Or “How I tried to get people to play a free flash game on zero budget.”

I make no claims to be a marketing expert. And I’ve seen similar blog posts to this by people who are unquestionably better at it than I am, and have had better results. But I thought it might prove useful to someone (possibly even just myself, for next time!) even if just as a “what not to do” piece.

Tealy & Orangey, as you probably know (and if not, why on earth haven’t you played it yet?) is a puzzle platform game. Though art-wise it’s pretty basic, I think the gameplay hook of controlling two avatars simultaneously is fairly rare, and well implemented. Usually people who play it have enjoyed it. So, the challenge as I saw it was trying to persuade people to just give it a go. There are so many free flash games floating around the internet, how do you persuade people that this particular link is worth spending a few minutes exploring?

My strategy for achieving this was roughly split into two parts:

1. Get gamers to play it and mention it to other gamers.
2. Get people that gamers listen to to play it, and mention it to gamers.

As far as that goes, I think it’s a pretty sensible tactic. Part 1 is generally building a buzz myself. Part 2 is trying to get websites to feature it.

Let’s start with part 1.

The first thing I did was go on to the Kongregate chat rooms and start mentioning my game. Kongregate has a load of rooms that players are logged in to randomly (as far as I can tell) whenever they are playing a game on the site. I’m sure some go there for pure socialising. As soon as I first uploaded T&O I went on to some of these and asked the players there if they’d like to give my game a go. I think key to this was that Kongregate is full of players, not creators. To them, talking to an actual game developer is still something of a special experience, and their words still hold some weight. I was very up-front about it being my game, and very chatty with anyone who played it.

There are a lot of games uploaded to Kongregate, of all levels of quality. Many get less than a thousand plays. I figured that if i could quickly increase my play numbers, while still being on the first page of “new games” I would stand a chance of people checking the game out just on the basis that it seemed to be relatively popular – and thus feed back into a positive loop.

It’s difficult to know how successful this was, mainly because I was doing other pimping of the game at the time so I don’t know where the traffic was coming from. I know it didn’t take much of my time or effort though, so I could it as being not a total waste of time.

At the same time I was doing this, I was also hammering my Twitter followers with advertising. The first tweet mentioning the game was this:

Anyone want to try out my new flash game? Tealy & Orangey http://bit.ly/fPgNf4 #tealyorangey (please rt)

Two interesting things about this tweet. One, the bit.ly link goes to the version of the game n my own site. At the time I was advertising two links – one on my site, and one on Kongregate. I really should have been focussing on spreading just one link. Two, it was the first use of the hashtag.

I’d had the idea of putting that on the first screen of the game after watching a bit of television. I’d noticed a few programmes now were displaying either their twitter name, or a hashtag for the show, after the credits. I guess the idea is that then there is much less chance of people inventing their own hashtags, and fragmenting the conversation. I thought there was really nothing to lose in this approach.

In practice I have had a reasonable number of players use it, which has enabled me to find them and engage them. So I can recommend it from that point of view.

I have made a point to reply to every comment I’ve received about T&O, on Twitter, in email, and on Kongregate. This seems to be quite unusual, judging by the reaction to it, and it’s entirely possible that with a more popular game it would be impossible. I should have mentioned, but before releasing the game I’d done a quick Google, and made sure to pick a name that had no results (there were some for “Tealy” and “Orangey” by themselves, but nothing combined). This meant that I could set up a Google Alert to be told whenever my game was mentioned on a site, and could then go and post a quick “thanks for playing” message.

At this point I was retweeting pretty much all of the positive comments I saw. I guessed that this could help persuade my followers that the link is worth following, though there was also some risk of annoying people by flooding their feed with myself. I was quite worried about that second point. Since then I’ve discovered that, not only did I not lose any followers during this period (Qwitter is a useful tool), but also that there were people who followed me that still hadn’t read a single tweet about the game 24 hours later!

I also started trying to work on part 2 around this time. My initial attempts were finding journalists and other website writers, and tweeting them directly with a message politely asking if they’d like to try my game. Something along the lines of:

hey, was wondering if you would check out my game Tealy & Orangey, I think you might like it. http://bit.ly/glAeql thanks!

