JUMP! First Gameplay Video

I'm very excited to share the first JUMP! gameplay video! This shows a couple levels of the game as well as the in-game Level Editor. Please let me know what you think in the comments.

Check out zendopixel.com and LIKE the ZendoPixel Facebook Page for the latest updates and game information. I will need beta testers soon. Liking and Sharing the ZendoPixel Facebook Page or following ZendoPixel on Twitter are great ways to get involved, helping me to spread the word, and getting early beta access to try it out for yourself.

Thanks so much for your help!

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ZendoPixel Blog

Marketing Guide for Indie Game Developers

I just recently stumbled upon The Marketing Guide for Game Developers and wanted to share it. There's a LOT of good information in there, spanning the gamut from working on the quality of your game to working with the press, blogging, social media, advertising and so much more. If you're new to marketing like myself, definitely check it out!

Introducing ZendoPixelTM

Today is an exciting day for me, because I have the great pleasure of introducing ZendoPixel! ZendoPixel is the new brand and trademark I've created for releasing apps and games on the Android platform. I've secured the website, Facebook, Twitter, and many others on namecheckr to make sure I can truly claim this trademark as my own.

For details about the ZendoPixel brand and my first Android game that I plan to release before June of this year, check out the ZendoPixel Official Website! It features information about my upcoming game, as well as a brand blog and forums where anyone can register to discuss ZendoPixel stuff. I'm still doing some tweaking, like trying to make the forum software look a little nicer, but would love to hear any feedback you might have.

You can also get involved with ZendoPixel on the following social channels:

Facebook: facebook.com/zendopixel
Twitter: twitter.com/zendopixel
Google+: plus.google.com/+ZendoPixelSoftware

Please share, like, reply, comment, tweet, and any other thing-a-ma-jig you can think of to help me spread the word! I'm just one guy trying to start something big for my family, and marketing is not my strength. However, I do believe in a big God who can do anything and blesses me every day. I am grateful for this new opportunity, and for every bit of support.

Building My Personal Brand

"Branded" by Derek Gavey, used under CC BY

One of the questions eating at me while preparing to release my Android game is "Do I need to establish a company (LLC) to sell on the Google Play market?" I know you can't trust everything you read on the internet, but this StackExchange post leans toward the negative. I haven't pulled the trigger on creating my Google Play Developer account yet, trying to get some details in order first, but that post indicates there is a "Developer" field where I can simply enter the name I want to use for my brand.

To do that, I thought really long and hard (and did quite a few Google searches) to find an obscure enough brand name that's easy to spell, easy to say, and sounds pretty darn cool. I'm almost too excited and about to blurt it out right now, but I've acquired the big three (website domain, Facebook, Twitter) and am in the process of fully configuring my accounts before a proper introduction. An excellent blog post from Mr. Bestebroer at OrangePixel got me thinking about the importance of building my brand. In addition to some useful marketing tips, he talks about including a little logo with each of your game icons to help players remember your games. It's a little mnemonic so that if they've played and enjoyed one of your games in the past, they are more inclined to try your newer games.

With that in mind, I've spent the past couple days creating my brand logo. I used a free vector-graphics program called Inkscape so I can resize the logo to any size without losing image quality. And I think I have a good plan for using the first character of my logo as the brand on my game icons.

Things are coming together, but I'm really not too good at the whole marketing aspect. I'm sure I have some friends who are way better at this, so if you have any tips or ideas about building your personal brand, or marketing in general, let me know in the comments below!

Code Isn't Everything

I recently saw this Gamasutra blog post by Pascal Bestebroer, titled "My game's done. Now comes the stress, struggles, and adrenaline of a one-man team doing his own PR". And I thought... HOW RELEVANT!

For the longest time I was laser-focused on writing the code for my game. And I would occasionally blog about it. But I didn't give much thought to marketing the game after it was completed. Kudos to Mr. Bestebroer for starting his PR as early as the first week of development! This guy clearly has had more time in the trenches than I.

Marketing is perhaps more important than the coding of a successful game, at least by conventional definition of success. For me, I think just getting my game out on the Google Play store will be a success. But it's good to realize, as I'm learning, that you're not done once the game code is completed. And if you can get a head start on your PR efforts, the earlier the better.

Finishing the Game

Image By: Tim Geers

I've been out of the game development world for about a year. Part of the reason I stopped working on my Android game (code-named PlaneRunner) over a year ago was burnout. It's not easy working a full-time job and staying up til the wee hours working on a side project many nights of the week. We also endured a grueling process selling our home (which took about a year) and moving to a new area, and I think part of me succumbed to the idea that it was time to let my hobby go. Maybe it's not really my passion, or just not worth all the sacrifice.

If only I had realized how close I was to the finish line...

Thankfully, I decided to take a look at that old PlaneRunner project this year. Much to my surprise, it was closer to done than I remembered! I had implemented the ability to save games, the level editor looked beautiful, and when I fired it up on my new Android Kitkat 4.4 phone... it actually worked. So it was time to figure out which features and bugs actually needed to get resolved for me to be happy enough to call it "done". All software developers know a program is never perfect, so it's just about getting it to work the best you can. If you waited until it was perfect, it would NEVER get released.

So the exciting news is that I'm now in the final stages of development. I'm not putting in any new features or bug fixes (unless I find something extremely annoying). This week I'm focusing on performance tuning, doing whatever I can to reduce memory allocation and garbage collection so the game runs smoothly. And this time I'm going to get it out there on Google Play so everyone can play it!

Picking It Up Again

I used to wonder what happened to game developer blogs. I'd follow someone who updated frequently and then, as if out of nowhere, they'd disappear. Being a little older (and hopefully wiser too), I think I now understand.

For some, a game project consumes so much time that blogging takes a back seat. For others, life just gets in the way. Having kids, moving to a new location, new job, or other life changes just take precedence.  I've had quite a few changes myself, hence a year of no updates, neither on my Android game nor on this blog.

But I am excited to share that I've picked up where I left off with the game and was pleasantly surprised to see I'm not far from completion. In fact, I've resolved most bugs, created both a Lite (free) and Deluxe (paid) version, and am working through the process to get my game on the Google Play market. These are exciting days!