Read previous parts in our account of Hogrocket's rise here.
The three of us had just experienced the busiest nine months of our lives. We'd created our brand new games company, Hogrocket, and written the tech we'd need. We'd built our first game, Tiny Invaders, and we had finally reached the nerve-racking period of shipping it onto the App Store. In this article I will look at some of the launch activities that we undertook leading up to the day of launch itself.
Marketing plans
Shipping was particularly nerve jangling for us because of an unconventional launch strategy we had in place. From the very beginning of Hogrocket we had blogged and tweeted about ourselves as a company and the development process of making our first title but we had never given details on what Tiny Invaders actually was. We had even kept the name secret.
We hoped that the awesome community of fans and followers we had built would be excited to get hold of our first title because they had followed our journey. However, we knew that the rest of the marketplace would be an entirely different proposition. In comparison they would be fickle, impulsive and fleeting with their attention.
We had deduced, therefore, that should we get someone’s attention we needed to make the most out of the opportunity. Quite often that’s all you get from people: a first glance, then you can become secondary noise against a backdrop of constant new hotness on the internet. For many people we would only get one shot at a sale so our impact needed to be as big as possible to maximise our chance of getting it. At least, this was our theory, but we were sticking to it!
Testing, testing
At Hogrocket we’ve always been very inclusive with those who show a keen interest in supporting us. With our background at Bizarre we had a strong support network of industry friends, from developers to journalists, alongside our respective family and friends.
Having this support network was a fantastic resource for us in the final stages of Tiny Invaders' development, during which we used a brilliant web service, Testflight, to distribute builds of the game to them. We created questionnaires to get valuable qualitative data alongside quantitative analysis gathered using analytics tools from Flurry. This phase of development was really significant for us because it fostered a real sense of investment in Tiny Invaders from the participants. When people contribute to something it creates a will to see it succeed and we were very thankful (and fortunate) to have a pool of people from all corners of the industry wanting to support us and make a contribution.
Collectively this group helped us fine-tune many aspects of Tiny Invaders from design to bugs, App Store description, tutorials and many other facets, helping to give it as much chance of success as possible. We are indebted to this group and considered this an integral part of our launch.
Pitching to the press
Journalists are some of the busiest people I know and they are bombarded with hundreds of e-mails a day from developers like us wanting coverage. It’s therefore critical to make their job as easy as possible to maximise your chance of getting attention. Our way of approaching this was to compile a press-pack designed to show exactly what Tiny Invaders was in a simple and very visual manner. This pack included screenshots, additional artwork, a movie trailer and a presentation file outlining key points of the gameplay. We then hosted it on our own servers and linked to it in our introductory e-mails and press release.
It also pays to stand out from the crowd and figure out what differentiates you from the billion other developers vying for column inches. Again, it makes a journalist’s job easier if you have an interesting story already there to tell and exciting visuals to show.
The Hogrocket story involved us rising from the ashes of Bizarre where we had lost our jobs at the hands of Activision. See, it has a hero and villain and everything! But let me assure you there wasn't anything cynical on our part in recognising this. It wasn’t a pleasant period for us to go through by any stretch and we were (and still are) trying our damnedest to turn Bizarre's fall from the worst thing that could happen to us to the very best - by creating our own studio and making a successful game. I think many of our community are really behind this spirit we have Hogrocket, which is fantastic.
As for the interesting visuals, we had screenshots from the game which looked great but in addition we commissioned our amazing artists, Ben Wright and Will Milton, to create a special piece of promo art depicting Tiny Invaders in a classic B-movie style movie poster, I absolutely adore what they created for us here:
We also pulled in a favour from our supremely talented ex-Bizarre colleague Eamon Urtone (famed for his PGR promo videos) to put together a trailer for us:
We bundled these two items into the aforementioned press pack. Publishing the trailer on YouTube then linking to it in our e-mails also gave anyone clicking them something to watch if they didn’t fancy reading anything. We then contacted as many members of the press as we could with our pitch!