Error Prone - The game that shows how robots are better at driving [and it's day of internet fame]
So one of the days at Stugan we had a jam for project sponsors, Trafikverket (the less evil swedish version of Sanral/Transnet) about the future of transportation. My game (and with art by Mark Backler) came together really well - perfect example of keeping the scope as small as possible for a 12 hour game. We won the jam, it got a ton of tweets online and also had a really good little message for why Self Driving cars will be the best and human drivers suck.
If you follow me on social media, no doubt you've already heard about! But you can give it a play here:
http://madewithmonsterlove.itch.io/error-prone
Given the success of the concept I decided to use it as a little practice run for Cadence PR. The 12 hour jam game then took two days to prepare for PR, but a few key things like GIFS, an HTML 5 playable build and a various other things went into getting it ready. I selected a few journos on popular tech blogs who write about self driving cars, and fired them a mail.
Today, one of them finally bit and there was a feature on the front page of WIRED.com. For a while we we're even trending in the most popular sidebar. Pretty Neat!
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/oddly-addictive-game-shows-stink-driving/
Someone then posted a GIF (lifted straight from our itch.io page) to imgur, where it made the front page and right now has 500k views. The itch page analytics now looks like this:
I was hoping to direct this into some attention for Cadence - but I soon realised most of the guys who write about self driving cars at tech blogs are specifically interested in automotive stuff. It did help that I linked the #LoopADay video ft Error-Prone on the itch.io page - and this was the only video in the wild of Error-Prone. That now has a few thousand views.
The whole experience has left me rather bemused. It's been great to laugh at the comments (oh god, the comments) and enjoy a bit of a validation, but all in all Error-Prone is a pretty complete concept. That fact it's a bit buggy is actually great, because it seems people are revelling in the challenge of beating a game that should not be beatable. It's also helps that it's topical and demonstrates its core concept effectively. We did get a rather optimistic invite to speak at a Tesla owner's club organised event in Belgium, but unless they are flying me that's not gonna happen.
Right, now back to the business of building the game I actually want people to look at. ;)
If you follow me on social media, no doubt you've already heard about! But you can give it a play here:
http://madewithmonsterlove.itch.io/error-prone
Given the success of the concept I decided to use it as a little practice run for Cadence PR. The 12 hour jam game then took two days to prepare for PR, but a few key things like GIFS, an HTML 5 playable build and a various other things went into getting it ready. I selected a few journos on popular tech blogs who write about self driving cars, and fired them a mail.
Today, one of them finally bit and there was a feature on the front page of WIRED.com. For a while we we're even trending in the most popular sidebar. Pretty Neat!
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/oddly-addictive-game-shows-stink-driving/
Someone then posted a GIF (lifted straight from our itch.io page) to imgur, where it made the front page and right now has 500k views. The itch page analytics now looks like this:
I was hoping to direct this into some attention for Cadence - but I soon realised most of the guys who write about self driving cars at tech blogs are specifically interested in automotive stuff. It did help that I linked the #LoopADay video ft Error-Prone on the itch.io page - and this was the only video in the wild of Error-Prone. That now has a few thousand views.
The whole experience has left me rather bemused. It's been great to laugh at the comments (oh god, the comments) and enjoy a bit of a validation, but all in all Error-Prone is a pretty complete concept. That fact it's a bit buggy is actually great, because it seems people are revelling in the challenge of beating a game that should not be beatable. It's also helps that it's topical and demonstrates its core concept effectively. We did get a rather optimistic invite to speak at a Tesla owner's club organised event in Belgium, but unless they are flying me that's not gonna happen.
Right, now back to the business of building the game I actually want people to look at. ;)
Comments
Awesome job :)
Can you put a tip jar on that page? Or is the nature of the thing such that monetizing even at that level is out of the question?
Also, I'd suggest putting up Cadence and The Last Word image banner links at the bottom of the page instead of small, easily miss-able text links. People often don't read. ;)
http://i.imgur.com/y4fCFt7.gifv