Jeff Hangartner – Revealing the Path Less Travelled in Video Game Industry

Jeff HangartnerJeff Hangartner, the founder of the gaming start-up, Bulletproof Outlaws has been a professional developer of games over the last half a decade. Creator of Pixelation, the 1st Pixel Art Forum and also originator of the Pixel tutorials which have been published in the form of a book. Jeff has always been a pioneer of the gaming industry.

CG Today is proud to present Jeff’s exploration as he shares the whole process of creating a start-up right from day 1. With the belief that gaming development is coming back to its original “one programmer in the basement roots” idea, Bulletproof Outlaws is chronicling every step of its start-up process from strategies, to marketing, setting goals and outsourcing, successes and failures. The aim is to help other developers who have ideas but are intimidated by the whole start-up process and are not sure how to go about it.

You can visit his website Bulletproof Outlaws to know more about him or send an email to get connected.

Bulletproof Outlaws - A Diary of a video game studio!

Lots going on these days but here’s the first article of 5, covering marketing as an Independent Game Developer! I’m just finishing editing the other parts right now, and then it’ll be digging out my iPad 2 to see if I can get Elusive Ninja running on it. I bought an iPad 2 like a month ago and it’s actually just been sitting in the unopened box collecting dust in my closet because I basically just bought it to test Elusive Ninja on it. I’m hoping the iPhone 5 doesn’t come out anytime soon, I can’t afford it!! haha I heard the screen was going to be bigger and go to the edges of the phone, I wonder if that means the resolution will change…that might be annoying from a gameDev perspective, so we’ll see what happens! Anyway, on to Article I:

Here’s Article II – Traditional Marketing, which covers more of the stuff that actually costs money. Article’s III, IV, and V are fully written, I’m just editing them and adding in pictures to break up the giant wall of text haha This weekend I’m going to take a look at the HD version of Elusive Ninja and see if I can iron out the little graphical glitches in it, and do up my Touch Arcade banner ads so I can get those out of the way! Articles III, IV, and V should go up next week sometime so stay tuned! I’m in the process of moving my website to a new host but it’s takin’ forever, so my site might still occasionally be down, sorry! Should all be fixed soon (I hope!!). :) Anyway, on to the article:

I should be posting up Article III – Game Related & Maintenance tomorrow, but I had to detour and test out the HD version of Elusive Ninja and do up my Touch Arcade banners that should go live on Monday.  I was able to get rid of the graphical glitch the iPad 2 had going on and it’s looking good.  I should be able to just fix up some of the animation files that have strange position issues, put it through some testing, and get it up on the App Store!  Unfortunately it doesn’t look like the iPad 1 will be able to run it, the thing just isn’t very powerful when you’re moving around huge images…it can start the game but then it has some slow-down and crashes.  The iPad 2 version however, runs smooth as silk.  I don’t know if it’ll be easier or harder to play it on a large screen, it’s definitely a different feeling than on the iPhone.

Anyway, here are the banners that’ll be going up on Touch Arcade soon:

Bulletproof Outlaws - Elusive Ninja

Bulletproof Outlaws - Elusive Ninja

And with that I’m off into the night to get crackin’ on the iPad 2 version and throw a bunch of images into Article III.

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Here’s Article III, which covers the poop-load of work involved in creating Press Kits, distributing Press Releases, etc…stuff that we often don’t think will take long, but then it ends up taking an entire day or week of mind-numbing work.  It also covers maintaining everything we’ve talked about so far and keeping up a web presence.  I switched my website host to Site5.com and it looks like everything has switched over fully, so hopefully that 500 Error shouldn’t be coming up anymore.  Let me know if you guys have any trouble viewing the blog!  Anyway, on to the article:

So my Touch Arcade banners have just gone up and I decided to put on a 50% Off sale for the first week of them.  I have no idea if this’ll do anything, but the banners were expensive and I’m looking at it as a learning experience haha  I used an automated service (iSpreadNews.com) to send out my Press Release because I couldn’t be arsed to spend all the time submitting it individually myself.  I also whipped up this flyer because I had a great brainstorm for how and when to use a flyer, and I sent it out go along with my Press Release.  I think it looks pretty mint all-around, and it gave me a new marketing idea to talk about once all my Marketing Articles are done!  Anyway, check out the flyer and go grab Elusive Ninja today!  I swear it’s fun haha:

Bulletproof Outlaws - Elusive Ninja

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Bulletproof Outlaws Diary