We're proud to announce the Frozen Synapse Beta!

Once again, many thanks to all of you who have posted messages of support for us on here - despite still being unable to get coverage from Destructoid itself it's been great to have the opportunity to let the community know how we're getting on with the game.

We launched the beta a couple of weeks back and things are looking good. We've had around 11,000 completed games, showing that our idea of creating a strategy game that can be played quickly was a strong premise.

It's taken us about two years to get to this point, but the amount of positive messages we've had from players has made it worth it. People are really loving the game; we feel like we've managed to create something that has the chance of being truly successful.

There's been a very nice reaction from the press too, with hugely positive previews from sites like Rock Paper Shotgun and Eurogamer. Our community has been growing steadily as well - the Facebook page is turning into quite an entertaining place to be.

We're currently working on some of the community features, adding things like in-game messaging and friend's lists that our existing customers have requested.

I tried Sleep is Death recently, which is a game that has one of the most fascinating premises I've seen in a long time. It was IMPOSSIBLE to get a game though, even using the community site that's been set up - I don't have 20 minutes to spend sitting around waiting to try something, no matter how intriguing its concept is. We've worked incredibly hard to make sure all new players can get a game - we're even giving away a free copy of the game to make sure people can play against someone they know. There are no less than three different ways of getting into a game quickly - you can even hit a huge button that says INSTANT GAME and our server will scramble desperately trying to find someone's who's available! I'm not bashing other indies here - this is a problem that all multiplayer games have - it's just incredibly important to make sure your players can actually *play*.

Our plan has always been to get this mostly-multiplayer (there's a single player Puzzle mode and Skirmish mode as well) version finished and then concentrate on a single player campaign. A lot of gamers who are into turn-based strategy want to play single player and get involved with the story; so we've already laid the groundwork for that. The tough thing is really figuring out how we can get the most out of our small team (we're only three people!) and create enough content to keep people hooked. Our current thoughts are that a strategic deployment of random generation, coupled with a bit of good level design and some quality writing should see us through - we're aiming to devote months of work exclusively to that though, so the odds are that we'll be able to come up with something that people really like.

It's tough though! We've never been at the helm of something people love as much as this game, so we're trying incredibly hard not to waste the opportunity. Sticking to our guns about certain things, but entertaining as many useful ideas from the community as possible seems to be the way forwards - we've already been pleased to see that people are contributing really, really useful feedback.

If you'd like to find out more about the game, take a look here.

Also, if anyone from Destructoid itself happens across this blog PLEASE get in touch with me at paulmode7@gmail.com - we would LOVE to get you guys in the beta.

Even if that doesn't happen, I will keep posting here to keep everyone updated on our progress - thanks so much for the support so far.

I'm finding this blog a good place to vent about some more general stuff to do with Frozen Synapse.

We've just had a three-day crunch on presentation and UI - as you can see from the above image, which includes a UI that is 1.) all over the place 2.) quite broken (weird things like that empty window in the middle-left which shouldn't even be there), we went a bit mental, and now we have to tidy everything up again.

This is what always happens in game development if you head towards an abstract goal like "put in a slicker UI with motion graphics" - you end up breaking everything, both literally in terms of code, and metaphorically in terms of aesthetics.

Frantically trying to pull all of this together in time for a large-scale in-person beta test we're doing at a local university AND a few press previews that we have coming up is extremely difficult.

However, we now have a bunch of good systems (including animating cursors - REQUIREMENT - I really want to put animating cursors as a marketing bullet point) and are gearing up for another stab at tidying and bug fixing next week.

I have been talking to a bunch of PR agencies, online ad management agencies and other promotional people about that side of things. A lot of that seems very scammy and ridiculous - one PR agency told me that they refuse to work to any metrics whatsoever because "PR isn't like that." Really? I thought the efficacy of PR was pretty easy to measure, actually - offline PR should show a demonstrable increase in organic traffic; with online PR you can see directly where the traffic is coming from. Pretty easy to measure if you ask me!

Anyway, sometimes it's good to post in places which don't necessarily bring in a vast amount of traffic (like this blog) because a few new people will read it each time and get to know about what we're doing. I was mocked by a few other indies for our ModDB page which was only growing by 2 or 3 people a week, but then we got a big feature on there, nominated for an award and gained a load of traffic. Always stick with places that have a small amount of very passionate people.

On the development front, we're working on a bunch of stuff for multiplayer - levelling and matchmaking - this will make multiplayer really flexible and keep providing you with interesting challenges. Something else we have in the works that I'm very excited about is one-click YouTube export - I've seen an early version of this working and it really is awesome. You play a great match (or you accidentally blow up your entire team with a misfired rocket) and you just click on the YouTube button - the video encodes and uploads completely in the background, so you can keep playing. We reckon this is the best way of getting people to share info about games they've enjoyed.

Today I have to do a bunch of exciting things: go through a sales statement for our audio products; go to the bank; pay some people; write some *reports* (yes, I actually have to do this, I started off in rock-n-roll games development and now I live in Dilbert); etc. etc. Still, it was nice to get three days JUST on development, and that should happen again next week.

Thanks for reading - once again, the place to be at the moment seems to be our Facebook page - check out the main link for the game if you want any more info on that...

http://www.frozensynapse.com

I'll be back soon with moarrrrr!

Thanks for the very warm reception I received when I posted earlier here about the difficulties of getting our game noticed.

Things have improved for us - we've lined up previews with pretty much all of the major print mags in the UK, as well as securing coverage on two pretty big websites.

We still tend to miss out on coverage from the US, which is a huge shame - we desperately want to make contact with the major news sources and get them interested in our game. Anyway, you'll be seeing big previews in a couple of high-profile places soon, which we hope will stimulate interest.

