Plan for Nick Zafiris
by Nick Zafiris · 12/06/2005 (6:02 am) · 6 comments
I'd like to take this opportunity to share my experiences regarding the announcement of our project Nuclear Nightmare: Rise of the Fallen.
Me and my cousin have been working on this project since summer. Actually, we started with Torque in Spring of 2004 but I consider that period a learning process and not productive time spent developing the game.
Now, we're at a point where we have a good portion of our first and second level designed, the soundtrack, and some features like saving and loading a game with mission triggers and autosave.
So we decided to show the GG community our project by submitting a dev shot of the day. After getting some good feedback, I decided to also submit it on a really good post-nuclear gaming site, No Mutants Allowed.
The next day, NMA published our news on their home page and we received many visitors from that site. This is where the fun started.
Publicity. The day after NMA published our news, we started receiving tons of visitors to our site and forums. After looking at the site logs, I realized that they were coming from other gaming sites in many countries in Europe and Asia (Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, UK, China, Japan).
It turned out that gaming sites liked the concept and had pulled our news from the NMA site and had posted it on their site including the screenshots and links. During the next 2-3 days, the news spread like a virus in dozens of gaming web sites and forums around the world and we were receiving about 1,000 visitors per day.
It was exciting looking for sites that had posted our news. Some sites decided to add their touch by adding their logo on our screenshot, brightening it, resizing it, re-saving it in a lower quality (to save bandwidth I guess), all of the above(!), splitting it in two, adding the game to their database of games, and one even wrote a preview. As we started to upload some more screenshots and concept art to our site, they were grabbing and posting those too.
Just Google for it and see for yourself.
Amid all this publicity, we also got a publishing/localization offer by a publisher for a certain region of Europe.
Problem. Naturally, we didn't expect all this publicity and we weren't prepared for it. This was originally meant to be a GG snapshot of the day. We only had a couple of screenshots on our site and very little content.
Result. While we did receive some fans that signed up to our forums, 99% of the visitors did not sign up. Sure, many will probably re-visit when we post more news but some might have been turned off by the low content. Their posts on other forums were not so flattering either. So not sure if this was ultimately a good thing or undesired publicity at this time.
Focus. Another thing I'd like to mention is that about a week's worth of game development productivity on my end was lost because of the excitement of going through the logs and finding which gaming web site posted our news and taking screenshots of them, replying to various forums, trying to find translations of posts, etc. It's easy to get caught up in these things and they must be kept to a minimum otherwise you'll never get any work done. You can't possibly read everything that has been written from everyone. Now the dust has settled anyway, and I'm back at developing the game full time using my brand new 17" Fujitsu-Siemens M3438G laptop might I add!
I'd like to know if anyone has had similar experiences. Also, feel free to sign up in our forums to comment on the game or ask any questions you might have.
I leave you with a quote from apocalypsefiction.com and some screenshots from other gaming sites:
----------------------------------------------
PC Game in Dev - Nuclear Nightmare
SUMMARY -
What? An aspiring team of game developers that aren't interested in making YAFC (Yet Another Fallout Clone)? This time, it appears that they want to develop some sort of "survival horror" based on a post-nuclear holocaust setting. They currently have two screenshots, a website &, according to them, they've been developing this since June 2005. We'll see how far this one actually gets...
LINK
www.nuclearnightmare.com/ (Nuclear Nightmare game website)
SOURCE
No Mutants Allowed
----------------------------------------------
Me and my cousin have been working on this project since summer. Actually, we started with Torque in Spring of 2004 but I consider that period a learning process and not productive time spent developing the game.
Now, we're at a point where we have a good portion of our first and second level designed, the soundtrack, and some features like saving and loading a game with mission triggers and autosave.
So we decided to show the GG community our project by submitting a dev shot of the day. After getting some good feedback, I decided to also submit it on a really good post-nuclear gaming site, No Mutants Allowed.
The next day, NMA published our news on their home page and we received many visitors from that site. This is where the fun started.
Publicity. The day after NMA published our news, we started receiving tons of visitors to our site and forums. After looking at the site logs, I realized that they were coming from other gaming sites in many countries in Europe and Asia (Belgium, Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, UK, China, Japan).
It turned out that gaming sites liked the concept and had pulled our news from the NMA site and had posted it on their site including the screenshots and links. During the next 2-3 days, the news spread like a virus in dozens of gaming web sites and forums around the world and we were receiving about 1,000 visitors per day.
