Como comencé un negocio con 25,000 varos, competí en mercado internacional y la cagué toda: Parte II

Debido al poco budget con el que comencé, no podía darme el lujo de entrar a todas las tiendas móviles. Así que evalué los recursos con los que contaba y los mercados. Dado que cuando comencé, sabia el lenguaje X y la librería Y para programar juegos. El estudio de mercado me apuntó como opción viable y rápida, hacer mi juego para Windows Phone. Además el mismo estudio me dijo que la plataforma de billy gueits no esta del todo abandonada. Recuerdo, que pensé: "Wey!!.....Una diferencia de 10,000 usuarios vs iOS no esta tan mal. Si hago un juego divertido en un mercado con poca competencia, mis probabilidades incrementan!...........tsssss que lluevan los millones".

Otra de las cosas que me llevaron al fracaso fue mi pasión por la complejidad en los temas y profundizar mucho. Ironía. ¿No?. De aquí en adelante mencionaré una palabra muy "técnica" y común entre los ninja coders, pero antes te arrojo la definición a tu cara.

waaaataaaaaa!!. 

"Un motor de videojuego es un término que hace referencia a una serie de rutinas de programación que permiten el diseño, la creación y la representación de un videojuego. La funcionalidad básica de un motor es proveer al videojuego de un motor de renderizado para los gráficos 2D y 3D, motor físico o detector de colisiones, sonidos, scripting, animación, inteligencia artificial, redes, streaming, administración de memoria y un escenario gráfico". Extraído de Wikipedia.

En palabras mortales, un motor de juegos es una herramienta que facilita el hacer juegos. Existen muchos en el mercado, pero yo quería hacer el mío. Hacer un motor de juegos es casi pornografía para los coding monkeys, además es un paso para convertirte en ninja debido al nivel de complejidad que lleva desarrollarlo. Desde siempre he querido hacer un motor. Un par de meses atrás había hecho uno a "medias", pero esta era la oportunidad de terminar uno mientras hacia mi juego. Gran error.

Como todo buen programador, me impuse metas difíciles de lograr y planee que el motor lo terminaría en 2 meses, para en 1 mes más terminar el juego, haciendo un total de 3 meses golpeando botones. Hice los primeros sketches del diseño del juego(o game design) y en un par de días ya tenía algo sólido y la diversión comenzó. 

Pasaron los 2 meses y el motor aun no estaba listo. El juego y el motor tenían un total de desarrollo de 60% y 40% respectivamente.  Ya con el avance que tenía, podía probar mis bocetos del game design y ver si lo que diseñe en realidad era divertido. El demo tenía un factor diversión, pero no uno que me convenciera. Yo quería que el jugador, tuviera sesiones de juego cortas para que así los nuevos intentaran rápidamente y no se enfadasen, he hice el juego muy difícil, para que los veteranos lograran divertirse y quedarse en el juego por mas tiempo. Hice pequeños cambios rápidos, y lo que tenía me gusto, pero aún le faltaba el toque original. El núcleo de las mecánicas y reglas del juego estaba inspirada en otros juegos que me encantaban, pero aún faltaba algo mío, algo que gritara mi nombre y el juego se ganara una identidad. Lo imaginé pero ya no había tiempo para añadirlo así que solo agregué un poco de mi mojo, pero faltó lo mejor. Además el tiempo lo tenía encima y añadir esas ideas me tomaría mínimo un mes extra de desarrollo.

El juego lo terminé no 3, sino en 5 meses. Todo esto porque los conocimientos para hacer el motor no los tenía, así que los aprendí sobre la marcha. Me divertí como chango, pero mi yo entreprenur estaba en posición fetal en una esquina meciendo, llorando y chupando el dedo por lo costoso que fue todo.

El juego estaba listo para ser subido a la tienda, después de un par de revisiones por parte de los compas de Microsoft, Infinite pew pew logró certificación oficial y estar en la tienda. ¿Y ahora que?. Aprender marketing, así que me conseguí un par de libros de marketing for dummies y de otro sitio llamado Pixel Prospector que prácticamente te explica el pedo con peras y manzanas. 

