Exoloper is in open beta, and if you're seeing this, that means I'm exhausted.
It's been a good couple months since I last posted here. August and September had me in cleanup mode, leaving little to write about and October has just been dedicated to getting the game's marketing and public presence in shape and ready to go online, and its hard (at least for me) to write about my progress on building marketing material.. at least.. while I'm building it. I also lost the last two weeks of work to sickness and non-anchorite work stuff.
So what marketing material have I worked on?
A big chunk of the work I've done over the past little while revolves around building out the games key art. Most of this is never a true "screenshot" of the game, but rather a carefully selected set of images extracted from the game with some minor tweaks. Particularly for the AppStore / App Icons you want to get the vibe of what it's like to play the game. Reinforce that core fantasy that your game sells.
With branding mostly sorted out in the UI dev phase, I simply extended upon that. The purple / green colour choice is never quite as appealing as blue / orange, but it does exude an air of mystery that's particularly useful in marketing. Doubling down on that by utilising the thick fog often seen in the daytime moments of gameplay help to give the world and alien vibe. We know we're not fighting for earth when we see these screenshots, so it's gonna be sci fi, we see mecha, tanks, and lasers, so we're building a picture of something tactical, something combat related. The big strong bold font reinforces that 70's sci fi vibe, like something from a pulpy sci fi book.
Exoloper
If you're already here on my website, there's a chance you've come across the landing page for Exoloper. If you're lucky, you've seen it in ok shape. Like my work on the key art and screenshots, most of this builds on the style guide I built for Interloper. In many cases simply copying the concepts. It was still a full rebuild, as Interloper's website certainly could've been built in a cleaner way, but you know what they say? Build better templates.
All of this is hand built HTML and CSS, with only enough JS to show some slides on mobile. There's something really lovely about building websites this way that's just so distinct from using React or Angular. It's simple, easy, elegant and it just works. Is it absolutely perfect? No. Does it do the job? We'll see....
I might be crazy.. no I'm definitely crazy. But a couple years ago I dropped all of Adobe's tools, all of Autodesk's tools, and basically any software I was paying a subscription for. This happend in part because I saw what LumaFusion could do on a 2017 iPad Pro 9.7" for $20 odd aussie bucks. When it became possible to run it on Mac it just became my default video editing software. Sure I miss some features from Premier and After Effects, but I barely used a percentage of all their features, and wasn't getting good value from the amount I was paying.
The result is I have a very stable and very reliable, but rather simple process for creating trailers. Capture a ton of footage, slice it all together, chuck a beat under it all then edit to that beat as best I can. My games tend to have enough explosions and what I like to call "HELLYEAH" moments that they can speak for themselves, I just need to jazz it up and give potential customers a wee taste of whats to come.
One thing I'm particularly proud of doing with Exo is adding "musician" to the list of hats that I wear making my games. Auxy on iPad is one of those apps I wished was available on Mac the same way LumaFusion is. (also man please let my sync my tracks via iCloud while you're at it) This one comes with a subscription, and is currently the only creative software I pay a sub for, but it's just that good. If someone with as much of a tone-deaf vibe as me can make even vaguely ok music with it, it's doing something right. Super easy to use, and more importantly, its just fun to make some sick beats with it.
In terms of the trailer, I could've grabbed one of the tracks from the game and called it there, but often trailers need something more bespoke, something that tells a specific story. As you can see, what I created was as simple as simple gets, but it does the job and I'm happy with it.
Copy writing isn't my skill. Go look through the game, check out my writing. Run back through some of my posts here, same thing. Full of mistakes, kinda rambly, and full of vagueposting. I thrive in a medium that you can experience with your body, see with your eyes, feel with your hands, hum to with your ears.
So when it comes to writing up copy for the game, I mostly lifted from my work on Exoloper. I'd guess I spent about two to three days writing various forms of copy for Exo, and for Interloper, more like two to three weeks. In most cases it kinda works in a similar way to key art. Get it right once and you can probably reuse most of that elsewhere. Lets hope it works because:
That copy writing phase was also to build out press releases and the like and to me, this was more difficult than any other part of building out the marketing. Every piece of advice in game dev marketing is all like "market your game from day one" and "don't wait until you're finished to start marketing the game" and well um. Yeah, probably right. I'll be real, I've got no idea what I'm doing with games press. Lovely people, great fun to interact with, but my god I didn't get into being a solo game dev to interact with people. I hope that whatever I sent off was coherent and made sense, and importantly, wasn't of any offense to anyone.
If you're press reading this, hi! Thank you.
I've often said to close friends that I'd love to never release my games, or maybe to just release them for free. Making games is an absolute delight, but the road to launch has me waking up every day with a gut punch of dread. You can't fail when you're just trying cool stuff out, but you absolutely can when it comes to selling a product.
## 18-10-24
- Open beta: touch arcade post
- Publications: collate
- Socials: add screens and gifs
- Socials: post prewritten posts.