It was exciting looking for sites that had posted our news. Some sites decided to add their touch by adding their logo on our screenshot, brightening it, resizing it, re-saving it in a lower quality (to save bandwidth I guess), all of the above(!), splitting it in two, adding the game to their database of games, and one even wrote a preview. As we started to upload some more screenshots and concept art to our site, they were grabbing and posting those too.
Just Google for it and see for yourself.
Amid all this publicity, we also got a publishing/localization offer by a publisher for a certain region of Europe.
Problem. Naturally, we didn't expect all this publicity and we weren't prepared for it. This was originally meant to be a GG snapshot of the day. We only had a couple of screenshots on our site and very little content.
Result. While we did receive some fans that signed up to our forums, 99% of the visitors did not sign up. Sure, many will probably re-visit when we post more news but some might have been turned off by the low content. Their posts on other forums were not so flattering either. So not sure if this was ultimately a good thing or undesired publicity at this time.
Focus. Another thing I'd like to mention is that about a week's worth of game development productivity on my end was lost because of the excitement of going through the logs and finding which gaming web site posted our news and taking screenshots of them, replying to various forums, trying to find translations of posts, etc. It's easy to get caught up in these things and they must be kept to a minimum otherwise you'll never get any work done. You can't possibly read everything that has been written from everyone. Now the dust has settled anyway, and I'm back at developing the game full time using my brand new 17" Fujitsu-Siemens M3438G laptop might I add!
I'd like to know if anyone has had similar experiences. Also, feel free to sign up in our forums to comment on the game or ask any questions you might have.
I leave you with a quote from apocalypsefiction.com and some screenshots from other gaming sites:
----------------------------------------------
PC Game in Dev - Nuclear Nightmare
SUMMARY -
What? An aspiring team of game developers that aren't interested in making YAFC (Yet Another Fallout Clone)? This time, it appears that they want to develop some sort of "survival horror" based on a post-nuclear holocaust setting. They currently have two screenshots, a website &, according to them, they've been developing this since June 2005. We'll see how far this one actually gets...
LINK
www.nuclearnightmare.com/ (Nuclear Nightmare game website)
SOURCE
No Mutants Allowed
----------------------------------------------
About the author
#2
http://www.stalker-game.com/index_eng.html
12/06/2005 (7:40 am)
Looks somewhat like the game S.T.A.L.K.E.R.http://www.stalker-game.com/index_eng.html
#3
-----
You're right, it does seem to be similar to Stalker at first. How are we going to be different? If you were to play the two games, I believe they would be different in the following ways:
Nuclear Nightmare is a slower paced survival horror in 3rd Person whereas I believe Stalker is a more action-oriented first-person game.
Very strong plot with twists
3rd Person Melee Combat
And we will try to apply more emphasis on the RPG elements in general
Hopefully, we will not let anyone down.
Nick
12/06/2005 (7:58 am)
We will try our best to make the game play differently than Stalker while preserving a good post-apocalyptic atmosphere. Quoting myself from a similar post in our forums:-----
You're right, it does seem to be similar to Stalker at first. How are we going to be different? If you were to play the two games, I believe they would be different in the following ways:
Nuclear Nightmare is a slower paced survival horror in 3rd Person whereas I believe Stalker is a more action-oriented first-person game.
Very strong plot with twists
3rd Person Melee Combat
And we will try to apply more emphasis on the RPG elements in general
Hopefully, we will not let anyone down.
Nick
#4
And as a note, Stalker was suposed to be released a year or so ago I believe, and I think the current release date is Late 2006. I think the gameplay and setting sounds really stupid. It takes place at Chernobyl that has been restarted and explodes again? Umm, are russians really that dumb? :)
12/06/2005 (9:32 am)
Congrats on the publicity, and yea, don't let it get to you, its double edged sword and you have to kind of read some of it and ignore most of it. You're an indie, you can't compete with big budget developers, Stalker is often compared to Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 had a $10m (at least) budget as far as I know, you can't compete with that. Chris Lamabard (sp?) had a good plan a few weeks ago about staying within your means.And as a note, Stalker was suposed to be released a year or so ago I believe, and I think the current release date is Late 2006. I think the gameplay and setting sounds really stupid. It takes place at Chernobyl that has been restarted and explodes again? Umm, are russians really that dumb? :)
#5
12/06/2005 (8:01 pm)
I wouldn't worry at all about the initial visitors being turned off by low content. If your game is good enough they'll come back later. Everyone wants to play a good game :)
#6
12/08/2005 (7:36 am)
Thanks for the input guys! 
Torque Owner Steve L
The game looks great! Now you gotta live up to the hype ;)