Snaky Jake Progress

[charliedog]

Snaky Jake has been our for a few months now and I thought this would be a good time to review progress. First the positives...

The game is getting a very positive reception in the press. Game Tunnel reviewed it in their most recent issue and gave it a positive 73%. I took on board some early comments and made a few changes before submitting to Retro Gamer. They have reviewed the game in the new issue and given it a spectacular 95%. Which is very good :) I've got some more reviews lined up over the coming weeks. (incidentally if anyone reading this runs a site and would like to review the game please get in touch)

The game appears to be very stable. I've had very few reports of crashes or other problems. This is good news because I'm hoping to use the same development environment (Popcap framework with the game code written in Python) for a number of games.

The people who have bought it like it :) Which is a good thing I think!

Traffic through my site is up. It's about 300% of what it was this time last month and continues to climb. Downloads are also going up

I'm getting some really useful data from this experience which I hope to use to make my next project better.

My site comes up on top in google when I search for the game by name(or it did this morning).

Now the bad...

Downloads from my site are down on what I expected. I am not sure why this is and wonder if any one can advise me?

Only about 10% of the people who visit my site complete a download of the demo and about 5% of those convert to a sale. Does this seem like a reasonable percentage? The conversion rate seems low but reasonable to me but I'm surprised how few people bother to download the demo after going to the trouble of visiting my site. I guess some of them could be people who have bought the game elsewhere and are looking for more information but it seems unlikely that the bulk of visitors fall into that category.

Maybe I just need to get more people to visit my site but I'd like to make sure that there isn't something obvious I should be doing in my site which might make it more likely that people will download the game.

Any advise will be gratefully received. At the end of the day maybe people just don't like the game enough to buy it. I can understand that as it is quite unusual and not the standard PC fare, but I want to do everything I can to make sure it gets a fair chance.

regards,

Tony Oakden
http://charliedoggames.com

[MiceHead]

If you have some video you'd like us to share on an upcoming ep of Indie Superstar (www.indiesuperstar.com (http://www.indiesuperstar.com)), feel free to send over a link (indie[at]dejobaan.com).

This is good news because I'm hoping to use the same development environment (Popcap framework with the game code written in Python) for a number of games.

That's interesting to me as a developer -- does the Popcap framework have Python bindings, or is that something you added? And if the game were about gems instead of snakes, would you have written it in Ruby?

(Scratch that last one.)

[charliedog]

Funny!

Actually it's the other way round, Python came first then Jake. If I'd started in Ruby I doubt I would have finished the game :)

Anyway in answer to your question, No. The Popcap framework doesn't come with Python bindings. A friend of mine, Jarrad Woods, added the support. I think Python and Popcap work very well as a development environment. It frees me from the constraints of hardware and memory management and allows me to focus on game play. My creative juices are able to flow virtually uninterrupted :)

I'll definitely be in touch about the video. There is one up on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=snaky+jake&search=Search

Can you grab it from there or do you need a file?

regards,

Tony Oakden

http://charliedoggames.com

[woo]

Do you have enough stat tracking to tell you, for example, how many people only ever hit your main page? I'm guessing not having a Download Now! button on the front page of your website is a bit confusing to some people. Edit: In fact, I'd drop the charlie dog rotating image thing and replace it with a download now/more info or something. If you want to make it animated to attract attention, that's okay too, just don't make it too annoying :)

I also don't like your download free demo and buy now buttons. They are just a bit off putting. Really making a big deal of the 14.99 price might help as well (not just making the font bold). You could try saying something like "20% off Introductory Rate" or something as well to explain the price and motivate the users. I haven't downloaded but what kind of in-game nagging are you doing? There have been several discussions on these forums about how to improve conversion rates by improving the "advertisement" of the full version in-game.

It may not be a big deal, but it may bump up those percentages a bit. Note: 5% conversion ain't bad.

Out of curiosity - are you doing any other forms of advertisement besides getting reviews?
-Andrew Douglas
http://theoreticalgames.com

[woo]

And while I'm ripping apart your site :) ...
the whole first section of what is essentially "About Charlie Dog Games" should just be under About Us link (and the spelling corrected) if this is going to be the site where you do most of your selling - the first page should sell it.

