Cant remember if this was from a dream i had or somethine, but i’d REEEALLY like to try it sometime.
I was arguing with myself on how to promote ur own game within other games, and i came up with something that sounds alittle fun to do.Do u guys think it’s a “good” idea to have someones indegame character show up in another indegame? this would ofcourse be stricly PR stuff, no money involved or such things, simply a “we are inde devs and we help eachother” out sort of thing.
Im wondering because it would be fun to see how players might react to a Sprig(my game) showing up in another game either as a NPC, enemy or helper, doesnt matter, and if that would actually help my game get more attention? and ofcourse vice versa, i’d love to have other peoples characters in Flourish as guest appearances, especially if the public knows that character comes from a game thats under development. Im guessing this would be some sort of collab in a way, but for the PR side, we still work on our own games, but our characters gets promoted through other games as short dialoge NPC’s or someone who simply throw u a medpack.
For my own game im beeing very quiet about it, its undergoing some serious playtesting and coding, and im painting complex “deployment” for it, but im thinking for general indiegames. Ive seen this done in some games, cant remember all of the.
I saw Niklas Arne’s humble bundle poster art and i was like “that looks like awesome teamwork”, even tho its a poster with characters form diffrent games, they were in the same frame,looked great.
I dunno, might sound stupid but would be fun to bring atleast some inde teams “togheter” in this way planning a guest appearance of some sort in another teams game.
Just saying i think it would be fun to try, not sure how often this is done, but havent really seen alot of it done,i think.
Dunno if on its own how much it would achieve (although it is fun), but because its novel its a talking point,and so if done well it could be news worthy in some circles … . I think in general indie teams working together to cross promote has got to be a good plan.
Unless both games were popular enough for the characters to be universally recognizable, I think it would really just lead to confusion and mismatched art.
Hmm yeah. I guess this is more for later use, gives the players this “heeeey…this is that guy from…awesome” and this would cause them to talk i think, or atleast go on forums and say if u go there, u will find a Sprig from Flourish, or that Knight form that indie RPG.
Vene if it doesnt do much, its still a fin thing to do i think? It’s basicly uniting indies,showing AAA and audience we are one huge team, even tho we fight for our spot on the sales list.
as for mismatched art, this would have to be remade by the current game artists implementing the character in the games style. I would be fine with this, seeing my Sprig in 3D or another 2d artstyle would just be alot fo fun for me. Not sure i’d want to have my style in another game if it really didnt match.
I dunno, sounds like something fun to do, it’s still a fun thing for players that know both characters to see them in indiegames doing simple things or just standing there.
all forums does this, nothing new, im immune to that.
i think it might work if teams work alittle togheter, and also mention the other game in its dev process. doesnt have to be anything major, but i think this could help the public catch more games, especially if they have simular gameplay, or are of the same “theme”
i cant out a robot in my fantasy forest game:P that would be tricky, unless its there purely for promoting another game.
Final boss in doom has a friggin head of the developer behind the wall, looks weird, but its fun too.
I played the first 2 Dooms with a colleague via IPX (I think IPX) it was over direct dial up in the wee hours of the morning but we always had too much fun chit-chatting to get far. I remember in Wolfenstein the last level before you escaped was blasting a Hitler into oblivion.
The game and style a friend of mine and I are using isn’t so easily exchangeable with the genre of most games in these forums but if we do luck out I will definitely look to develop your exchange concept as a cool, effective way to give a hand up to another Indy.
Well depends on how dear u are holding ur characters i guess. like i said, dont mind seeing my Sprigs in another style if it suits the game that wants to use them to promote me better. I’d gladly paint someone lese character to suit my handpainted enviroments and cartoony characters.
Dunno, this might works for some, teaming up is fun nonetheless, like cross over easter eggs.
Me and my buddy aren’t as far along but in particular we’ve agreed to challenge ourselves and not allow violence (or the Mario Bros Mild Cartoon Violence like found in playing most sports I guess would be more apt description) but Sprigs doesn’t look geared to violence.
