Welcome to my second post. And thank you very much for the lot of feedback. I was also positively surprised when I saw that I got a “Featured Post” and comments. Sadly I had no time to write this entry earlier, sorry.

Here some words about our shortly released title Solar Struggle. It is a 3D arcade space shooter where the player can only fly in 2D plane. It has 11 missions with storytelling and a skirmish mode. It released first on XBLIG and we’re planning a PC release in the next months.

We and our partner redspotgames wanted to release the game on XBLIG because it is an interesting platform. The opportunity of this platform is big and we’re evaluating if it is possible to get our games to the players this way. I recently read that Gameloft also wants to publish a game on XBLIG. I am curious if they have success on XBLIG.

We found a partner who has experience with marketing of video games and who supports us. In the last three years we learned that it is better to work with others, have success and share with them as to have no success because we can’t cope with the amount of work in-house and deliver a halfway finished product.

Building the website:

We didn’t have a lot of money to build up a huge new website for this game, so we were looking for existing solutions like an CMS system. We decide to use Wordpress because it is easy to maintain and to skin. We’ve taken the Idea from Gas Powered Games’ upcoming title “Chris Taylor’s Kings and Castles” (http://gaspowered.com/kingsandcastles) who use the same approach to inform their community about the early progress of their project. I know Wordpress isn’t a full-blown CMS. It is a blog-software, but it has a lot of advantages.

1)      Everybody knows blogs and how they work, so the user will be familiar with it.

2)      The content-manager can easily add new news, texts and pictures and so on. And we do not need to develop a completely new website. We only need a design and put it into a template for Wordpress. With the right plugins (qTranslate) Wordpress is even supporting multi-language content.

3)      Basic interaction is possible by commenting the articles. We’ve thought about setting up a discussion board but we’ve learned that it is not easy to get people to involve and a empty discussion board looks not that good.

The first official information about our game we released was a teaser website. We also integrated links to the Facebook fan-page of Solar Struggle (http://www.facebook.com/pages/SolarStruggle/141640955866114) and our twitter account (http://twitter.com/zsoftware). Together with redspotgames we managed to get a lot of attention in the press with our two released videos.

In the following time we tried to post information about the game and the development team to the Solar Struggle blog and Facebook page every few days to keep people interested.

Press releases and content:

Redspotgames and Mittelpunkt Media (the press agency which supports us) published several press releases. Redspotgames started by announcing an unnamed title and writing about voice-actors, space theme etc. Afterwards we announced the name of the game and a teaser video.

Some days later we announced the platform and the trailer video. It was a lot of work to prepare video content and to answer questions from press, but it was worth it.

We had more page impressions on facebook page and on blog website of the game. Also searching for Solar Struggle became very easy. From this moment on google find a lot of news, previews, pictures and reviews for Solar Struggle. We couldn’t reach so much attention without press releases.

Release:

We had to release on the first day (press day) of the GamesCom 2010 and, honestly, it was the worst thing we could do. There were only a few portals who wrote about the actual release. We feel that the low press coverage during the GamesCom made us miss the US and GB XBLIG charts.

There were also not many gaming portals who wrote a review in the next days. At the moment more of gaming portals and magazines have a Solar Struggle review in their pipelines, but not all articles are published yet. I can good understand the editors because they have a lot of new material from the gamescom to write about the big games first.

The next problem was the trial. First, Microsoft allows only 8 minutes trial time for XBLIG. During this time we need to explain the controls and how to play the game in general. Second, the first two missions in the game aren’t the best two missions because the player has weak ships and the story is not evolved yet. And also here it was our fault not to think about this a year ago.

As we figured out that the introduction into the game was too hard for many people, it was too late to make it more suitable to beginners. We’ve tried our best to reduce texts and confusion during the tutorial but we saw at the GamesCom that most people just don’t get the controls at first and thus getting frustrated very soon.

SolarStruggle is a cool game! Once you get the controls. Sadly, the game trial doesn’t give most people the chance to figure it out.

In my next post I will write about "Fruitbash", our upcoming XBLIG title, and what we are doing differently this time. If you want to know more about specific subjects in this post don't hestitate and leave a comment, I will try to answer them!