Yay, Spring Bonus is finally out for mobile, and just in time for Easter!

Grey Alien Games partnered with Hot Head Games to publish it on multiple mobile devices as follows:

iPhone/iPad

Android

Barnes & Noble Nook

Kindle Fire

Windows Phone

Please tell your friends and family. Thanks!

Last year I decided to make a “Choose your own”-style adventure game with my boys (aged 7 and 9). We drew out a few simple rooms and then I videoed them describing the rooms.

Then we uploaded the videos to youtube and linked them together with choice buttons in the videos. It’s only a very simple quick game but it was fun to make!

Enjoy!

A couple of months ago at Full Indie I recorded a bunch of indies saying funny/cliché things for fun.

This is the resulting video (contains a couple of f-bombs just in case you are offended by that sort of thing).

Enjoy!

Got any more classic indie clichés? Please post in the comments.

Back in November 2011 I wrote a post about how my casual games seem to have a very long tail in terms of sales. I followed this up with a 5 minute speech/slideshow at Full Indie in December 2011 called “Holiday Bonus Postmortem”.

Here’s the video:

Stay tuned to this blog for a follow up on my December 2012 sales (hint: it was my best month ever!) and how the mobile versions performed.

I’ve been meaning to collate my most popular and important articles from 2011 into a list for a while but have been waylaid. Anyway, here it is. Enjoy!

January:

January was an important month for me because I quit Big Fish Games after working there for over 2 years to go indie AGAIN (I was indie for several years before I moved to Vancouver to work at Big Fish Games).

- My Indie plans for 2011 (I did a whole load of research into all the potential platforms I could make games for and whittled the list down into my main areas of interest.)

- My First Game is Live on Xbox Live Indie Games! (This was an important event for me because it was my first ever game on a console! Holiday Bonus didn’t sell that well due to low downloads (converts well though), so we never ported any other games to the XBLIG.)

- I’m Officially Indie (again) (Going indie again was very important to me. This post talks about a party I had to celebrate, Full Indie, and my plans for 2011.)

- Mac App Store Tutorials (At the start of 2011 I ported two of my existing games to the Mac App store and put together this article to help other devs through the pain of code signing etc.)

- Beans on Toast and other British toast-based snacks (This was a silly article that I had fun with that proved quite popular.)

-Check out my Old-skool PC Game Collection (Just in case you are interested, there’s a photo of my huge old-skool FPS collection and other games.)

March:

- What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures (Some book recommendations.)

- 12 Tips for Making a Game Tutorial (This post generated some interesting debate.)

April:

- Spring Bonus is now available for PC and Mac (This was my first new game since going indie again. I’m very proud of Spring Bonus, it’s my best solo game to date)

May:

- I’m going to make 50 games this year! (This was a bold claim and I didn’t make it, but I did do pretty well because I shipped 39 games.)

- Spring Bonus is now available for Windows Phone 7 (A friend of mine in the UK ported Spring Bonus to Windows Phone 7. It was my first game on that particular phone, in fact it was my first mobile game release!)

- I am in control of my life (I was inspired to write this article to help people understand how many things in their life they are really in control of and can change if need be.)

June:

- My 10 simple tips for fitness and health (It was my birthday in June and I got my picture taken with two of the original Star Trek cast members. You can see the photo in this informative blog post.)

- Metal Spawn – New minigame! (I organised and ran a Full Indie game jam in June and made a minigame called Metal Spawn. Check it out!)

July:

Casual Connect Summary (I was on an indie panel at Casual Connect in Seattle and summarised my experience plus got another Star Trek cast member photo! Here’s the link to a video of the panel I was on.)

October:

I met William Shatner! (Meeting Shatner has been a geek dream of mine for years, and I finally got the chance in Vancouver. Check out the sweet photo!)

November:

Being indie is a long-term game (includes graphs!) (I’ve been running Grey Alien Games since 2005, and since then I’ve come to realise that games can keep on selling for a very long time and actually make most of their money after the first year. Read all about it in this very popular article!)

December:

- My Thanksgiving Sale Statistics (with graphs!) (Back in November I tried an experiment and ran a Thanksgiving sale on my website and tried to promote it via various means. It wasn’t super successful but I wrote up a full postmortem in this post.)

- Holiday Bonus is out for iPhone/iPad and Android! (This was an important date for me. A friend in the UK ported Holiday Bonus to Unity and we released no less than 9 different versions on iOS/Android/Web! Those versions included multiple FREE versions.)

- Always Alone – New Minigame (I participated in the Ludum Dare #22 Game Jam on the theme of “alone” and was pleased with this weird narrative-based game that I made. People seemed to think it was good.)

- My 2011 Indie Game Picks (I played some great indie games in 2011, though not as many as I’d have liked to. You can find a summary of the ones I enjoyed in this post.)

