Thursday, March 23, 2017

What Did You Learn About Today?

So this week has been a little different. I've begun using and learning several new applications: Discord, Slack, Audacity, Lightworks, and MailChimp.

So Discord and Slack are chat/voice chat applications that improve on Skype in many ways. They don't take much learning, really. So far as I can tell, Slack is popular among software development and more serious business stuff, while Discord is popular among gamers and online fan communities. A lot of influencers (Twitch streamers and YouTubers) have their own Discord channels. (I also spent a few hours copy/pasting business contact info for influencers so that one day I might send them a copy of my game for them to play and share.) I'm considering one for the Flock of Dogs community. Actually, I've made a Flock Talk Discord server that has like 3 members (if you want to become the 4th member, join here: https://discord.gg/fYZFNTB !). Woohoo. I'm using Slack, because someone just created a Boston Indies Slack server, so I've been chatted a little bit with local indies. 

Audactiy is a sound editing program. I don't have the rights to a certain song about a whale by Yellow Ostrich, but after I have my meeting today (which I guess I'll talk about next week), I plan on emailing the band's licensing dude to see what kind of agreement we can come to. I want to use their song for a trailer. Their song is 3:44 long, but using Audacity, I cut off a lot of the intro, outro, a few verses, and some weird bridges, and got it down to 1:40, because game trailers, as a rule, are supposed to be about 90 seconds long. Then my roommate (see flockofdogs.com/about), who has done this sort of thing professionally, redid my work and made the cuts much more seemless. So thanks, Matt. I'm like way to excited about using the Yellow Ostrich song. My buddy who's in a successful band said I might be expected to pay $1k, which to me is quite a lot. Maybe I can ask them to make payment conditional upon a successful Kickstarter.

Lightworks is for video editing. This ties in with the trailer I'm trying to make, but also needing to submit to Boston Festival of Indie Games (https://www.bostonfig.com/). The submission deadline is April 15, then there's a few rounds of selection. I'm going to be submitting Flock of Dogs and also, two friends and I are working on a tabletop game we're also going to submit. 

MailChimp is for handling contact lists and emailing those lists. Currently, I have three groups. People who have shown active interest in wanting to follow development: they'll get monthly emails. People who want to help my playtest: they'll get sporadic emails and be asked to participate in the Discord server or send me email feedback/videos and report bugs. Then there's other people whose email I have, you know, from being a person with email for like 15 years. I'll probably email those people three times. Once to let them know about the game and invite them to become one of the other types of people and to tell their friends. Once to let them know I've started a Kickstarter and to tell their friends. And once to let them know I've released the game and to tell their friends.

Why am I doing all this and not working on the game? I don't know. I read articles about "if you want to actually be an indie game dev as a career, you better build a community"! So, as much as I'm (a) afraid of rejection and (b) think my game is so far from being done and (c) don't want to annoy people with promotional material........I wanna make games. So I want to build a community. Because community members will then want support my game and they'll share my game with others, which will be good, because my game is going to be worthwhile. It  won't rot your brain, desensitize you to violence, or isolate you and make you lonely. Ah, video games.




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