The mistakes with RAA`s Marketing.

No cryptic Title this time. I want to come straight to the point.
In the last few days I realized something. I realized the mistake I made with the marketing of RAA, or in particular the first trailer. 
As you may know by now, RAA is SIACTRO´s first game to be developed and with all "first times" poeple get a little to ambitious if they don´t watch out. That was very well the fact with this game.
Retro Arcade Adventure was never meant to be an epic journey for the player that will continue for hours and hours to come. It was from the very beginning aimed to catch the simplicity of an Atari 2600 game.
However with the first trailer I made a horrible mistake, I got to ambitious. I tried to make a trailer that showed an epic adventure with Dragons, Barbarians, Demons and Heros that will entertain you for hours and just suck you into the world of fantasy...

I failed at that.
Partially I failed because I seem to suck at making trailers and partially I failed because that is not(!) what RAA is all about. The moment I start thinking about a game I really want to make is allways the moment I have a special situation in my mind that just suits the game perfectly in my opinion. Let me explain you the situation I think, RAA is perfectly made for:

 It is Thursday. You just want the weekend to finally start because you are tired of your job/school/normal-day-routine. There is nothing on TV but you feel the need to entertain yourself somehow.
That is where RAA fits in. It is not your story heavy game that you actually need to think about ot get into, it is just there to entertain you. You are able to just start it up and chop your way through enemy hordes. If you are interested in having a motivation to chop them down, you may read the plot that will be told on screen in a typical little textbox system.
You may choose the adventure or the arcade mode to entertain you for the rest of the evening.
And that is what RAA is all about. Nothing more, nothing less, just a little shot of entertainment.

I failed to show it up to this point, but from now on I promise to show you the real Retro Arcade Adventure and not try to let it look any better than it will be in the end.

Short update

Ok as the title already suggests, this is just a short update. Everything is going very well and I try to
keep my set deadline to have the game in peer review during march. I am working very hard at the moment to get all the content done and ingame. After that, it should go a lot faster. 
Since the trailer is almost a month old(not quite but soon), I decided it would be a good thing to show you what I am working on right(!) now:

I will explain all of this soon enough so stay tuned. And yep we are going under water!

Global Game Jam - Result...finally

Ok, yeah I know...I am late... but I was...well... actually there is no excuse. I was lazy and finally finished Majora's Mask and started playing Resident Evil Revelations(yep, with 3DS addon-pad-thingy).
However now I will finally talk about this year's GGJ. It was an amazing event, don't get me wrong I wasn't expecting anything less than a totaly awesome weekend full of game creating goodness! This time however it was absolutely amazing. We had a lot of awesome teams and great games were created that weekend. My team, this time, was really big for Gamejam limits. We were seven people and many tasks were overcrowded. However the actual game looked really amazing. 
Loopy Island is a Point and Click Adventure with a pretty strange humor(Arnold Schwarzenegger cameo and fus-roh-dah!). It is reminiscent of genre classics like Monkey Island and Leisure Suit Larry. My tasks on the team contained sound, synchro and some gamedesign parts. Unfortunately we did not manage to finish the game in time(too many people = too many ideas and discussions). It still is an interesting alpha to check out, if you enjoy these kind of games. 
If you are interested how a game would look like if it was made in 48 hours with a smaller team, retro graphics and on a Nintendo DS then check out last years project of me and my team back then(only three people): 8-Bit(ch) Slap Apocalypse 
It has a sick humor too and was...well...bloody. Oh and very buggy but fun as hell to create.

Global Game Jam - Challenge accepted

Hey there readers,
this post is not about Siactro or Retro Arcade Adventure but rather about a really awesome event that is starting tomorrow(depending on the place you call your home). It is the Global Game Jam, a workshop that challenges you and your team (if you have one...) to create a game in 48 hours(sounds familiar ey?). The really awesome part is that it will happen at special locations(universities, schools, your mom's garage?) who will host this event. Me and some friends will get together tomorrow at the cologne game lab, one of our local hosts for this event.
There will be a special keyword that we have to incorporate into our gameconcept. From the moment we hear that word, the 48 hours start ticking. It is truely an awesome event and I will keep everybody over at Twitter updated during the event. With a lot of livecams and documentations afterwards it is really an interessting thing to check out.
Hope you will enjoy the interessting games that this event will produce.
Until tomorrow then! See you on Twitter!

I love thy hate.

Strange title isn´t it? Ok well let me explain this: As you may know, the guys at IndieGames.com posted some news about Retro Arcade Adventure a few days ago(Thank you so much!) and I can´t thank them enough for that. It was a nice written newsentry and I was really flattered. In fact it was the very first bit of text that was written about one of my games ever. 
Now for the interesting part, the comments. At the moment Iam writing this blogentry, the news got about 14 comments, not counting the four bots or the one positive and one offtopic comment that is about seven comments full of criticism(a few really fair one though). The part that was criticised the most was the visuals of the game. As you know, it is not really 8bit but it was inspired by 8bit. Some people seem to really hate this fact(e.g. "looks like total shit"). So after my game was branded as total shit with 15 bits graphics, 1 bit gameplay and poor fakebit aesthetics I really have to say... thank you! Thank you very, very much! : )
It never happened up to this point that a game of mine got so much attention and brought people´s minds to post so much creative comments. Sure it was a lot of criticism but the attention that the game got in the last few days is outstanding(the trailer had about 54 views at the end of day one and now it has 2.300!). I am so happy right now that people actually started talking about Retro Arcade Adventure and hopefully will continue to do so.
With personal respect: Thanks to the seven critics.
Oh and  people still talk about it. Just check out this awesome news by DIY Gamer:
http://www.diygamer.com/2012/01/game-heart-retro-arcade-adventure/
Thanks to the guys and gals behind DIY Gamer too, you are great.
  
In conclusion: Things are starting to roll and I hope this was the real launch for SIACTRO. 

Retro Arcade Adventure - Trailer #1

Trailer is coming...tomorrow!

Yep...not much more to say! : D
Expect the first real trailer sometime tomorrow(depending on where you live of course).
I worked a bit on it today and will finish it after breakfast tomorrow but for now, good night.