Game Progress Update #92

Hello world, and welcome to the ninety second Dev with Dave Game Progress update!

This last couple of weeks seems to have whooshed by so fast. It only feels like a few days ago I was busy writing the last update.

I don’t suppose it’s helped that we have had nothing but torrential rain for the last few days, which has spoilt any plans I had for going out and doing things, as well as making the days dark and dreary.

Anyway, lets look over what I have managed to do this update.

Marketing Stuff

As with the last progress update, (which you can read >here<) Pretty much all of what I have done the last two weeks on this project has been to do with marketing and making sure the marketing stuff is ready to go once we have a concrete release date.

I’ve not done much to the actual marketing strategy document (or blog post, I’m undecided currently), focussing instead on the email sequences aspect this time round.

Email sequences

Probably the biggest aspect of the marketing push for Flappy-vaders, other than paid for adverts, is the email list.

The Flappy-vaders website will collect the email addresses of those interested in the game, which will in turn trigger an email sequence to welcome folks and tell them a little more about the game.

I had previously written out a few emails which make up two sequences. The first sequence is triggered when the user signs up. The second will trigger a week or two before the actual launch day.

I decided that the best thing I could do was to create the emails in Brevo (The email sending solution I decided to use as I use it in all the websites I make for transactional emails).

First I had to configure a few things in Brevo before I could do this. I was unable to access the Host control panel, so I still need to setup the DKIM record to help prevent the mails from going to peoples spam/junk folder.

Creating the emails in Brevo was quite simple. They have drag and drop tools which allow you to configure the emails as you see fit with little effort.

It was during this bit that the self-doubt crept in. The more I looked at what I had written, the less confident I was that it would work. It started with a subject line which I thought could be better. But the more and more I read the copy, the less I felt like it was good enough.

I initially opened Chat GPT to bounce some ideas around with regarding the subject lines, but the more I delved into it the more I worried about the content of the emails.

Then I figured I’d try a more analogue approach. So I printed out what I had so far, and had planned on sitting outside under the gazebo as I worked on the emails. The rain ruined this idea, so instead I went and sat on the sofa inside.

Other marketing ideas.

One thing which did distract me for a good hour the other day was the idea of getting celebrities to record promotional videos for me.

I was scrolling on my phone, and saw an advert with Anthony Starr (the actor Homelander from the Boys) for some game or other. (I’m pretty sure it was the real Anthony Starr, and not a deep-fake.). This got me wondering, and a quick Google led me to Cameo.com and possibly wasting an hour of time I could have better used.

It turns out, I could get a celebrity like Paul Chuckle, or another from a wide range of talent, to record a short promotional video for Flappy-vaders for only a few hundred pounds.

That’s all for now.

And that’s all I have time for now. It’s already twenty past ten. I’m supposed to be playing Fortnite with my buddy at ten, and I still need to finish preparing this post, and then do the social media.

Oh well, hopefully it’ll not take too long.

I will be back, as always, in two weeks with the next progress update.