First, some more recognition! The A MAZE. Indie Games Festival was held in Berlin at the end of April. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to Germany to be there, because it sounded really cool. What did make it out there was Spaceteam, as one of the games nominated for “The Most Amazing Indie Game 2013”.

And, currently making its way back to me in Montréal is the award and prize money! It’s totally amazing to be recognized and rewarded by other indies that I respect. Huge thanks to the judges and organizers. And the money will allow me to keep working for another few months, which is incredible. Funnily enough, it’s almost the same amount of money that the game has made so far from upgrade purchases, so I just doubled my revenue :)**

**

So what’s next? I’m kind of in a weird limbo state now. I’m being kept busy with a handful of Spaceteam-related projects but I’m also trying to start working on my next game. It’s hard to stay focused.

Android

The Android version is getting very close! The porting company is still working on testing & polish. We want to make sure it’s ready before we release it. The remaining issues are things like Achievements and (unsurprisingly) some bugs that only happen on certain devices (eg. the OpenGL blend mode for erasing slime works on the Nexus 7, but not on a bunch of others…)

Localization

I’ve always felt like this was a reasonable next step because it’s not a whole lot of work (for me) and has the potential to expand my audience a fair bit. I’d like to get French, German, Spanish, and Italian at least. But I’ve also had fans offer to translate into Russian, Chinese, and Japanese!

But translating Spaceteam is not trivial. I can’t just hand off a list of static strings because most of the text in the game is randomly generated nonsense. I build imperative phrases like “Verb Adjective Noun!” with no regard to gender, conjugation, or adjective position (before/after the noun). Sometimes nouns and adjectives are used totally interchangeably (“Flange Gyro”, “Gyro Flange”, “Gyroflange”, etc).

Each language needs careful tweaking to make sure the word combinations make sense, sound technobabbly enough, and are funny without being too hard to say. So I’ve been building a Translation Tool to help with this process, you can check it out here: http://www.sleepingbeastgames.com/spaceteam/TranslationTool/

(Incidentally if you or someone you know is interested in helping with the translation work, please let me know! I need all the help I can get.)

Furthermore, when I put the symbols (for Symbolic Mode) in the game I needed them to behave like regular words/letters for display, so I used a convenient hack: I replaced all the accented/foreign characters in my font bitmap with symbols.

Then when it came time to localize the game I faced a tricky problem: I had replaced all the accented/foreign characters in my font bitmap with symbols.

:) It took me a week of work to recover from that little hack.

Publishing

It looks like the publishing deal isn’t going to work out for one simple reason that I didn’t originally consider. The publisher requested that I move Spaceteam to their developer account (so all their apps were in one place, seemed perfectly fair). To do this Spaceteam would have to be replaced with a “new” app in the App Store (same name and icon, but different account). The unforeseen show-stopping side-effect was that not only would people lose all the achievements they had earned from the original app, they would lose all their In-App Purchases. We tried to brainstorm ways of dealing with this smoothly, but we couldn’t find a solution. In the end I decided that pissing off my biggest fans like this would be a bad move.

Reskins

A couple of fun reskin/conversion projects have come up that involve making customized versions of Spaceteam with different graphics and words. I can’t go into details yet, and they may not end up happening, but there’s definitely some potential here. New word lists (or customizable ones!) were always something I had planned for future upgrades.

Truthfully though, I’m looking forward to being done with all these loose ends.

I’m still not able to properly focus on my next big project (Shipshape) so in between juggling the various Spaceteam balls I’ve been prototyping some other small local-multiplayer games. This was never the plan… but they’re so much fun :)

Stats

Downloads for April/May

Average downloads: back down to 1,000/day

Total downloads: 387,716

Total sales revenue: $7,169.56

• prize money: € 5,000

Last time on the blog: Boston. This time: San Francisco, for the Game Developers Conference. GDC is smaller than PAX, but it’s still 23,000 people. Far too much to see and do on your own. It’s also industry only (ie. not open to the public) so there’s less cosplay and more schmooze. I’ve been to about 4 GDCs now and I always love it, seeing old industry friends and connecting with new ones.

Monday

We arrived exhausted (and in my case getting sick) so we tried to take Monday off. Somehow we still ended up going to a party :) The food & booze was free, the funk band was fantastic, and I got two hugs from strangers when they found out I made Spaceteam.

We also met up with Sara’s dad who had flown in to give us an accordion. We now have two accordions.