In development news, we've had some new character animations done - here they are in rather comical form:


Videos & Audio - Frozen Synapse Game - Mod DB

They need to be over-the-top and melodramatic, as the characters are often viewed very small in-game.

We've also been experimenting with some semi-randomly-generated backgrounds - this should help to provide a lot of variation. Soon, we'll be having a big art crunch to tidy the game up and polish it a bit in advance of our previews - there's a huge amount to get done, including weapon effects and some anti-aliasing issues which are causing us a major headache.

It's extremely difficult to make a game which has even a fairly simple aesthetic to look polished - things like the smoothness of lines and the accuracy of particle effects really make a massive difference. This has been the first game I've ever art-directed, and keeping in mind certain technical limitations is something I'm going to have to get a lot better at.

I really hope that we manage to generate the success we sorely need with this title so we can go on and make other games under slightly less time-and-financial constraints - juggling the contract work we do, as well as each of us juggling multiple roles in the company can get very stressful - there's not much time to relax! Still, we're making games and we're getting a good response, so that's what it's all about!

We started a Facebook page for the game - http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Frozen-Synapse/297858703892?ref=ts - and humorously suggested that we wanted to get more fans than Ubisoft's RUSE, which currently clocks in at 3,200. This actually provoked a response from our very small group of initial Facebook fans who boosted us up to 85 within a few hours! We'd love that to continue, if only for the comedy.

Our agitation group "Can this indie strategy game get more fans than Ubisoft's RUSE?" (http://www.facebook.com/#!/group.php?gid=315490009678&ref=mf) was formed to stimulate such behaviour! It's immature, but then, so are we.

Finally, to reward people for signing up to our mailing list, we're offering four free music tracks. Two of them are concept tracks, which were used to decide the direction we were going to take with the music, and two of them are actual tracks from the soundtrack. You can get them over at http://www.frozensynapse.com as well as getting more info on the game.

First things first: hello.

My name's Paul Taylor, and five years ago I helped to start a company that makes indie games.

I didn't know what indie games were (or actually what a company is) at that point. But I helped to start one anyway because I wanted to be involved with making games more than anything else I could be doing with my time.

The first thing I ended up doing was audio: this is something I've done for years and it was great to actually get some experience working on a game. Then I realised that nobody was going to promote the game, and therefore, by extrapolation, nobody would get to hear all of the audio I'd done.

I've found that the best way of promoting a game is to 1.) make something really interesting and then 2.) tell as many people about it as possible in a personal, polite way. This seems to be something that a lot of companies don't really grasp - they make something and then try to tell everyone about it through lots of expensive advertising.

Big companies can do that because they have data to help them predict how well a specific type of game will perform: it's a straightforward investment proposition. However, a large number of these more generic big-budget titles are failures too, proving that either their data is flawed or not detailed enough; or that they're not acting on it properly.

As an indie, it's impossible to afford advertising on this scale: you can never sling enough money at the problem to overcome your obscurity. You have to rely on people getting excited about your game, and then make up the difference with as much advertising as you can afford.

Most indie developers hate advertising: it's difficult, boring and ultimately not very satisfying: you see the response from ads and think - "All of these people like the game: if only I could talk to them by some method other than pushing ads in their faces".

Now, the fact that there are a lot of indie games out there seems like a good thing for gamers, because it means that indies have to make good games to stand out.

Unfortunately, some gamers are demanding that indie games get cheaper all the time AND that they increase in quality. This greatly restricts the type of indie games that can viably be made. Short, very cheap, art-house style games are in vogue - great if you like that kind of game; a disaster if you want to make bigger, fuller, richer indie titles.

So, if you want to make one of these "medium-sized games" what do you do?

Here's Frozen Synapse, the game we're working on right now:



It's a PC tactical game.

To make this game we set ourselves the following...

1.) A small budget

You can't make a game like this with zero budget - it needs people to work full-time on it. Someone could slave away at this for five or six years while maintaining a day job, but as anyone who has ever had to split their time knows, things are better if you focus on them. We used the proceeds from our previous game, and money from contract work to try and make this game as good as possible - we're still young (inexperienced) and idealistic (idiots)...

2.) A quality target

We want this game to blow people away.

Our last game was completely divisive - some people absolutely loved it, some people called us very rude names on the internet because they hated it so much. The press reaction was similar ranging from "WHAT???" to "this is pretty good / admirable". One site gave us an award for innovation, another one said that we should essentially be destroyed.

So, this time around, we have decided that the game HAS to exceed people's expectations, and that's difficult, because people expect a lot. We're working on it!

3.) A promotion target: people will know it exists!

I'm trying to use every means necessary to get people to pay attention to the game while it's still in development. Major publishers do this for a reason: it takes a long time to build a community around a game.

And you know what? I really, really don't want to be a dick about it. I don't want to spam or annoy people (sorry if anyone feels I've done the first, or that I'm currently doing the second!); I don't want to have to buy advertising. I hope by writing this kind of more in-depth blog about it, people will see that I just want to get our game the audience I think it deserves by sharing some info.

Luckily, other people now share my belief that the game is worth talking about. We've had a great response on Rock Paper Shotgun, Joystiq, TIGsource, Gamespot and a load of other places.

What I'm trying to convey is that if indie games are able to reach fans without advertising (i.e. through communities dedicated to quality games) then prices don't have to be as high, and games can be better! When you're trying to be the good guys (putting game quality first ahead of marketing, listening to fans of your game, taking advice from experienced people etc.) it's sometimes hard to get people to notice you. If you guys think that people in the Destructoid community would like this game - please, please tell them about it.

Even if we can't reach the main page and get the attention of everyone (we have tried!), maybe we can find some individuals who are interested within the community - I hope you think that's a valid motivation for writing about our game here.

If anyone is interested in the game - feel free ask me anything you like!