NORTHWAY GamesDesigning Games on the Road

Colin and I released Incredipede one month ago on October 25th. It’s available for sale from our website (via the Humble Store) and also on Good Old Games. There’s a Flash demo version now making its rounds on the internet, which is apparently quite popular in China and Spain. We’ve had great press in Rock Paper Shotgun, Gamasutra, Indie Game Magazine, Verge, PC Gamer and Edge Magazine. People love Thomas’s beautiful art and the game’s quirky original mechanics.

But it feels to me that most of the world is still waiting to discover Incredipede, because it’s yet to appear on the One True PC Distribution Platform: Steam. There’s no doubt about it: they won. Even I (Sarah) use their store to find new games, and often buy games through Steam rather than directly from developers. The most common question we get from people looking to buy Incredipede is “will I get a Steam key when the game is released there?”. The answer is yes. When!

As you’ve probably heard, Valve recently changed the way they accept indie games like Incredipede onto their Steam store. It used to be you’d email them directly and hear back yay or nay or (more often) nothing. It was obviously an understaffed and un-ideal system, and to Valve’s credit they’re trying to improve it. Incredipede has been one of the first games to use their new submission system Steam Greenlight. On Greenlight, games are voted for by the general public and the top 10 are accepted onto Steam every month. Being a relatively unheard of unreleased game, Incredipede had little chance of getting enough votes in time to launch with Steam. The onus is on the developer to bring players in to vote for their game, a challenge that IMO makes the controversy over Greenlight’s $100 fee seem downright silly.

Incredipede flew up the ranks after release and is hovering at #20, which means it’ll likely be accepted in a couple months. Colin’s planning some improvements for the Steam release and we may push it back to February or March to avoid the post-Holiday hole. We’re both quite confident that this is going to happen, but it’s been demoralizing to have to wait, checking that number every week to see if it’s moved.

So if you haven’t yet, please go vote for Incredipede on Steam Greenlight. And yes, if you’d like to buy it now, we’ll give you a Steam key as soon as it’s on there.

Rebuild mobile’s on sale for 99 cents as part of the indie #superstrategysale. If you’re looking for real mobile strategy games, now’s the time to get Rebuild, Hunters, Call of Cthulhu, and Tactical Soldier – Undead Rising for a fraction of their usual prices.

Rebuild’s been on sale quite a bit lately. October marked the one-year anniversary of Rebuild 2 (Oct 6th to be exact, with the mobile version on Nov 17th). To celebrate I did my first big content update for Rebuild, and ran a 99 cent sale for most of the month. The main new addition was seasons – now you could start the game in winter and play with an extra challenge: farms produce no food (no, not even winter melons!).

Of course, although it’s possible to get through by just tightening your belts and doing daily scavenging trips to food-marts, that wouldn’t be as exciting as, say, eating human flesh. For example. So I made that an option: if it comes down to it you can eat your fallen comrades. Of course, once you try the other-other white meat it’s hard to be satisfied with anything else, and cannibalism has a tendency to escalate to much darker places. You’ve been warned!

Another advantage to this winter mode is that it comes up naturally if you start a fort in spring and make it to day 200 or so, well past the point that the game gives you interesting content. So you can now try to save up enough food to feed your 100-person fort until spring (hint: you’ll need 100 * 30 * 3 = 900 day’s rations). Or, you know, just see what happens. Winter might be a good time to get in that helicopter and get the hell outta Dodge.

The October sale and new content afforded Rebuild a round of press mentions and a New & Noteworthy feature on iTunes. It surprisingly didn’t make it into any Halloween-themed features which was what I was aiming for with my brazen new pumpkin icon. Downloads slowly petered off after the initial spike, and the curve didn’t seem to change when I put the price back from $0.99 to $2.99. In all the event doubled my expected profit for October. Probably it was worth the trouble, although the iPhone5 release and some Google Play bugs made it far more stressful and time consuming than it should have been. Not to mention that month I had to finish Incredipede with Colin!

By happenstance Rebuild also got rolled into Google Play’s 25 cent sale in September which was rather interesting (55k downloads in one day whaaaow). It seemed to have no effect whatsoever on my iOS sales, but Android sales appeared to triple because of it. It was interesting to see them try such a daring “Steam sale”, but I hope to hell players don’t get used to it and start waiting for 99 cent apps to “go on sale”.