Necesitaba una campaña publicitaria que no me costara ni un solo peso (recuerden que no había money) y que llegara a la mayor cantidad de personas posibles. El plan era mandar la app a youtubers y blogs especializados en el genero que el juego cubre, publicar en reddit y en otros subredits de desarrollo más técnico, un pequeño concurso en redes sociales y la cereza en el pastel, cobertura de prensa sobre videojuegos. Tenía el Kit de prensa listo, pero aún había un problema y eran los canales de distribución que la Windows Phone Marketplace me daba, esto para hacerles llegar el juego a todos los actores de mi plan de dominación del mundo mundial. El problema aquí es que: Tenía una app en la tienda y que no podía ser descargada a menos que le arrojaras dinero a tu teléfono y algo que si me hizo sudar un poco de sangre, NO EXISTEN CUPONES DE CANJE. Así es, hablas sobre ese tema con Microsoft y ellos te sacan una cruz y comienzan a rezar el rosario. Los cupones eran uber necesarios para que la prensa canjeara un código y obtuviera el juego de a grapa. Pensé: "No hay pedo, subo otra vez la app solo que esta vez la registro con un nombre en código y que no cueste nada". El nombre en código era para que nadie pudiera encontrar la app en la marketplace a menos que sea con el link que yo otorgaría. Mande mi nueva app y Microsoft no la acepto porque no se permitían duplicados de apps.

Desde este punto Microsoft dejo de ser mi compa. 

 

Como comencé un negocio con 25,000 varos, competí en mercado internacional y la cagué toda : Parte I.

Hola!!

Mi nombre es Alan Sosa y soy un tipo que simplemente comete muchos errores a cada momento e instante. Y ¿sabes que?. Disfruto cometerlos.

Porque cada error me ha hecho lo que ahora soy.

Esa fue mi punch line sentimentalona, ahora por lo que estas aquí. Te contaré como emprendí mi primer negocio, desde la comodidad de mi casa, con inversión FFF (friends, family and fools) y al final cague todo de una forma que hará que cuentes esta historia para romper el hielo con tu crush. Pero antes me gustaría contarte un poco de mí. Quizás, para que logres entender un poco el contexto en el que hice las cosas, lo mucho que disfrute todo y el porque de las decisiones que me llevaron al fracaso. Esta será una lectura larga, así que toma tu cobija, los pañuelos, palomitas y refresco. Además habrá imágenes de gatos, lasers y gatos laser.

Me gustan los retos y entre mas dificultad mejor. Fui el típico niño que disfruto mucho jugar con sus amigos, andar en bicicleta, trepar árboles y explorar terrenos baldíos, ademas de jugar un chingo de videojuegos. Soy alguien que adora la competencia y siempre profundiza demasiado en los temas de interés. Mi vocación por aprender es algo natural; Siempre busco algo nuevo, porque simplemente lo disfruto mucho.

Pero hay algo que amo mas que a nada en el mundo y es el crear cosas con mis propias manos.

Creo que esto es debido a que mis papas me regalaron el juguete adecuado en el momento justo. Una cubeta de Legos cuando tenia 7 años. Ahora tengo 25 y de vez en cuando juego con ellos, de hecho aun conservo esa misma cubeta de Legos; Tomo las piezas, construyo algo y lo coloco en mi escritorio. Nunca me enfado.

Esa sensación de crear, no tiene precio.

¿Mis pasiones?. Entre muchas, la programación y los videojuegos. Jugarlos es divertido, pero es más divertido hacerlos. Así es, soy un coding monkey que se dedica a los beeps & boops.

¿Mi negocio?. Un estudio de videojuegos. Impulsado por una persona que utiliza como combustible litros de café y toneladas de galletas (de preferencia, chocolate). No es una mala idea, ¿cierto?. Un mercado que va en crecimiento, que registra ingresos anuales mayores que la industria del cine y la música combinados y tiene estimado que en 10 años esas números incrementen un 60%. ¿Cómo fracasar en algo tan prometedor?.