I was (and am still) working on my patter. I don’t think I’ve yet found the perfect 140 character message to build a reader’s excitement and curiosity. I attempt to personalise each message to the target – if the journalist in question is a writer for an indie-themed site, then I was sure to play up that site. If they wrote for a mainstream site, then mention that I know they don’t always feature indie games, but perhaps they’d like to get behind this one. I think I was probably too polite here – “I think you will like it”, “you may like it” etc. rather than “I know you’ll enjoy it”.

Simultaneously I was emailing similar messages. These had a bit more detail about what they could expect from the game, my background (I decided to play up that I was a professional designer who had made this in his spare time. I thought that there was some chance this line would instill some confidence that the game was going to be of some quality), a few links to screenshots, etc. Still linking to both my site, and Kongregate.

I will say at this point that I am fairly sure that those “send us a tip” email addresses that several sites and blogs have go completely unread. The only successes I had were from either the direct tweets, or when I emailed the journalists that work for the sites directly. In the future I will be ignoring those email addresses, in favour of the personalised messages.

I had some success with all of this, and the game got some decent quotes. I included some of these in the next round of emails I sent out, again in the hope that they would lend some weight to my claims that the game was worth people’s time.

This has pretty much been my entire approach to creating a buzz around Tealy & Orangey, and still is today. I have been working on a big update that adds a new game mode and levels, to give players who have completed it a reason to come back and play again. When that hits I’ll no doubt do the same rounds of emails in the hope of getting a bit more exposure.

So, to summarise:

• Give the game a very Googleable name, and set up a Google Alert.
• Talk to as many people as possible about the game.
• Encourage those people to tell their contacts about it as well.
• Use any positive quotes or press in future messages, to give them more weight.
• Communicate with the game’s players and reviewers, be nice to them.
• Communicate with journalists and other spokespeople directly, don’t use generic email addresses.
• Find the magic combination of words that will ensure everyone who reads it tries the game. (Still working on this one!)

From an interview with Team Ninja on Eurogamer:

Is [Dead or Alive] as relevant today as it was five years ago?

This is a pretty strange question to me. Especially so since I recently saw someone state that Duke Nukem Forever wouldn’t sell because it was not relevant.

I’m just not sure in what sort of context the word is being used. What, or who, are these games meant to be relevant to? The only similar use I’ve experienced before was “culturally relevant”, but clearly in the case of both Dead or Alive and previous Duke games this isn’t what people mean – they’ve never been that.

So I’m just not sure what is going on here. If someone could let me know how Dead or Alive was relevant five years ago, I’d appreciate it. Until then I’ll just assume it’s people using words that do not mean what they think they mean, in an attempt to make their opinions sound more critically relevant.

(Ps: This is the first post I’m writing from my new Macbook Air, so any errors in it I’m going to blame on that, okay?)

Just before Christmas I had started playing Alpha Protocol, and after playing through a handful of levels wrote up a fairly comprehensive list of what I thought was wrong with it.

This evening I’ve just completed the game, after what must be well over 24 hours of game time.

So, I feel like I owe the game something of an apology. Once you know what’s going on, and what you’re doing, it becomes a “not the worst” third person shooter (it’s more fun as a shooter than Wanted: Weapons of Fate, for example, and that’s nothing but a shooter) with a decent story and very compelling role playing elements.

In my case, finding out what was going on boiled down to not trying to sneak all the time, and tooling myself up with an assault rifle and body armour. I’ve since learnt that I pretty much screwed myself right at the start by choosing the one option that gives you no skill points to begin with. Obviously letting me do that without adequate warning could be considered by many (including myself) as a failing of the game.

And even with this new approach it still took until the end of the extended tutorial sequence – hint to other players, until you leave the middle east, you’re still in the beginning of the game – before I was able to start tooling up properly.

But the thing is, I’ve looked at some guides since completing it, and the amount of give and take in the story for the player’s actions is staggering. I haven’t played another RPG that made me feel like I was choosing how events played out to this degree.

There are probably around a dozen characters, some very major, who you can choose to kill or spare, and your choices will be dealt with intelligently by the game (and other characters) right up until the very end. Depending on your actions, who likes you, who hates you, and what information you discover along the way, you can talk enemies in to being friends or persuade them that your enemy is also their enemy.

People will hate you and storm off to later be killed. People will make last minute escapes to later stand in your way. You’ll choose between yourself, your country, and the people who say they stand for your country (but might not. But maybe their interests will also match your interests).

And at no time does the dialogue ever feel like it’s contradicting itself, or that characters have forgotten your actions a couple of missions ago.

