Category: business

I’m going to london indie conference ‘world of love’ on friday. I’m not speaking this year, but I’ll be there. I’ll probably have a few drinks with some people afterwards too.

I know some indies just never go to stuff like this, and don’t think it’s worth the hassle. I can sympathise, I live a LONG way from London, my alarm clock will go off damned early, even if I’m only aiming to get there for 10amish, and miss the start. I have a major drive, and a tube journey ahead of me, plus the entrance fee. Bah.

But I suspect it is worth it. I know a lot of people think these are good opportunities to meet publishers etc, but I don’t really care about that. I’m already selling my games through every portal I’m interested in, do not want any retail deals, and frankly, if someone wants to work with me, they should email me. I read them all.

I don’t feel more likely to work with someone or trust them because we have ‘pressed flesh’. I’ve never met my mac partner, or the people who do my art or sound. Why do I need to? I treat such relationships as a meritocracy.

My aim is more to meet and chat to fellow developers, and share tips and horror stories and ideas and warnings about how to do what it is we do. We don’t meet up often and there is always something to say. Plus I have to tell Nicholas how wrong he is about freemium :D

If you are a UK indie developer, not sure whether it’s worth going, I humbly suggest it probably is :D

I haven’t blogged in 4 days, madness. It seems like a lot must be going on at once.

Item #1 is probably the new game, the mysteriously titled ‘GAME FOUR‘. There will, of course be more details to come in time, but currently it’s looking like I know the general theme and design, it’s just frustrating to look at crappy coder art, plus some bits stolen from GSB. The game is supposed to look jaw-droppingly awesome, and currently looks BAD. Still, I think the general principle is a good one.

Item #2 is insulation. It all started with a new light fitting for the bedroom. Electrician amusingly informed us that the bedroom ceiling is effectively made of thin air, and will not support it. No problem, we need to lift some floorboards in the attic. Damn. Floorboards are tongue and groove and tucked under the walls. Damn. Cue removal of wall panels, and excavation of several tons of straw presumably used as nest material by god knows what… arrrghhh. At least we get to put some insulation in there now. Still a work in progress…

Item #3 is ShowMeTheGames. I am working on a site redesign, plus the february ad campaign. I talked about it a bit in an interview here.

Item #4 is fighting spam on my forums. I think I’ve finally won by introducing brand new ‘hard to AI-bot-guess’ sign-up questions. Hopefully that reduces it a lot.

Item #5 is memory-footprint reduction for GSB. It sells well on the app store and I’d like to get it to run on the ipad. That means some serious memory pruning, and I’ve done some work on that. I shake my head at my wasteful, rubbish IniLoader class. that was 8MB wasted. I thing the hash table for my strings wasted a lot too, all fixed now. My main concern is that lots of per-frame STL allocation stuff might be fragmenting memory. Why isn’t it easy to just take a live snapshot-chart view of a programs memory usage, including all associated DLLs calls?

I’ve probably been doing a dozen other things too. Boring ones, like updating the copyright notices on my website. Oh Joy.

If you run a website, especially if you use any marketing or advertising, it’s very handy to know where your actual positive, interested, enthusiastic visitors are coming from. People who bounce into your page and then go ‘meh’ and bounce out, are probably not worth concentrating on. One way to do this, is by looking at the bounce rate (people who visited just one page). Thankfully, google analytics lets you dig deeper. Here is how to see which sources are sending you traffic that view 3 or more different pages of your site before leaving.

Firstly, here is the standard view of ‘all traffic sources’ under analytics.

I can see my top traffic referrers here, and see which ones have a high or low bounce rate. To get more complex data we need to hit that ‘advanced segments’ button at the top. Then we need to select ‘Create a new advanced segment’. That will take us to the segment editing interface. You can drag and drop items from the left to the right.  Under Dimensions, then visitors, you will find ‘page depth’. drag it over and set the condition as shown

Now when you return to the traffic sources screen, you can select more than one segment (from that same ‘advanced segments’ box). You can view the high-page depth visitors alongside all visits, to get a breakdown on which sites are sending the more-interested traffic. GA happily shows you in green the percentage of all visits that my page-depth3 users are in. It also adds a new line to the graph. This is especially handy if you get a massive sudden spike, from some review or ad campaign, or mention on a web comic. You can see easily whether it’s a spike of ‘meh’ traffic or a spike of really valuable traffic.

This won’t make you sell more games immediately, but it will give you more information, and that’s always good. Nothing beats hard data, and it could be that the ads you bought on that obscure manga site are actually paying off big time (or not at all). It only takes 5 minutes to set this stuff up. There is much much more you can do with segments, if you dig around. I hope this just encourages a few people to play with them. Unless you are a real analytics geek, you may not have even noticed that button at all.

Here is the talk I gave last year about making money from indie games. Ignore my crappy powerpoint slides, I explain it all anyway. I hate the open document format. Proprietary software FTW :D

World of Love: Cliff Harris from Mudlark on Vimeo.

Here is a question for indie game developers.

Who are you competing against, and who is on your side?

It’s not as simple a question as you might think. Don’t rush to judgement. I find that the supposedly simple questions are in fact the most interesting. I can list a lot of people on my side, and a lot of people who compete with me, and some people who are in both lists. The people in both lists are what I’m pretentiously calling competing allies.

Imagine a fellow PC indie strategy game developer. Lets call them ‘Cunning Fox Games’. CF Games earn about the same as I do, and sell direct online. We probably have some crossover of customers, with people owning games from both of us. Are CF Games on my side? or my competition.

They are both.

A customer of CF Games has been identified (maybe at some marketing cost) by that company. The identity of that customer has worth. They already own CFG’s games, but possibly not mine. I would benefit a lot from CFG telling their customers about me. And the reverse is true. In other words, if me and CFG mention each other, we can BOTH make more sales, and be better off.  So far, so obvious.

But let’s say I mention CF Games, and they don’t mention me back. Maybe their CEO met me once and thinks I’m a bastard, and doesn’t want to give me any publicity. Maybe I know this. Should I still keep recommending them?

Yes

And for purely rational self-interest, too. I *want* people who enjoy my games to buy games from CF Games too. I can’t make 3 games a year, but my customers can buy 3. Why not become known as someone who recommends good, relevant games? Why not encourage those players to keep playing strategy games? Why not encourage them to keep buying indie games? and to buy them direct from the developers. In the long run, this grows the market for me too. The more people who are used to using BMTMicro, the better.

Some small businesspeople can be very small minded. They keep an eye on fellow small businesses and treat them as the enemy, but that’s just wrong. If you sell indie games, I’m not your competition, I’m your ally. Activision sell 1,000 times more games than you and me combined, and frankly, I’d rather have a beer with you and swap ideas, strategies and business tips with a fellow indie, whose experience is directly relevant than some CEO who never plays games anyway.

So my tip of the day, is remember, sometimes helping rival companies helps you too. It’s not a zero-sum game.