This weekend I and a host of other indie developers put our games on sale #BecauseWeMay. Last week Amazon had the same idea and put Rebuild on sale for 99 cents, and although I’m personally fine with whatever they do and it did make me money, I didn’t have the option to say no. Other platforms do the opposite: they set a price in stone and don’t let developers put their own games on sale. So #BecauseWeMay is an acknowledgement of those platforms (like the Apple App Store, Google Play, and Steam) that let developers choose their own prices. Super Office Stress took the message to heart and actually raised their price to 99 bucks.

In other Rebuild news, I’ve done a few more interviews recently, and wrote a postmortem where I describe the ups and downs of writing Flash games. All this keeps getting me thinking about a sequel…

• Rebuild postmortem for Adobe Developer Connection
• Interview on Quarter to Three
• Developer interview on A Great Becoming
• Tactical chat with PocketTactics
• Developer interview on HorribleNight

But mostly I’ve been beavering away with Colin at Incredipede. I hope he’ll want to post something soon because it’s looking great!

EDIT: Amazon’s decided to feature/discount Rebuild again this weekend, so you can go get Rebuild for your Kindle Fire. How much will it cost? Only Amazon knows!

Yes, you can now get Rebuild for your Droid Nexus Galaxy Razr Epic Maxx, or whatever you call that thing! But first, an update:

Rebuild’s doing way better than expected on the BlackBerry PlayBook. This week it’s featured and in their top paid games – up there with three versions of Angry Birds (or is it 4 now?). It’s gotten mentions on crackberry.com, blackberrycool.com, and playbookdaily.com.

All of this is so awesome, because the port took zero effort… and I’m rather fond of my new PlayBook.

But even with all this extravaganza, my sales there are just barely matching the current iPad/iPhone sales (where Rebuild is #500 in games, #50 in strategy with a super-minor feature in iTunes – bet you can’t find it). So being a relative nobody on iOS == stardom on the PlayBook? Bummer for RiM, but I’m just so happy to be loved that I’d rather not dwell on that.

Up next: the terrifying Android marketplace. I’d been avoiding Android because of my instinctive fear of all those different devices. Despite all my laboring over the iOS version, Rebuild is still a little sluggish and crashy on the iPad 1 and iPhone 3GS. There are much less powerful Android phones out there and no easy way to target only the ones with enough RAM and CPU/GPU power to run Rebuild smoothly (although I’ve tried using compatible-screens). So it is with trepidation that I announce Rebuild on Google Play.

But apparently that’s not enough. I knew the hardware base was fractured, but I didn’t realize the app market itself was also fractured. There must be 100 different sites that sell Android apps, and each one wants me to upload my binary to them along with screenshots and promo art in different arbitrary dimensions. Many of the Android “review” sites either require you to sell through their store, or charge $200 for a review. Am I really seeing this right?

I’ve submitted to Amazon so I can get it on the Kindle Fire (although for $200 the PlayBook is a massively better hardware deal). But I’m not sure I have the stomach for all these other stores. Have I been naive to only buy apps through Google? Android users – where do you get your games?

I just released the version 2.0 update to Rebuild iOS, which adds support for iPhone 3GS/4/4S and iPod Touch 3&4. To celebrate, Rebuild is also on sale for 99 cents through the end of this weekend!

I just got new business cards made up for GDC. This one is my favorite. :)

I hope this update also addresses some of the stability issues that Rebuild has been having on the iPad 1. Did you realize an iPhone 4 has twice as much memory as the iPad 1? So it was easier than I’d expected to accommodate iPhones, and obviously I should have done this earlier. I can’t get enough of how nice the cartoony map graphics look on that double-density display.

My folks got me these great Incredipede themed pins from Illuminati Glassworks on Gabriola Island. Gabriola is a small island off of the coast of British Columbia. Sarah and I are spending Christmas in B.C. on Vancouver Island where I grew up. Gabriola is known for supporting a lot of interesting artists.

We’ll see what happens to them… I only have like 10 so I guess I’ll give them to friends? Or mabey I’ll do some kind of contest…?

After all sorts of whining about Flash’s poor performance on the iPad 1, I manned up and made it happen.

The iPad 1 version of Rebuild has less snantzy animations, the map doesn’t scroll quite as smoothly, and admittedly it does run out of ram sometimes and crash. But these issues don’t seem to have lowered the game’s ranking or sales. I’ve gotten more complaints about Air incorrectly listing 15 languages than about performance.

