Know the playing field.

A good PVP player will tell you that success requires understanding the terrain.  Knowing what your goals are in Arathi Basin  and where to go to achieve those goals are key to getting your honor points at the end of the day.  (Am I dating my time in WoW by mentioning Honor Points?  Most likely).  Also understanding how other players react to the field is important as well.  Where are the hotspots?  Watching out for repetitive behavior is key to understanding a PVP match.  This concept is also key to doing better in the market.

There is another side to this coin.  If you don't understand something, don't expect to play it well.  As the example in the intro illustrates: I didn't understand the market forces which lead to the collapse of the industry, and lost money.  The same will happen to you.  If you are a gamer looking to start investing the first advise is to learn as much as you can about what you are going to invest in.  It is actually far easier to stay on top of the market as a whole.

Advice #1: Play the market, not the stock.

Unless you really know a particular company very well (say Activision Blizzard for example) don't try and play just one stock.  Instead look for things called Exchange Traded Funds (ETF).  This kind of fund should have very low costs, because a human doesn't get paid to manage it.  If you find one with high costs, run away.  Find a different one.  An ETF just tracks the market.  That's all.  Instead of paying attention to one particular stock now you just have to pay attention to what's happening overall.

Advice #2: Collect Good Information.

For weeks NPR has been talking about troubles in the market because of the stagnation on the rise of the debt ceiling.  And the market slipped a little bit more each day.  Were you paying attention?  Were you taking action based on that information?  This is like a big red zone in the heat map.  The thing to pay attention to is 'nervousness' when investors are nervous the stock market drops.  In this post, lets avoid the issue of what to do when the market drops, we'll talk about that in future posts...  But for now simply understand that although you cannot predict specific behavior in the market, at times you can really get a great idea of the increasing likely hood of a drop in the market.  Last weeks "Market Meltdown" is a great example.

I'm going to apply more gamer strategies to business over time, but for now, lets keep this post to that one tip.  So now that we know we need to pay attention to something, where can we find great places for that information?  Preferably places that don't include a lot of craziness.  Some great suggestions come up next week!

The Adwords Experiment: Week 3

The Adwords Experiment is up to week 3! Actually going through this process has taught me a lot about using Adwords.  If you are going to run an adwords campaign that uses many low competition keywords, you have to create an ad group for each keyword.  Ads must have the keyword in the text of the ad.  Learning how to do this is like learning how to walk.  Clever bidding is like learning how to run.  The first two weeks of this experiment was definitely running before walking.

At the end of the third week we see stats that are pretty close to the first two.  Something is not right, so more drastic changes need to be made.  In week 2 we started seeing Adgroups increasing the effectiveness of each ad...  But at the end of Week 3 going into Week 4 its time for a complete overhaul.

During weeks 1 and 2 more Ads in my campaign were created and polished enough to become 'eligible' for inclusion on the results for the keywords in the campaign.  But not many people were seeing them.  And no one was clicking them. The campaign now contains 23 keywords and 19 adgroups which support those keywords.  Ads no longer double up on the keywords, which seemed fine at the beginning of the process.  There are multiple copies of ads in each adgroup if multiple keywords happened to be used in the same ad.

Going forward each Ad Group will have one Keyword.  Even if it has multiple ads.  Operating under the assumption that whatever algorithm Adwords uses is smart enough to use multiple keywords with multiple ads in a single Adgroup is apparently not the case.  So some major time will be spent resorting the Adwords Campaign, and rewriting the rough draft of the guide.  Getting that guide is going to save you so much time.  It will even be better then reading about all these mistakes and corrects as I make them.

Till next week!  Keep Experimenting... Share your results if you have any! Oh and keep an eye out for my ads.

5 Great Ways to Find an Artist for your Game Project.

 For the ZoRTS project finding Artists seemed to be the biggest challenge.  There is just something about artists which makes them really hard to find.  Maybe there aren't many out there at the moment.  Maybe Artists are looking in traditional media instead of game design.  Or maybe working on a project for no pay is not very appealing.  Regardless of the reason for a difficult search here are some of the strategies the ZoRTS project has used to find Concept Artists and Sprite Artists for The ZoRTS Project.

1.) Trade Shows/Conventions.  While attending Pax East 2011, I went to every panel for art.  Not to attend the panel, just to talk to the Artist lining up to listen. At a big convention you have an hour long wait for the room.  Two words: captive audience.  You can talk up your game, get business cards, or just chat with art folks.

