry about jumping, but you also deal less damage, get blown about by the wind more, and can’t go into lava or ice age areas.  And so on.

I like to tell the story of this one player who, during the beta, made essentially a melee fighter using the spell Death Touch and some jump-related and defense-related enchants; he managed to kill an overlord with this build, and I was blown away that this was even possible.  It took a lot of sideways thinking to make the build in the first place, and then a lot of skill to bring down an overlord using that build.  That’s what I mean by encouraging players to show their own cleverness (as well as skill).

Adaptive Gameplay, And True Freedom Without Being Directionless
In a linear game, the difficulty curve can be set by level designers.  In an open world, that’s not possible because we don’t know where you’re going to go.  So what we did was make it adaptive to how you play: monsters have a general baseline difficulty to start with, and then they upgrade as you demonstrate your proficiency.  Killed 100 regular bats?  Okay, we get it, you’re good at killing bats.  Time for… bats on fire!

You can literally go almost anywhere you see in the open world — including right into the overlord’s keep at any time.  Come on, it’s no secret where the oppressive dictator lives.  The problem is that the monsters surrounding his keep will probably kill you before you even reach his front stoop.  But if you’re so good that you could avoid getting hit at all by enemy shots, you could just go right into his keep and take him out with your starting pea shooters.  Realistically it’s a lot more fun to actually play the game and buff your character appropriately before going for the take-down, but even then you get to choose when and how that take-down is going to happen.

Each world is literally endless.  When you beat one overlord, and thus save one continent, a new continent that is bigger and more complicated opens up.  Some things carry across continents, others don’t.  It’s kind of like a “New Game+” option that a lot of RPGs have, except better because you can still go back to your old continent any time, and there’s a lot more direct continuity.  Each continent should take most players 8-14 hours to complete, but that really varies enormously depending on how much side exploration they do.

One immediate worry with a game of such scope, with such long-form goals, is players feeling directionless.  That was certainly something we struggled with early in the public beta, and with AI War as well.  Thanks to the help of our core fanbase, we’ve managed to put together a system that guides without being directive.  The “planning menu” in the game gives you suggestions on what to do at all times based on your current status, but you’re free to ignore those suggestions and do whatever you see fit.  It also includes the equivalent of an entire wiki right in the game itself, so that you don’t have to go looking at external sources to find out where arcane ingredient #7 is, etc.

Where We Hope To See This Go Next
This has been our most successful beta so far by a factor of at least 4:1, and we had really positive showings at both Minecon and PAX East.  Players willing, my hope is to be able to focus on building more of this game for the next 3+ years to take it from what is already massive (30-40 hours to even see all the content at the moment) to something gargantuan like AI War.  As with AI War, the hope is to do tons of free content on an ongoing basis, and then a few optional paid expansions with larger content-drops along the way.

Speaking of AI War, that game has been out since May 2009 and we’re still doing almost weekly free updates to it; and we have at least two more expansions planned regardless of how well AVWW does.  We know that some folks’ faith in post-release content has been shaken in light of various recent events with other developers, but we have a three-year track record of being there on an ongoing basis.  We don’t intend to stop that anytime soon.

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PR and marketing for indies is not easy. I would suggest there are a number of factors determining how tricky they find it:

• Your age (young hip trendy kids know a lot of people through school./college etc, probably wider game-playing circle).
• Your time in the industry (I know a lot of people who I’ve met voer the years at conferences, meetups etc).
• Your personality (shyness sucks here. outgoing people make more contacts).
• Your attitdue to PR (If you hate self-promotion, that will count against you a bit).
• Your numbers. (4 people teams have 4 times the time, the friends and the contacts).

Of course, this can all be adjusted and overcome, but it’s worth realising not everyone starts from the same position. I guess I win on time in industry and attitude, and outgoigness, but suck on numbers and age.

Given that it’s not an equal game, there is also the issue of where to concentrate your limited PR/Marketing firepower. Here are a number of alternate strategies.

1. Make the game so awesome everyone just HAS to tell everyone about it. Forget about PR. (this *can* work. ever seen dwarf fortress get promoted?).
2. Blog like crazy, Build up a huge blog following who will buy and promote the game for you.
3. Social network! run a popular facebook page or twitter feed you promote everywhere. Hope the virality works for you.
4. Advertise! Actually spend money on banner ads. (This works, everyone says it doesn’t but they don’t stick with it. I *know* it works.)
5. Reviews! Be and grovel for coverage from every journalist in the universe. Hope reviews drive traffic to your site.
6. Sales channels! Make your game available from everywhere, and hope people see it enough, and check it out.
7. Press-the-flesh! Go to conferences and shows like E3, PAX and so on, and actually talk to real-life gamers about your game!
8. Forums – Talk about your game on any indie-friendly forums you can find, try to encourage discussion of your game on all the big name web forums, and sites like reddit etc.
9. PR-firm. Hire someone professional to do all this for you.
10. Youtube. Try to get those influential lets-play style video-bloggers to talk about your game.
11. Cross-promote. Work with other indies to do guest blog posts or stuff like showmethegames

All these methods have advantages and disadvantages. I’ve tried them all (except hiring), to a greater or lesser extent. I wish I could tell you I knew which ones really work the best, and it depends on your personality in some ways. I am paranoid about being called a shill if I mention my own game on a forum. I live in the Uk and am an eco-geek so don’t fly to E3, Pax etc. The semi-autistic bit of me enjoys the number crunching of running ad campaigns. Your mileage will vary.

In general I think it makes sense to focus your PC on a specific area, otherwise you are going to just ‘bounce off’ and get no measurable results, like most indies do with advertising. I am time-limited, and work on code-heavy games, so my time is super-limited. Plus it’s just me. As a result, I’m thinking the time-intensive (social networking/conferences) stuff may not work for me. One of the main sources of PR for my stuff is actually this blog. If you scan the archives you’ll know I’ve blogged a LONG time, and this blog is surprisingly popular. of course, the blog predates the social-networking and youtube-videos explosion, so that’s not to say those aren’t better channels. I have facebook pages for gratuitous space battles gratuitous tank battles and redshirt, but I don’t have the time to really promote them as much as I should (feel free to like em!). I’m always re-assessing my priorities, but the answer keeps changing.

What do you use (if you are a dev) and as a gamer, where do you first hear about new games?

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Ok, so patch 1.006 for Gratuitous Tank Battles is now live. There are, as usual a bunch of minor tweaks and improvements, but here is the stuff that you will notice more than the rest:

• Airstrikes are in! You only get them as defender, and be warned they can damage your units too, so aim carefully You need to unlock them before they are usable:

• There are some new augmentations available that work on defensive capabilities, such as boosting armor and shields etc.
• Defensive AI now takes into account attacking unit movement and tries to build ahead of the enemy, not just right on top of them (which often means they built turrets too late, and were useless by the time they were built).
• The tab key now cycles through all your divisions, if you have multiple ones set up, shift+tab reverses it.
• New progress bars in the UI to show supplies and victory progress.

Hopefully this all improves the game and makes it more polished. It’s funny how adding stuff such as the supplies / victory progress bars and the tab-button stuff makes it so much easier to play, but I hadn’t realised they were needed all this time. Nothing beats just playing & playing & playing your supposedly finished game

Existing buyers should get their game auto-patching today or tomorrow. Make sure you have entered your serial code and picked a username or it won’t happen. New buyers get a ready-patched 1.006.

Tempted to pre-order now? Here you go.

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