The link (and the typo's) for click here for more info under the Snaky Jake section isn't really going to get many clicks either. It has to draw attention and be immediately recognizable as something they can click on to download, to purchase or get more info. People shouldn't have to move their mouse all over the page looking for things that are clickable :)

There was also a good discussion recently from GDC talking about having in-game references to free levels available online so that people who got the game from a portal would be motivated to look for your site to get more content (and therefore drive future direct sales).
-Andrew

[charliedog]

That's really great Woo thanks for the feedback. I'll edit the site tonight when I get in. I think you are right the front page needs to sell the game. I'll also add some news items linking to the reviews and displaying the scores whilst I am doing it. Conversion rate is going down a bit now as downloads go up and sales stay the same. I think there is quite a bit more I can do to improve matters.

regards,

Tony Oakden
http://charliedoggames.com

[MrQ]

definatley put buy and download links on the front page there. The quicktime stuff annoys me a bit, I got a big 'update quicktime now' popup over the top of your site.
I agree about the download and buy buttons, make them a bit nicer and maybe have an instructions page launch when you click download. Something for them to read and to reassure them that the game is legit. Might help some people from cancelling downloads.

[Escapee]

I think the bigfish logo looks so much better than the front page logo
http://www.bigfishgames.com/downloads/snakyjake/snakyjake_feature.jpg. I 'm not sure if you are allowed to use it because an attractive looking logo will surely attract more downloads . ( i'm more tempted to dl the game from BFG rather than your site )

Yes put the download and buy button on the front page your should probably see the DL % increases. Good luck :D

[DrWilloughby]

A 5% conversion rate is stellar. At 10% DL rate is bad. It's always dependent upon the game of course, but I'd shoot for a DL rate from 20%-40%.

Crits:

Way too much text for a game of this sort
no DL/Buy buttons on your home page
User is presented with text first rather than images, headlines, and call to action
Not immediately clear to user what type of game is is
No review text stating how great the game is


Hope this helps

[zoombapup]

Your front page should be a sales page. Stick the game on there. Make it a short text, lots of screenshots. Dont even bother with the video stuff on the main page I dont think.

Look at a typical games main page on any portal for an example of what you need..

Dont buck the system, go with it!

[gosub]

Definitely put some screen shots on your home page. I'd also link to that video. Nice job.

-Jeremy

[DrWilloughby]

Actually, I think a video makes a great sales tool. Our conversion rate on Venture Africa went way up after putting a video on the site. But yes, more screenshots would be good.

[jcottier]

Let's go to the point: Your website layout is really BAD. Most people will just surf on your main page and gave up. This is why you have a tiny dowload rate.

Why do you hide your DOWNLOAD now button? It MUST be in the front page, you have only 1 game then you don't need many pages. Sometimes less is better.

As a start, make this page your home page:
http://www.charliedoggames.com/?page_id=3
This tiny change will make a big difference on your dowload rate.

Also, I can garanty that only 0.0001% of your visitors read your text. It is far too long. Make it shorter and go to the point.

I didn't try to be diplomatic (sorry about this ;-) ) but few people already said this and you still haven't change it.

5% convertion rate is huge. In the real world it is beetwen 0.1% and 1% for the lucky one.

Jean-Claude

[charliedog]

Thanks everyone for the feedback. Don't worry about being diplomatic Jean-Claude I've been around long enough to take on board constructive criticism whether it's diplomatic or blunt and to the point. I am going to change my site. But being a one man band is difficult because I have too much to do. I was going to do it myself but I think I'll just pay the guy who set my site up to do it tonight. I'll change the front page so the user can download immediately from there. Add some quotes from the reviews, put in a link to the YouTube video and see what happens. Maybe I'll cut down the SJ page too but if people are downloading straight from the front page that won't matter so much.

Thanks again to everyone for the feedback.

[charliedog]

I have updated my site. Does this look better?

http://charliedoggames.com

regards,

Tony

[JoKa]

Yes, looks much better, pretty straight forward now :)

[ChrisP]

That's good, much more streamlined! If I was going to be picky I'd say make the left hand side less busy - for some reason my eye skipped over it at first. Maybe because I'm used to seeing a navigation bar there. Maybe you could try putting it on the right of the page instead?

You made a typo: "thier".

[charliedog]

Thanks guys.

I noticed that there is a typo in my text. I'm terrified to correct it though because every time i thouch my site it becomes corrupt. The guy who made it uses a mac and I am editing it on a PC. Has anyone else had problems like this?



Heres an interesting thought.

If I am qouting from a review and the review contains typos, should I correct the typos? I guess I probably should but then technically it's not a qoute any more is it? :)

regards,

Tony Oakden
http://charliedoggames.com

[DrWilloughby]

Feel free to correct the typo (without rewording).

