Game of the year

Thats right, Year 0 Tactics is a nominee for game of the year 2015. The competition, hosted yearly by our leading body for the games industry, TIGA unites developers across the United Kingdom and gives the opportunity to showcase amazing games.

Year 0 Tactics has been entered as ‘best social game of the year’ and really proud and excited to have even been announced as a nominee. We love Year 0 and we love how far its came since it launched almost 1 year ago coming this December.

Winning this award would truly be amazing for us, showing your support would be truly appreciated. You can find out more details about the competition and attending the event here:

http://awards.tiga.org/

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How to get noticed on Steam Greenlight

Hi IndieDevs or Gamers,

So how do you get noticed on Steam Greenlight?

Who’s got experience with Greenlight? We launched our first ever Greenlight campaign at the beggining of september and it seems to be a hit or miss process. By this, I mean if your game or product doesn’t make a positive impression on the hundreds of Greenlighters within the first day, your game is pretty much buried within the catacombs of Greenlight.

Our game is around page 5 alongside all the other promising games that we know are brilliant and we love but instead are sat there collecting dust. Like many others, as an indie team we don’t have a marketing budget. We simply can’t afford the rates magazines and leading websites charge to get a feature. As well as this, I have never received a reply from any of them. I think that getting a feature article (RPS sometimes do Greenlight articles) would help improve your traffic.

So, after 35 days on Greenlight we finally hit 30%… To celebrate, I want to summaries some of the things I’ve learnt or noticed about Greenlight

• Its a popularity content (obviously) but if you aren’t popular within 24 hours, you’re going to have a bitch of a time.
• First impressions count… The piece of media or video your visitors land on needs to be to the point and catch their eye
• Prepare for the Steam Warriors. We got some seriously negative feedback from one guy alone who just wouldn’t stop. Some people are just out there to be a dick.
• Theres bundles, but I’m yet to figure out who would buy one?
• We believed the Icon was the most important thing to pull someone in. As Greenlight listings support .GIF format we spent a long time planning one out and creating one. Turns out when you’re locked away in Page 5 no-ones even browsing through the page listings.
• No one seems to care on Twitter. I made loads of marketing resources. As Greenlight requires a sign in to vote with an account, your followers may not have a Steam Account. No ones going to sign up just to vote for a game. (5 pound spending fee)

What advice do I give? Well don’t put up something thats very early in progress, like we did. We put up a propsed idea for a game. We already had a game, but with steam we were going to update all the graphics and enhance the gameplay. As the game was still being built (still is) we didn’t have much gameplay in there, but there was some. What we did instead was upload gameplay from the current game which essentially shows off all the basic mechanics and features. This went down quite well.

Have something that looks finished and is actual gameplay.

I’d be interested to hear your experience on Greenlight and how you got round all the huzzle.

Our game can be found on here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=499031538

TACTICS UPDATE AND LEGENDARY GAMES

It’s been a busy and pretty hectic month at Legendary so far. With release our Dice and Scorepad apps, as well as pushing out an alpha build of Year 0: Tactics on android we’ve also had a new project on the go, which I’ve got to remain brief about. As part of the Legendary Services side of the business goes, we’ve taken on a new project developing a 3D world creator toolkit. This will be our focus for the upcoming months as there are deadlines to meet.

With that being said, we aren’t abandoning our beloved community and Year 0: Tactics. We have some huge plans for Year 0: Tactics in the future and you’ve put forward some amazing suggestions that we one day would love to see in game. I thought you should all know that if you start noticing a lack of attention to Year 0: Tactics updates then this is why. We thought that the ‘Day of the Harvester’ update Tactics saw recently, was a pretty good way to get the ship sailed with this new project, and give you all something to play with for a while!

THE DAY OF THE HARVESTER

This one goes out strictly to all you Year 0: Tactics fans. Although if you don’t even know Year 0: Tactics exists or what it is, then let me stop you right here, and encourage you to play it.

The harvester is without any questions the most iconic asset in Year 0: Tactics. It’s the fundamental heart of your base which provides you with your most basic, constant supply of resources, as well as it’s the main goal for capturing when raiding someone else’s base. Bearing that in mind, we felt the current harvester model was rather… well, pathetic. Now we are in love with the actual design and we think it looks great, I mean take a look at the concept art we have for it, it’s amazing.

Unfortunately, the in game model really doesn’t do the concept art justice… at all. Take a look at it.

