Inside Interplanetary: Releasing a Public Alpha

Netcode! What have you done to my planet!?

Good evening, friends! Game Design Sasu, here! We're gearing up for a new alpha update, at the moment. It's looking quite nice, but there are still many interesting bugs to weed out. In addition to that, there seem to be multiple kinds of flu hanging around the TJR ecosystem. We're falling one by one!

In the meantime, I thought I could write something helpful for fellow indie devs. I already talked about this before on our IndieDB forums, but it was deemed useful enough to dedicate a blog post to it.

Today I'm going to talk about our experiences with giving out test versions of Interplanetary.

Preparation

There really is no substitute for a proper user testing. Everyone will eventually grow blind to the problems with their game, so fresh people are needed to give some perspective. We had had a couple of small testing sessions with our friends and relatives, but we needed more and variable data. Reaching out to gamers of the Internet was the answer.

Before sending out your alpha to the masses, consider why you want to do that. Do you need testers, publicity or just people to play your game with you? Our main priority was to get useful feedback, so we took that into account when building the testable version.

We had to make sure to give the testers the features we wanted them to test. The targeting system especially was something we wanted to get a lot of feedback on. This also meant that some of the more irrelevant features would need to be polished not to drag too much attention to them, or simply left out altogether. We didn't want people to just comment: "the planet graphics suck" and leave. When giving feedback, it's easy to grab into the most obvious thing and ignore the others.

Seriously, try to iron out the distractions.

To gather the feedback, we created a survey with SurveyMonkey and put a link to it in-game. Looking back on it, we should've also given the link to each tester when contacting them for the first time - surprisingly many missed the in-game survey link and later asked how to provide feedback.

When creating a survey, it's important to think of the right questions to ask; most people won't bother writing out their life stories. You need to make the survey very easy and to the point. Try to add some very specific questions to steer the testers to concentrate on things you need comments on. The current version of our survey works well enough. People have a chance to comment on many different things, but they aren't forced to fill out every space to submit.

This system worked well until we reached over 100 answers. The free version won't show more than that, so we needed to pay a fee to access the rest.

Distribution

How to actually go about distributing the alpha version to the testers depends on many things. Interplanetary's first alpha version was a very incomplete game, filled with all kinds of issues. To say that we were hesitant putting it out there would be putting it mildly. Ease of access is the key of getting people to test a game which doesn't have an established reputation, but we still decided against simply sharing download links or using the Unity Web Player (doesn't really work out in Interplanetary's case anyway.)

This is when the idea of alpha keys came along. We would announce the alpha testing and ask hopeful testers to contact us to receive a code they can use at our website for a download link. This way there was less room for misconceptions, as we could explain to each individual tester the situation with the game. No one would just stumble across it, thinking it was the final product. We could also draw out the more serious testers; even if the process of obtaining the code is rather painless it's still a step that gets us into contact with the people most interested in the game.

For convenience, we mostly used our Twitter and Facebook to share the codes. We could then use these networks to easily communicate with the testers afterwards.

We also made code cards for live events. Spent some fun nights sticking codes on them.

The whole "system" worked manually: a person would contact us, ask for a code and we would give it to them along with instructions. An automatic system of some kind might have saved a lot of time, but I personally prefer direct contact, so it's easier to answer to questions and such. There was a period when I really wished we had a robot for this, though: the day we were noticed by RockPaperShotgun was absolutely insane! I had to spend days answering all the code requests we were getting.

Once Interplanetary landed to Steam Greenlight, we changed the system a little bit. Partially for the convenience for the users and partially for my sanity, we decided to build a special Greenlight Alpha with a direct link to it on the page. This version was less experimental than the earlier ones and the aim was to make it also work as a sort of a very early demo; a tight package with the main features polished well enough. Being in Greenlight, people would also more easily understand that it's an incomplete version. A playable version, along with screenshots, videos and description, worked well to give people a full idea on what the game was to be and also show that Interplanetary is not a mere concept. Never underestimate the power of screenshots and videos, though: no one would have bothered to download the alpha, even if it's completely free, if we hadn't given them a peek to get them interested first.

A certain website even took the Greenlight Alpha without asking and ported it for Wondows.

As of today, the PC version has been downloaded from the Greenlight page 3,513 times and the Mac version 225 times. We received 34,251 "Yes"-votes during the campaign, so not nearly everyone found their way to the download link, which is probably partially because we couldn't place the link in the main description by the way Greenlight works. We had to make a separate news announcement on the page, but they are not particularly eye catching. We should've pointed this out in the main description.

For the Greenlight Alpha, we opted to use Mediafire to host the game files. Considering the popularity of Interplanetary's Greenlight campaign, this was a good decision: having to pay about 20 cents a download on our server, would've cost us a lot. The only drawback here was that the URL pointed to Mediafire, which isn't quite as "cool" as hosting the files on your very own space. We paid for the service, however, so the link was direct and there was minimum hassle for the players.

