itch.io

Hi everyone - we've just released our latest game, Badminton Manager! You can download it for free here: https://swipestudios.itch.io/badminton-manager , or see a short gameplay demo here: 

Badminton is the fastest racquet sport in the world, but by playing Badminton Manager you can become a global champion from the comfort of your sofa! Start your journey by playing friendly matches against local opponents, earn money to train your player to improve their skills, and then enter tournaments around the world to win trophies. 

Great post, and thanks for taking the time to put together something that will no doubt help a lot of people!

Happy new year guys, we're looking forward to another year of playing College Football updates and wish you much success and happiness in 2020!

Have a great year, and we wish you the best of luck!

Start by seeing what you can do for free - a good thing to begin with is emailing or submitting your game to indie review sites, most of them have a 'Contact Us' section or a webform where you can give them details of your game. If they review or feature your game then that's a whole bunch of people that will see your work and may go and play it. Also sign up with sites that will give you additional visibility online - for example we use http://www.indiegamelaunchpad.io/ and they tweet a link for a different game out to their 12k Twitter followers every hour.

In terms of paying for advertising; we've always been told to use Facebook's targeting tools which are apparently really easy. You'd need to make sure the maths made sense for you though - there's some info here on how much you'd likely be spending to get a user to pay for you game: https://www.bluecorona.com/blog/how-much-facebook-advertising-costs

Good luck!

We run one for every game we make - they're very worthwhile! Once you've got the core loop or mechanic of your game established, or a fairly representative version of the UI, ask five to ten people who've never seen your game before to play it with you watching them. Don't try and guide them through anything - just watch and see how they get on. You'll find that patterns in their behaviours start to emerge, and that's when you can start to figure out what is working and what needs changing.

As an example; when we made Village Cricket we have a state where a player can lose a match and is then presented with 'Retry' or 'Return to Menu' buttons. Due to the way the buttons were positioned we noticed during the beta test that a lot of players were accidentally hitting 'Return to Menu' straight away, and then cursing themselves because they'd meant to have another attempt instead. We swapped the two button positions over, ran the test again with a couple of other people, and nobody had any problems anymore. 

Hi - have you taken a look at Unity's Gradle Troubleshooting page to see if your problem is listed there? https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/android-gradle-troubleshooting.html If there is nothing there that helps, you could try searching the Unity Forums (https://forum.unity.com/), they're great for finding posts where someone has the same error as you. Good luck!

You can export an APK build from Unity that allows the game to be installed to an Android device without the need for Google Play Store during development, this is what we use for quick tests. You would be able to share this with people by uploading it somewhere and providing a link, but people would have to be willing to set their device to 'Allow Unsigned Apps' in order for it to run. Unity's own instructions for building are here: https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/android-BuildProcess.html 

Hope this helps, and good luck with your game! 

In 2015 Soomla offered a comprehensive list of contacts for Games Industry press here: https://blog.soomla.com/2015/05/gaming-press-blog-contact-list.html . I seem to remember someone on Reddit keeps another copy of the list updated but I can't find a link sorry.

Now you've just got to do the hard work - email people, be polite, and provide info and eye catching materials for your game. A bunch of the contacts will inevitably have expired or be dead-ends since the list was made, but that's where we started out and soon you'll find you're building your own list of contacts that are useful to you. Best of luck!

PS - You may like to include a link to your game in this thread, so that you can be seen by anyone reading your post :)

There's nothing wrong with what you're planning to do - building a game using assets you're paying for is pretty common, and as has been said above that's exactly why the asset marketplace exists. We did it in one of our own projects by paying for a set of character portrait images because we couldn't achieve the art style we wanted with the skills we had available on our team, and thought nothing of it. We'd have needed to spend a lot more to commission and brief an artist, so buying stock assets made much more sense to our project budget.

You can also make use of free assets that people have made (with the correct usage rights), and if you give them a shoutout in your credits or social media then everyone's a winner! Good luck with your project!

Loved it! Very simple to play and *very* addictive! 

#loveindies

Very cool - looks great, sounds great, and very easy to play! 

#loveindies

Great game and we loved playing it! After a bit of practice we managed to get a score of 95-55, and the jaunty musical accompaniment was great ;)

#loveindies

Really fantastic work! As soon as we saw that you're Football Manager manager fans we knew we had to play this and weren't disappointed! 

Things we loved:
- It was really easy to jump straight in and start playing, having default tactics and a lineup already set was a big help.
- The GUI is really clean and easy to navigate, and very simplistically stylish.
- The depth of the game is great - with so many attributes for each player you feel like you can endlessly tweak your team to try and affect each game.

Feedback:
- You could add a 'Continue to Next Game' or 'Continue to Next Event' button rather than progressing a single day at a time.
- It'd be great to be able to view reports/breakdowns of previous games by clicking on them in the 'Calendar' screen.
- If basic season stats could be viewed from the 'Squad' screen or 'Depth Chart' screen it would help with roster changes and team selection.

Overall we loved the game, and look forward to playing future updates!

#loveindies

We've been thinking about what we could give back to the community to celebrate #loveindies and thought that maybe there are some folks out there who'd want to see their name in a video game - so that's what we're doing!

Sports games are our thing, so if you'd like to have your name added as a named non-playable-character in the itch.io versions of My Baseball League, Nations Cup Cricket 2019, or Village Cricket then let us know and we'll put you in via an update. It doesn't matter whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to the games; or just want to say hello, we'd be happy to hear from you. You can get in touch by replying here, via a review, our Twitter or email us privately via info@swipestudios.com if you'd prefer.

Our games use 'real' sounding player names (rather than handles or usernames) so if you're not comfortable with that then we can change a team name to be your home city/town instead, or you can just come up with a cool sounding alter ego name! PS - if your name looks like a swear word or we think it's offensive then we won't be putting it in, sorry!