We’ve named our characters and discussed the style but are waiting for the Unity Avatar System to see if we can adjust the base meshes sufficiently or if we’ll need to create out own models.
I’ll PM you with my email address and again when we get the models made for you can decide. We’ll have to make a 3D avatar of Sprigs for you and also our characters as Sprites but I think if Unity 4.2 releases by June 30th We can have all the 3D Avatars done by July 31st. In the meantime I’ll make the 2D Sprites and the 3D Sprig and get back to coding.
Yeah im never gonna make a violent game simply because i dont enjoy them myself,got a daughter now that loves sneaking up behind me and watch my characters animate:P There are ppl out there who can make blood gush from characters way better than me, so have at it. I wanna focus on making games “friendly” to both younger and older audiences.
Sounds good to me, i replied.
this is like 1 step further than writing about other peoples games, if a dev took the time to place another game’s character in his own, it must be worth atleast looking at?
Funny thing with M16s was I shot expert with them without ever having fired or held a gun before the Drill Sergeants taught me how to shot; then I had to retest marksmanship or flunk basic. Glad I don’t have to do that anymore.
Hmmmm, maybe we need those Drill Sergeants teaching everyone how to shot?
I had the same thought with cross promotions and indies, but after more consideration it seemed like something that needed to be taken further to really maximize its effectiveness.
Basically, in the end it seemed like for something for this to work…you would have to enter into a sort of loose partnership of cross-branding with other dev teams. Yea having a character in the game is one thing you could do, but there are also a whole lot of other ways to strengthen each others brands (and the partnership / group overall).
With multiple people in the promotional partnership, you would have less of a burden on any 1 team (basically pooling resources to have a greater overall media presence for everyone).
Promotional artwork for marketing using everyones IPs
Contests featuring everyones IPs
Cross-over games (kind of like mario party or super smash brothers, taking all IPs from the partnership and creating a smaller off-shoot game)
Attending E3 or other hard to get into conventions with a booth, but promoting everyones products there.
A team forum to build a community around (instead of each indie team trying to run their own forum and tiny following)
In the end it would be like the indie version of forming a parent company ~though isolated to promotion~ (so the nintendo to manage the mario, zelda, and the rest of their titles)…only to a much lesser degree and the IPs remain in control of their respective teams.
Like any partnership though, you would have to select who you work with carefully.
That’s cool, so if Flourish or the game in my my partner’s plans is a success then we could use that to slowly build a gaming ad ‘coop’ to help out others in a genre or ESRB rating more logically if you will. Base the coops off the ESRB rating.
It would have nothing to do with trying to merge into a big company but rather helping neighbors compete with a limited advertising budget leveraging a successful game title.
The thing that has to be made clear though is some won’t have any advertising budget and also my friend and I have some ad credit we think is a decent ad budget in reality it is laughably small so anyone we coop with, we wouldn’t expect them to reciprocate in advertising budget. So while I’d be happy to include the character(s) / company in the advertising it’s not the primary goal for the previously mentioned reason. This is mostly about working a character in a game as a guest and then a ‘Easter Egg’ for a free copy of the game made by partner company (if coop partner consents to such an arrangement otherwise they can charge, IAP, and do ads when careful of the ESRB rating).
If and when a game went big then the goal of the coop would be to help other indies through the strength of their title and guest characters (of course guest characters (and the partner game company) have a place in advertising when advertising is bought). I don’t have any other goal for it. Of course it’s also a matter of how much time you could spend going through the coop pitches but such worries are a bit premature.
Yeah was thinking more about this and those seems like solid points to me. Having a character simply show up in another teams game might not be enough, and i like ur ideas there. Imagine a forum containing 2-3 indiegames that are basicly separate, but u have easy access to all of them since they are beeing parented by 3 diffrent devteams, and we would know enough about them to answer any questions and so on.
Collab posters for each game would also be pretty nifty, if people play a game and they see characters on it they didnt see in the game, it will most likely start to make them curious who those other characters are,and so on.
It would certainly be fin to try this. What could be even better is to basicly agree with another devteam that ok, we team up and we work our games into eachother in small subtle ways.
