I hope you all had a wonderful holiday break!

We’re back in the office now and I thought that, given we’ve just started a new year, it’s probably at a good point to give you a bit of an update about what we’ve been doing, and what we’re planning on doing next!

Pi Store

Hopefully you’ve all seen the Pi Store by now,  but if not – just before Christmas we launched a store (with the Raspberry Pi Foundation) specifically for the Raspberry Pi, allowing people to distribute tutorials, games, applications, etc. for the Pi.

The Pi Store has seen some incredible traffic since its launch, and we’ve had a lot of really useful feedback which we’re using to improve the Pi Store, and IndieCity itself.

Linux Client

Just prior to launching the Pi Store we asked for volunteers to help us test our upcoming Linux Client as well, and saw a huge number of people step forwards, which we are so grateful for! We’ve had a couple of unexpected delays to the next build for testing, but hope to have something sent to those kind people who offered to help  within the next couple of weeks.

Tip Jar

Something else we implemented late last year that you might have missed is a tip jar feature, allowing people to reward developers for their products. If you want to enable the tip jar for your project, go to the “pricing” tab of your project setup and check the box near the bottom of the page.

Next Up!

So what’s next? Well, we’ll be fixing up some of the issues that have cropped up within the Pi Store, pushing out a new version of the Windows Client (bringing it more up to date with the Pi Store, and the upcoming Linux Client), and pushing forward with getting the Linux Client ready for people to use!

Once the Linux Client is ready to be used, we’ll start focusing more on getting Mac support worked out.

If there’s anything we’ve not mentioned that you think we should be looking at, please let us know by email, by posting on the forum, by commenting here, or through IRC!

We’re super-excited to announce today that we’re running the official Raspberry Pi Store, open now! The official Raspberry Pi blog post about it is up now, so you can go read their take after this!

The Raspberry Pi is something we’ve long been interested in as a cheap computer that allows anyone and everyone to start creating content, and we’re thrilled that the Raspberry Pi Foundation wanted us to create a store for all sorts of Pi content, from games to apps to tutorials to assets for use in content that can then go back on the Store!

Developers already registered with IndieCity will find the ability to add a Pi SKU under their “platforms/installers” section of their game setup.

New users can sign up through the IndieCity webpage, or enter via the Pi Store front page, or download the Pi Store on their Pi, either by running the new version of Raspbian which includes the Pi Store, or by apt-get installing it. If you need any help, or just want to hang around and chat Pi we’re available over in #PiStore on Freenode, so come say hi!

This is a fantastic step for us towards our ultimate aim for IndieCity to be a place where developers can show off all their content, regardless of platform. We’re most of the way towards having a Linux Client, and soon after that hope to have a Mac OS Client, but developers will also be able to list items that can’t be distributed on IndieCity (for example iOS apps).

We’ve been saying from the start that we want IndieCity to be the place for discovery of indie games, so opening up to non-Windows content is a major part of that!

Linux

Speaking of Linux… thank you very much to those of you who emailed to volunteer to help us test the Client! We have quite an extensive list of testers now, covering a fairly eclectic range of distros which is fantastic! It’s not too late if you want to help though, as it’s looking likely that the next build that needs testing will be after Christmas, so if you fancied helping us test, please email Enquiries@IndieCity.com including details about your system.

Single zip upload / Exe in subfolder

A number of developers out there who have asked for this, especially since some middlewares force the game’s executable to be in a subfolder. So from now on just put ALL of your data (including the game executable) into a single zip and upload that.

Once uploaded you’ll see a couple of new fields:

• Executable path: Start typing in the path and filename (or just the filename if your .exe is in the root of your zip). The site will auto-suggest the file for you as you type.
• Source directory: Some developers would like to provide their source-code, which we think is great! If you want to do this then check the ‘Yes’ box, and then type in the path to where your source-code lives within the zip file.

PLEASE NOTE: If you’ve uploaded your game before 14th Nov, you’ll have to re-upload it IF you want to Build it again.