Still too much text at the top of the page. I wouldn't have more than 1 sentence, and I would put it in a bigger font.

(sorry to toot our horn here, but take a look at our site: Venture Arctic (http://www.venturearctic.com))

Looking better though!

[woo]

The problems with editing the source files probably have to do with line ending characters. Generally they don't cause issues in html but they can make it go all wacky for editing.

1. Use source control for the site and have a backup of it to CD, regularly.
2. Use an editor such as JEdit that can maintain the line ending the way your html developer needs them. There are also a number of ways of converting line ending characters between unix and windows.

I would also recommend the feature from Venture Arctic where you have a screenshot/title screen that has the click to play video as the current starting frame of the video from youtube is just a blur.

-Andrew Douglas
http://theoreticalgames.com

[MrQ]

looks heaps better!
I like youtube over quicktime ;) the buy and try buttons are good on the front page there too. They look like the bigfish ones though? did you rip them? :D

Just wondering if you have noticed a change in your download rate or sales after the changes?

[Grey Alien]

yeah 5% CR is really good. It just mean that the downloads are very targetted. Only poeple who are really into the look and style of the game bother to download and then a large number of them buy it.

The game was well executed, but I'm afraid my 6 year old son said it was "boring" sorry ;-) I think he's too violent though and prefers to shoot things. My 3 year old son was scrared when the fruit chased the snake and it exploded, so that was a no go either haha.

[Escapee]

yeah, 5% CR is very good. Dling the game now. :)

[mrkwang]

I reviewed it for my webzine Pig-Min. Fun game it was.

Review is linked to Big Fish Games, with my affiliate.

Not sure how many Korean will purchase, anyway.

[charliedog]

Hello again.

I thought you guys might like to see the report from file kicker showing numbers of successful downloads of the Snaky Jake demo from Charlie Dog Games over the last 60 days. The first red bar indicates when the reviews for the game started to come through (Game Tunnel, Retro Gamer, Game Trend, Jay's Games) The second red bar indicates when I changed the format of the site. Note that this does not include downloads from affiliates as I have then mapped to a different file in filekicker

The reviews clearly had a major effect on downloads. Changing the site may have had an effect but it's harder to see from the graph. During the same time hits on my site increased proportionally. I did note that percentage of downloads to visits has gone up slightly since I reworked the site. It's a bit harder to get data out of the website but I'll have a go and publish that too if people are interested.

Note the graph shows successfully completed downloads not individual downloads. Typically about 77% of the downloads which are started actually complete.

516

regards,

Tony Oakden
http://charliedoggames.com

[electronicStar]

What happened between 3/19 and 3/29 ?

[MrQ]

I always love seeing data of this sort, keep it coming!

[woo]

Thanks for posting the data. As the point of these changes were specifically to increase conversion of visitors to downloads, that's really the ideal metric to measure success, though you probably should exclude referrals from this thread into your statistics as they will potentially throw off your percentages.

However, if, say, you are getting on average 5 downloads a day off of (based loosely off your earlier percentages), 50 or so new visitors a day, you're going to need to do more than just increase the conversion from visitors to downloads if you want to make more than a handful of sales. Even if you were converting those who visited into downloads at 40%, which is really very high, that still only puts you (given, say, a 4% conversion rate as you said it was dropping, but is still great) you're talking 600 downloads a month and 24 sales. At 14.99 a sale minus fees, that's not a huge amount of money (though sadly it's better than some numbers I've seen)

I think you need to have two objectives here:
- Continue to increase the quality of the site as that will lead to higher % of downloaders to visitors. It's better but it's still not what I would consider "ideal"
- Develop a marketing strategy to drive more traffic to the site. There's a huge number of pieces to that and it's really what you feel is best for you but common techniques are discussed all over this board. Just getting reviews from those sites is apparently not going to drive enough traffic and will level out fairly quickly. One of the best ways to draw more traffic is to develop more games :)

Good luck and let us know how it goes!
-Andrew Douglas
http://theoreticalgames.com

[spellcaster]

I guess this is not the right place here, but while watching the video I had the impression that something was wrong. Nothing big, just something small .. and finally I realized what it was: The jump animation has no preparation phase. The jump starts directly from the idle position. It's not as noticeable as it would be with a human figure because the snake is already in slightly curled position but still...

Regarding the website - I agree there's too much text. What I was missing was a short description, like a game slogan. "Snaky Jake - the award winning crawl'n'jump" or something like this.
In a world where every storyline can be used for a match-3 a fast way to identify the genre of the game is a good thing.