Bueno, todo comenzó con el estudio de mercado.

Marketing Report #1

Introduction

This marketing report is not only for Infinite pew pew or Cubito Morado. It's a report that explains this whole bunch of new experiences that i've made in this new magical journey.

The process of marketing the game began since the moment i finished coding it. So far, working with Microsoft platforms has been a really big challenge, and i can tell you now that Windows Phone isn't completely ready for indie game developers, in fact, it's light years away from it, and the lesson learned is: If you want to start to sell your first game and use Windows Phone as a starting platform, just don't do it. Forget about it!.

Contacting press people

Reaching the press people was not the difficult part here, in fact, it is pretty easy, but i lost a lot of press coverage thanks to the Windows Phone Marketplace.

Since mid december to now i have been investigating in how to get press coverage of the game, so i read some books, dive in some blogs and even watched tons of youtube videos. It was , and still is, a fun and exciting topic. Man.....i'm having a blast!. Learning about marketing has been a delightful experience. 

I ran out of budget (actually i should be looking for a job now) and decided to put away some points from my marketing plan, like the landing page and the new trailer. Why?, well, the trailer that i wanted to make was really difficult to create in Blender and it had consumed me a lot of time and paying a Adobe After Effects mothly license was something that simply couldn't happen. So happens the same for the landing page that's why i decided to use the old trailer and made a humble landing page in my blog.

After some research i found 30 press contacts for Latin America and almost 60 presss contacts from Germany, USA, Spain, England, India, Rusia, France, Italy and Portugal. The press kit was ready but there was no way to send the game to the press, so i kinda did a trick here. As a developer it is easy to install and send applications to other developers so they can try them out in their phones. But press people don't know a shit about developing an app and that's okay, they don't have to. In order to play the game they have to download a whole bunch of tools, install those tools and use special applications to install the game that i compiled for them.  It's messy and way to complicated. The only way to install applications in a not developer-unlocked Windows Phone device it's via the Windows Marketplace but it was too risky to upload a free version of Infinite pew pew because other people that might not be press could download the game. So, after some research i found that the marketplace has a way to download the game in form of a .xap file so you can put it in your phone and manually install it by yourself with a tap of a button, but this only works with Microsoft certificated applications and to get the certification for my newly coded free game i had to send it to Microsoft so it can be in the Marketplace. So i did this; i sent the press version that i compiled so it can be certificated and be in the Marketplace, after the game got certificated i downloaded it from the marketplace, afterwards, i removed it from the store so nobody can put a hand on it. Now i have a certificated application that can be only obtainable via me. I tested the application in my phone and a couple of my friend's phones and everything worked perfectly, i was so happy. I guess i found a flaw in the Microsoft's certification process.

Well, Everything was now ready so i made a manual of 3 steps in how to install the game in the phone, a .zip file with the game, put it in dropbox, wrote the letter and send the package to all my Latin American contacts. I decided to start only with Latin America because, somehow, i felt that a problem will show off in the last minute. I think that my guts now have the capability to predict misfortune and caos and oh boy!!!!.The shit just didn't stopped raining.

Caos and Misfortune

On the first day, i heard back from 2 contacts. I was surprised, because us , Latin Americans have a tradition called "the arrival of the 3 Wise Kings" that celebrates in January 6th, and i sent the mails in January 5th. Most people don't tend to work on this day, so yeah. This contacts told me that they wrote about the game and it ran perfectly on their phones. After a couple of days another kind soul sent me an email explaining that he wrote about the game.  I was thrilled!