It’s like a childrens car you push around. So, after a bit of talking we decided to pimp it out a little bit. Sam, our 3D artist has been working on it for the past week, building up a new model from scratch, including new geometry, textures and animations. Sam went into the task initially thinking ‘I need to redesign the whole thing’ and so he did, he produced a crazy truck like thing which given its purpose was new, yet Ewan and Gavin didn’t like it. This then put Sam in the direction of ‘improving’ the harvester rather than redesigning it. And so he did! Take a look at it now:

Hopefully this update will go live within a few days. The model is complete, Sam’s just working on tweaking the animations as we speak. I thought it would be cool to keep you awesome people in the loop though 🙂

WHATS IT LIKE TO BE THE COMMUNITY MANAGER GUY

By no means am I an expert. In fact I’m quite the opposite. I’ve had only near to 6 months experience in my job, so I’m actually quite the amateur. I don’t want to start this blog giving the intention that I think I know it all, because quite frankly I don’t. I’ve got a whole lot to learn. Like I’ve said before, when you’re working in a small company like myself, the ‘marketing’ guy often happens to be the community/social media guy. Which is me. My job title is ‘Marketing coordinator’ but really that’s only 1/4 of it. The rest of my job is public relations and engaging with the community and making sure they’re healthy. That’s my favourite part of the job. I love it, and I really do. It’s amazing talking to people, hearing their voice and putting their ideas forward to the team. It truly is, I couldn’t have asked for a more rewarding job.

But what does it mean to be the community guy? What do you have to do? I remember when I started working off I had no idea where to start. My initial thoughts were Twitter and Facebook, but theres so much more to it than that. It opens up a whole gateway to the company you work for. It’s true when people say, the PR guy (public relations) is the face of the company, that and the logo. While I’m no expert, I’m hopefully going to give you a few tips I learnt when I was starting off. This is aimed at anyone who’s just starting a role similar to me, and should hopefully give you an insight into managing social media and getting ahead of the game.

DO RESEARCH

It’s true. Research is key. Your boss will tell you to do it, so do it. And don’t just use Google. Use Youtube. I found dozens of videos on engaging with customers, tone of speech, approaching customers and how to email. There’s loads. Each give a different perspective on how to do it. You can adapt what they recommend to your job environment. If you’re the PR guy for a company that sells leaf blowers, you can adapt a cool strategy and make it a blizzard are awesomeness.

JOIN FORUMS

Well, I work for a gaming forum so I joined up loads of forums like Gamespot, HTML5 games, Reddit. Each of these let you add a signature, so put your company logo in there and a link to your forum or website. Become a well known member of each of these forums. You’ll build a solid, strong and friendly reputation for yourself and the company. Something that can later on help. You can also advertise new products and opportunities all to do with you company. Just be careful of spam regulations in place.

MAKE THE EFFORT AND EMAIL PEOPLE

More, more, more, more more! You need to send loads of emails. If your sent email box is below 10 a day, then you suck. If you don’t have anyone to reply to or email, then get someone to email. Find someone who reviews games, EMAIL THEM, find a new website you want to get featured on EMAIL THEM, just email everyone. Get word our about your company. You’ll pick up the basics of email in no time. You need to have your account configured to make your company look snazzy though. And by this, I mean put a cool signature in it. Well, Don’t put a picture in it. Just the name of company, your name, job title, VAT, Tax number and company description. Just make it look professional. Here take a look at mine. Don’t just copy my details. That would be silly. Your company will have their own.

IF YOU’RE ON FACEBOOK, STATUS UPDATES REGULARLY

Don’t spam though. That’s bad. Even if customers love your company don’t spam them. I would say at most, 2-3 Statuses a week. But vary the days. Maybe put one out Monday, Wednesday and then Saturday. I only put out one status a week. But it’s always a meaningful one. That I know people are looking forward to hear. And also keep it relevant. Don’t blabber off. If people have opted in to liking your page it’s because they wan’t to hear news, competitions and other things relevant. Don’t go posting links to other websites or videos. It’s unprofessional and it’s not what they wanted. Also don’t forget to attach media, and a link referring back to the source (website or game) You want to put a call to action, and then action. I.e:

Check out this awesome picture of a cat, it’s sure to brighten up your day.

View Cat

(Worst status of the year award)

BECOME A TWIT AND GET ON TWITTER

Twitter is awesome because you can engage with your fans instantly and its fun to use. You can recruit so many fans through twitter its beautiful. Because Twitter is a client based on popularity, and today generation love to be popular. When you’re starting off an account with 0 followers follow these steps to getting a few 100 within a day or two.

1.

Search for something relevant to your company or business. In this example, films.

2.

Press discover to then discover.

3.

Now press who to follow, to find people to follow.

4.

There you go. A tailored audience. Now just hit follow on probably 500-1000 and you should get back about 200 followers. Great way to build a basic community. You can of course unfollow after a few days if you have a bad ratio, but you will probably loose followers doing so.

Well that’s all for now, I hope you’ll find this useful. Like I said, this is only for beginners. So please use it well, and best of luck with your quest to becoming the best community manager guy you can!

WHATS BEEN HAPPENING WITH TACTICS

Christmas was a busy period. We got a whole bunch of new testers to play the game which gave us a huge insight to what direction we should take the game when we get back from our 2 weeks break. Testing is so important to us. Being a company that focuses on our consumers and giving our gamers what they want, we thrive of your feedback and believe me when I say, we will change the game to your views. I’ve seen it happen.