I’ve been tracking the figures on AppFigures.com and was excited to see Rebuild’s #1 app ranking in Anguilla. Well… just kidding, but it was in the top 100 games in the US and UK for awhile. Considering it was never featured by Apple, Rebuild did pretty well, and made $15k in the first month.

It’s evident that Rebuild’s success on the iPad came from it’s previous success as a Flash game. The sales peaks came on days when Rebuild was reviewed on sites like TouchArcade, as well as AppTudes, AppSmile, iPaddisti, 148Apps.

Releasing iPad 2 then iPad 1 separately may have been better too, because the update triggered a second round of press.

Likely it will earn another $15k from now on, possibly more if I put out an iPhone version or a content update and do some creative sales to get more press. But of course I’d rather be working on new things.

Like the Katakana crossword game Colin and I wrote for his mum for Xmas. Or the movie keywords parlor game I’ve been meaning to write for years. Or Word Up Dog (perhaps soon to be rewritten in Stage 3D).

Or, you know, Rebuild 3.

I was so busy enduring (or more like enjoying) typhoons in Japan and the Philippines, I nearly forgot to report on Rebuild 2 being live and in the wild! It’s now playing at at portals near you including Armor Games, Newgrounds (where it’s featured!), and Kongregate!

Feedback has been mostly positive, though some fans are disappointed that it wasn’t more different than the original game. I’m with you – I should have focused on adding more crazy new stuff rather than trying to improve what was already there. I suppose I saw all the flaws in Rebuild 1 very clearly and wanted to fix them all and make Rebuild 2 better in all ways. Turns out that’s incredibly time consuming, and believe it or not, Rebuild 2 took me (not to mention EvilKris who did much of the new art) longer to write than the original game. I get the anti-franchise sentiment and I totally agree that originality is one of the most important aspects of good Flash games. On the other hand, I feel all good inside knowing that Rebuild 2 is the lean, mean, post-apocalyptic city building game it was always meant to be.

EvilKris put together a video of his ending animations in their glorious full form, for those who want to revel in their un-cut awesomeness. Spoiler alert – here it is. The game’s already been mentioned around the web, including a review on JayIsGames and a game pick on the Indie Games Blog. Let me know if you see or write a review, I’ll collect them all in one place.

Finally, Rebuild 2 is going to be played in HorribleNight’s 24 hour gaming marathon benefiting Child’s Play. The guys need your donations to keep them playing games like Rebuild 2 ALL NIGHT LONG (and the next day) this Friday the 14th.

Rebuild has been sponsored – hurrah!

That means it’s coming out very soon, and what better time than October, when everybody has ghouls and zombies on the brain. And things just got zombier, because my primary sponsor is another zombie-themed game: Dead Frontier, a free to play mmo where you battle the hordes in an extensive ruined city. It’s quite pretty (I think so anyway though I know some of you don’t share my appreciation for gore), and it’s a good example of the cool shit you can do with Unity.

The sponsorship bidding process was long and stressful just like with Rebuild 1, and as before I’ve been screwing things up left and right. I was wallowing in One Cup sake earlier and wishing I could hire someone to handle this business stuff. But alas, history has shown that partering with producers is more trouble than it’s worth, especially for a small game like Rebuild.

Plus, if I didn’t do it myself, I might miss out on fun marketing stuff like doing interviews and this blog, plus I like being credited as “Sarah Northway” rather than some faceless studio. Likewise it’s nice to deal directly with people, like Neil Yates of Dead Frontier and Daniel McNeely from Armor Games, who I’m happy to also be working with again.

So look for Rebuild 2 soon on ArmorGames and other fine gaming establishments!

The first round of press is out for Incredipede and people are reacting really positively! The trailer made it to Reddit’s front page and I’m super excited about that! The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and I’ve gotten a bunch of very friendly emails. In short: things are going great! But here’s the thing: even though things are going great a fear lurks in the back of my mind. I fear Internet people.

When I made Fantastic Contraption there was a big positive ruckus of people. It was amazing and wonderful. But for the life of me I couldn’t bring myself to engage with it. There’s something about the weight of hundreds of people (virtual or not) that threatens to smother me. So for Fantastic Contraption I hired my good friend Andy Moore to talk to people for me. He did a great job but he’s moved on to writing his own games now.

This time around I am determined to not run from the challenge. I will try really hard to respond to everyone’s comments, put myself out there and talk about the game. That’s a big reason that this blog exists in the first place.

So, here we go. The rollercoaster begins!