{"id":2001,"date":"2013-10-18T14:19:19","date_gmt":"2013-10-18T21:19:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/?p=2001"},"modified":"2013-10-18T14:19:19","modified_gmt":"2013-10-18T21:19:19","slug":"outreach","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/?p=2001","title":{"rendered":"Outreach"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Marketing is something that&#8217;s a little trickier to discuss: we haven&#8217;t gone through the whole cycle yet at this point. Super Hematoma is not done and so we don&#8217;t have much measure of success or failure. But I&#8217;m pleased with the attention that our <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/?page_id=1923\">retrospective<\/a> received.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>What with the summer heat kicking in here in my shoebox apartment and Matt still chewing away on the code it&#8217;s meant that it&#8217;s honestly been hard for me to stay motivated&#8230; with the stuff that&#8217;s he&#8217;s working on just out of my reach it&#8217;s meant that I&#8217;ve been hesitant to work on more art in case the direction needs to change. It&#8217;s also been a little difficult to concentrate due to the temperature in my apartment. Did I mention it&#8217;s been warm in my apartment?<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>It seems that it&#8217;s pretty normal for there to be slumps in production. I haven&#8217;t really discussed it with other developers, but there are <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/blogs\/VincentDumont\/20121112\/181347\/\">enough articles<\/a> about <a href=\"http:\/\/positech.co.uk\/cliffsblog\/2010\/07\/02\/how-to-stay-motivated-whilst-programming-a-game\/\">staying motivated<\/a> as an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.doolwind.com\/blog\/working-from-home-as-an-indie\/\">indie dev<\/a> that I&#8217;m not surprised to be finding myself in a small one at the moment. What&#8217;s interesting is that a lot of that advice is stuff that we had applied right out of the gate when we started. But with distractions popping up in our lives over the past month I&#8217;d say things have been derailed a little. Time to get it back on track though. In fact, my fingers are currently quite sore after jamming on the guitar trying to get out a new tune for our next level.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>What has been encouraging, is the support that we&#8217;ve received after posting our retrospective.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-2005\" alt=\"Traffic\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Traffic.png\" width=\"600\" height=\"233\" srcset=\"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Traffic.png 600w, http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Traffic-300x116.png 300w, http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/10\/Traffic-500x194.png 500w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 600px) 100vw, 600px\" \/>Colored graphs are traffic on Sprixelsoft.com, while the red line is traffic on our IndieDB page.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Actually, truth be told, we had some pretty amazing traffic on IndieDB the day I did the write-up on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/?p=1892\">vfx<\/a>. Traffic spiked up to just shy of 1000 hits that day&#8230; which is something I&#8217;m not sure how to explain since the last time I did a post about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/?p=1289\">vfx<\/a> over there it was one of our lowest trafficked news posts. As you can see, while the retrospective wasn&#8217;t <em>especially<\/em> magnetic on IndieDB, it is the\u00a0first time we&#8217;ve received any traffic that is noteworthy on our <em>own<\/em> website.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">A lot of those hits came from my post over on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.reddit.com\/r\/gamedev\/comments\/1nutoi\/\">reddit<\/a>, but what I found just as exciting is that we got lots of hits from over at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.gamasutra.com\/blogs\/StephenTucker\/20131004\/201727\/Super_Hematoma_An_Indie_Games_First_Year_of_Development.php\">Gamasutra<\/a>. There are a few things that make me happy about this traffic.<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>It&#8217;s traffic from new sources. This means new people that likely haven&#8217;t heard anything about us before have now had their first taste of us.<\/li>\n<li>We received comments from some of these people. While I&#8217;m surprised to see (and curious why) there were down votes on reddit, the response was generally positive. We got comments such as &#8220;<em>I wish more indie developers would give us this kind of insight!<\/em>&#8221; and &#8220;<em>You guys are awesome and I hope great things happen for you.<\/em>&#8220;. We even had someone who does Lets Play videos asking to be kept in the loop so that they can demo it when we&#8217;re ready. How cool is that?<\/li>\n<li>The link to our page was buried in the Gamasutra article. To me, that says that for people to have visited us from Gamasutra, it means that people were actually <em>reading<\/em> the article. Likewise, I could see that there were lots of people clicking links to the various articles and websites that we&#8217;d linked to in that article. Again, this tells me that people actually were reading. This makes it feel like it was worthwhile.<\/li>\n<li>It&#8217;s a little weird to see our stuff appearing elsewhere on the internet. Like\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.daphat.com\/effects-of-super-hematoma\/\">here<\/a>, or especially\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.celebrityballa.com\/2013\/10\/left-4-dead\/year-first-retrospective-hematoma-s-super\">here<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li>We&#8217;ve even started receiving spam for game development services.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>Can&#8217;t wait to get some more stuff done to show you guys. My fingers are pretty sore right now from trying to jam out a new tune for our next level on my old seven-string.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Marketing is something that&#8217;s a little trickier to discuss: we haven&#8217;t gone through the whole cycle yet at this point. Super Hematoma is not done and so we don&#8217;t have much measure of success or failure. But I&#8217;m pleased with the attention that our retrospective received.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2011,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13],"class_list":["post-2001","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-progress-report"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2001"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2012,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2001\/revisions\/2012"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sprixelsoft.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}