Funcional Funcional Siempre activo El almacenamiento o acceso técnico es estrictamente necesario para el propósito legítimo de permitir el uso de un servicio específico explícitamente solicitado por el abonado o usuario, o con el único propósito de llevar a cabo la transmisión de una comunicación a través de una red de comunicaciones electrónicas. Preferencias Preferencias El almacenamiento o acceso técnico es necesario para la finalidad legítima de almacenar preferencias no solicitadas por el abonado o usuario. Estadísticas Estadísticas El almacenamiento o acceso técnico que es utilizado exclusivamente con fines estadísticos. El almacenamiento o acceso técnico que es utilizado exclusivamente con fines estadísticos anónimos. Sin una requerimiento, el cumplimiento voluntario por parte de su proveedor de servicios de Internet, o los registros adicionales de un tercero, la información almacenada o recuperada sólo para este propósito no se puede utilizar para identificarlo. Marketing Marketing El almacenamiento o acceso técnico es necesario para crear perfiles de usuario para enviar publicidad, o para rastrear al usuario SEO en México que lleva tu sitio al 1 de Google un sitio web o en varios sitios web con fines de marketing similares.

These are just objectively better screens than anything I have in the game right now. For most indiedevs improvements like this one are going to give you much more bang for your buck than anything related to marketing. You should think of marketing as a multiplier on a game’s base quality. If the base quality level is high, then optimizing for marketing is the thing to do that makes the most sense. But very few indiedevs are making games of high base quality, and so that’s not the thing they should focus on. I’m definitely not making games of high base quality, as SNKRX just looks like garbage, and most games I’ll release in the near future will similarly also look like garbage. So I really don’t need to worry about marketing that much because there are much more solid gains to be had elsewhere. The reason the gifs above look objectively better than the UI I have going on in the game now is because they just are composed better.

In my opinion, easily the best thing indiedevs can do to improve the quality of their games is to learn to become more attuned to how well a screen is composed. It’s very hard for me to pinpoint exactly what makes a screen well composed, but generally they’re just better balanced. It has little to do with the quality of each individual asset. You can have games with assets that look amazing but that are composed poorly, or you can have a game with very simple looking assets but that are composed well. But the main thing about screen composition is that a well composed screen will pass most people’s visual quality filter at a glance. If you look at a screenshot/frame of a game for 1-2 seconds, you can already tell if you think it looks good or not. That’s mostly about the screen’s composition. So improving this skill has obvious ramifications to how well your marketing efforts will do, since if the game passes more people’s filters, they will be more likely to share it and so the game is more likely to get a better response whenever you post it online.

Let’s look at a few examples. Below there will be 7 images of 7 different games. All you have to do is look at the images for a few seconds and try to get a sense of which ones look the best and which ones look the worst. Done? Try ranking the images now. 3rd… etc. I’ll give you some space to not bias your ranking, so scroll down once you’re done. 6th. Meaning, 3rd and 6th images are the worst, while 5th and 7th are the best. I would guess that for most people at least these extremes would be similar, while the middle might have more variation. Why exactly are 5th and 7th so much better than all the others? It’s just better art, but it’s not only better art, the art is composed properly on the screen. For instance, the 4th image has very simple looking art, yet it’s better than the others because everything comes together properly on the screen.

1st and 2nd images are the types of games that really don’t pass for me, despite individual assets actually not looking that bad. All of this to say that improving this skill, especially as a programmer, is going to be much more valuable than anything else. I have very little artistic talent, but I can still attune myself to this somewhat and this attunement will yield results whenever I have to compose screens of my own, even though because I’m not really an artist the results will still be subpar and easily made better by someone who’s actually skilled (as the UI example shows). And this is not the only skill you can improve that will yield high results. The speed of your development, all techniques involving juicing things up, learning how to find/pick/create good sounds, etc. Knowing this, that there are so many avenues of improvement available and that they will all yield much better results than focusing at all on marketing, the thing that makes the most sense to do is to choose a strategy that will help you increase these gamedev skills rather than one which optimizes marketing.