Digital Dave

I just received the completed Icon for the game and am incredibly happy with how it turned out.

Not a lot to report this week.

I began implementing Stage 3 yesterday. I wanted to wait until I completed a deep QA pass on the game, and had stage 1 and 2 balanced. Right now I don’t know of any bugs so I went ahead and began adding stage 3.

Thankfully adding a stage to the game is extremely simple. For the most part the game is data driven. I create a plist file with level information (how many butterflies, what breed are they, what goal [collection, mix, etc]) and dump it into the game – viola, I have butterflies roaming around. Once I add a specific feature into the game, I modify a meta dict which will give a specific level a feature.

The other thing I decided to do was switch the analytic package. I jumped from Flurry Analytics to Localytics, but sadly Localytics is having some issue with their data updating. Ah well, I’m going to hold out a bit. Their UI is much clearer than Flurry and the package take a fraction of the space that Flurry did.

So. GDC is next week. It’s a bummer that I’ll be unable to go, but sadly I’m not right around the corner this year. If only Disney waited a couple of months before shutting my studio down… The artist for Colorflys, Tanna Tucker, will be at the GDC this year and she’ll be passing out some postcards. Go find one!

Over the last week I’ve been spending time polishing up the user experience while going through each level and balancing the requirements for medals. In other words, I’ve been trying to keep my eyes from bleeding while playing the same level over, and over, and over again. Finding bugs definitely enhances this experience.

The other exciting part of development is handling the marketing side of the house. I like spending time trying to spread the word about my projects, but, it is incredibly time consuming. When you’re juggling programming, audio, fixing art while figuring out why your artist hasn’t sent you the latest revision, etc, dealing with marketing can be hard to stomach. But, it has to be done.

On Sunday I started a little brand awareness campaign on Facebook. My goal was to get over 100,000 impressions, around 20 fans for colorflys, see what demographics the game attracted, and to figure out what creatives gained the most attraction.

Facebook is a great way to experiment before you decide to plunk down ads on a gaming website for far, far more money. You don’t want to be experimenting when your CPM is $3.00. But if you know you have a creative on Facebook that has a specific %CTR you can assume your %CTR on an actual gaming website will be equal to greater than that. At least that gives you a basis to determine if even running the ads would be worth it.

I currently have 7 different creatives up. I’ve branched each creative into 2 or 3 different ads that focus in on specific demographics. In all, 17 ads (7 were added after Sunday).

If you run an ad for your fan page you will pick up some fans. In the early stages I think fans hugely outweigh sending somebody to your actual webpage. Build a good fan page, with photos and a welcome page. 1 fan instantly connects you to a network of 130 on average. From Sunday until Thursday I’ve picked up 23 fans (after 150k impressions, 40 clicks), expanding my reach to 2990 people.

Unless your ads start having huge success, I’d just start with CPC ads. Be shown as much as possible and pay for the rare moment someone clicks your ad. If it works out right you’ll rotate your next ad saying you’re released and people will remember seeing it (as long as you don’t have huge gaps in time). Considering Facebook is only tracking around 90,000 iPad fans under 23, my ads are probably shown a few times.

Other than ads, I’ve been preparing a list of websites so I can start knocking down the doors to as many editors I can find. I’d like to get at least one preview, introducing the game+trailer, out before I release the game. As much as I really want to get this thing out there I really need to do it in a sane way.

This last week I put emphasis on exposing Colorflys to a lot of fresh eyes. Right now I am so embraced by the development cloud that I can’t reliably answer questions like, ‘Is this game fun,’ ‘Is there anything confusing about the game,’ ‘Does the user interface work.’ It’s sad, but when you devote all of your time solely looking at a project, you’re point-of-view becomes severely twisted. The only thing you can do is stay focused on the design and let people play your game.

Here is some insight into some of the playtest sessions.

The older generation(s), gaming experience (Wii), touch screen experience (None)

Here, I noticed that my subtle hints were not working well at all (outlined text on the screen, sometimes pointing to things). This was probably because the hints were not front-and-center. As they played I envisioned how I would redesign the help system and I expressed that to them. Once they had a clear idea of what to do, they progressed fine.

After a few levels I noticed that they really didn’t think about the score, progressing happily by capturing butterflies one at a time. This is an error on my part. There is no clear indication of success between capturing one or capturing 5, also the curve went way too high, so capturing multiple butterflies was a risky move.

And finally, my objectives window (and user interface, in general) was not clear. You can see in the image above that I have a popup view with that level’s goals. Despite putting text on the first level, pointing to that view, they really didn’t pay attention to it. I knew this because when you get to Stage 2, you absolutely have to look at your objectives.

Overall, these people really enjoyed the artistic direction of the game and enjoyed the game once they figured things out.

