Wednesday, April 11, 2012

On My Mind: The Neogaf Experiment.

So, last week, I launched Sometimes You Just Can't Win on the iOS, a "game" that is an artistic retelling of the time I was working as a game designer. As of right now, I'm sitting at around 1500 downloads. Is it what I expected? I don't know. Did I ever plan to advertise the game? Not really. My intention for this 0.5 release is really just a way to get my story out. Think of what's out there as beta: game balance, playability, and length just aren't there yet. I think I'll do a real push when a)I have something to monetize in it, and b)when it's more feature complete.

However, this doesn't mean I didn't mention it anywhere: I made a NeoGAF post about it:

ITT: AlphaTwo00 tells all about the time he was in GameDev & you gets free iOS "game" (read at your own discretion, naughty words and insensitive comments abound!)

Part of the post was meant to be a bait and switch tactic for me to get people to check out my game; but the game was also part of that story I wanted to tell (along with the other half of the post, talking about me as a designer looking into gaming community forums).

In my mind, I was expecting angry replies because I was in a "not as well regarded" studio making less than appealing games to enthusiast, but that never came through. Most of the comments were fairly nice (along with the PMs). Partially, I think people who wouldn't give a shit wouldn't bother replying, and the ones who did are more than understanding about how game development works, which was nice.

However, I really think that for me to be transparent about everything was clearly the point: people on the internet are often more willing to attack something that is faceless, but for me to be open about who I am, what I do, then they are more accepting of what I'm offering. This is pretty contradictory to what I've seen everyone say about game development PR: don't say anything that isn't carefully massaged.

I guess going forward, I'm going to be as transparent about what I do if I start working on another game. I think that's a nice start.

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