But it doesn’t half make you work hard to get this cool stuff.

So yeah, I’m sort of sorry for slagging Alpha Protocol off so much, but it goaded me in to it.

And I wouldn’t necessarily suggest that anyone actually puts the time in to finish it, when you could be playing other, better, games.

And I do still stand by what I wrote.

Um … sorry.

Can you spot the point on my Google Analytics visitor graph when b3ta linked to Tealy & Orangey?

Go on, give it a go.

(Hello b3tans.)

Well, I said I would write this blog post, but to be honest I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to put in it. It’s going to be something of a “the story behind”, and something of a postmortem. On a game that I have just spent 2 hours working on tonight, so isn’t actually in the ground yet.

Still, it might be of benefit to some aspiring game dev somewhere, so let’s start at the beginning, I guess.

Very slightly under two months ago I spent an evening learning Flash and the Flixel library written by Adam Atomic (of Canabalt fame). It was the usual momentary spurt of wanting to learn something new, combined with wanting a fast prototyping tool. XNA is nice and fairly straight forward, but I still find it a bit too much to get a simple game running.

Flixel, as I mentioned earlier, is fantastic for prototyping and other quick 2D game development.

In the time after that, I spent the odd hour here and there making a sort of re-imagining of one of my favourite games of the Amiga era, Cannon Fodder. For some reason nobody has made a modern “one man RTS” (I guess maybe League of Legends and the like are similar, but always with the elves and orcs!).

So I was plodding on with a few hours of progress here and there. I got to the point of having a map, enemies, various weapons, and a lot of the core elements in place, when it because Christmas.

Actually that’s a lie, just before Christmas the usual deluge of good games came out, and distracted me from doing any development for a while.

After Christmas I was wanting to get back in to it, but it had been just enough time that I had gotten a little rusty. And to be honest, I was getting a little fatigued by not having much of a whole game to show.

Lesson 1: When people say “start small”, listen to those people. They are clever and I am an idiot.

So I wanted a small game idea that I could get together into something to release. I don’t usually tell people my New Year resolutions, because I think it’s a bit naff, but I had been very annoyed at myself last year for starting a few games and not finishing them. This year I had told myself I was going to release something, and something I could be proud of.

But I needed an idea.

I had the idea of a platform game. I really like the theory of games like Super Meat Boy, N+, and VVVVVV. I say the theory, because I’m absolutely awful at them. Just don’t have the skill or reactions at all. But what if I was to make one, I could make it with levels that I could do. That would work.

Lesson 2: Make something that you really want to play. Because you’ll be seeing a lot of it, and later on you’ll have to tell people why it’s absolutely brilliant.

But there are a lot of games like that out there. I’m sure there are other people like me thinking of making a new one. I’d need a hook. To be entirely honest, I can’t remember what clicked the idea of Tealy & Orangey in to place. I just remember visualising the horizontal split, the two colours, and then later levels with holes in the floor.

(Actually, I’m going to edit myself here. I have just remembered that for whatever reason, a PS2 game called Kuri Kuri Mix – The Adventures of Cookie & Cream in some territories – had been floating around in to my head. Looking back, this must have been the inspiration to some degree, as it was a game that could be played by a single player who would have to move two characters. You had different controls for each, but it’s too similar to not have been an influence on my line of thought.)

At this point the game was in black & white in my head. It’s a simple colour scheme that lets you get away with a lot in terms of not having a lot of detail in the art (I am no artist). The problem, I was thinking, was Limbo. And the Misadventures of P.B. Winterbottom. And probably a load of other really nice looking greyscale games. Frankly, it’s been done, and it’s been done a lot better than I would be able to do it.

I needed another colour scheme, of two striking colours. I have no idea why it popped in to my head, but I suddenly thought of the “Hollywood loves teal & orange too damn much” rants from last year. Teal and Orange. It would even add an extra level of reference that would make players feel “in the know” if they get it. Unbelievably, this seems to have worked.

Lesson 3: People feel connected to a game if there is an “in joke” they get. Just make sure those that don’t get the joke aren’t excluded. Or think that the joke is about testicles.

Looking at my Workflowy list for Tealy & Orangey (sorry, you do use Workflowy, don’t you? Because it’s awesome and you should) I see what ended up being a fairly faithful description of the finished game:

• Teal & Orange
• Simple platformer
• 8 x 8 graphics
• player controls a teal block and an orange block
• controls are mirrored for blocks – teal going left makes orange go right
• hazards in orange or teal, only affected by like-coloured hazards
• levels start out seperated, end up crossing over

Did you notice the odd one out?