2.) Art Schools.  One of those Pax East Attendees was a representative from an art school.  They are always looking for 'internships' and opportunities for their students.  They even have offices set up to help find projects that are looking for artists.  You may want to avoid the fine arts colleges, and go with ones that have game or programming curriculum...  But don't limit yourself if you are located in a part of the country with only a few colleges.

3.) Go to Kongregate.com.  Many of the games there have art under a Creative Commons License that will allow you to use the art for free, as long as you mention the artist.  This pack of art may be all you need for a prototype, or it may be a place to start and build from.

4.) Build a website!  If you are laboring in secrecy there is no way you can get the word out about your game.  Polish those inbound marketing skills, or contract me to do it, grab some free Google webspace and start telling us about your game.  Use this to attract the attention of the artists that you need.

5.) Reddit!  Use the /r/gamedev, /r/indiegame or similar subreddit.  And there are other more appropriate boards there as well.

In fact this blog post was inspired by a reddit post.  Check it out here to find out if they have added any new and useful comments.  What ways have you used to look for artists to work on a game?  Any 'war stories' about trying to find that great artist?  Next week it's finally here, 1 Free Business Plan for your computer game.  It was held back one week to tweak it and make sure it's perfect!

Late to the Debate...

I like to think about things for a while before posting about them.  This Gamasutra article about Canada helping game designers reminded me of an opinion about our own debate about tax incentives for computer games.  This post is basically a rewrite of a comment Caroline's post on the Fire Hose Games website. Give it a read and leave a comment with your opinion.  Also it would be great to catch up with the current state of this debate, so if you know of any locations where it's being talked about online, link them in the comments section.

A Gamer's Advice for playing the Stock Market.

Could looking at the market from the point of view of a gamer shed some light on preventing terrible losses in the real stock market?  Does being a gamer provide helpful insight into 'the market'?  Can we gamers prosper by looking at the elements of the stock market as we look at the elements of games?  Lets explore those questions with a new series of blog posts.  These posts will get released on Fridays.  If this kind of thing seems interesting, let me know in the comments below.

Economic downturn.  It scares everyone who is trying to 'play the market'.  Scares them more then their first Creeper attack, because a downturn is long and drawn out, not sudden and explosive.  Watching your portfolio shrink is the creeping fear of disaster, not the sudden death of a gunshot.  In my time I've worked at a Mutual Fund Company and a Private Student Loan Company.  My investment education started at the height of the market in 2008.  An employee purchase program sounded like a great idea.  A few hundred dollars set aside from my paycheck went into a $45 dollar stock, which  promptly fell to around a $1.00 over the next couple months.  The official toll: 96.96%.  My advice comes from my experiences, my business education, and reading about investing.

If there are any topics that you would like to look at through the lens of gaming, leave a comment.  They'll get written up in this series.  So post them now to get your burning questions in.  Oh, and I am not a professional so please consult with a trained financial professional before making any large stock purchases...  Or even small ones.  Next Friday we going to talk basics of investing for gamers.  First Strategy: Know the playing field.

One really exciting thing coming up is the release of Diablo III.  There have been a few ruffled feathers from
gamers of late about some of the protection surrounding the game.  I for one am going to be thinking more about the in game economy.  Diablo III will allow players to auction off goods in either gold, or real currency!  There is major opportunity for applying lessons learned on the real stock market to the virtual one, and vice versa.  One great resource is The Diablo 3 gold guide.  The guide is written by Markco Polo who wrote the amazing Just My Two Copper blog, and also The Traffic Blogger.  Markco does a ton of research and experiments into the best ways to make gold, and now real money in Blizzards Games.  Hopefully this series of posts will have good crossover and we'll be able to highlight some real world economic effects using the games economy!

The Adwords Experiment: Week 2

This week on the Adwords Experiment the bid on each keyword has been kicked up to 2 cents per click.  There was some additional tweeking which many help the ads come up in keyword searches.  These tweek's were necessary and should have been done before the experiment started.

Remember before you start an Adwords campaign, make sure that your ads actually contain the keywords they target.  Google uses relevancy and bid amount to determine if your ads come up in searches.  Apparently they wont let just anyone bid on any keyword with an unrelated ad.  To make sure your ad actually comes up, polish the ads to be meaningful and contain the keyswords relevant to your site.  For this reason the 'shot gun' approach is most likely not a successful one.