For those who aren’t aware, Tactics was released on Facebook on the 23rd January 2015, so the game is still very young on the platform. But by goodness, its got a serious amount of attention we weren’t expecting. And I mean serious. We were expecting a similar amount of users on Year 0, around 800-900 MAU (Monthly active users) but we were wrong. The game shot up in popularity, seizing us in our tracks, shocking us leaving us left starstruck. We weren’t sure what was happening. That Friday half of the Legendary Team were spent looking into our home grown analytic client trying to solve the problems; wheres this traffic coming from, how are they getting here, who the hell are they? Few questions were answered that day. Before we launched Tactics on Facebook, over 2 months of launch on PC browser and Amazon Kindle & FireTV we saw 700 sign up to Tactics, without ANY advertising, that figure isn’t too bad. Now, 3 weeks after initiating Tactics on Facebook, we have near to 22,000 account created with an MAU of almost 20k. Amazing, isn’t it? Now we’re still mid investigation to how this happened but the charts seem pretty steady and consistent, in the weekdays, our sign ups die down, and weekends they shoot back up. This kind of attention and bulk of user sign ups has meant server upgrades, so that’s worth mentioning. For those who haven’t noticed, our servers were upgraded and now Tactics will be a whole lot faster and a whole lot smoother.

We’ve also got a nice selection of new loyal fans giving us feedback on a day to day basis which is really appreciated and it has a huge impact on the games development. In a sense, its changed our whole approach with Tactics, what started off as a small spin-off project from Year 0 focusing on mobile gaming has now turned into the mothership of games.

Focusing on actual in game content for our Year 0 Tactics fans out there, in the past 2 weeks alone we’ve had some huge game changing updates which you’re bound to have noticed. If not… there’s a few things in your settings you need to do which I’ll take you through.

The sky. Yes, the sky has changed. Before it was a rather romantic, orange sky. Now its a poisoned green sky which looks awesome. The quality of the image is also a lot better so you can know for sure our artist hasn’t simply just hopped back into Photoshop and changed the colour.

The graphics. Okay, if you haven’t noticed this, its where you need to do some internet settings. If your graphics on Year 0 Tactics don’t look like this:

Then go into internet settings and clear your cache, restart the browser badabing you’re graphics will be updates to our shiny new set. The ground, textures and models have all been updates. Your feedback said the game looked ‘naff well, given our technical capabilities and limitations (you don’t even want to know) we did almost the best we could. (I say almost as our tech team is working on lighting & stylizing at the moment). So, enjoy the upgraded Tactics!

Free scavenging with each move. Given of course the unit you are using has scavenging capabilities (Scavengers/Infantry) you’ll auto scavenge on all scavenger terrain. This includes buildings, wrecks, trees and srubs. Now, there are two ways to play the game, which is what we had in mind originally, but it was proving to be pretty difficult. You can go in guns blazing, trying to take on the opposing team, or play it stealthy, and go on a scavenge missions, stealing all the enemies resources, its entirely up to you!

Tow ‘n move! You can now tow and move in one action, at no extra cost. Following on from this, if you’re mid tow and you win the battle surprisingly you’ll get the vehicle you’re towing as well!

This is the tip of the ice berg. There’s been a whole more of technical tweaks that aren’t worth going into detail, but we’ve improved the player matching and also smoothness of the game. The tutorial has had a few changes as well but apart from that, that’s all! Until next time everyone.

LEGENDARY GAMES

4 Years old, with 4 games and a whole load of sideline projects as well. Legendary Games has had quite the impact on the creative media industry not just within its glorious hometown of Nottingham, but it seems globally as we’re taking on new projects and opportunities from businesses based all over Earth. With that being said, its important to remember that we are truthfully, and honorably a games company. We all have games roots within the company, our CTO worked on the original Tomb raider game, Ewan our CEO programme manager a Monumental Games, and we’re all huge gamers so being able to work on something we love is really rewarding and special. I’ve only been with Legendary for 4 months, but I already feel welcomed and I’m proud to be a part of the projects that have passed through us so far. Before acquiring a position within Legendary Games, I was in fact aware of the developer because of my college course. Thankfully, I was given the opportunity to become an active tester for Legendary’s ground breaking Year 0 where I began to develop a relationship and knowledge with the developers. This opportunity I believe really aided me in getting a job within Legendary Games as my interviewed mainly consisted of more of a chat of Year 0, and an upcoming title ‘Year 0 Tactics’ with the CEO. The interview went great, being able to meet the CEO directly and have a chat with him gave me a huge insight into the games industry and what it’s like to actually manage a game. With having experience of the game and done some company research, I was able to make myself not look like a tool as I knew relatively what I was speaking about.

I had made time to research the company and I ensured I had played all of their games. At the time I applied, there were officially 3 games published on the games portal, now theres 4. These were;

Since kings of chess was launched all those years ago each game we believed has marked the progression and development of HTML5. We can look at Tactics now and admire it for its capabilities and pushing the HTML5 technology to the edge. We represent HTML5 games with our library of games and we’re excited to take it even further. We have a potential 3 upcoming projects we are delighted to announce to you very shortly.