The next days, the bad news started to fall. I received a mail from a mayor gaming site in Mexico explaining that they had trouble installing the game. They were so kind to sent me pictures about the problem that was being displayed on their phone and i tried to solve the problem. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 corrected games were sent to them a none of it could be installed!. I was about to put a bullet in my head!. I was so lucky that the guy that attended my mail, was a gamedev rookie (like me, yay!) and like any other gamedev, he was commited to put a hand on that game because he was excited just by watching the game trailer. I told him that the problem might be with the mail account configured in the phone's marketplace then he did some background check and he agreed with what i had told him. The next day i received a mail from him explaining that he couldn't be able to install the game. I threw myself in fetal position and started to cry. I just lost press coverage with a major gaming site in Mexico. After i finished to cry i decided to not lose that coverage; So i opened Visual Studio and quickly coded a PC version of the game, sent it to the same guy, crossed my fingers and voila!. The guy replied to me in twitter the next day: "Dude, your game it's amazing!!!". I just can't explain how much i love that guy now, he's an awesome human being. I'm still waiting to know if he wrote about the game or not. Maybe he's just too excited and is still organizing his thoughts to describe the experience.

That was the last contact with the press i've had. At first, i thought that the other 27 press people might have had the same problem installing the game, so i sent them again a mail with the PC version of the game. So far, they haven't replied to me yet. The results?!. I fucked it up in Latin America. From 30 press people, only 3 wrote about the game, that means that now i have a 10% probability of being press covered in other countries. That's just so low.

What am i doing wrong?

Firstly, being so stupid and naive to think that press will help me to do most of the promotion of the game, and not promoting the game by myself the right way. I have multiple accouts in Twitter and Facebook: 2 for me (Alan Sosa) and other 2 for Cubito Morado. It has been really messy to publish on this 4 accounts, because my Facebook account it's like the social connection with my friends and people close to me in Mexico, and the Cubito Morado's Facebook account works good to start building a fan base in Facebook on the other hand we have Twitter: Nobody of my relatives or friends is in Twitter, so mostly, my Twitter account it's like my social promotion in there, and the Cubito Morado's account it's useless. So i'm gonna delete the Cubito Morado's Account in Twitter and use my Account (Alan Sosa) to promote the game.

Other thing is the market segmentation. In Facebook, mostly of my followers are Latin Americans or Spanish speakers, and in Twitter are from all around the globe. So that means that i have to use english and spanish to promote the game in Facebook, and only english in Twitter. I'm not sure of using multiple languages in the same accout, it just does not look professional.

Before coding Infinite pew pew, i did a market research. I didn't had enough budget to hit the shelves of iOS, Android and Windows Phone at the same time. Microsoft's mobile platfom looked like the cheapest and most viable option. In other words, Windows Phone looked like a big blue ocean; It didn't had enough competition and had a very small difference from users who buy apps and use the platform over iOS. Now i have to solve the bad market research i did back then. Everything looks way too different from what i found when i was "researching". My distribution channels are so damn limited. So, my only choice is to expand the market to another platform that doesn't cost a lot and that i can be there in less than a week. Good thing i'm working with XNA, so doing that is not a big deal,. It will take me like 2 days to make a full port of the game for Windows Desktop and sell the game using ITCH.IO or even DESURA.

Further strategy

I will make use of social networks to promote the game; Facebook groups and Twitter in order to keep the game alive. I'll publish highscores and game screenshots everywhere, also using the #screenshotsaturday in Twitter is a good idea. And, i'm gonna write about my adventure in Reddit. Prepare the PC version in 2 days so it can be in itch.io in less than a week. and investigate how to put it on Desura. Send the mails to the other countries, but this time incluiding the game for PC, this means that i have to expand my contacts list and do some research again.

Infinite pew pew is out. So, what's next?

Hello everybody!.

After the long wait from Microsoft, the game got certificated and it's finally in the windows phone marketplace. It's good to know that fragmentation doesn't exist on Windows Phone. This is my first app/game that hit the virtual shelfs so i didn't know a shit about this. I just thought that things here were like in Android's; That you have to create an app for each Android version and that really put a scare on me, because i thought the game wouldn't pass the certificacion process and a port with Monogame didn't look like something that could happen in a short time period, but everything went damn well and i'm fucking, fucking , fucking, thankfull ........ & excited.

I really feel this project as a personal achievement because it's my first BIG game to hit the virtual shelfs. Well, everything is good up to that point, because nobody knows a shit about my game, hell!!, people don't even know about it's existence.

So what's next?.

I present to you my marketing plan, (this time made the right way, not like the crappy ass that i did a month ago.) .Drumroll, please...