Originally you where currently in control of just one of the avatars. I think I was going to put a particle effect (similar to the trails they have in the current version) on the one you were moving. The other one would mirror your left / right controls.

To anyone who says the game is confusing now, oh boy, you should have played this version. In a level with static hazards you pretty much had to creep forward, or rely on muscle memory mapping out the route for you. It was suitably strange and unique, but absolutely no fun to me. So, it had to go. Who knows, maybe I’ll bring it back as an “insane difficulty” mode.

Lesson 4: If it doesn’t feel like it’s going to feel right once you’ve tweaked it and fixed the bugs, scrap it. Hey, if it turns out to be a great idea after all you can always re-code it.

Actually, there’s other stuff in my Workflowy list as well. “Moving platforms?” is another that I will refer you back to lesson 4. The collision wasn’t working very well, they were a little bit unpredictable, and the feedback I’d had about them matched my own gut feeling that they were another moving element that just complicated things. Fixing the collision would have been a couple of hours work, and they might still have been rubbish. Reworking the levels that used them was about an hour’s work, and would lower the feature set.

It was an easy choice to make.

The next one says “hidden stuff in levels?” This was because of a creeping feeling that I had that people would find just platforming a bit boring, and that the difficulty could be a turn off. Having bonus stuff to collect would allow for optional harder challenges for players to do, while keeping the main progression fairly easy. The problem was “what would you collect?” I mean, the game’s not Braid, there’s no story behind it. Stars or something? It just seemed very arbitrary, and I wasn’t totally sold on the idea.

Especially since I had set my mind on having all the levels be single screens (I didn’t want to run the chance of having one of the two avatars not visible), and even with 8×8 tiled graphics there is a limit to how much puzzle space you can fit in for entirely optional routes.

A lot of these issues were resolved in my head when I had a few close friends play the game. Now, this can be tricky. Depending on how good they are as friends, and how well they know games, you do run the risk that your friends might say a bad game is good to be nice to you. Or worse, they might genuinely think a bad game is good, and lead you down the wrong path.

Thankfully these people are very close friends, so I knew they would feel comfortable telling me if my game was bobbins. On the other point … I trust their judgement as much as I would trust anybody’s. At the end of the day, people have different tastes so you can’t act on every piece of feedback. But you should take it all in with an open mind.

Lesson 5: Get some playtest with people you trust to be truthful. Listen to everything they say (but don’t feel you have to do it, because it’s your game. And if you can’t make exactly the indie game you want to, what’s the point).

After a few iterations of this over subsequent evenings, I was feeling good about the game. I had a suspicion it was doing something fairly new (at least, I couldn’t bring to mind a similar game at the time). There was a problem though – as well as not being an artist, I’m also not an audio engineer. I had no idea what sort of music or sound effects I wanted for the game, what would suit it, or where I would get those things without paying (it’s a game I was releasing for free, I wasn’t going to pay someone else for some assets for it).

I knew that if I held off releasing until I had audio, I would be spending the time tinkering. Maybe making the game better, maybe making it worse. It’s hard to tell.

In the end, I decided to go for an initial launch with no audio at all. Surprisingly, almost nobody seems to care. I’m not sure if people play flash games with the audio off (because they’re in offices, or schools), if they thought it was a stylistic choice, or if they were just glad that I hadn’t put ear-piercing techno or heavy metal in there (unlike 99% of flash games). One way or another it didn’t matter to them, and I’ve only had very few comments about it.

Lesson 6: You can release a little indie game with no audio and people will not care. (Also expensive HDMI cables do not improve audio quality.)

Right, I have a feeling I should start wrapping up this monster post. I’m going to talk about how I attempted to promote the thing in a separate update, but here are a couple more lessons I have learned over the last week and a half (oh yeah, did I mention it was made in seven days worth of evenings? I mean, I’m no Mike Bithell, but that’s still not too shabby).

Lesson 7: Don’t release your game right at the end of the day, when you’re tired and about to go to bed. Or get some energy drinks in.

You need to hang around and promote it a bit while it’s still on the first page of “new releases”. You need to fill in submission forms, and make a little icon. You need to do things that are better when you’re awake. You idiot.

