Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: gratuitous tank battles

Gratuitous Ad Campaign

People tend to keep this stuff to themselves, but I’m not really sure why, unless you are WPP or Saatchi and Saatchi, worried about the competition…

Anyway, I’ve been running a few ads since the launch of GTB. The game is on big name portals such as steam, which is where it gets a lot of visibility, but I don’t think there is any harm in promoting the games website direct, my company, and the idea of direct sales.

My ad campaign has been fairly low key so far. I have exclusively used google adwords as my ad provider in this case (I’ve used other companies for other campaigns, but adwords seems to be a good ROI).

The ads have been running for 4 days so far and the stats are:

446,851 impressions
901 clicks
Average cost per click: £0.15.
Traffic bounce rate: 71%
Ave visit duration: 25 seconds. (vs 1 min 09 for all traffic)

Interestingly that makes for a cost per thousand impressions (CPM) of £0.30.

Even given MUCH better quality traffic, that’s why I laugh at the CPM prices quoted by many big name sites.

I can’t help thinking that the scale of my ad campaign is laughably small so far (I might double it right now…) and that the average visit duration is really low. Roughly 10% of my adword-sourced visitors spend >60 seconds on my site, which I consider to be a fairly good quality visitor. That means £1.50 to get a good visitor that way, which seems pretty poor, if you consider they still might not buy the game (although they may still mention it to others, or buy it later).

However, comparing it with 2 other recent ad campaigns shows me that adwords certainly beats them, in terms of price-for-quality-visitor.

I’m definitely going to go double my daily ad spend…

Gratuitous Tank Battles Release Day! (please tweet!)

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!

 

Advertising (and a bad back)

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.

Update on the situation with Gratuitous Tank Battles

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).

Gratuitous Tank Patching

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
=============
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
8) 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!