[charliedog]

Here are the stats from my website for this month. If you compare visits with downloads you can see that it's still around 10% of people who visit the site download the demo.

Thanks for your comments Woo. Yes I think the answer now is to get more people through my site. And I think the best way to do that is to get more games up on the site... At the moment 24 sales a month seems like a dream :). I will have some more games up on my site before the end of the year. And I hope to diversify a bit. I don't think I'll be doing another platformer for while.

Thanks for your comments spellcaster. yes I agree the animation isn't quite right. I may try and do another version of SJ later which has this fixed. I had to be very economical with the game art to keep it within my budget. It shouldn't be too difficult though to add a couple of frames on the start of the jump with SJ "compressed" a bit ready for the spring. Originally I hoped to add in a lot more custom animations but time and cost prevented that. I doubt this would have effected sales significantly anyway.

[woo]

I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next, however I wasn't implying that was the only significant item to have in your marketing plan.

There's a fairly good argument for developing a marketing plan here: http://forums.indiegamer.com/showpost.php?p=113312&postcount=24

In terms of what your marketing plan should be however... that seems to be up to each person. It would be nice if there was a marketing plan in a box that would ensure at least 1000 unique visitors a day, but there's just no magic solution to that problem yet.
-Andrew

[woo]

I've been inspired to take action. The insanity must end. Indie's need more information to help them self-publish and actually be successful.

http://theindieaffiliate.blogspot.com/

More info to be posted soon.
-Andrew Douglas
http://theoreticalgames.com

[RinkuHero]

I noticed the same thing about the jumping animation, it doesn't look right to me. The rest of the game seems very polished though, if you changed the jump animation it'd look professional.

Is it just me or is 158 downloads in 60 days pretty small? Even at only 10% downloading, that's pretty few. I mean, I put up a 'Sisyphus pushing a rock up a hill' mini-game (freeware) which has bad graphics and 2 minutes of gameplay and it had more than that -- with no advertising or marketing at all besides posting it in my LiveJournal and GGE; I'm used to numbers like 100,000 downloads in 8 months for some of my freeware games, driven mainly by forum posts and word of mouth. Do shareware games really get that significantly less downloads than freeware games, am I just lucky, or what?

[Farbs]

I think the 158 downloads are just from Tony's site. His downloads from portals etc would be much much higher.

[charliedog]

That's correct. Conversion rate from the portals is lower though. I am sure if the game was free and maybe smaller it would download much better from my site.

I may be going to spend a little bit of time producing an update for SJ soon. If I do I'll fix the animation and expose the editor to users. The main work to do on the editor would in file browsing and naming of the levels. Plus a little bit of tidying up.

[RinkuHero]

I definately think you should work on the total downloads per day if it's still going at the rate of less than 200 in 2 months with a 5% conversion rate. It needs more marketing! My game has only been released 5 days and I have 600 downloads, and I think that's even too low.

[Techdojo]

Hey CharlieDog - Just to let you know I just tried to download your demo and the link seems to be broken :(

Also I was wondering if you'd be willing to share a little bit of advice on a couple of things...

I'm intrigued as to the combination of the PopCap framework and Python can you elaborate on it a bit, also what tools did you use to layout the maps and stuff?

In your first post you mentioned that the game was out and had got an average review which you took on board - does this mean that you then made significant changes after the game was released?

How did this impact on the registered users, did they have to re-register or did you send out a blanket email.

I'm curious because at the moment I'm trying to work out how best to implement a simple scheme that will allow users to "upgrade" their downloaded demo to a full version through a personalised key that will work across updates but will automagically downgrade the software back to a demo should they want to a copy to their friends.

Thanks in advance

Jon...

[charliedog]

Hi Techdojo (Jon),

I fixed the link. The download should be working fine now.

I wrote my own tools to edit and layout the map. THe tools are built into the game but I disabled them for the release because I didn't have time to polish them up (things like loading and saving of maps is very clunky and hard coded). Having an editor built into the game for a platform game is definitely the way to go, IMO, as it makes fast iteration of the design, and content related bug fixing, very easy.

I released a slightly easier version of the game when it went live on BFG. That was the only thing I changed. It's too early to tell if it has made much difference. In my case it's an entirely new build and not a patch.

Hi RinkuHero,
What sort of PR/Marketing did you do? Do you have any advise as to what is the most effective way to spend marketing dollars or time?

regards,

Tony

[RinkuHero]

You can check my site's forums (link in sig), I have a whole thread there where I talk about how I'm marketing my current game, how many sales it's been getting and so on.