Game Progress Update #77

Hello World! Welcome the the seventy seventh Dev with Dave Game Progress Update! It’s been another busy couple of weeks here in Dave’s world. Work on keeping up my existing apps and games on the various stores has become a bit of a priority and has taken up quite a lot of whatever spare time I would ordinarily have spent working on the game.

It was also Valentine’s day this week, which I spent having an enjoyable chinese meal with my gf while we watched Douglas Trumbull’s 1972 classic, Silent Running.

As always I have managed to get some work on the game. I have split my time two ways mostly this update. The first half of my efforts was spent on working on the remaining Trello card. The other half was spent on planning and implementing a social media strategy, preparing to promote the game.

Level Difficulty

I have been working on this card for a while now. It is the last remaining card on the Trello board which isn’t a bug fix. Carrying on from >the last progress update<, I have been mulling over how best to handle this.

My current thinking is to have a wider range of zones created, and record a maximum speed for each zone. I plan on doing this by manually setting the specified zone for testing, and also manually setting the speed variable each test.

This is proving to be quite a slow process, not helped by the fact that the game is quite a lot of fun to play.

I have so far created several new zones. Compared to the first few zones I made, these are more varied in the objects used. I have also made more use of the ceiling to floor pipes which I thought were lacking in the other zones.

Social Media

The other half of my efforts have been spent working on the marketing strategy.

For those who have not been following along, I am going to be concentrating my marketing in three specific areas.

• Organic social media promotion
• Paid advertising
• Website with email capture to build email list

The general plan for the three areas are as follows..

Organic Social Media Promotion

As I mentioned in the previous progress update post. I have already selected and joined several Facebook groups which seem to fit the target demographic. I am planning a series of of scheduled posts to these, as well as regularly checking and interacting with other peoples posts.

Paid advertising

Paid for advertising is a little less well planned. I’m not entirely decided on how much budget will be available for this. I expect I will use a variety of adverts to direct people towards social media or the landing page during the pre-launch campaign.

Then I will switch efforts to promoting the store page with a Google UAC advert when the game is finally released.

This will coincide with a renewed effort on the social media front as well.

Website with email capture to build email list

As I am just using a simple landing page with email capture for this, I haven’t really been able to use SEO to bring people to the page. Instead I am planning on using social media and adverts to drive people to the landing page and to leave their email address.

Once the game is closer to release, then I will use the list to send a few emails (A week, before, the day of release, and a few days afterwards) to announce the release to those interested.

Perfectionism strikes

I have also decided that I don’t like the text at the end of the game which says “Tap to try again”. It doesn’t seem to fit the rest of the UI particularly well.

Instead I will replace it with either a button with the same text, or a duplication of the two buttons from the title screen (the menu hamburger and the play button).

I would still like the button(s) to remain hidden until the speed has reduced enough, just like the current line of text does.

I have added this to the Trello as a new card in the Known bug/issues column.

That’s all for now

That’s all I have time for this week. I’m already two hours late publishing this post, and I have still to create the social media posts for it as well!

I’ll be back in two weeks time, with the next update. It’s a special one next time as it’s number 78. This marks THREE YEARS of me working on Flappy-vaders. If time allows, I will try and do something special to celebrate this.

In the mean time, It’s time for me to go.

Catch you all later 🙂