Lesson 8: Update. Put right what once went wrong.

This is probably a bit of a crossover with the marketing post, but the benefit of releasing a game in a fairly “bare bones” initial state is that there is a lot you can add later. On your own site or Kongregate, you can upload new versions to your heart’s content. And people will love that you are supporting the game and making it better. Really. I know, it sounds almost counter-intuitive, like the audio thing.

Ok, that’s all for today. I think the experience of putting Tealy & Orangey together has taught me a fair amount, and hopefully some of you have found this useful too.

Remember, you can play Tealy & Orangey on Kongregate, or on this site.

When you make a game you never quite know what the reception is going to be. I had been working on Tealy & Orangey (from now on I’m just going to write that as T&O, okay?) for a couple of days and had it in a basic state, with just half a dozen levels, before I showed it to a group of friends.

They were pretty enthusiastic about it, which was nice. I mean, it helps to know you’re not completely insane and working on something that is absolute garbage, while thinking it’s amazing. Still, even then it’s impossible to know how people in general are going to take to something.

I released T&O at almost midnight on Monday. It had reached a state I was very happy with, and I thought if I held on to it any longer I would hit a stage of endless tweaking and introspection, and probably always be a little too put off to get it out there.

It turns out, people generally like it. Phew!

I’m going to do a follow-up post in a couple of days about the approach I have taken to getting the word out there about T&O. I’ve read other, similar, posts by devs before, but I don’t think another data point can hurt. And it’s nice to have something sort of interesting to talk about.

Oh yeah, does anyone have any idea why Fraps has stopped recording for me? It used to work, but now I can only get it to record my full desktop, not focus on a window. It’s very annoying, I was hoping to get some playthrough videos created for levels that people commonly get stuck on.

Remember, you can play T&O on Kongregate. I’d also really appreciate you rating it if you have an account there.

Anyway, on to my highlights of the T&O press…

Rock, Paper, Shotgun

It’s neat. You should try it.

Thumb Culture

What it does, it does very well. Its execution is almost flawless, the jumping feels right, and the intelligent level design allows the mechanics to thrive.

9/10

IndieGames

An enjoyable way to fill ten minutes of your time.

DIY Gamer

Every now and then I’ll come across a browser game that I really enjoy, typically in some fashion that creates a unique sort of gameplay.

And, saving the best ’till last, this tweet.

Hello! Sorry I have been quiet for the last week, only I was struck with an idea and was sort of overtaken with the need to put it in to practice.

I would like to introduce you to Tealy & Orangey.

It’s a puzzle platform game that also requires some sharp reflexes at times. You control two coloured blobs – Tealy & Orangey, in case you hadn’t worked it out – and have to get them both to their end of level markers at the same time.

Sounds easy enough, and it does start out that way, but before long there are things getting in your way.

To be honest, it’d be easier if you just went and played it.

If you have any comments about the game I’d love to hear them, so please leave something in the comments at the bottom of this article.

I’m also planning on writing a (very short) post about the development of the game, as it has had a few changes in the seven days it’s taken.

I hope you enjoy it!

At last! We have reached the final two answers, including the mysterious “wildcard” prediction, where our competitors get to come up with whatever they please, in the hope of winning big points.

14) The UK Christmas all format top five.
(1 point per game in the chart, 1 bonus points per game in the right position.)

Daniel Lim

1. Call of Duty 7
2. FIFA 12
3. Assassin’s Creed 3
4. Need for Speed
5. Just Dance 3

James Parker

Call of Duty: The New Class,
Need for Speed: Angry Skidmarks,
Just Dance: Morrissey,
Super Mario 3DS,
Elbows McGinty and the Free Lunch

Jeremy Johnston

a. Uncharted 3
b. Pokemon Black/White
c. Gears of Wars 3
d. Mario Sports Mix
e. Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

Ross Mansfield

CoD 7
Gears of War 3
Forza 4
A Mario-based 3DS title
Something to do with dancing or exercising in front of your TV

Steve Bromley

a. COD 7
b. Football Manager
c. Sims – Some crappy christmas addon pack
d. Fifa
e. Just Dance 3

Teck Lee Tan

1. COD7
2. Diablo 3
3. Mario something or other
4. Ass Creed something
5. Half-Life 3 (:p)

Tony Gowland

a. Call of Duty: Michael Bay edition.
b. Fifa 12
c. Need for Speed: Cruise Control
d. Mass Effect 3
e. Uncharted 3

Warren Merrifield

1 CoD
2 Need for Speed: Whatever
3 FIFA 12
4 Star Wars Kinect
5 Mario Kart 3DS
(I want to put Batman:Arkham City in there too, but I fear that it will have run out of steam by Xmas)
I’m presuming that the App Store doesn’t count for this, but if it’s worth a bonus point, I reckon the #1 selling game on the App Store at Christmas will outsell (in units, at least) the #1 game in this chart.

