Category: Play

How to start up a Forum

You know what, I’ve never known how to really do this. The only way to get people to register is if they have a reason too. I started the Video Game Dev. Forum and for some reason no one from this blog has posted on it.

After there’s a reason to join, you have to advertise the forum. This is tricky because spamming on other forums about your forum will get you into trouble. So you just have to hope that people see your signature and click on the link. This is where I have failed. I have never advertised the Video Game Dev. Forum on its own. I’ve always mentioned the blog thinking that people would click on the Video Game Dev. Forum on the link. So I’m writing this post now to inform everyone about this Forum.

It’s tough to maintain a forum but usually when you and your team post messages on it your user base will eventually register. This is definitely the step that can take the longest time.

How to Destroy Your Audience

Now this is really easy!

#1: Send out newsletters 5x a day

#2: Make crappy games

#3: Don’t answer their support questions

#4: Have a buggy game released at launch

#5: Release spyware on their computer as they install your game

#6: Have pop-up ads, for other websites (especially porn) when they visit your company website. This is saying that you are not making a porno game.
#7: Make your plays pay $24.99 in monthly subscriptions to your online game that you never add content to

#8: Never update the status of your games on your website

#9: Have horrible Voice Actors voice your characters. Include background noise, static, and any puffs that they make when they are speaking.

#10: Sell your newsletter subscriber’s email addresses to a 3rd party company.

Get ready for Phantom!

Yes it’s back! Finally! And this time it’s with a vengeance!

Seriously this company can have this service released. Now that they’ve dropped the actual Phantom unit and gone with just the service avaiable on Winodws XP and Vista.

The reason why this is good for indie developers is that there is random coding that you have to insert in your game to get it to work with Phantom. If your game runs on Windows it can run on Phantom!

Check it all out at www.phantom.net

Now hopefully they can get their act together and release something before they go bankrupt… Expect the lapboard to be release in October, if they miss that date well they’re definitely dead.

Everything Takes Time

I’ve been writing in this blog for about 3 months now and as you can see very few people have commented on my posts. Does that mean my blog is unsuccessful? Possibly, but at the same time I see my hits are doing steady numbers. Should I measure success by the amount of money that I’ve made? Well that’s a no no. I haven’t made much, only a couple of dollars and even if I do have a ton of hits there’s no reason that doesn’t mean that I will be making more money.

The best way I think to measure success is to hear colleagues say, ‘I like your blog’ etc. As long as you please a core audience you’re successful.

Finding a base of users and never letting go of them is the only way you can grow. Treat these few people with respect and hopefully they’ll recommend your product somewhere along the way!

Being an indie developer, you must always be able to have time. Time is what you need to grow. Over time you will make better products. Over time your audience will grow. As long as you can afford more time the better off you’ll be.

Now if you make crappy products, well you just screw up this entire formula… Please don’t do that.

It’s time to use BlueHost!

I’m dead serious, drop your hold hosting provider and join Bluehost.com now! They just upgraded their standard hosting account to 30 gigabytes storage and 750 gigabytes bandwidth!!!

You’d think that a company like this would have problems maintaining all of this but the only downtime that I’ve experienced with them was a couple of weeks ago when there was a major rain storm in Utah. But we were back on within a couple of hours. They always backup the data at least once a month. They have a fast answering technical support line.

Bottom line is that unless you have your own server, you should switch over to Bluehost.com. All of this for only $6.95 per month! Best of all every 6 months of so they upgrade their accounts for free. So who knows what kind of storage they’ll be offering in the future… I’ve used mutliple hosts in the past and Bluehost.com is the best out of them.