I know Ivory is making Bloom, and the settings suits Flourish in alot of ways. The games are pretty much forest and the character are also alternative fantasy. These 2 could have done this easily but simply showing my sprigs in Bloom as simple critters u cant even interact with, and one of her main characters or golems could be something i can paint in the background, and it just fits. And we’d also work on letting the community know there is a collab going on here because did u SEE that giant golem in the background in Flourish??? yeah, thats from Bloom, now go find the Sprigs in that game, and u get a…a…i dont wanna say it, but ACHIEVMENT!
The thing here is, it might not do us ANY good! or it might actually start something new and soemthing the public would enjoy, and it opens a new area for what we can do as indies becasue lets face it…is there something we CANT do?
Cross marketing ey…? I think that’s a great idea if the games are the same genre. Even just putting up links for each other on your sites is a huge help. Indies need to stick together, especially if working on bigger games.
exactly, cant really see where something like this could go wrong except teaming with the wrong people.
Not only for crossmarketing but it opens doors and contacts for a team to ask another team opinions and feedback, since they are maybe simular in look and genre, but they dont really have to be either.
Im gonna develop our game towards the publib dmeo before i reveal anything tho, then i might consider putting someones character in my game as “marketing” for them, this can only be positive no matter ho popular a game is, players will notice its a character from another game if given alittle info, and they will seek it out. damnit i know i would!
One way to simplify the cross marketing besides being strict about ESRB levels in coops would be to create top level URLs that include the game name or the major characters as part of the domain. e.g.
and if you were consistent with that; although due to the number of named characters , maybe start off with game name only, it’d make it easier to find other coop games.
If the coop became successful such that you wanted to create a full time site dedicated to soliciting coops you can create a top level domain:
chicken-coop.co is just an available domain name I looked up as an example to host a indy games coop site. I wouldn’t want to commit to that type overhead unless one became independently wealthy and did it as a service to try and help others make a living.
I’d hesitate to buy a new domain just to solicit and promote coops although once one game hit big, having a single index pages to subdomains that are individual games / companies would be helpful or many. It quickly loose it’s effectiveness if it become a giant catalogue of ‘In Progress’ threads to be listed the game(s) / company would need one vetted and published game.
I’ve written about a ‘Sundance’ section for Indys as a sort criteria for Apple, Android, Windows Stores in other threads but let’s face it: they have little incentive to do so and than actually doing something that makes ‘Indy’ 'Indy rather than just a marketing lip-service gimmick. So maybe sundance.chicken-coop.co
Pooling advertising is OK when there is a budget on both accounts and the release date of the titles is the nearly the same. But the fail I see in advertising is trying to include too much information in an advertisement and with a coop, for each coop partner with co-opted characters you would get a very busy advertisement even if only 2 teams were placing characters because you have 2 company names, at least 2 characters, and 2 different games. You would need to ignore genre, make ESRB most important (parents know this), feature the characters (which is good trying to develop intellectual property and the mistake all the zombie / war game writers are mistakingly ignoring: and you don’t need to be J.R.R Tolkien here folk.), and ignore the game play. In effect, make trying the game a game itself. Of course in this situation an ESRB Rating is important: who needs unpleasant surprises playing a game? I’m not even sure how one gets an ESRB Rating it might be a expensive proposition.
About the only thing that couple go wrong would be for a game from the original programmer’s / designer’s perspective would be to have a game become very popular but then have the coop partner’s characters become in that game and not your own. So in effect, you’d make all the money from the game but you wouldn’t have rights to the intellectual property of the coop team’s characters. Couldn’t really complain too much but people entering into coops like this would have to realize that the original holder of the coop characters would potentially make a lot more money than the game on future games, plush toys, and so on, Angry Birds style. Not too bad problem to have, that’s just the luck of the draw.
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So, I looked it up and you can get a free ESRB rating for digitally downloadable games. You basically fill out a detailed questionnaire. I see that as a big advertising plus for games that you want to certify as clean for parents.