Enjoy playing!
Ross + Pete (Swipe Studios)  

Thanks for sharing this, we had fun playing it! It was very easy to understand, and we loved the 8-bit look. We only have two small suggestions:

• Allow players to re-name their horses once they've purchased them. We bought two of the same type of horse, so both in our stable had the same name. Also we wanted to give our horses crazy names! :)
• Colour the stamina bar based on what impact it's having on the horse's performance (green is fine, orange/yellow is deteriorating, red is a hopeless runner) as it was a bit difficult to understand whether a poor performance was because of horse abilities, or tiredness.

Good luck with the rest of development, we look forward to playing future versions!

Hi Caleb - you could give Unreal Engine 3 or 4 a try; it's free to download and you only have to pay if you ship something for sale (5% of gross revenue). There are many tutorials available as well as community support too (https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/support). 

A lot of the C++ coders we know use Visual Studio, and we do too (but for C# instead). Good luck with your project! 

We're really excited to announce the launch of our third game on itch.io (and fifth overall) Nations Cup Cricket 2019! 

Nations Cup Cricket 2019 is the follow up to fan favourite Village Cricket, and allows you to bat and bowl your way across the cricketing world in pursuit of glory! Did you miss out on tickets to the World Cup? Then play this instead!

Take on 50 teams from as far and wide as the Philippines, Bermuda, Kenya, India, and greatest-team-in-the-world England. Laugh as you beat some blokes from Australia trying to cheat their way to the top!   

Features include:
- Simple one-touch batting and bowling
- 50 teams from across the world
- Randomised events that affect your players
- Multiple pitches and crowd sound effects

We've never used different APKs for different architectures for any of our games, but want to try and help. The Google Multiple APKs document states "Google Play then supplies each APK to the appropriate devices based on configuration support you've declared in the manifest file of each APK" so it looks like you need to have some differences in each App Manifest file between your different versions.

As for what those differences are, the best info we could find was how they work with Filters which are described here and in more detail here. Good luck and we hope you can get it to work.

1280×720 is a pretty safe bet; streamers who use either Twitch or YouTube will have no problems and if you go with Downloadable rather than Browser they'll be able to capture/stream via the active window easily.

Best of luck with Witches - we're a big fan of choose-your-own-adventure games (our first ever game, Swipe Manager: Soccer, was one) so hope it does well for you! 

Looks great and thanks for sharing - we started using Butler on our last project and wondered if a GUI rather than command line solution was available... now it is! :) We'll give it a try on our next update for sure!

We're delighted to announce that we've launched our second game on itch.io (and fourth overall) - My Baseball League! You can get it for free here: https://swipestudios.itch.io/my-baseball-league

Are you searching for all the excitement of nine innings worth of batting and pitching, without any of the effort? Then My Baseball League could be the game for you!

Using a simple button press to bat and pitch your way through 50 opponents; your team will have to overcome the challenges of players eating too much before a match, staying up too late the night before, and getting distracted by their mobile phones. Forget the glory of the World Series – this is baseball at its most simple!

Congratulations on releasing Cherry Creek, it looks great! Don't worry about getting it out there during GDC; we've always figured that we won't be competing with Google/Epic Games/etc for a front page feature on IGN about our games anyway,  so focus on smaller indie-centric outlets for coverage and pick up players that way (in addition to organic storebrowser players). Best of luck and we hope the game goes really well for you! 

1. We try and take a break of about a month after finishing a project before we get started on the next one.
2. We always find that we have loads of ideas for the next project while we're still working on the current one, so we often know what we'll be making next before we finish. Time away can then be used to think about and do other things!
3. A mixture of playing sports (to make up for all the late nights sat at a computer working) and playing games made by other people.  

If you're feeling great about going to from project to project or jam to jam then keep doing it, but as soon as you start to even think you might need a break take one straight away. There's nothing worse than sitting staring at a screen but not feeling motivated to make anything!

Great art style, it looks fantastic! Both options have their plus points, but I think you need to pick one or the other and commit to it.

If you want to go purely text based then you could return to your original idea and tone down the detail in the background scene so that players clearly understand they are only interacting with the text. Or, if you want to go for interactive menu then make sure players won't wander off and try and click on things that don't do anything - for example, can I walk over to the calendar and click that? If the staircase is 'Play' and the table is 'Options' then consider only having those two items in the scene so players aren't confused.

Best of luck with your game!

When we wrote the story for our first Choose Your Own Adventure game we used the classic three-act story arc structure to figure out the broad plot points we wanted, and then built up from there.  So we had our beginning (establish the player's purpose and humble origins, and then start to build them up towards something good), the middle (player comes close to initially achieving dreams/goals, but then suffers major adversity and is set back), and then the end (player overcomes adversity and builds themselves back up to achieve the goals they missed out on previously).

Within each act we then identified smaller plot points we wanted to explore, additional characters to introduce, and threw in a few crazy ideas for fun. We weren't getting into detailed story/script writing for a month or two until we'd figured out the over-arching structure and were happy with it.

Once you get to the detail step you might like to check out http://twinery.org/ if you don't already know about it; it's a really great tool for visualizing interactive stories with tons of different parts.

Best of luck with your project!

Hi everyone - we're Swipe Studios and we've just released a game on itch for the first time, it's called Village Cricket and you can download it here: https://swipestudios.itch.io/village-cricket

It's a really simple single-click game where you can enjoy one of England's favourite pastimes - standing around in a field for hours on end while some blokes play bat and ball. You'll have to cope with your players eating too much before a match, staying up too late the night before, and getting distracted by their mobile phones.

We hope you enjoy playing!