Fortunately Google lets you have multiple ads per campaign.  Which gives you an opportunity to create ads which target those keywords.  This has been a classic example of learning how to run before learning how to walk.  The experiment may be in trouble simply because time hasn't been spent perfecting the ads.  But on the bright side it won't cost anything to keep going...  So the experiment can be rerun at a later date.

For Week 3 the keywords and ads are narrowing down into 'Ad Groups'.  There will be six ad groups each with between 1 and 3 ads.  They will end up having 3-4 keywords each.  You can save yourself a lot of time and effort by setting this up ahead of time.  For me this is a fun experiment, so the trial and error approach is fine.  But if you are doing this for real money, at a real company, make the Ad Groups ahead of time.  You know you are doing it right when Google starts suggesting additional keywords to go with your ads.  For me that took till the first day of week 3.  If you group well it should happen almost immediately.

There isn't much reason to post pictures of the graphs...  They look exactly the same.  Same number of clicks, same cost.  But the impressions are rising.  So people have been seeing the ads.

This week was pretty much the same as the first week. Which is disappointing, although informative.  It means that the amount that you bid is not the only relevent factor in using Adwords.  I'm preparing something really special for you guys based on what I'm learning.  Anyone who wants to run a good Adwords Campaign is going to want to take a look.  Check back with Week 3.

Newbies guide to the 4 stages between an idea and selling a game.

This discussion is the Business Development side the 4 Stages of Game Design.  If you've been paying attention you'll notice that ZoRTS gets referred to as a project a lot.  Have you ever wondered why that is?  There is a good reason for that, and it can help you think about your game project.  There will be some elaboration on these concepts in a future post which contains a free business plan for a computer game.

My Project Management Professor at Boston University one day told our class to make sure not to confuse a company with a product. This idea has been expressed here as a logical expression Game Idea != Product.  Many, many people especially gamers, confuse an idea, a plan, a project, and a company. This is completely understandable, they get excited about taking an idea and turning it into a business. It's very important to understand the difference between them to preserve productivity, and to put your efforts into the correct thing at the correct time.  A big point that Scott MacMillian makes is that some projects can be created without starting a company.  Why go into $30,000 to $50,000 (or more) worth of dept when you would be completely happy just making the prototype?

• Project: A plan for taking a set of ideas and turning them into a product (in this case a game).  Additionally the  process of taking that idea and actually doing something with it. The project would include starting with some kind of plan (referred to as Project Documentation) to create Game Design Document and then execute the plan to produce a prototype.  The documentation should also include a deadline, goals and a timeline.  You obviously cannot sell a Project to a consumer.  In the game design industry until you actually have an executable file that you can have another human sit down in front of and enjoy, you don't have anything.  You simply have a collection of ideas written down.

• Prototype: The output of the first project should be a playable prototype. Unless you are really ambitious, like the Dwarven Fortress folks, then your prototype will be a demonstration of the technical skills of the coders, and the basic ideas and game play you intend to elaborate on.  The DF prototype/alpha is way more than a technical demonstration, and they happen to be the exception that proves the rule.  For us mere mortals we want to make our prototypes demonstrate that we can deliver something that has some fun game play.

• Computer game: (aka a product) the full release version of executable piece of software that someone can get some enjoyment out of.  We learn that there are multiple stages between Prototype and Full Release in a previous post.  For the big AAA titles there are years of production which include QA testing, Beta Testing, all kinds of polish.

• Company: Once you have a product, something that generates revenue, something that the players can get their hands on, you finally can start a company.  Why wait this long?  Because on your first project, or first game you are bootstrapping.  Which means you have to pay out of pocket for the expenses the game incurs plus the expenses the company incurs.  The second you start a company, your expenses go through the roof.  People have to be compensated for working at a company.  Employee's are much different than 'volunteers'.

Go through these stages at your own pace.  And if you find one partcular stage that you don't want to move past, don't.  You could stay in the project space forever and still produce a game...  It may not be really great, but you wouldn't incur the cost of incorporation.  If you really want to make a company, respect the stages that lead up to it, because you can save yourself a whole lot of money by making mistakes before incorporation.

For these reasons I try very hard to tell people that ZoRTS is a Project, and the result of that project will be a game prototype.  It is very tempting to tell people that I work on a computer game or that I have started a game company, but that just isn't the truth.