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Bringing the blog back to life

25 06 13 - 19:13 As you may have noticed, my last blog post was in April 2012. What has happened since then? A lot of stuff. Why didn’t I write about it? Perhaps because I was waiting for a piece of good news to post - unfortunately, there has been none.

In my last post I mentioned that we were still waiting for a response from Valve. The answer came five days later, and it was a generic “your game is not a good fit for Steam” reply. We were shattered at that time – the most important, or even monopolist, PC distributor had rejected our game. This was probably the main reason why I stopped posting – I couldn’t force myself to write that over a year of my work would probably turn out to be wasted.

Three months later Valve announced Steam Greenlight and we regained hope. But when it finally launched in late August, it turned out that Oozi isn’t a game that appeals to a mass audience. Sure, there were some people who liked it, but there was simply not enough of them to greenlight the game; and when we released the game to the public through our website, we realized that critics didn’t fall in love with it either – Oozi’s metacritic score is just 67. We’ve made a somewhat decent, but not exceptional game, with no means of distributing it to our target audience.



As a result, I had to return to my job at Tate Interactive. I was lucky that they needed a programmer at that time to help them port their Vita game, Urban Trial Freestyle, to PS3. Being an ex-employee I was a good candidate: I knew their engine, their workflow and we trusted each other. So most of my time between July and December last year was spent doing contract work that helped me not to run into debt.

Of course I never gave up on indie development. In my spare time I was still working on the iOS port of Yet Another Zombie Defense, with visuals redone by Andrzej, the artist who created all the art in Oozi. The game was ready in February, but as I learned, the iOS market was even harder than XBLIG or PC. It’s so oversaturated that you really need top production values to get any attention. In addition, you need to understand your audience and monetization model - simply porting a successful game from another platform may not work as you might expect.



When I realized that the release of Yet Another Zombie Defense on iOS was a flop, I decided to switch back to the market that I knew best and that I had the greatest success with – XBLIG. I chose to make a game that I have had in mind for a long time – an extremely difficult vertical scroller with avatars. It wasn’t very successful either, but at least it took me only about a month to develop, and it still may turn out to be profitable.



So now here I am. I haven’t earned much money over the last two years, but I’ve learned a lot. Hopefully that knowledge will help me make better business decisions in the future. My next move is to release a sequel to Yet Another Zombie Defense on XBLIG - something I should have done long time ago.