External file hosting sometimes makes you evil.

We were and are still giving out alpha codes to people, since the Greenlight Alpha was the only version distributed by a direct link. The latter updates would require a code. This seemed to work quite well and caused relatively little confusion.

Conclusion

I can really recommend using an alpha code system for everyone. We've received tons of good comments and followers because of it. Semi-regularly updating the alpha version also gives you nice mile stones for development. It can sometimes be quite a chore to handle the code requests, but typically the flow is steady enough to manage. We still get a couple of  inquiries every day, but whenever there's media coverage or something else, the amount skyrockets.

Starting to run out of codes real soon, actually, so give us a holler and we'll get you yours! There's at least one more alpha update on the horizon, so expect that!

Being a tease(r)

Hello, Jukka here. This time I’ll explain a bit about process of creating a teaser and why we even wanted to have a teaser.

We are currently working our way towards alpha. With each step in development, we are also trying to reach more audience. As a young and still pretty much unknown dev team, we need to employ as many means as possible to make Interplanetary and ourselves known out there, unless we want to count everything on people finding us through Steam Greenlight. This is not that reliable strategy because of the sheer amount of other games that go there. Trailers are of course very, very widely used in games and movies, so a we knew we’d be making at least one at some point.

The  Nordic Games Conference was looming in the horizon when we decided on making a teaser, which we could show around. Though some of us aren’t exactly fans of teasers, since the information they give usually isn’t much and doesn't even necessarily include actual gameplay... But, as the name suggest, it’s supposed to tease the viewer to see if we manage to pique their interest or at least when they bump into it in the future, they’d recognize us or the game. Also it’s short, so it’s quite easy to show it around to people in person.

The Idea

So by the time we first wanted to have the teaser we had something of a playable prototype, but its purpose was to test some of the game mechanics and most of all, familiarize the crew with Unity. So it wasn't really something we wanted to feature on a video. Instead we decided to focus on artwork and try to tell something about the setting and the mood of the game.


Romeo & Juliet

So we sat down to think up ideas... And then pretty much jumped the first train which felt interesting: The prologue of Romeo & Juliet:

"Two planets, both alike in potency, In distant cosmos, where we lay our scene, From ancient greed break to a mutiny, Where great arms, shake the grounds apart."

So obviously, we made some modifications to it (here’s the original) and it was only the first few lines we wanted anyways. It kinda fitted and we hoped to get that “I see what you did there”-effect when someone would recognize the source material… We even got someone to record the lines in genuine British accent.

The pacing made it feel much longer than 30 seconds.

NGC

So comes the deadline along with Nordic Games Conference and the teaser is finished. We had planned to have the teaser running at the Kavio Cluster’s booth we shared with our fellow dev teams, but in the end, we didn't have a big display or sound, so Niklas showed it around on a tablet. After he got back we had “post-mortem” about the event and the feedback we got and concluded the teaser didn’t really do what we wanted… Turned out nobody really made the connection to Shakespeare and so it just felt like a poetic narration and the whole shooting-at-planets-thing didn't quite fit, even in any particularly funny way.

Revision

So when the first version of the teaser didn't work, we sat down again to come up with a new plan. We wanted to use the existing material as much as we could and still we wanted to tell something about the setting, so we came up with the idea of following a railgun shot as it flies through space, towards its target.

Execution

My main tools for the job were Photoshop, Blender, After Effects and Premiere. After Effects I hadn't used before and there’s still much to Blender and 3D-modeling for me to learn. For both versions I made a storyboard of some kind. For the first version, I animated some sketches and transitions in Photoshop. Although it gave a good idea on how things would look in the final product, I should have used more time on the sketches themselves. I ended up using more time on animating their movement than on the actual images. So for the second version I stuck with more traditional storyboard and instead put more thought on what I needed from the material that I would need to create still.

Storyboard for the second version 

It is still very rough so if it’s not you who’s doing the editing/material I suggest you put a bit more effort into making it clearer for outside viewers.

Images

I’m not yet a very fast artist, so I often find having to remind myself not to get stuck in one image for too long. I've been also watching the videos from FZD-school channel on Youtube, and one point that Feng Zhu often makes in his videos, is to keep in mind what is the selling point - the most important part of the image - and make sure that that part is well defined and presented.  So, since I didn't have the time I needed to go through the images and make everything detailed, I tried focused my efforts on just certain parts. This also made sense because a single image wouldn't be shown so long that the viewer could explore every part of it.

All the images used in the teasers. Only half ended up in the final version.