My generation (~25), gaming experience (Wii, Android), touch screen experience (Android)

These folks really seemed to enjoy the direction of the game despite some of the problems I mentioned in the previous section. They didn’t get too frustrated. Many of them, including the males, enjoyed the artistic direction as well.

I had one female in this category who really excelled at the game. She figured out most of the challenges and was being bold by trying to capture a lot of butterflies at once.

Younger Teens and Kids

This is a game that should fare well with this group, but with the obvious mis-steps I took above, I didn’t want to test these folks yet. I could easily imagine that they would run into the same problems.

Developers

I wanted to reach out to several developers that I follow on Twitter to see if they would like to look at the game. I figured this would be a good move considering that these people know exactly what I’m going through.

Sure enough, I received an incredible amount of feedback here. A lot of folks had the same confusion as those above (bad hint system, user interface unclear in places, no known incentive to capture more than a 1-2 butterflies). They were positive about the game, and Markus Nigrin sent this gem:

“The graphics are drop-dead gorgeous, my wife was watching me and asked what I played, which happens very(!) rarely”

Time for Change

For the past couple of days I’ve spent time fixing the obvious issues. I re-wrote the objectives view to be front-and-center and now each level includes extra butterflies that are not part of the objectives. So there is no getting around it. The player needs to look at the objectives otherwise they’ll strike out on the level for catching the wrong butterflies.

The old, really crappy in-game menu

Hopefully, more pleasant, and obvious.

I’m currently playing with blurring the background to make the UI stand out (the butterflies will be hidden above while the menu is up).

I’ve also put point indicators in the game for when you capture butterflies. This should invite players to capture more butterflies. After the player captures something, the point value pops up, does a 360 and fades away.

Testflightapp.com
I decided to give this a whirl for the remote players. Overall, it was an absolutely pleasing experience. Add your testers to the provisioning profile, upload your build, select the testers and fire away. The testers receive a link and download it. To sign up potential testers, they simply visit a link. Sure beats dealing with the sometimes painful alternative (installation issues anyone?).

Another huge pro from this is that I can easily see who has downloaded the app. The UUID for your tester is easily available for you to click on (copies to clipboard) or you can export out the entire list. I highly recommend it.

You can follow me on Twitter @dlmcgraw

Early Level in Stage 2

Since I have the first two stages complete (1 remaining), I’m preparing myself for a final round of playtesting this weekend. The first round of play testing I conducted back in December went well, but I had a hard time not interfering with the players since I  had no tutorial points. My goal is to find folks in a range of ages, observe, take notes, and not interfere until the session is complete. I don’t want to say something that might dictate how the player continues to play the game. I need to see when the player gets stuck and how exactly they get out of the situation.

My 3 biggest questions for the playtest session are;

• Did the player feel that the game was fun? How did kids, teens and adults react? This is a family oriented game, but I’m primarily targeting kids/teens. Are adults having fun?
• Did the player find points of the game too difficult where they couldn’t figure out what to do?
• Would the player buy the game?

As of yesterday I had 13 bugs on my list. Today I’ll knock out the remaining 4 and try to polish things up a bit.

One thing that I polished a few days ago involved the way I was handling fonts in the game. I knew I needed to visit this down the road since flat fonts would a) look generic and b) clash way too much with the painted backgrounds. If you’ve ever created bitmap fonts you know how much of a pain it can be. Thankfully, Glyph Designer released recently and saved me the headache!

I didn’t want something that completely saturated the screen, just something that signals that a combo chain is active.

I was inspired to get back to experimenting with music from a blog post by Whitaker Blackall, whom is currently working on Casey’s Contraptions. This morning I spent a little time creating this (not for Colorflys, just experimenting):

Energy by mcgraw

I’m still incredibly new with music creation, but being a hybrid with the skill to code and create audio would be very cool. Imagine taking the same emotion you put into game design into your music? That could create quite a powerful experience. For example, check out Aquaria, coded and scored by Alec Holowka, currently working on a new indie project, Marian.

And, finally, a little challenge between items on the to-do list. Planks. I can currently hold the position for 1:32.0. Don’t forget to breathe.

Until next time. Have a successful week!

http://colorflys.igotitgames.com

I’ve been working on something for the iPad for a few months now. Progress has been a bit slow due to everything going on, but I am back in motion.

I’m really excited about this project. I’ve had the idea for this project in my bag since before the iPad, but I couldn’t develop it because I wanted more screen space than what the iPhone/iPod provided. When the iPad released I absolutely knew what my first title would be.

At this point I would say I am about a month away from release. My initial goal was to get it released before the GDC so I would have something to show off this time around, but it looks like I will not be able to make it (to the GDC) this year.

Feel free to support the project by following it on Facebook and/or follow me @dlmcgraw and @igotitgames.

Look for some more information being pumped out relatively soon!