A lot of the “usual suspects” making up those charts, though that is to be expected – the UK Christmas charts haven’t changed much in years, with parents and grannies buying the latest in well-trodden franchises as presents.

“Angry Skidmarks” would be a good name for a game, though. Maybe if someone wanted to make a modern-day take on Supercars 2.

15) Bonus wildcard prediction – make your own.
(1-10 points awarded depending on unlikeliness and accuracy of your prediction)

Daniel Lim

Motion controls will die an absolute death. Sales of Wii, Move and Kinect will all bottom out, causing Nintendo to hastily announce a new console (Wii HD?) to try and spur sales on. Microsoft will announce they’re new console earlier than expected and Sony will be scrambling to keep up.
(Can you tell I’m going for all 10 points? )

James Parker

None of the games in my top five will be released in the year, but one of them will still chart according to MCV.

Jeremy Johnston

Harmonix will be bought by Activision who will downsize them, then no longer have them work on Rock Band (except DLC song content) OR Guitar Hero but announce a different version or sequel to Dance Central.

Ross Mansfield

Duke Nukem Forever – Turns out to be average at best, Metacritic 79

Steve Bromley

New Jazz Jackrabbit game announced for Mobile devices Late 2011!

Teck Lee Tan

Respawn defies expectation and push out a blockbuster by year-end 2011 – a Fantasy RTS.

Tony Gowland

Nintendo announce a new version of the Wii this year, called the WiiThriiDii, which is essentially two Wiis velcro’ed together in a way that lets you play any existing Wii games in 3d by using two normal TVs and some special glasses.

Warren Merrifield

Nothing too wild, but I reckon there will be a firmware upgrade to the new AppleTV (in July or Sept.) that will let people “airplay” certain games installed on their iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch on their big screen TV, with the handheld acting as a dedicated touch and/or accelerometer controller. I think it will start to make headway in the market fairly slowly (faster in the US, of course) and will start taking the Wii’s lunch money at first. But App Store sales won’t be captured by ChartTrack and reviews won’t be really Metacritic-ed so it will be hard to compare on a like-for-like basis.
The first month sales for the 3DS & PSP2 will both be eclipsed by the first month totals of the new iOS devices.

And with that, we have all of the predictions laid out. All that remains now is to sit and wait for some (or none, but that would be bad) of it to happen.

Who do you think is most likely to come out tops over the course of the year?

Please insert generic introductory banter here.

11) A big IP that is expected to shift millions, but that struggles to make an impression, causing hastily re-written earning predictions.
(1 point if you get the IP, 1 point if you guess one of the major issues that reviews pick up on)

Daniel Lim

Devil May Cry from Ninja Theory. Reviews will complain about the new Dante’s character/look and also suggest that the new direction has lost too much of what makes a Devil May Cry game a Devil May Cry game.

James Parker

Rage – Impressive technology but lacklustre gameplay.

Jeremy Johnston

Deus Ex 3 and many reviews will claim that it’s easy to see that this game didn’t have either Warren Spector or Harvey Smith attached. If that isn’t expected to do that well already, then I choose Killzone 3 because “it didn’t bring anything new to the table”.

Ross Mansfield

The Sims Medieval – Mismatched target demographic.

Steve Bromley

Rage by ID, Driving sections feel tacked on.

Teck Lee Tan

Tomb Raider

Tony Gowland

I am going to plump for the 3DS versions of Nintendogs and Cats. Based on the series’ previous sales it will be expected to do well, but the 3DS won’t sell as strongly to that casual audience. Reviewers will say it’s just a retread of the previous ones, but in 3d.

Another wide range of predictions, with only id’s Rage getting more than one vote. Two different Square Enix / Eidos titles as well (and two that I’m personally hoping are great!), which will certainly be interesting given their recent woes with Final Fantasy getting quite the level of acclaim they had wanted.