New content descriptors

We’ve added a handful of new content descriptors that you can assign to your game for additional accessibility info:

• Epilepsy warning: if you have fast flickering imagery in your game
• Remappable controls: if people can change the controls of your game
• Colour-blind Accessible: if your game is colour-blind friendly (watch out for red-green issues in particular)
• Deaf accessible: If you provide subtitles and / or icons for any audio cues etc
• Game Controller Required: if your game need a separate controller in order to be played

Underground renamed

You may have heard about this from us before, but through research we’ve found that gamers weren’t visiting the Underground enough, mainly due to confusion as to what that meant. Initially we thought it would work well for brave gamers to be ‘going into the Underground’, but it turns out they’d just prefer to see games as either finished or in-progress.
So now if you want your game to be publicly available while you’re working on it you should set the status to ‘In Progress’, and gamers can then filter their browsing based on that.

Recommendations opt-in/out

You may have spotted this already, but you can now choose whether to have similar games shown on your own game page or not. Careful of the double-edged sword though: if you choose to opt out then your game will no longer appear on other games’ pages either!

Misc:

Your ‘Developer Avatar’ is now known as your ‘Company Logo’ – just makes more sense.

These changes are driven by your feedback. We take it all on board and work towards improving the site to make it easier for you to get your games out there, and also easier for gamers to find and get them. If you have any suggestions or find any issues with the site then drop us a line at enquiries@indiecity.com. We’re always happy to chat about the site.

*drumroll*

Lightmare Studio

Heed the warning from the red planet, Earthlings! The Martians are about to strike our beloved planet to take our single most valuable resource: cows! Protect Barney’s “ladies” in this colourful and whimsical tower defence game!

Ludocraft Ltd

AirBuccaneers HD is a Co-operative Vehicle based Team Deathmatch multiplayer game. Players fly around as Vikings and Buccaneers with heavily armed hot air balloons above beautiful Scandinavian landscapes and engage in fearsome aerial battles.

Meltdown Interactive Media

Monster Truck Racing Extreme Offroad is an indie arcade racing game with a few simulation elements thrown in. Purchase this 1 track single-player alpha build now for a discounted price and receive the full game when it is released.

Thanks for all the amazingly creative entries we had! If you didn’t win this time, don’t despair as we’ll be looking out for more awesome looking pages in the near future.

A huge thank you as well to everyone who turned up. Without you the evening wouldn’t have been what it was – a fairly chaotic, interesting mix of different people sharing their varied experiences of making indie games.

I also wanted to apologise for the problems we had with the venue,  and let everyone know we’ll be making sure to discuss things like music in more detail with any potential future venues!

Dan (from Team Ekko) has already blogged about the event, as has Andy over on the Zero Dependency blog. There are also photos up over on the Zero Dependency FaceBook page. Unfortunately, because the event was so busy, we couldn’t take many pictures after the start of the evening, but there are at least some up there!

To enter, all you have to do is make your developer page as awesome as you possibly can! Choose your colours, upload your banner images and backgrounds and make them a visual delight. On Friday 5th October we’ll be wrangling a friendly graphic designer to look over all the customised pages and pick his favourites.

If you want to enter, please make sure you’ve claimed your custom URL (i.e. http://YourName.IndieCity.com) through your Developer page as the ad will link directly to it.

The three designs judged to be best will be put into the MPU rotation on Rock, Paper, Shotgun (right hand side, below the “Respond to our gibber” box) for a few weeks (because we’ve booked the space based on number of impressions we don’t know exactly how long it’ll run for).

If you miss out the first time round, don’t worry! We’ll be taking a look at the custom pages again and choosing some more brilliant designs in the coming weeks.

If you’re short on inspiration, two of our guys here at IndieCity have already done up their pages, so you can see Tom’s, and Chris’s for some ideas!

Just to reiterate, the deadline for you to edit your pages is Thursday 4th October (midnight BST).

