Archive for May, 2007

Best Tip for Game Production

Friday, May 25th, 2007

Gameproducer.net is running a good post about the best tip for producing games.

My tip was “Finish your game“. Because without a finished game all the bug testing, polishing, marketing, support tips etc. are irrelevant. Of course I could have offered plenty of tips about *how* to finish your game and maybe some of those will come out in the comments for the post. I’m sure I’ll post some more tips one day soon anyway 🙂

One of the tips I liked was Focus on Focus. This is extremely important and should not be taken lightly.

Reflexive Top Sellers list

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

The Reflexive Arcade top sellers list is based on the last 30 days, and the User Favourites list is based on the last 30 or 60 days (not sure which). The User Favourites is based on the Conversion Rate – that’s the number of sales divided by the number downloads, not by the user reviews. This is sensible because it’s based on what people do (i.e. buying a game) not what they say…

I tracked the rise and fall of all my games on Reflexive through the Top Sellers and User Favourites lists and put them in a graph and looked at the correlation between the two. It was pretty interesting.

Say for example, your game has a peak for 1-2 weeks then fades away a bit, it will keep on rising in the top sellers chart until the 30th day and then will rapidly drop as the sample period goes through your 1-2 week peak (thus reducing the total sales in the last 30 days).

The best I ever did was reach position 33 in top sellers (out of 610 games!). I don’t think that’s breaching my NDA contract as the information is publically available via looking at the charts. Anyway, that mean that 32 games had sold more than mine in the last 30 days. They were new games that were coming out that were hotter than mine and made more sales AND some were older games that were STILL selling more than mine did in 30 days – and I sold a pretty reasonable number. I found it pretty interesting that some “classic” games just kept on selling bucket loads month in month out.

Anyway my next game will be right up there 🙂

Finally installed Akismet

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007

The amount of spam that I’ve been getting on this blog has been steadily growing to ridiculous proportions. I’ve been putting off installing Akismet (a wordpress plugin that blocks spam) for ages because I thought that it might be complicated, but today I finally got round to it (after being driven to near insanity by spam).

It was REALLY quick and easy to install. I googled for it, downloaded it, extracted it to the correct folder, uploaded it, activated it on the plugins menu, went to wordpress to get my API Key and entered it – and that was it! Took about 5 minutes.

Now hopefully I won’t get distracted by stupid emails flooding in all day long tell me about a new spam comment on my blog. I’ll let you know how it goes.