Category: business

So Friday was world-of-love conference day for indies. It meant waking at 5.30am and banging my head on a metal railing in the dark. Bah!

The conference itself was worth going to, met a bunch of people from indie development which was cool. Alice taylor and Sophie Houlden gave some great presentations, and tak’s talk was interesting too. I did a sudden ’10 seconds-notice’ interview with radio 4 for a program about indie games which will go out in june at some point. I hope they don’t edit me out :D I probably sounded a bit nervous, and didn’t say anything wildly controversial, but I got through it, and I’m glad I said yes to it.

I had a few of those ‘maybe I should have business cards made?’ moments, but decided maybe not. Afterwards was pub, then pizza. Just like the last world-of-love there was no room in the pub for anyone, and nobody could hear a thing. Surely there is a better way?

The bad news, is when I got home, we realised the next day some scumbag had tried to break into our garage. Very unusual, apparently they tried everyones. It’s not like where I live is high crime. They cut the lock using boltcutters, so I had to go get a new one, and then got bolts that were too short. doh! Still, you learn a few knacks as a boatbuilder, and those screws aren’t coming out in a hurry. Plus, I’ve ordered one of these. Maybe it’s time for me to invest in a night vision attachment for my bow. I already have a night vision scope, but I need both hands to shoot someone. Bah.

Also, a casual game publisher has stopped paying me my royalties. I hate publishers, they are almost all a bunch of criminals. Another lesson learned I guess, and another reason to ALWAYS sell direct to the customer if you can. Maybe they will suddenly appear and pay me, if not, they just go on my list of people to get revenge on when I rule the galaxy.

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.