While working on the second version Tarita, our artist, suggested we add a bit more life to the images by adding some animation in them. I hadn't planned for this to start with, so it meant a little extra work, but we figured it was worth it. I went through each image sliced them to layers, adding some extra where I needed. Most of the animations I did in Photoshop, except the final image with the city and explosion. It had so many bits and pieces that After Effects was easier to work with than Photoshop CS4's pretty clunky animation system.

Will it Blend?

3D is not exactly my main proficiency, but thankfully, planets are not the hardest thing ever to model, although, if anyone knows a good way of avoiding texture distortion at the poles of a sphere in Blender, I’m all ears! There isn't much I can say about making the 3D material, except that rendering the it as separate images, and using After Effects to turn them into actual video, was a life saver. It was mostly due to me forgetting to adjust some setting or noticing something in the middle of an animation that I didn't like, but having to render the whole animation again would cost me so much time since my work computer cannot handle Blender rendering and working in Photoshop at the same time.

An added bonus was that I could render just the planet on a transparent background and add the background in premiere and adjust it however I wanted.


Music

Although we can find a way to do pretty much anything we want on our own, sometimes it’s just better and faster to rely on other professionals. And concerning the music, we were fortunate to come across Vince Parrish, who agreed on making the music for the teaser and even the game itself.


And that's it, the story of creating a teaser. After we reach the alpha, we are also planning on finally getting some gameplay footage out there. So, look forward to it!

Free Your Play 13, thanks Supercell!

At this point we realized the event was a bit bigger than we had expected.

Hello again! Finnish Midsummer festivities made us drop out of our regular blogging schedule, but we're back now with a little description of the excellent Free Your Play-event.

We had a chance to travel with unusually large portion of our team this time. Supercell was generous enough to provide four of us with tickets, and that's everyone who applied. We considered the possibility of traveling by train, but eventually decided a road trip would be the way to go, and that turned out beautifully.

The crowd gathers and the event is about to start.

The event started in the early afternoon, so we had plenty of time to check out, eat breakfast and even do a little bit of shopping before heading to the event site at tapahtumakeskus Telakka. There was even a free buss transportation from Kiasma, which made things a little bit easier for us non-locals.

Ben Cousins, about to present his theory on the future of gaming.

The official program of Free Your Play consisted of a couple of keynotes, interviews and a panel discussion. A recording of the program is available as a webcast here, but feel free to take a look at my nutshell'd version.

Sadly Peter Molyneux couldn't make it to the event, but Ben Cousins covered his former boss very well with his own presentation.  In short, Ben introduced us the idea that game industry seems to be following the cyclic pattern of disruptive innovation, and it helps us to predict the future direction of development. 

After Ben Cousins we had a chance to listen to an interview of Daisuke Yamamoto from GungHo, the creators of tremendously successful Puzzle & Dragons. Turns out GungHo does many things in a more traditional way and even by the feel instead of collecting metrics and trusting them blindly. 

The next part was a panel talk with some hot names working with F2P model, like Lassi Leppinen (Producer of Clash of Clans), Tom Putzki (Director of Communications, Wargaming.net), Tommy Palm (King.com) and Daisuke Yamamoto as previously mentioned. There was way too much good stuff to cover in this blog post, but the general feeling seemed to be full of anticipation and there's still a lot more room for growth for F2P as a monetization model. Is it going to be the only one in the future? Probably not.

Official program is over, time to mingle!

As usual, the most important part of the event started when the official program ended. The guys at Supercell seem to know this very well, and they provided a very good environment for socializing. The food was good, the bands were great and yes, there were free drinks. Again we had the opportunity to meet a great number of interesting people and make new connections. 

It appears that the event website is not accessible anymore, but in addition to the webcast linked above, there is more info and pictures available at the Free Your Play event page at Facebook. Once again thanks to Supercell for hosting this awesome event. Let's hope we can be there next year as well!

The second most popular gaming conference in the north

Networking ®, the Trading Card Game

Hello! Now that our bearded scout squadron (with glasses) is back from Sweden and recharged, it's time to write a couple of lines about our trip to Nordic Game Conference, Unite Nordic and some related events.

For us the trip went very well. People seemed to like the idea behind Interplanetary a lot, and Hedgehop, one of the games we still very much hope to finish at some point, was very well received by the few people I had a chance to show it.

We thought about writing a longer post mortem and a more detailed description of the events, but there are plenty of those around at this point, and you can always watch some of the presentations online. So, instead, here are some things you should keep in mind when it's your time to travel to NGC. (Majority of these points apply for most games industry events.)


Nordic Game Conference tips for the newcomers:

Plan ahead.
Make it clear to yourself what you require from the trip and plan your actions accordingly. Is there someone you want to talk with? A company you want to connect to? Are you looking for a training place? Do you want to find a publisher for your game, or are you there for advice?

