Category Archives: marketing tips

Supernova 2:Spacewar awarded!

Yes, the indie game website Gametunnel, in its popular Indie Games Of The Year awards, included my Supernova 2: Spacewar into the top5 simulation games of the year. While I think my game is more a wargame or a strategy game than a simulation, I’m still proud of have it included among the bests indie games of this year, also looking at the tough competition.

On the development side, some good news: Spirited Heart is going very well, though I think I won’t include a combat sub-game in it (I’m still not sure about that). But the characte generation is done, and also the status screen with all the various game options: Work, Study/Train, Relax, Relationship and Check Status.

It will be a weird game I think. Similar to Cute Knight, but without the dungeon part, and with a slightly different gameplay mechanic. I am also thinking to ask Hanako’s programmer to license the use the dungeon-crawler engine he used in that game, so I finally could resume working on Tower Of Destiny, which is in hiatus-mode since 2005! :/

Anyway for now I’m concentrating on Spirited Heart and 3 more “mysterious games” that will be released during next year. I don’t want to disclose too much, but each game can be described with a word: Poker, Robot and Flower.

How to lose a potential customer: phone verifications

Yesterday wanted to advertise my games (old and new ones as well), so thought to try those blog advertising services.

I had already used their services in the past, and must say that got some positive review and traffic from the posts. So yesterday wanted to buy more ads, and went to one of the 3. Unfortunately, even if I had previously bought lot of posts from them (over $500 value), they decided that I couldn’t buy anymore if I didn’t call them by phone (of course a USA number) to verify my credit card info! (big cheer sound)

Of course, being european, I am not surely going to call someone in USA to verify my CC info. Also, what they need to verify? they expect me to tell my CC number over the phone? no thanks, is much safer to use the web! 😐

So they lost a potential good customer for a totally useless anti-fraud system (expecially in this case since I already bought several stuff from them before). No problem, I’ll go with the other 2 who aren’t so dumb to use such system (they even let me use Paypal actually!). I’m not saying which one of the 3 is, but is enough to browse their sites to find out… 😉