The Path to Become Agile: Part IV

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The Path to Become Agile: Part III: http://gamasutra.com/blogs/SamyDib/20151124/260139/The_Path_to_Become_Agile_Part_III.php

Giving Thanks

            This was another tough week for work as it rolled through the Thanksgiving holidays. As you may know, this holiday usually revolves around spending a lot of time with family and eating more food than one stomach can physically handle. So during the week we had to really crunch in and see what could be accomplished with a smaller sized sprint. This involved us moving most of our larger working hours to the weekend.

            We were able to create a new set of dungeon levels and fill in some new bounties to populate the bounty list. We are trying to make enough to ensure that the randomization system we put in place keeps it fresh and interesting. It was fun coming up with different bounty tasks and dialogue to go along with the levels. This was our main focus for the shortened week so I’d say this sprint was more successful than the last. It’s important to plan out the workload with each sprint so you’re not planning too much in your allotted time. This is what I learned from my crazy sprint last week that wasn’t so successful.

Beta Prep

            As we know in the indie side of game development, marketing is a huge endeavor and plays a huge role in the success of your project. For this reason, I wanted to begin early on retrieving emails of those who are interested in beta testing out our game. Right now we are in the alpha stages of development with internal game testing taking place. We are moving along at a steady pace though and can see ourselves moving into the beta phase very shortly. When this occurs, we would like to be ready with an already established list of players eager to test out what we have.

            As we don’t have a direct landing page for our site at the moment, I realized that I needed to find another approach to create a sign up spot. I began searching the internet for any good sign up providers that may offer free services. After a while, I came across MailChimp. This service provided exactly what I needed when it comes to sign up forms but it doesn’t just stop there. They offer a powerful tool to customize your sign up forms and house all the emails you receive on their site. These emails will be used to enter in potential beta testers within Google Play. Not only that, but MailChimp allows for custom made newsletters to be created and sent out as well. This is a very powerful tool to not only keep people updated on your game but also market future projects as well to an already established following.

            MailChimp currently gives its services out for free up to 2,000 subscribers and then you’d have to pay monthly for a more premium service. This is great as since just starting out, my current subscribers are at a bare minimum. Once I reach over 2,000 then I think I’d be ready to upgrade or move over to something else as we see fit. We are currently releasing the address to our beta signup across all of our social media platforms and you can see it listed above. Well that’s it for now, until next time community.

References

Keith, C. (2010). Agile game development with Scrum. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-

Wesley.