- Contact Publications
- AppStore: Screenshots x 5 iOS portrait
- Appstore: Images for iAP's
- Socials: Launch Gif
- Presskit: Upload trailer and screenshots
- AppStore: Preview Video 01
- Youtube: Teaser Trailer
- TVOS Icon and banner image
- Animation: Add stomp (when hitting units)
## 26-09-24 // 8103
- Bug: testflight edition was set to full iAP mode, removed debug iAP code.
## 19-09-24 // 8084
- Gameplay: logstacks need to be destructible
- Audio: new infantry death sounds
- Music: forest campaign
- Graphics: Changed medium exo interior texture to be more duo-tone
- UI: Mac: Window mode + resolutions settings added.
- UI: Shockwave cannon needs icon
- UI: averaged out update time for speed and throttle labels
- UI: Restore purchases view needs proper design
- Bug: Tip Jar paid is left on waiting
- Bug: Tip Jar should disappear after being consumed.
- Bug: Restore purchases button confirm button fails
- Bug: Settings ui doesn't work with controller
- Bug: UI: Edit unit component cells need better hover / selected states
- Bug: Turning off auto fire turns off manual fire in touch controls
- Bug: UI for campaign unlock is borked.
- Bug: New Campaign ui doesn't work with controller
- Crash: Desecrated site has no valid responses.
- Crash: FOF Scramble will break teamcolour on unit spawn
- Crash: No localisable string "bld-fact"
- Crash: UI_VPaperdoll still having issues on extraction
- Issue: No haptics on interactive in drop sequence
- Fix: cleaned up debug controller so that it clears on production builds
## 09-09-24 // 7924
- removed debug controller from badlands
## 06-09-24 // 7923
- Music: Tutorial
- Music: industrial campaign
- Music: forest combat
- Audio: Light, Medium and Superheavies now have seperate engine sounds.
- Graphics: Tanks now leave track marks
- Graphics: Doubled size of supearheavy tanks.
- Graphics: Reduced bloom on thermal vision.
- Graphics: added simple rain droplets to exo windshields
- Balance: decision missions should spawn the player in the middle of the map
- Balance: rebuilt all mission enemy spawn patterns.
- UI: Portrait roster + edit unit on iPad kinda sucks.
- UI: Redo campaign choose page to more prominently show the ability to buy new campaigns.
- Issue: Secondary Add unit button isn't easily visible
- Bug: Priority target selected in non destroy missions (drop / tutorial / ambush)
- Bug: Next and Add buttons arent't properly updating on weight change in Roster.
- Bug: Utility Suit cannot use all six utility slots it has assigned.
- Bug: Enemy utilities were super loud.
- Bug: Superheavy support tanks had infantry pods, should've had tank pods
- Bug: some navmesh areas with verticality feel rough to walk over.
- Bug: roster tutorial borked on iPad, maybe desktop.
- Bug: Medium tank and Inf cannot be equipped (due to wieght restrictions)
- Bug: Level design: Some exits don't visually read as exits, particularly in Industrial drop zone.
- Bug: Text labels are no longer visible due to overflow issues
### Part changes
Projectile_AI_Missile_Ballistic:
damage: 75 -> 25
## 30-08-24 // 7852
- UI: Added feedback request after five opens. (it's short and you can say no!)
- UI: Add unit cell needs an info button
- UI: Cleaned up Settings titles.
- UI: Changed settings boolean values from true/false to on/off.
- UI: Move audio to first place in settings
- UI: add engine and reactor icons to each paperdoll
- UI: Torso twist ui needs to be more prominent, maybe a compass or something
- Balance: pass on power and weight of items
- Balance: All usable units need basic ass preset loadouts.
- Feature: Friendly AI are no longer useless.
- Feature: Enemy Tanks / infantry no longer try to just leg the player exo.
- Feature: Change "Warp" back to "Drop" in the drop sequence
- Feature: Added setting for auto fire
- Feature: Added setting for auto aim
- Issue: Weapons need to fire only when in range
- Crash: No Enemies chosen UnitSpawner.CollectEnemyData() in tutorial?
- Crash: on Exit Intro level.
- Crash: Nullref string in combat
- Crash: PlayerInput depdency on load
- Crash: OutofRangeException on deleting only unit in roster
- Bug: Ai awareness doesn't exist when raining
- Bug: Item info doesn't work in anything other than portrait iphone
- Bug: CombatMap too zoomed in
- Bug: UI: Tutorial covers move ui in campaign in iPhone landscape
- Bug: Tutorial: toast covers settings button
- Bug: Active camo audio effect retains after exiting battle.
- Bug: Paint selectors are transparent by default on cursor platforms
- Bug: Can't use paint?
- Bug: Util Exo would show all reactors as full hp when they only had one reactor.
- Bug: Rarely ever get a building as a target
- Bug: Adding a new unit to the roster makes them invalid, despite being actually valid.
- Bug: iPad Landscape ui busted in roster
- Bug: Nullref in roster when switching campaigns
- bug: pilot rank goes up by two on campaign complete?
