Arevan is OUT!
Ah sorry for late posting…I couldn’t manage time since Arevan’s release yesterday. Check it out-
Finally, delivered the baby (read Arevan)! Whew! Haven’t slept for ages…feel like going into the ‘hibernation’ mode or sleep for a century! The phase-based testing was a success! Caught all the major bugs…bugs kept cropping up at each phase. In fact the testing stretched to 4 phases and I would like to thank all my testers who did an AWESOME JOB! I’m so happy to have found them ^_^
Also I need to get the official strategy guide done in two weeks because I promised to do so. You must have noticed that I also changed the looks of my site. Well after my web designers ditched me 
, I had to take up things in my own hand. And I’m glad that I did because I would have never realized that a little bit of tweak here and there can completely change the overall look (saved me money). Bought some images from Vectorstock, did some mixing and matching in photoshop and Voila! I hope you like the new layout <3
Now comes the most difficult part after releasing the game- Marketing. Fortunately I did chalked out a plan of action long before the game was about to release. I’d like to share it-
- 1) Primary release on my site, Amanda’s and Indinera’s.
- 2) Press Releases to be sent to Gamepress and 7 game PR sites which I digged from the net. I have also signed up with Juuso’s PR service which shoots PRs to 173 game or game related sites.
- 3) Game submission to other websites (not portals or publishers). I’ve searched a lot on the internet and short listed 121 such games sites. These sites are similar to our sites, they sell different types of games as affiliates.
- 4) Game submission to Software sites through either softwaresubmit.net or manually (I discovered another list of 659 such shareware sites who accept softwares . e.g. Softpedia, Cnet, etc).
- 5) Submission for game review sites (I know only 17 of them, the list is increasing). The reason I listed it towards the end is because by this time the remaining bugs , if any, would have been fixed and the verdict of the games success will be already felt by then. So the reviews by those sites would be positive if the game did well with the players.
- 6) Submission of game to publishers. Again I researched a lot and found game submission forms and pages from various publishers. Reasons for opting for publishers at the end is same as for review sites. So far I discovered around 30-35 such publishers/distributors/portals.
After Arevan was released, I discovered another major tasks that Indie devs might face with their softwares- white listing their software on antivirus companies. Yeah, that’s because many customers complained that they could not download or run the program as Norton blocked it (in spite of the fact that my game is DRM free). So chatted up with the Symantec guys, they gave this link to submit softwares, so that it gets into their white list. Amanda also gave another. Here are they if you need it for you software-
https://submit.symantec.com/whitelist/new.cgi
https://submit.symantec.com/dispute/false_positive/
https://submit.symantec.com/websubmit/retail.cgi
They guys usually take 3 weeks to check and create a new update for the antivirus. Then once the users updates his antivirus, the white listed info gets updated on their system. I wish I knew that before, then would have submitted the game long before it was released. But it’s never too late 
Any way, I was thinking of making my forum look like my website. And paid EPworks for that. But they haven’t responded yet… I hope I won’t get ditched again 
Ah…I can’t imagine I’ve become so pessimistic and whiny . Let’s forget it, there’s tons of tasks ahead that needs to be done. Thats all for today, folks 
