Original article at Lostzombies.co.uk
Context
This isn’t going to be much use to an established company or developer, It might be a little more interesting to students looking to start a company or newly founded devs. Also my spelling and grammar are shocking so apologies in advance!
Lost Zombie Studio consists of two people me (Jody Gallagher) and Matt Sharpe, We have both worked on games projects in the past including a few pretty big games that I wont bother to list here. We have been working on Away Team for roughly a year with a spattering of contracts in between. The game has changed pretty dramatically over that time into something much bigger than originally planned. This meant we had to make the choice of building it ourselves with little money or just scrapping it and continuing with the contracts. There just isn’t enough time in the day for both!
We obviously decided to push on with the game as its something we both deeply believe in and we started LZS to do cool projects like this in the first place.. Also who needs money!?
We are both complete novices when it comes to marketing or PR which meant we just ignored it, also marketing is boring right!? So the first incarnation of the LZS site was pretty terrible. It was a plain old site with some hyperlinks, I would show a screenshot of it but, thankfully, it has been sent to the farm. We had thought that if we build it they shall come, surely if we have a place for people to come see the game that’s about all we really need to do… Potential customers will be flooding in, Press will get wind of the game and we can put all this “suit” work behind us.
Obviously that was wrong! we realized pretty quickly no one knew who we were or cared about our little indie game. Other than my mum, no one was going to buy this thing once we finished it. So we decided to listen to the experts yelling at everyone to share what they are actually doing (Brian Baglow) and come up with some sort of plan to do that.
So this is a breakdown of what went right and wrong over the 24 hours from relaunching the site and also some info on what we did as far as planning to get to that. I should also note this is all stuff you can do for free, other than my own personal time we didn’t spend a penny.
Preparation and what went “right”
We do the game development to a rough scrum style so we decided to add the marketing, PR and other neglected tasks to the sprint for that week. We are all used to working like this (or at least probably should be) by now so it made sense and meant we wouldn’t procrastinate. as a bonus it also meant we did some research into different vectors for selling and marketing the game. People have tons of different ways of planning this stuff out but iv found a simple shared Google spreadsheet does the job fine. Trello is also really useful and free!
WordPress! “Middleware” is something most developers use every day in our projects and saves a massive amount of time and money, so instead of building a site from scratch again we decided to use wordpress. This was an excellent choice and only took a few days to set up. There are probably other solutions out there but WordPress just worked for us. It also has great integration with
