Sunlight

Okay, maybe more like an indie marketing plan than the plan, since every game and every company comes with its own approach to marketing. Nevertheless, at Ronimo we have gathered a ton of experience with marketing through Awesomenauts and Swords & Soldiers , and I have also done quite a bit of marketing for my hobby project Proun . Today, I would like to share this knowledge in the form of a rather complete plan that other indies hopefully find useful to help guide their marketing. Traditionally marketing is the field of the large companies and the large budgets, who buy advertisement space on television, magazines and websites. However, today a small indie studio with hardly any marketing budget can still get a lot of attention going. In fact, I think indie studios can potentially market downloadable games better than big companies! When we launched Swords & Soldiers, we were a pretty much unknown company with no marketing budget, and yet we managed to get enough attention...

If you don't feel like reading through this entire blogpost, be sure to scroll down to the video in the middle for a demonstration! Those who read my blog from the very beginning, might remember a blogpost that went by the illustrious title Designing Levels Without Tools . When we made Swords & Soldiers , I was the only programmer at Ronimo , so I had to resort to drastic measures to be able to develop a complete console game in one year. The result was that our designers had a rather odd level design tool: Notepad... So much has changed since then! Awesomenauts was made with a larger team over a longer period of time and in this time we managed to make top-notch tools. So today, I would like to introduce the editors of the Ronitech! We have three in-game editors, plus an in-game AI debugger, which can step through our AI trees. The in-game editors are a Level editor, a Particle editor and an Animation editor. Next to that, we also have an AI editor and a Settings editor. Th...

When at Ronimo we released the prototype for our cancelled project Snowball Earth last week, I mentioned that we pitched it to tons of publishers. So what is that like, pitching to publishers? In the past five years we did a lot of pitching for a lot of different projects. Despite that the pitches for Snowball Earth were not successful enough to land us a deal, we did get the hang of it enough to get some good deals going: we managed to sign Swords & Soldiers HD for PS3 with Sony, and we managed to sign Awesomenauts for XBLA and PS3 with DTP. We learned a lot from our contacts at publishers on how the process works, and today I would like to share that. Before I start this story, please note that pitching can have many forms. For small distribution-only deals, things can be a lot simpler than this, and each publisher will have his own way of handling things. This text is my impression of how it works when you want to sign a larger title and want not just distribution, but also ...