Community Building

A lot has happened lately in terms of Niche & Tower Offense Community building.
We visited the Real Life Café several times to show the games around and for feedback.
Whenever we go to a festival/event now, we collect mail addresses from players. This enables us to reach them again for sure when we have a big announcement or for the release of the games.

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We started using Mail Chimp for our newsletters, which made them a lot more professional :)
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The Niche playtester group is growing rapidly lately, now featuring almost 200 members.
Our nature games collective Playful Oasis is also coming along well. We are 15 members currently. This week we switched over from Skype to Slack to improve our communication. Not yet sure if it’s working xD

 

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Last week, we had a streaming session with Tower Offense in collaboration with gamerbase.ch. We played the game and responded to questions from gamebase.ch and the twitch chat. You can watch the recording on Youtube, but the comments are Swiss German ;)

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More insights coming soon :)

Respawn

Summertime means Gamescom in approaching. But before that another event took place in Cologne: The Respawn
I went there by train accompanied by Robin, a teammate from Capsule Games.
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The first glance at the Respawn festival + awesome weather!
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Strolling around. You can try out bow shooting here, awesome!
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The talk system of this event is very interesting. There are multiple stages in a relatively small room. Each visitor gets an audio-transmittor with headphones. All the talkes form the different stages are streamed and the visitors can switch between them. So you can basically sit in one talk but listen to another.
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We’re here for business! Tower Offense and Niche both pitched their projects in the “Treasure Cave”.
We also had a few pitch and match meeting with publishers and other indie devs.
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And then the scary moment approached. I had signed up to give a talk about our nature game collective Playful Oasis. Talking has become a bit of a routine for me in the last few months BUT this talks was 45 minutes long, hadn’t done that before. So I worried whether I’d be able to fill the time. Did it work out? I’ll let you judge that yourself: https://voicerepublic.com/talks/playful-oasis-an-indie-collective-story ;)
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Master model & Shelter 2 review

This week we have a special master course, which means school lessons every day…
In this course we pretend to finish our master thesis within just one week. We even have to present a product in the end, the real deal. Today we had to build a 3D model of our project idea. Here is a snippet of mine, still very undefined:

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During lunch break, I published my FIRST REVIEW EVER on our site about nature and biology games, Playful Oasis. Thanks Andi and Isa for spell checking! Go reeead it :D

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In the evening a friend of mine went live with his game kickstarter.
Really? Again? I have too many friends running kickstarters ;)
The game is called Dino System. I had the pleasure to try it a few weeks ago. This game is so full of love, perfectly worked out systems and potential. Daniele, the project lead, has spent countless nights to bring the project this far. The Kickstarter goal is only 5000$, seriously this has to work out!
Support <3?

Workshop Chocolate Tower Llama day??

After a quick trip to the printer’s shop (you’ll see the result a bit later) I joined Gian and Robin at the Capsule Games office. It was a very entertaining morning with lots of joking and fun. Gian took care of the background music, mixing dupstep with funny goat sounds and Beethoven. My time was mostly spent building up the playtester group for Tower Offense.

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In the afternoon, we (the game design master & 4. semester bachelor students) had a workshop together with the SRF. In a short session we had to develop a concept for a planned format. The first round was completely open in terms of projects size and cost. In the second round, we had to take financial restrictions into account.

Heading back to Capsule Games, I picked up the finished materials from the printer’s shop on the way. And here you see the result: Chocolate paper for the SGDA. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out and hope it will be a helpful goodie at the GDC.
Before heading home, Robin gave me a quick program structure crash course to help me with my refactoring problems. Thanks Robin ^^

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My life is crazy…
I was peacefully reworking the Niche code, applying the structures Robin taugth me earlier. Suddenly Patrick, the guy from Indiegames.ch told me about a “llama Jam” which seemed to be happening on Twitter. The whole ruckus was started by two Llamas that went loose in Arizona. We agreed that we should host the Jam on Playful Oasis. Let’s see how many people will participate :)
Do YOU like Game Jams and Llamas?

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