As in an earlier question, I have got an answer from Warren, but he wanted me to keep a lid on it for “scary men in suits with briefcases threatening to ensure you never work in this town again, kid” reasons.

12) Launch of Sony’s next handheld (either PSP-based or phone-based) – price at launch and month of launch in first territory.
(1 point for price, one point for month)

Daniel Lim

September 2011 – ¥29,800 (Japan will be first)

Jeremy Johnston

Not coming out until April 2013, will cost 279.99 at retail.

Ross Mansfield

£149.99 – October 2011.

Steve Bromley

US$199, Oct 2011.

Teck Lee Tan

PSP Phone, December, Japan, 24000JPY

Tony Gowland

November 2011, £250

Warren Merrifield

It’s got to be loosely comparable with an iPhone/iPod Touch if Sony were sensible, but they clearly aren’t. So let’s say a base price of $299 (probably less if phone-based and bought on contract and more for higher capacity Flash storage.) Will they try and get out before the new Phone & Touch? Maybe in Japan, but miss it for the US/Europe. Let’s say Aug in JP, Oct US and early 2012 for EU.

Most guesses are plumping for the very end of the year, which I suppose makes sense for a system that might not exist, and hasn’t been announced in any way yet. What is quite clear is that I am going to have to do some currency conversion to work out who is the winner here. Boo.

13) Call of Duty 7 24 hour US & UK sell through in dollars (Black Ops was $360 million, for reference).
(Closest guess out of all competitors gets 3 points)

Daniel Lim

$420 million

James Parker

Will be less so unlikely to be publicised – but I’m going with $300m

Jeremy Johnston

346 Million

Ross Mansfield

$395 million

Steve Bromley

$395,621,000

Teck Lee Tan

$450m

Tony Gowland

Think the data for this might be hard to get, because I suspect t won’t actually do quite as well, so Activision won’t be shouting about it. Still, “not as well” is still relative in CoD terms, so $300 million.

Warren Merrifield

If Blops was 360, let’s call CoD a good round 500 (it will certainly be reported in the news as “half a billion dollars” at any rate.)

Three of the eight think that Call of Duty has hit its high note, whereas five think that greater sales are yet to come. I am kind of hoping that it does beat the previous record, otherwise I suspect it’s going to be very hard to come across the numbers in a way that doesn’t butcher them in to looking better.

Only two more questions to go, chums!

Now we move on to three predictions about announcements. Two targeted specifically at the mid-year E3 crazy festival, another that could happen at any moment. And also asked for a little bit more creative thinking from the contenders. Some of the movies they have invented have tempted me to stump up the funding myself.

8 ) A sequel that is announced at E3.
(1 point)

Daniel Lim

Bulletstorm 2

James Parker

Borderlands 2

Jeremy Johnston

Mirrors Edge 2

Ross Mansfield

Fallout 4

Steve Bromley

Medal of Honour 2

Teck Lee Tan

The Secret of Monkey Island: Episode 0. In which LucasArts decides to reboot our beloved adventure series as a survival horror game.
(or, RUSE 2)

Tony Gowland

A new Fallout by Bethesda.

Warren Merrifield

Oh, go on then. Half Life 3. And speaking personally, although it’s unlikely to happen, an iOS-based “Bully 2″ would be awesome.

I thought this one would be some easy points for the contenders, to make sure everyone is at least off the starting block by the summer, and they certainly haven’t disappointed. Everything mentioned sounds pretty believable (remember this is just the announcement, so even Valve confirming that they had rolled Episode 3 into a standalone new title would count, even if it took them another four years to bloody finish the thing).

9) A new IP that is announced at E3.
(Developer / publisher and rough concept. 1-5 points, depending on how closely you nail it)

Daniel Lim

Developer: Gearbox Software
Publisher: 2K Games
Concept: Modern/near-future tactical shooter set in big, free-roam world with at least 4P co-op.

James Parker

High Noon Rising – by Activision a Western FPS using the CoD Tech

Jeremy Johnston

A Motion Controlled Shooter published by EA involving a robotic human or android that slowly becomes aware that the dystopian society he lives in is not perfect and that the government is watching everywhere he turns.

Ross Mansfield

360 Exclusive Rally-based driving game – Microsoft Game Studios/Playground Games

Steve Bromley

Travellers Tales, Lego Twilight (Does this count as an IP?) If not… ermm.
EA, Some sort of Speedboat game!

