Indierover: Indie game development and more

You should read this post first if you don’t know what are these girls doing here.

Well, I want to introduce you to Fran and Cat, they are funny, pretty, and really indie… and of course they love Draco Mahjongg

Soon more “guerrilla girls”.

If you have read the previous post you already know what was my plan for making a bit of guerrilla marketing.

Well, I want to introduce you to Virginie and Coralie, two fantastic and pretty girls that are really good friends. They love Draco Mahjongg

Soon more “guerrilla girls”.

For an indie game developer marketing is one of the most important things.

You can have finished a great game but if you don’t work hard in using all the possible ways to show your product to the audience and selling it properly maybe all your effort will be in vain.

Marketing is not and easy subject and I will not try to explain here all the steps you will have to do in order to launch your game to the bigger audience possible (maybe in other post). But I will like to write about a type of marketing that is really different and can make a big success in your planning: I will talk about “guerrilla marketing”, well in fact I will talk about the guerrilla marketing I’m planning for this blog and my future games I will release soon.

One of the bigger problems of and indie game developer is that usually he doesnt have lot of money. Guerrilla marketing is a body of unconventional ways of pursuing conventional goals but it is a proven method of achieving profits with minimum money. Furthermore, its a bit crazy, so I really like it of course. You can read more about guerrilla marketing here.

Some examples of guerrilla marketing that maybe you can think are stupid but were really successful:

• - Imagine you have a new florist’s. Why not to hide some baskets with flowers in a park and to put inside some cards with the address of the florist’s and greetings?
• - Everybody is used to publicity posters and quite nobody reads them. But, for example, you can convince some friends to wear a t shirt with the sentence “Why don’t you go to the toilet of THIS cinema?” inside a cinema, and to put your poster just inside the toilet.

So, I will try to do a bit of guerrilla marketing for promoting the game I’m developing called “Draco Mahjongg”. I have several ideas, but I will write only one of them now, by the time I will try the other ones I will share them with you. The idea its really simple, I will take photos of my most beautiful friends with the game in their hands. Later, I will make a special section or gallery called “happy dracos” or something like this, with a few words explaining who are they and what they think about the game. And of course, I will use these photos in all the places I will be able, including webs, forums, etc. These girls will be more much friendly and funny than any hostess of the E3

Techniques like complex photo edition and matte painting are often really useful for multimedia purposes. For example I used 3d model integration in all the backgrounds of “Draco Mahjongg” game in order to show Draco (designed by Devilish Art) in several beautiful landscapes around the world, this was cheaper than buying flights for Draco to all this places (sorry Draco I have to save some money for parties).

To integrate Draco in each landscape was easier than I thought. These were the only two things I had at the beginning:

• 1) A render of Draco in a big size (1200×1200) with transparent background. It depends on the 3d packcage you use, I used 3d studio max and .png format with alpha channel activated in order to save the transparent background.
• 2) The photo of the landscape (1600×1200).

And these are the steps I followed in order to make the integration in photoshop:

• 1) Copy Draco into the landscape in a different layer (ctrl+c and ctrl+v). Change the size, orientation and move it to the place you want, you can use ctrl+t for the transformations.
• 2) Now we have to make some color and ilumination corrections in Draco in order it fits properly with the background. I played with hue/saturation, brightness/contrast and color balance until I was satisfied with the result.
• 3) The last thing is to improve little details in order to win some reality. I created a new layer and I drew a smooth shadow. I used the brush with black color, later I added some gaussian blur and finally I changed the transparency of the layer a bit (80%).

And thats all! Hope you will be able to put your 3d models around all the world