Game Production

How To Get Your Game Noticed

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HowToGetYourGameNoticed

About two weeks ago, I went to my old University (Universidad Simon Bolivar in Caracas, Venezuela) to give a talk to the student association called DELU USB. This student group’s purpose is to meet other poepl who want to develop games and learn together. They asked me if I could give a talk on any topic I wanted, so I suggested Template Metaprogramming in C++ and How to Contact The Press to increase awareness of their game. Because not everyone in the association is a programmer, I decided to give a talk on the latter. Since I believe the topic and information to be useful and easy to understand, I decided to translate it to English and make a video of myself giving the talk to post it on YouTube. I also have plans to record myself giving the same talk in Spanish, for those who are interested. Here’s the video of the talk in English. Enjoy!

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Tips when planning a Kickstarter campaign

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As I approach the launch of my first Kickstarter campaign, I have a few tips I thought I’d share that should be taken into consideration when planning your own campaign. I will consider making a part two for this post after the campaign is over with everything I learned from it. These are things that I may have known before I started the campaign, but either overlooked or underestimated the time it would take to get them done. This is intended to be a short post, as I am getting ready for a very long trip (30+ hours of travel!) and I’m only a few days away from my campaign’s launch, so pretty busy at the moment!

Anyway, here are the tips:

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Kickstarter Planning – Part 2

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KickstarterPlanning_Part2
This is the second part in the Kickstarter Planning series. To read the first part, just visit this link: Kickstarter Planning – Part 1

It’s been two weeks since I posted the first part of this series and I have done a lot of work towards my Kickstarter campaign, which has taken time away from updating the website. I apologize for that. There are still a lot of things I have learned over the past month that I want to share, but I figured I should first finish the section about Lobster’s guide. For reference, I will post the link again below:

A Lobster’s Guide for Video Game Projects on Kickstarter

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Kickstarter Tool – Rewards Planner

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As a follow up to my previous post (Kickstarter Tool – Goal Calculator), this is the second tool I created and used while planning my Kickstarter campaign. I wanted a quick and easy way of organizing my rewards and plan my tiers while assessing costs and actual value of the items in each tier. The idea is to have costs that are within the project’s budget while also giving people items that have a higher value than the actual pledge. Here’s an example of what the tool looks like:

Kickstarter Rewards Planner

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Kickstarter Tool – Goal Calculator

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While planning my Kickstarter campaign, I have been creating “Tools”, mostly on spreadsheets, to do some necessary number-crunching. I will be posting all these tools as I make a prettier, more generalized version, of them. The first one I decided to clean up a bit was the one I used to calculate what my project’s goal should be, taking into account Kickstarter and Amazon payment fees, taxes, etc. Here’s what the tool looks like:

Kickstarter Goal Calculator

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Kickstarter Planning – Part 1

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There are a lot of things I wanted to talk about first, but as I said in my Introduction Post, I will talk about the projects I’m currently working on.

“I will give a step-by-step explanation of everything I will do to plan my KS campaign”

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So what have I been up to these past couple of days? Planning a Kickstarter campaign. I’ve heard a lot about Kickstarter (KS from now on) success stories which are super motivating and made me want to go down this path to fund my new project, SUPER III. Problem is, I’ve heard even more horror stories that happen when people don’t have a good KS plan, so I want to write a series here where I will give a step-by-step explanation of everything I will do to plan my KS campaign and either reach our funding goal or fall short. In both cases, keeping a detailed guide of what I did will be extremely insightful when pursuing your own campaign in the future, either by learning from my mistakes or by using my campaign preparation as a guideline for yours.

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Topics I want to cover

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As promised, here’s a list of topics I’ve been meaning to cover throughout the life of this blog. I will probably talk about other things not listed, but what is here should give you a general idea of the direction I want to take this blog into.

  • Production Methodologies (Agile/Scrum, Waterfall)
  • Books I’ve read or will read about programming, production, leadership, personal growth, etc.
  • Reviews/Recommendations of videos you should watch from these sites: GDCVault, TED Talks, Extra Credits, among others
  • Comment about articles I come across that I find interesting
  • Updates about projects I’m working on
  • Code tutorials on topics I’m familiar with or maybe about something I’m learning at the moment
  • Coursera course reviews
  • Anything else I feel like writing about 🙂

If there’s any other topic you’d like me to talk about, don’t hesitate to Contact me to let me know or just leave a comment below.

It’s alive!

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After a long time of tweaking and trying to make everything perfect (yes, I’m perfectionist), I finally decided the website is at a point where I’m comfortable showing it. There are still a few pages that are empty, but most of the information I wanted is already in. Now it’s time for me to start making blog posts!

Let’s start over… Hello! I’m Alejandro Hitti, a Computer Science student specializing in videogames, more specifically, in videogame production. I am also currently working on an indie game called SUPER III, developed by SUPER 91 Studios.

There are a few reasons I created this website. First, it was a nice way of displaying my work, like a portfolio. Second, I am at a point in my career where I want to experiment with tons of different techniques and learn interesting topics that will help me improve professionally. My idea was to share this experience and leave a crum trail of sorts to anyone interested in pursuing a similar career path later on. It is also a way of motivating myself to learn, as I feel the pressure of keeping my website updated.

I believe this post has gone on for long enough already. Shortly I will post a list of topics I will be covering. If you are interested in my project, I would greatly appreciate your support and I hope you find what I talk about to be interesting and a great learning experience as well.

Cheers!