In the next days i will be posting about this new journey so it can be useful for other newbies (like me), so the new section will be called "Marketing Log".

Let me translate my hieroglyphs in the picture for you:

1.- I'm gonna start off with a new trailer. Short, and that shows off the value proposition of the game 

2.- Landing page: Minimalist & pretty; That focuses solely on one idea: "Dude, get the fucking game".

3.- Press kit.

4.- Send letters to press, mostly windows phone bloggers and youtubers, obviously with a free copy of the game.

5.- Dig into game dev forums and talk about the game: twitter, reddit, monogame , facebook. hell!, even gamejolt.

A glance of hope for Infinite Pew Pew....

Hello everybody!!.

After the bad moment and the mist cloud that i was living on because of Monogame, I've been trying to look for alternatives on how not to port the game and trying to release it before the year ends. So far, Monogame has been a pain in the ass. Reading the Monogame forums i can tell that many people think the API has a lot of bugs, issues and crap, specially the newest version. After the bugs Mono threw to the game, i thought that a much stabler version would help me; Actually the 3.0 version could, but, it won't in the future cause it does not support Windows Phone 8.1 so it kinda will turn useless when a newer release of Windows Phone comes out.

When i started the project i did some research about trying to run XNA apps in newer Windows Phone releases, and Microsoft seemed to still support this old apps in the newest installments of WP, thanks to their compatibility mode. They have their flaws but every information that i found seemed to point out that those apps actually work, there's no way to try to install the app in a newest WP unless if you do it through the store and the only way to do that it's sending your app for approbation to Microsoft so it can actually be in the store for download. If this works, it would be great because it will save me a huge ammount of time in porting the app but above all, it will save me money.

The developer account  has been created and everything points in not to have restrictions about the WP version that i want to upload the app. I tried to reserve the name and it has already been taken, so the new name (and final) will be INFINITE PEW PEW. For now i will focus on finishing the app advertisement , icon, logos and stuff that will be in the store so i can send it for approbation to Microsoft and if everything works well; The app will be in the store before the year ends!!.

Thanks for reading & have a wonderful day!

Horror, apocalypse and catastrophe.

Hello dudes and dudettes!!

I want to start off with the good news!. I finally managed to run the game on a WP 8.1 device, thanks to monogame. But everything isn't rainbows & candies.

Well. Where should i begin?. Everything is falling apart and i really need time to fix all the bugs that mono threw to the app. So that's why i decided to change (again) the release date to some day in November/December/January2015. I want to apologize for this, i'm really sorry, specially to those special souls that are really interested in the game and are always asking for it's development state....i am deeply sorry....

This is my first game. I've done some before, but this is my first big release, so i think it's a common thing to make mistakes all along the way. For now i'll walk slow and try to solve these bugs

Here's some captions of the game running on a Nokia 520 Windows Phone 8.1 Device.

These are the worst bugs that are kicking my ass for now.

* When minimizing and resuming the app. Mono, doesn't draw sprites correctly, in fact, some sprites actually doesn't draw. It might be some memory leak , dunno..

* The game runs at 120fps i can't make it run slower than 60fps. I really need to achieve this so the low-end devices (like mine) can run the game correctly and smoothly.

* The mediaplayer (the one that plays the background music) crashes for some reason. specially when the sound buffer it's pretty busy.


Thanks for reading everybody. Stay tuned for more updates.

Have a nice day :D

Sneak peak & a delayed release.

Hello everybody!. It's been a while...


I want to start off with a little sneak peak of the game running at 60fps in an actual windows phone device.

Now, the bad news. I have decided to delay the release date of the game.... again. I've been running into trouble when porting the game to Windows Phone 8. Monogame gets tough with some parts of my little engine, but nothing big, it will just take some time to fix it. So , i decided to change the relase date for the next week, so the new date is 11- 14- 2014. Yay!

The good news is that the game it's 100% done and runs really smooth on any device. (60fps on high-end devices , 30fps on low-end devices). 

Thanks for reading, and stay tunned for more news!!!.

Have a nice day everybody!. :D