And that’s it! Wow, looks like I blogged quite a lot more than I thought I did

Previous Best of Lists:

Best Articles of 2008

My site has now had 2 Million hits! (by hits I mean pageviews as measured by some crappy counter code)

Back in July 2011 the site reached 1.5 Million hits. So that’s 500K hits in 9 months = approx. 55K hits per month. The previous monthly average was 45K hits per month, so it’s an improvement, but not a huge one. Probably just down to more bots

I had hoped to reach 2 Million hits by the end of 2011, but to be honest I didn’t do much to drive traffic to my site last year. Let’s see what happens this year and if I can reach 3 million hits (double my traffic) by the end of 2012!

Back in 2011 I was recorded for two podcasts along with some other indies and I thought I’d repost them here on my blog in case you are interested.

Podcast 1

The first podcast was recorded on 9th July 2011 at Alex Vostrov’s house in Burnaby, B.C. Chevy Ray Johnston was the host and Graham Jans was also present. The main focus of the podcast was about finishing and shipping your game with quite a lot of talk about working with artists.

Here’s a link to the podcast on youtube.

Podcast 2

The second podcast was also recorded in July at John Geoffrey Newman’s condo in downtown Vancouver. Alex Vostrov and I discuss a bunch of things related to being indie including the founding of Full Indie, and “asshole” developers.

I’ve remastered this podcast (with permission) to boost the volume.
Here’s a link to the podcast on Youtube.

The original blog post/recording by John Geoffrey can be found here.

Self-employed parents: Do you have a home office? How have you been avoiding interruptions from your kids?

For years I’ve had a home office and for years my kids have kept coming in and interrupting my work and phone/skype calls despite continual attempts at training them to not do that. The same happens for my wife too who also works at home. It’s not so bad when they are at school but in school vacations like Spring Break my wife and I often have to keep on working (for financial reasons and due to obligations to third parties) and so we attempt to tag team spending time with the kids so the other one can work. Interruptions aren’t so bad if I’m doing some mindless admin, but most of the time I’m doing something mentally taxing and my train of thought gets shattered. I’ve ended up shifting my schedule to working in the middle of the night, which naturally creates other problems.

I know some people prefer to have an office in a remote location, but we can’t currently afford to do that and also then there’s travel time and having to buy another computer and furniture, plus the fact that I’d be out of the house all day which defeats the point of being an indie game developer and working at home so I can see my family a bit more than the average 9am-6pm worker. Ideally I’d have a home office that is separated from the main house, but that will have to stay on my wishlist for the moment.

I know it seems like I want to have the best of both worlds of working at home and being able to do that in peace, and perhaps it’s not possible, but still I’d like to aim for that. And thus I am seeking advice from others who are doing this too.

If you have had experience in working at home with kids, please post a comment. Thanks!

image by mrtopp

The three main conferences I go to each year are GDC (San Francisco), Casual Connect (Seattle), PAX Dev + PAX (Seattle).

Someone on a forum I frequent asked what the benefits are, and so I thought I’d list what I specifically find useful about them. Your mileage may vary:

Press/Publishers/Distributors

- Meeting press so you can build personal relationship (Friend of mine gets taken to dinner by well-known press. They always write up his news.)
- Showing game demos to press (Another friend of mine came to GDC the first time this year and got tons of press mentions including a GameSpot video.)
- Meeting new publishers/distributors.
- Strengthening relationships with existing publishers/distributors so they remember you when you ask them to feature your games.
- Initiating or making deals.
- Getting your brand out there. (I wear a Grey Alien Games T-shirt and obviously have lots of business cards)

Other Devs

- Interesting educational/motivational talks with useful takeaways.
- Helps keep your finger on the pulse with regards to what’s happening in the industry as a whole and within your niche.
- Discussing business/marketing strategies and sales figures with other indies who are willing to share.
- Meeting new indies (and people you’ve only spoken to online) and strengthening relationships with indies. Apart from the fact that hanging with indies is enjoyable to me, sometimes it can result in future alliances, or key bits of useful info, or introductions to people etc.
- Checking out the IGF games in one place and meeting the devs. Plus getting a feel for what sort of game wins awards.

Misc Cool Stuff

- Getting motivated to get on with your work when you get back.
- Helping you to decide on new directions to take your business in and give you new ideas about what to do with your old IP.
- A break from your normal routine, and in my case, better weather than at home too!
- Being in another country/city.
- Parties, free food/booze, music.
- Hanging with Notch (or insert game dev celebrity of your choice)

There’s probably more but that’s a good start.

What reasons have I missed that you go to conferences for?

Recently there’s been a meme going round that shows how people’s jobs aren’t what other people think they are and how they are boring or suck. So I thought I’d do my own version about being indie!

Because my picture viewer plugin bugs out when you zoom in, you might want to try this link instead. If you want to spread it, please use this yfrog link instead to save on my bandwidth, thanks!

Another point I’m making with the image that is less obvious is that I’m honest with myself about what my work is and most of my friends are indies, so they know what being indie is like. Also my family has seen me doing indie stuff for years and so has a pretty good idea of what I do. I like to be open about what I do because constructing facades takes too much energy and they are likely to break one day anyway.

Of course, maybe the reality of being indie is not quite as the image implies 100% of the time (like when I’m doing tax returns) But hell, it is awesome quite a lot of the time, and that’s good enough for me!