Your data:

Before the week is out your developer area will have new ‘at a glance’ stats on your homepage, and a new stats section. We’ll email you nearer the time detailing how to access and use this new section. It’s in the stats area that things get exciting. First off you will see the ‘Impressions’ section. This will tell you how many times your game has been shown to gamers in 4 different ways:

1. When they were browsing the games list on IndieCity
2. When it was a recommended title
3. When they searched for it by name
4. When they came to the page directly from an external link

Underneath this section you’ll then see the chart area, where you’ll be able to track your per-game page views, the number of demo downloads and the number of purchases over time. On top of this you can track the number of views of your developer profile page, which we think will become quite a key statistic for you over time. What can you do with all of these new statistics? Here are some thoughts:

Track marketing efforts:

If you do a big marketing push, you can track the increase in number of people arriving at your pages, and the conversion rate (page views to demo downloads to purchases) as word of mouth increases about your games. You can also see how people use the different methods of getting to your game. For example, if a lot of people are using search to find your game that means that people are specifically looking for it on IndieCity, whereas if the majority are coming via the recommendations then maybe you could do more work on getting the name out there so people know about it!

Game Tile Effectiveness

Your game tile is the information shown about your game on the browse and recommendation shelves and it’s very important! With the impressions and page views components of the analytics pagework you can track how effective your game name, short description and box art are.

Take note of the current values, then try changing one of the 3 elements (or more than one if you’re feeling brave – yay for multivariate testing!) and compare how well it has performed to the previous version. Pick the winner and try again.

If you’re serious about maximising the awareness of your company and game then this is very important stuff: Google did this when they tested 41 different hues of blue for their adword links, and closer to the indie world Cliffski is all over this kind of thing (check out his blog posts on trimming down page content, adding page content, and changing button colours)

Demo effectiveness

You might not have a demo for your game initially, and perhaps the page views are high but the purchases are low. You could try adding a demo, and then review what that does to your conversion rate. If you want to get really serious track how much time it took to make the demo vs the increase in return.

Price-point

Another very important element is the price of your game. There’s lots of psychology and marketing research about people’s behaviour to price point, when they consider things to be a bargain, when they go into impulse-buy mode. With IndieCity you can change your price point at any time. You can even set up your own sale and inform the social/press world. Edit your game description to explain that it’s a 7 day half-price sale or whatever, and then track how that changes your game’s effectiveness.

Phew!

Well, that’s just a few ideas of what you’ll be able to do later in the week with the new in-depth analytics. As always we’d like to hear from you though: what will you test and compare with this new information? After we’ve launched this we’re expecting to continue updating it to be as useful as possible for you guys, so what other data would you like to see?

Quick note: we have populated our analytics database with as much data as possible (from both our database and Google Analytics) but some stuff, specifically the impressions, was not previously tracked so will be at zero when this first goes live. There might also be a small delay in getting all the data from Google Analytics over to your statistics page, but don’t worry, it will be added ASAP!

Edited to add: at the moment your views won’t be separated into their different sources (whether the visitor came through recommendations, browsing, search, or direct), but this will come in a future update. We wanted to push this live to you as quickly as possible, so as mentioned above we’ll continue to work on it for quite some time to get it exactly how you want!

From the outset we’ve always wanted to empower developers, while helping gamers find games that appeal to them. We’ve listened to the feedback we’ve received from the many indie developers who use the service, and have been quietly beavering away on a major redesign that will contain a whole lot more functionality while also being easier to work with.

Our plan is to push out fairly regular site revisions to add more features gradually, allowing us to test and get feedback from you, the developers. Therefore, starting later this week we’ll be excitedly launching phase one of the new and improved IndieCity!

We’ll be emailing all our registered developers when phase one goes live, but we wanted to give you guys a heads up about what to expect when you log in to the new site!

So what are the changes?

Something we’ve learned from a lot of indie devs is that many of them don’t enjoy setting up their own web domains, adding social streams, blogging platforms and keeping them tuned for SEO, etc. In response to this we have therefore expanded IndieCity’s functionality to help on this front. Later this week the new site will launch with the following features:

Your own domain: We’ve made it easy for you to claim your own domain name in the format http://<developer / company name>.indiecity.com. This will enable you to easily direct your fans to your page and your games. It’s first come, first served so make sure you log in as soon as the new site has launched to claim yours!