If you travel with a group, discuss your goals beforehand. This way you can keep on the lookout for your friends as well: If someone spots a person you want to talk with, they can give you a call.

Cutting out your 150 fliers manually is very indie.

Prepare some material for your game or team.
Think of the message you wish to deliver to your target audience, and what that target audience will be. Prepare the materials early. You may also want to prepare an elevator pitch for your company, team and/or your game.

Make reservations as early as possible.
This allows you to find cheaper flights and accommodations. Comfort Hotel Malmö is a good choice, it's located right next to the Slagthuset where the conference is held.

Pack light.
You'll end up needing only 1/3 of what you have in most cases. Linens and a towel are usually not needed, even if you stay in the cheapest possible hostel.

Wear good shoes.
Your trip is likely to involve lots of walking and standing, and it'll be a lot harder to focus on important things when you have blistered feet.

Be aware that the price level in Sweden is very high.
This is true even from a Finnish perspective. You can expect a McDonalds meal to be around 10€, a beer in a bar around 8€ and drinks around 12€. There's a good China Box at Gustav Adolfs torg which is not exactly cheap, but it's a good alternative to the other fast food places.

Data roaming is around 0,8€ / MB and wifi access in the conference area is pretty unreliable, so you might want to consider Swedish prepaid for the event.

Conferences offer lots of quality content for social media.
You can post interesting things often, and if you tag the people or companies you meet, there's a chance you will get retweets/shares etc.

Travelling in good company is optional but recommended.

You don't need to attend every talk.
Though the talks may appear to be the main thing, most of the information you will get is something you can find by googling. The real value lies in stuff that you can learn when discussing face to face with the professionals. Attending their talk may be a good way to earn a chance to speak with the person later, though.

Have some business cards with you.
It's so much easier for the people to remember you afterwards if you give them one. Offering yours is also a less awkward way to get one.

It may be a good idea to wear clothing with your team/studio/game logo.
This makes you more recognizable and memorable. It also makes it easier for people that know your game to recognize you and start a conversation.

Make use of your previous contacts.
Game industry people are usually friendly and eager to help- it's usually ok to ask them to introduce you to someone they already know.

Go to the afterparties every day, even if you don't drink.
There is a good chance you will get your most important contacts there. And if you do drink...

Don't drink too much.
Most of the evening parties offer free drinks, but you'll get more out of them if you stay reasonable.

Most importantly, talk to people.
This is the core of everything. Only by socializing you'll end up getting new contacts and strengthening the existing bonds.


So there you have a couple of points to keep in mind, some of which we have learned the hard way. Hopefully now you can avoid them and have even more fun and productive conference experience!

All in all, the trip to Malmö, Sweden, was very, very worthwhile. Thanks to Neogames, Wooga and Kavio Cluster for making it possible!

What news from the south?

This week was an interesting one! We traveled to Helsinki with some fellow Kavio game developers in the beginning of the week and got a change to present the very early prototype of Interplanetary to some game industry professionals. Thanks again Frozenbyte for having us!

Needless to say, we got some very good feedback. While there are still some problems with the proto, we we're happy to notice we are moving to the right direction and the main parts of the game work as intended. It's also very encouraging to notice that nearly all of the issues that came up were something we had already acknowledged.

The Interplanetary proto is now officially finished. Though we didn't have enough time to try out all the features we wanted, we now have a good idea of the final game design and we are ready to start working on the final version.

This week's blog post was delayed a bit by busy busy business and a thunderstorm, sorry about that.

Kajaani Pelaa!

Coming to the most awesome bookstores soon!

This week's blog post has a little less to do with Interplanetary, but it's great news nonetheless! 

”Art Unknown: Raw Diamonds from the Frozen Wastelands” is finally released. Created by Marita Paldanius, Marko Keronen and Aki Savolainen with support from Kavio Cluster, the book contains game art of the young and talented game developers of Kainuu region. (That includes us, yay!)

From our part in “Art Unknown” you can find art from some of our earlier projects, such as Spiritual and Ouroboring Life, as well as some the earlier concept art from the upcoming Interplanetary. (There’s plenty of more to come as well.) Though Interplanetary has developed dramatically both as a concept and in practice since the material for the book was gathered, Jukka Kivijärvi's illustrations have stood the test of time very well. There are even a couple of never before released concept images from our adorable mobile game concept Hedge Hop,  by Tarita Tammela. 

The release and the press conference with the books authors took place last Wednesday, April 24th, at the Kajaani Pelaa!- event in Kajaani. The event also included presentations of some of the games created by the Kainuu developers, BeaverKarts tournament (which was a lot of fun, thanks Rust0) and the screening of short movie The North, which is to be shown at the upcoming Cannes Festival. 

By the way, there will be some fresh graphics from Interplanetary tomorrow at the Screenshot Saturday. Don't miss it.