Teck Lee Tan

Platinum/SEGA, One-liner-spouting badass with hybrid punk rock/goth fashion influences, able to bend time and space (so, slomo’s the world, but not himself; bamfing; black hole stuff), lands on earth and fucks shit up.

Tony Gowland

Ubisoft will announce some kind of naval game with the Tom Clancy name attached. I think that counts as a new IP? Sort of.
Failing that, Capcom will announce something that’s very similar to Prince of Persia in gameplay, but you play a bright human/cat/monkey thing with a prehensile tail and bright purple fur (Anime / Furry market a go-go).

Warren Merrifield

EA. Dunno dev though, although I dare say it will use the Unreal engine in some form. A 3rd person supernatural-action-RPG that’s “inspired” by all the Twilight-spin-off “Gothic Teen Romance” media movement in the same way that “Dante’s Inferno” was inspired by the poem Think an US take on Zelda with modern-urban-supernatural Uncharted or Tomb Raider style graphics and interaction.

Again, all very believable – is this a sign of how on the pulse our players are, or of how obvious we feel the games industry has become?

A couple of Twilight mentions as well – though I have to admit I think Warren’s Unreal-powered version sounds more entertaining. Think of how well rendered the glistening vampires could be

If I had to back one suggestion above all others I would actually go for James’ rather than my own. I hadn’t really thought about it, but after Red Dead’s performance this year, I could easily see Activision plopping a studio on to quickly getting a Western out there with their existing strong FPS engine.

10) Name a game IP that will be announced as a movie (nothing already announced). Pick some casting.
(1 point for IP, 1 point per correct cast announcement)

Daniel Lim

Mass Effect (just the main crew members otherwise this will get ridiculous!)
Tom Hardy – Shepard
Michael Jai White – Jacob
Olivia Wilde – Miranda
Cillian Murphy – Thane
Michael Clarke Duncan – Grunt
Natalie Portman – Jack
David Hyde Pierce – Mordin
Sigorney Weaver – Samara
Paul Bettany – Legion
Alan Rickman – Garrus
Marion Cotillard – Tali
Seth Green – Joker
Keith David – Captain Anderson
Martin Sheen – Illusive Man

James Parker

Assassin’s Creed – Sean Maher as Altair, Paul Ross as the Pope

Jeremy Johnston

Twisted Metal starring Sam Worthington and Mila Kunis, plus someone who was a minor character in Cowboys vs. Aliens but was relatively unknown before that.

Ross Mansfield

Dr. Kawashima’s Body and Brain Training
Dr Kawashima, Kevin Federline, Gary Busey, Dustin Diamond, Anne Diamond
It will be like Battle Royale crossed with Celebrity Fit Camp, Hosted by the sinister Dr Kawashima.

Steve Bromley

Uncharted Movie starring Brendan Fraiser, Danny Trejo and a CGI Marlon Brando.

Teck Lee Tan

Assassins Creed. Gerard Depardieu as Ezio’s dad. Marky Mark as Ezio (:P). Just kidding. David Belle as Ezio. Somehow, Hollywood will have Ezio meet Altair and do a buddy cop thing. Except Altair will be played by Eliza Dushku (what?)

Tony Gowland

Assassin’s Creed (Ubi have been testing the waters with their little animated shorts etc.) Featuring Nolan North as Altair & the modern day guy. Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as the main Templar baddie, and Simon Pegg as the Danny Wallace character. Robert Downy Junior will also be in it somewhere.

Warren Merrifield

I’d really like a Half Life movie with Hugh Laurie as Freeman, but I don’t think that would really happen. An animated Zelda maybe? I’ll say that they will use the VO artists for the US version, from Pokemon, so Veronica Taylor?

As I mentioned at the start of the post, I would definitely pay to see some of these come to the big screens – in particular Ross’ Dr Kawashima idea, which is pretty much genius.

Three different takes on an Assassin’s Creed movie as well. Clearly Ubi’s increasing trust in and expectation of that IP hasn’t gone un-noticed. I think I like Teck’s time-travelling buddy cop version best, and let’s face it – Hollywood never takes the background story straight from the games anyway, so it’s just as likely as a faithful “genetic memory” explanation.

But I’m sure you are just scrolling down to mention in the comments how the Uncharted movie has already been announced, and so Steve’s entry here is invalid. So it has, and so it is, sorry chap.