Unique Ways That The Game…Guerilla Gardening…Gets Promoted

Miguel, from Spooky Squid Games, talks about unique ways to promote their latest game… Guerilla Gardening

You can download the podcast here…
http://www.indiegamepod.com/podcasts/guerilla-gardening-podcast.mp3

Or listen to it here…

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Show Notes:
Interviewer: I’m here at the San Francisco Game Developers Conference and with me today is a special guest. How about you introduce yourself?

Miguel: I’m Miguel Sternberg from Spooky Squid Games.

Interviewer: What game are you working on?

Miguel: I’m currently working on a game called Guerrilla Gardening: Seeds of Revolution. It’s a game based on the guerrilla gardening street movement which is all about planting plants where you shouldn’t. The game sort of takes that basic idea that people are doing in real life and takes it to a more extreme state where you play Molly who is a guerrilla gardener in a police state where they ban all plants. You use a bunch of plants with fantastic powers to try to avoid the cops, plant pretty plants near government propaganda and show up the local citizens so that they’ll overthrow their oppressors.

Interviewer: Now, you have some interesting ways to promote the game and marketing techniques, specifically using a blog and YouTube and stuff like that. Can you talk about that some more?

Miguel: I decided really early on that I wanted to blog about the process, partially from my experience with other projects and going back and trying to blog about them later. It ended up being a huge amount of work. You have to go through all the archives and stuff and try to remember what you were doing at the time.

Also, I just figured the sooner I can introduce people to the idea of the game and get them interested in it, the more time I have to build up an audience for it. So, I have the blog and I also have what were originally monthly development videos. They show a small bit of the prototype. Now, I’m making them twice a month.

At the beginning of the month I’ll put one down and then later on I’ll put another one. They are very short. They are like a minute and a half to three minutes long. They’ll show one aspect of the game very quickly with a little walk-through.

In addition to that, I have a mailing list which I send out once a month. Generally, if there’s been any press, I’ll mention where the press was. If there’s something interesting that’s sort of semi-related to the game in some way or that someone who helped on the game, such as the voice actors, I’ll point people in the direction of their projects and then I’ll just summarize what went on up on the blog very quickly. So that someone maybe forgot about the blog during the month and can realize, oh that happened. It’s about the updates and let’s go back to what’s happening there.

I’m still fairly early on doing this. I’ve been doing it for a few months, but I’ve been happy with it. I’ve been finding it the same way as getting an arts asset into the game gives you that little boost to accompany a little bit of progress. Getting it out there in public, also gives you that little boost even though it does add a little bit of extra time and look.

Interviewer: So, it helps with the motivation.

Miguel: Definitely helps with motivation, having it there, getting the comments coming in, that type of thing.

Interviewer: How are people responding to it on YouTube? Are they posting comments?

Miguel: Yeah, we’ve had a few people posting comments fairly regularly on it and asking questions about it. Is there a plan to do this or that? It’s very few people right now, but I’ve been doing very little to promote it.

I want to build up a certain amount of content already there before I contacted anyone in the class and trying to drive traffic to the site because the worst thing is trying to drive traffic to the site that is completely empty and that you never know if the person is actually going to have stuff there. It’s already proved there’s stuff there. There’s content and there is going to be more coming.

Interviewer: You mentioned a freeware game earlier before. Can you talk about how you use that to promote your current game?

Miguel: Yeah, I, actually, before Guerrilla Gardening I put out the first version of what I hope is going to be a larger game called Night of the Cephalopods. When I first put that out, I was lucky and I got some press attention on indiegames.com.

When I realized that I was getting a whole bunch of traffic and people who were interested in the game, I very quickly put out that mailing list and started collecting people’s emails who were interested in what I was doing and thought they would be interested in the other game. And also I wanted to update them what I updated the freeware game in the future. So, I found that very helpful.

I think it’s probably a good idea for the new developers to put out some small freeware games along with the commercial stuff they are working on, both because I think the interesting game concepts are unsalable because they are too small and because it’s a way of promoting yourself and getting people interested in your particular vision and the type of games you want to make. It’s nice to give people free stuff.

Interviewer: Sure. Do you have any last words then for indie game developers out there in terms of either marketing or freeware games or anything else like that?

Miguel: To do it, I think, just go do it.

Interviewer: Thank you very much.