Tuesday

Tuesday was business day. We met with a potential publisher, discussed ways they can take Spaceteam forward, help with marketing. This is likely to happen in some form, and I’m very curious to see the effect real marketing will have (word-of-mouth has worked wonders so far, but monetary wonders can be fun too).

We also met the team building the Android version! They seem pretty great. I’m still not ready to make an official announcement, but the port is going well.

This was the only day I could attend talks so I squeezed in some Indie Game Summit sessions. But I’m really looking forward to catching up with everything I missed in the GDC Vault which has all the conference sessions recorded with audio, video, & slides (I’m so thankful to have access to this! Fellow Montréal devs: Vault party at my house soon?).

Wednesday

First of three days at the booth, being “on” again for 8 hours a day. Sara compares the experience to door-to-door canvassing, calling it “emotive labour”. We were better prepared this time: throat lozenges, hand sanitizer, and a giant water bottle.

I’d say maybe 40% of people who stopped by were already fans of the game, 60% new players. Somewhat predictably, PAX was the reverse. Another 60% of visitors asked about an Android version… I should have just brought a sign that said “working on it” that I could point to, to save my voice.

Wednesday night was the IGF/GDC Awards Ceremony, which is fancy and televised and basically the Oscars of game development. Since we were nominated for an award (the Nuovo Award, celebrating “abstract and unconvential games”) we got to sit in the VIP area with the other nominees, wine, and hors d’oeuvres.

I was super excited to see Cart Life win in my category. It’s an interesting, important game and deserves the exposure much more than Spaceteam (which has a way of promoting itself). I also figured I might have a shot at the Audience Award, but it went to FTL, which is also fantastic. I was in good company :)

Then, the only other party I felt well enough to go to: Venus Patrol + Wild Rumpus. Lots of cool people and games on display. Worth it.

Thursday

More booth.

Since GDC is industry-focused I got approached with a fair number of business opportunities. Some interesting, some probably soul-draining, some hilarious for reasons I can’t legally talk about.

And another awards ceremony! The IMGA is unrelated to GDC and usually held in Barcelona, but they decided to come to San Francisco this year (and apparently got kicked out of their conveniently-close-to-GDC venue at the last minute because they were a “competing festival”. Scandalous.)

It had a much more cozy atmosphere. The other nominees were friendly and awesome. We ended up sitting on the floor playing Spaceteam with the show’s MC, the Zumbie team, and Masaaki the crazy somersaulting Japanese guy who made Taiso.

Also, we won the Innovation Award and got to hold a giant novelty cheque. It comes with a TV ad that will be shown in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Time to start localizing!

Friday

Booth in the morning, then prep for my part in the Experimental Gameplay Workshop. Always a fascinating session, and I was very lucky to be participating this year. Met more cool indies like Michael Brough and Jason Rohrer. I gave a 5-minute presentation including a live stage demo with help from Richard Lemarchand and Martin Middleton (who worked on Journey). We started and ended on Sector 10… thanks guys!

Saturday

GDC is over.

I am sick but optimistic about the future, jealous of all the cool things I missed out on, and ready to spend the weekend relaxing in San Francisco.

Went to the contraptular Mechanical Museum, and then took part in one of those Flash games where you have to solve puzzles to escape from a room… but in real life. WE WERE ACTUALLY TRAPPED IN A ROOM FOR AN HOUR. It was the greatest. We need one in Montréal.

The Mechanical Museum at Fisherman’s Wharf

Stats

The conference surge is over, but my daily download average for April is still higher than it was before (~3500/day). Let’s see if it lasts!

Total downloads: 340,635

Total revenue: $6,561.17

Latest Reviews

Inconsequential and quite Idiotic

WHAT THE POOP IS THIS POOPY POOP I TAKE MORE INTERESTING POOPS THAN THIS POOP, I HAVE NEVER EXPERIENCED SUCH POOP IN ALL OF MY POOPS. “POOPING NEVER CHANGED” SHOULD HAVE BEEN THIS GAMES SLOGAN, BECAUSE IT IS NOTHING BUT A GIANT STEAMING PILE OF POOPY.

~~~

Hysterical can be played equally enjoyably with friends, family, old people, goths, and conservative republicans.

~~~

Nanoo naanoo

Rad- very cool. I’m drunk and my friend and I have a hard time pronouncing the gadgets!

~~~

It made me laugh, cry, depressed, immensely happy, and i found the meaning of life.

~~~

made me totally forget about the food cooking in the oven

~~~

We played this at Disneyland and made everyone jealous. The line waits were amazingly fast because of this game. It’s especially good for space mountain, and astro blasters. One awesome challenge was walking quickly through the caves in Indiana Jones while in the middle of the game. At the end we all couldn’t believe our focus and how much we just skipped.