New customisable developer pages: There is now a lot more focus on your developer pages; after all that’s where you’ll want to drive lots of traffic towards! Your page now lists your company info and games, with the text, background graphic and body colours all customisable to fit in with your game and company’s styling. We’re really looking forward to seeing what you all come up with on this front!

Pure Agent scenario: This is one for our UK devs: you’ll now be able to use IndieCity as a Pure Agent, meaning that you’re responsible for paying VAT, which also means that if you’re under the income threshold you’ll be tax exempt.

Apps too: Another big change we’re making to IndieCity is allowing apps! We want to support indie devs no matter what they create, and we’ve had numerous requests from developers who want to provide their own game dev tools on the site. We’ve also run into issues before over when a game is an app and vice versa. From later on this week we’ll be accepting app submissions as well as games.

IndieCity stepping back: Your customised developer pages should take centre stage on the site, and to help with this the IndieCity branding will be reduced. We want to be the engine that powers indie developers’ web pages, not a service that takes the spotlight away from them. Our ultimate aim is to make it as easy as possible for you to set up your online presence, build your audience and distribute your games.

These changes are just the beginning of the features we have planned for the new IndieCity! A lot of the work we’ve been doing has been under the hood to prepare our backend systems for these and many more changes. Some of the other big features we will be adding over the coming weeks include advanced analytics, blogging, and a comments and reviews system. Social network functionality for gamers is also in the pipeline, so they can follow developers, and you can contact them directly with game and news updates.

Keep an eye out for our regular news updates and site revisions as we work together to make IndieCity the one-stop shop for indie games.

We are incredibly excited to be bringing you the new features functionality mentioned above and we hope you’ll like them to! As always if you want to discuss any of this with us use our IRC channel (#indiecity on irc.freenode.net), email us at enquiries@indiecity.com, or post on our forum or this blog entry!

Quite a few of you have done so, and we’ve seen games in all stages of development, but what has been really cool to see is people using Underground to not only distribute their game but also write it!

I spoke to DjArcas, who runs ProjectorGames, about how it’s going for him!

How many games have you worked on previously?

Yikes. I’m not exactly sure. I worked on 65 SKUs in the AAA industry, 11 XBLIG games, and I have 3 games available for purchase on IndieCity.

Would you say you’ve started to move away from XBLIG towards PC and if so why?

The Xbox is getting really long in the tooth now. Having compared world generation times between Xbox and my 2 year old laptop in FortressCraft, the PC chews through heavy maths around 30 times quicker. (So a world that takes an hour to generate on the Xbox takes TWO minutes on my ageing laptop!)

With Microsoft being entirely uncommunicative on the future of XBLIG on both the current and next generation of hardware, the future of the service is very uncertain. Whilst I utterly love the magic of being able to see my game running on a console, I have a horrible feeling that magic is going to disappear for ever quite soon.

I’ve got a lot of ideas I want to turn into games, but having to spend the lion’s share of your time optimising the game simply to keep it playable is no fun at all.

Could you tell us a bit about how you’re writing your newest game, FortressCraft 2D?

I’ve decided to let people get right in at the very start of a game’s development. I wrote the design document in public view, and have allowed people to comment.

I’ve also been pushing upto a dozen new builds of the game onto IndieCity each week, and soliciting feedback from the community.

I’ve managed to push out multiple builds in a 10 minute window, specifically in order to add in extra debug, or solve issues that people had found.

I wish I could have put patches onto XBLIG this quickly!

What made you pick this innovative model for writing the game?

I’m an idiot? No, I’m honestly shocked by how ignorant people are of how games are made.

Yesterday someone shouted at me for “Cloning 30 games at once” (like I should come up with a system to allow a player to jump WITHOUT comparing it to Super Mario Brothers or something?). People really, REALLY have no idea how games are put together!

I hope to show people how games come together, how every game is a conglomeration of ideas from previous games, and how, despite having a huge design document available, ideas still get implemented “just because”, and features get dropped as they don’t work in the game.

