A solid brand will give your game an established identity. That identity will help your players relate to the game. That relationship will give your game legs and make it easier for players to spread the word about your game. As a result your game will have more players and have a greater chance of becoming a franchise upon which other games can be built.
Many will say that you can’t have a successful piece of entertainment without effective branding.
While everyone can recognize that branding is important in the traditional gaming world, branding in the Flash world is not so black and white. The primary reason for this is that in most cases, the only tools you have to sell your game are a thumbnail image and the game’s name.
To say that I like my Moleskine would be an understatement. My Moleskine is my right hand, an extension of myself, it is the depository and reference point for all of my ideas, grand or small. I take it with me everywhere. If I’m upstairs at our house, my Moleskine is with me. If I go for a walk to the park to play with my daughter, my Moleskine is with me.
If inspiration strikes, I’d rather be prepared than count on myself to ‘remember it for later’.
My Moleskine is a riddled mess of notes, sketches, sticky notes and random ideas. It is held together with duct tape because my pen also needs to be with me at all times. (no point in having a notebook without a pen…)
4 Year's of Moleskine
I have lost two Moleskine’s in the past 4 years. Both were tragic events. One was left on a plane as the family was flying from Vancouver to PEI. By the time I realized it was gone, the plane had been cleaned. On the inside page of each of my Moleskines, I offer a reward of $100.00 if it is found. It still infuriates me to this day that the damn cleaners couldn’t bother to look inside the front page of that book.
I love my Moleskine.
This morning, while checking out Raincoast Book’s Blog, I stumbled across something that has the potential to replace my beloved Moleskine:
This book looks absolutely incredible! Wonderful bits of inspiration, handy visualization tools and more.
One question – if someone were to make this the ‘Game Designers Notebook’ and included notes and reference points from consoles, handy frequently used LUA and AS3 commands or other things along those lines, would people interested in something like that? What do you think? Leave a comment.
Vancouver Skyline - Stolen from my friend Allie @ Vancityallie.com
Well, after two years on the east coast, the Neville family is going to be moving back to Vancouver in a couple of months.
I will dearly miss beautiful Prince Edward Island – two of the best summers of my life have been spent on the empty and endless beaches of the island and my work with Longtail has incredibly rewarding.
But the bulk of our family lives on the west coast and, as a result, that is where we are going.
For me, I’m going to focus on family and NRD as well as doing some consulting and teaching. There is a book idea in there too.
It’s been over seven years since I have worked at home and with Cassandra running around being awesome all day, I look forward to being a bigger part of her life and not being the first person out of the house every morning.
The next year with NRD is going to be about experimenting with story and games in Flash. There will be more comics, comic/game experiments, game hybrid pieces – lots of stuff. Most of it will be short form and a good chunk of it will be weird.
So that’s the news. We are both going to be busy moving, house hunting (If you know of a 3-4 bedroom in Vancouver (Main, Cambie, Kits, Dunbar) available in Dec or Jan – hit me back), etc over the next couple of months, but I’ve got a month and a half of Petra’s Call in the can, so things should keep ticking along like normal here.
The reaction from Episode 9 has been great. Amazingly, resoundingly great.
People have been into every aspect of the episode – the art, coloring, pacing, dialog, backgrounds – I’ve gotten great feedback on every side of the episode.
Below is a collection of ‘pages’ from Petra’s Call.
On the left are images from Episode 9, on the right are three of my favorite images from the earlier episodes. Even with a quick glance anyone can see there’s a big difference in the style, consistency, composition and overall feel of the pages. Taking my time - and the work gets better.
While my process is always changing and I’m always trying new things, the biggest contributor to the improvements in Episode 9 is that I made one simple and major change:
I took my time.
Up until Episode 9, I had been working with tight schedules and was always pushing myself for the deadline.
“I have to get all of the pages inked in the next 2 hours – and then it’s done.”
“I have 2 mornings to get the whole issue penciled, if it isn’t done in time, it doesn’t matter, I’m going to inks.”
I needed to take more time and give myself more perspective on the work. This let me do a few key things that weren’t part of my process before.
A) Editorial feedback from my wife. I gave my wife 5 drafts through script to final art. She gave me a lot of dialog and pacing feedback that made a big difference.
B) Redrawing and redrawing some more. From thumbs to final inks, I spent a lot more time sweating the details. It took a lot longer, but it was worth it.
C) Taking a breather. Stepping away from the work to work on something else and coming back with fresh eyes. A big step here was doing the old ‘horizontal flip’ trick, where you flip the art 180 degrees horizontally, which exposes mistakes you wouldn’t have caught otherwise.
D) Putting in the extra time. Making a fully colored comic, plus setting up the site, Flash browser and everything else (you know – day job making video games, wife and kid, etc) takes a lot of time. I had set aside two hours every morning to work on Petra’s Call – and that was it. Now I am spending more evenings and weekends working on the comic as well.
All of these have helped me ‘Level up’ with my work on Petra’s Call and I am at a point where I’m a lot happier with the work I’m producing.