- Bug: Util Exo weapons jitter around sometimes
- Bug: DPS has $ in front of tag in Add Item View
### Part changes
infantry:
weight: 0 -> 10
APC:
weight: 10 -> 30
Light tank:
weight: 10 -> 45
Medium Battle Tank:
weight: 30 -> 80
Medium Utility Tank:
weight: 30 -> 60
Active Camoflauge
weight: 0 -> 5
power: 0 -> -200
Electronic Warfare Module
weight: 0 -> 5
power: 0 -> -60
Infantry Pod
weight: 0 -> 20
Radar Nullifier
weight: 0 -> 5
power: 0 -> -80
Shield Generator
weight: 0 -> 5
Light Smoke Launcher
weight: 0 -> 2
Smoke Launcher
weight: 0 -> 2
Hyperbolic Motivator
weight: 0 -> 6
Fuel Injection
weight: 0 -> 6
Thermal Vision Sensors
weight: 0 -> 2
Zoom Lens
weight: 0 -> 2
Experimental Reactor
armour: 500 -> 100
Hybrid Cell Reactor
armour: 500 -> 750
power: +250 -> +350
Advanced Tokamak
power: +175 -> +215
Shielded Experimental Reactor
armour: 500 -> 100
Shielded Hybrid Cell Reactor
armour: 500 -> 750
power: +250 -> +350
Shielded Advanced Tokamak
power: +175 -> +215
All Sensors:
weight: 1 -> 4
armour: 30 -> 250
Vulcan Cannon:
weight: 5 -> 10
## 22-08-24
- Feature: UI: Show how each of your units died through campaign
- Feature: UI: Show Reactor and Engine status on PaperDoll
- Balance: Remove time from decisions (in ui as well as gameplay)
- UI: Drop sequence needs significant improvements
- UI: Extract menu should have filters? Or at least be pre-filtered by weight or rarity
- UI: Feature: Only highlight nearest exit location, not all exits on objectives complete in combat
- UX: Need to show that a unit is invalid on roster page
- Graphics: Targets in tutorial need proper models, not CWTH towers
- Graphics: Tutorial rooms lack scale or visual interest
- Bug: Nullref in campaign extract
- Bug: Speed indicator no longer updates?
- Bug: Resource indicators no longer update?
- Bug: Paper doll health isn't updating live in combat
- Bug: Knockback (hammer) doesn't feel quite right?
- Bug: AI not firing as much as they maybe should?
- Bug: keyboard control tooltips show up on mobile
- Bug: Items + units lost not coming up in player destroyed end of campaign
- Bug: Exobay: Adding a new unit reverts selection to the first unit, should be to the newest unit.
- Bug: nullref on extraction
- Bug: campaign marked as destroyed when only one leg was lost
- Bug: UI: Losing an arm shows both arms as destroyed
- Bug: Units added via hangar can become priority target?
- Bug: Spawned units via hangar don't get added to paperdoll
- Bug: Player paperdoll doesn't update in combat
- Bug: Smoke launcher sfx happens on player, even when played from other units
- Bug: Allied Infantry dont fire?
## 14-08-24
- Tutorial: Initial campaign step should move on UAV use.
- UI: Don't show core components in extraction
- Feature: automatically push throttle to max on fuel injection.
- Bug: UI: Forefit campaign / reset tutorial save need to close on accept.
- Bug: sometimes ik control for stick gets reversed
- Bug: Campaign: Able to move while on combat node
- Bug: Getting common loot in loot drops
- Bug: Combat nodes show when selected, even when not revealed.
- Bug: Nullref: Missing Infantry icon for PaperDoll
- Bug: Campaign extraction UI_VCampaignover Out of Range Exception:
- Bug: Unit weight maxes out at < weight max, not <= weight max
- Bug: Utilities disappear sometimes?
- Bug: Exo parts spawn without exo in Exobay
- Bug: Exobay OutOfRangeException
- Bug: Exit colliders need to be far wider
- Bug: Destroyed bunker object has no texture
- Bug: remove time UI from extraction page
- Bug: UI: Tutorial UI often covers interactable content, should have a non-purple background as it's not interactible.
- Bug: UI: Campaign Tutorial: Repair popup stays in exobay until all tutorials are complete. Should be a one and done.
- Bug: UI: Campaign Tutorial: Highlight on UAV continues after UAV is used. Does not increment tutorial stage
- Bug: Campaign Tutorial: Extract button always appears at extract node of tutorial.
- Bug: Roster: clearing slot means you cannot equip into other slots.
- Bug: UI: target reticles not coming up for shooting / manual fire in tutorial
- Bug: Hangar spawned units have no SSICON overlay.
- Bug: Units spawn in truss of space elevator in Space Elevator level
- Bug: Units spawn in factory in Badlands level
- Bug: Infantry pod deployed units need to show up on radar
- Bug: Unit SSIcons aren't appearing when they spawn in / in drop sequence again.