~~~

You haven’t experienced joy until you’ve played this game. Birth of a child? Wedding day? Graduation? All are sad facsimiles of happiness crapped out by an uncaring world. Play Spaceteam and be made whole.

~~~

5 stars for man purses.

Phew.

After 10 days of back-to-back, coast-to-coast conferences, getting sick, and then immediately entertaining houseguests, I’m finally feeling ready to get back to work.

Too much has happened for a single post, so I’ll start from the beginning.

Even during the lead up to our big business trip I was kept pretty busy:

• Making business cards (I used Moo.com so I could have a different random panel or character on every card, these ended up being a big hit!)
• Making a 5′ standing banner for my booth
• Fixing bugs with Massive Mode
• Making a self-playing Attract Mode that I could use at the conferences
• Responding to fan emails :)
• Discussing exciting business opportunities!
• Working on a Translation Tool that I’m hoping to use for crowdsourcing localizations

Then on Thursday March 21st… the Spaceteam team went on a road trip to Boston.

PAX East is the Penny Arcade eXpo (East coast version). It’s a fan conference (rather than an industry conference like GDC) run by the folks behind the Penny Arcade webcomic. PAX is big. Really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mindbogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to PAX, listen… There were 80,000 people there.

I was there as part of the PAX East Indie Showcase (with 6 other really cool indie games, check them out!), which meant I got a booth on the show floor to hawk my wares to anyone who happened to stop by. I was at the booth all day Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Luckily I was able to share my duties with Sara and sometimes Phil and Jérémie.

It was so cool to meet and interact with fans, new and old. People came by to say how much they loved the game and tell their own Spaceteam stories. We gave handshakes, hugs, photos, interviews, and autographs. I heard about people using Spaceteam to interview job candidates. I heard about medical schools using Spaceteam to train students to operate in high-stress environments like the OR. Stories like this warm the cockles of my heart :)

Special friends made: Jaime and Jo.

Saturday

On Saturday there was an official Spaceteam Tournament, organized by PAX so I didn’t really know what to expect. We ended up with 17 teams of four (68 people total) all trying to connect in the same room. This led to… technical difficulties 😉 We were slow getting started but people were very forgiving. In the end individual teams had to run out to the hall (or in one case, the washroom) to find an isolated space to connect and then come back to play their game.

We used Deterministic Mode so every team played through the same set of sectors/panels/anomalies, which I think worked pretty well. We only had time for two elimination rounds. The 8 best teams advanced to the second round and then the top 3 teams won gold, silver, and bronze medals!

We’re so thankful to Rachel and PAX for organizing everything and providing the awesome engraved medals. One team of four managed to get to Sector 18 before getting disconnected with Spacerats! I was suitably impressed.

Special friends made: Noah and Roger.

Sunday

There was one final surprise in store for us. On the last day of the conference at 6pm, just as we were packing up our booth I got a couple of strange congratulatory tweets and someone came over and told us news that we didn’t fully understand (this being our first PAX): the final top-secret round of the Omegathon had been announced… and it was Spaceteam. We soon found out (by watching snippets of a nail-biting live stream on my laptop) that this meant that two teams were playing Spaceteam competitively on stage in front of thousands of people during the closing ceremonies!

This was of course some incredible unexpected exposure… BUT… the game kept disconnecting, live, on-stage. We could hardly bear to watch as we saw the teams get through several levels of stressful competitive play only to get rudely kicked out of their game by the flaky network connections (Wifi at PAX was super-saturated and unreliable due to thousands of devices all competing for airwaves). We felt terrible for the teams and the organizers, it must have been really hard to anticipate and test for those conditions. Eventually the hosts called it a draw and declared both teams as winners (so hopefully the contestants won’t hate us :).

I’m really hoping Spaceteam doesn’t get remembered as the game that “crashed” a lot at PAX, but I have a feeling the net result will be positive.

By this time I had lost my voice and was starting to feel pretty run down. But it didn’t stop us getting on a plane and flying across the country to San Francisco for the next event. Stay tuned for GDC…!

Stats

As expected, PAX made a big difference to downloads. But at precisely the same time Spaceteam got featured by Apple in the “Best Games You’ve Never Played” category, so it’s hard to tell exactly where the new people are coming from.

Before PAX average daily downloads: 1,000/day

During PAX average daily downloads: **8,000/day

Total lifetime revenue up to March 25th (day after PAX): $5,827**