If everyone was as transparent as to where their ideas and iteration came from, I think the games industry would be a much healthier place. This is something the film industry has done well for many years, but the games industry is still in it’s infancy. (For instance, George Lucas makes no secret of the fact that Star Wars is rip-off of Hidden Fortress)

Is it something you think you will do again for future games?

Almost definitely. Being able to rapidly iterate, and get feedback from my community is amazing, and it’s going to end up with a much, much better game at the end of the day. There’s almost no gap between altering a code feature, and having the public able to play it.

I’ve already used IndieCity to offer up Tactics Forever to my beta testers (http://underground.indiecity.com/game/TacticsForever) and once it’s in a state where the general public aren’t going to complain it’s super-broken, I’ll reduce the price to something sensible.

What’s the best aspect of this approach?

It’s a well-known fact that, the smaller the changes you make to a program,  the less chance there is of breaking it. This approach means that I can prototype features and get people to try them out in short order.

For instance, yesterday I implemented robot pets in the game; the feedback was positive, so I’m making more of this feature now. If I had to wait until the pets were a finished, polished feature before letting people play with them, then they would probably not have gone in; and if they turned out to be a bad feature, I might have wasted multiple weeks of valuable dev time.

IndieCity is really helpful in that it doesn’t get in the WAY of it. IndieCity offers me some level of DRM, it offers me automated distribution, it takes care of payments and credit cards and money, and it lets me get on with the much more awesome game dev. It doesn’t stop me pushing out prototype, unfinished or purposefully-broken builds, and offers almost nothing in the way of restrictions. On top of that, it offers Achievements and Leaderboards. Woot!

A few things you could do to help more though:

Improve the speed of the website! I’d also like to see more information regarding the state of my builds (how old is the build? Did I just upload a .exe that’s identical to the previous one? Can I roll back to previous builds?). Overall though, I’m very happy with the level of features offered, especially as it’s so early in IndieCity’s life, compared to other digital download services.

Would you recommend this approach to other developers?

Only if you’re very brave, and don’t mind dealing with Joe Public. I’d like people to know about how games are made though; there’s very little in the way of an equivalent of DVD extras in the games industry right now!

Speaking of the lack of “DVD extras” in the games industry, how do you feel about the (fairly) recent release of Indie Game: The Movie, and the Double Fine Adventure Documentary?

I really detest the whole Indie Game: The Movie thing, to be honest. It came across as really self-serving, and not particularly in touch with the vast majority of Indie Developers, as it follows basically the highest-profile indie developers in the world. I suspect if it had followed an average indie game, which shipped a few thousand copies, it wouldn’t have been quite as good, though!

I’d like to see more of this sort of thing though; hopefully focusing on a few lesser-known developers.

Are there any downsides or traps to this kind of open development you would warn other developers about?

Be VERY careful if you’re not an experienced coder, in the changes that you make. I’ve had 30 years of learning what’s risky and what’s not.

If you’re less experienced, then make sure you check everything twice, then check it again. My testing crew will attest that I still occasionally forget to switch the networking from “lan” to “internet” when delivering them a build!

Is there anything else you want to say to our other developers?

I hope to see you all at the EuroGamer meetup, and why not check out Steam Heroes, DealSpwn’s Indie Game Of The Week!

And if you feel the need to abuse me for any reason, the best way is to tweet me at @fortress_craft

An extra special thanks goes to each of our experts who helped make the event what it was – Alex Tutty, Mike Rose, Brian Baglow, Keith Stuart, Ryan Doyle, Dan Marshall, David Hayward, James Parker, Jack Jones, Alex Chapman, Paul Taylor, and Graham McAllister.

Despite a few organisational niggles at the start of the night (apologies for the slight delay caused by these!) it seemed like everyone had a fantastic time and there were lots of great discussions going on.

We took a few photos on our phones, but unfortunately it’s surprisingly difficult to get decent quality photos while everyone’s moving and it’s dark! The best (least blurry ) of the bunch we took are below.

If you’ve got any more photos, or any comments or feedback we’d love to get them!