If you are not using the Twitter behavior - you should! Example inside.
HoneyTribeStudios
Member Posts: 1,792
Title says it all. If you add twitter messages to your game, people will use them. This can make the game more fun and help with visibility. i.e people finding out about your game from their friends' twitter profile.
As part of the twitter message you should include a link to where the game can be downloaded and an interesting/fun/cool image. You can choose an image that you use in the game to save space. Or import an image especially for twitter. Keep in mind that if you are using retina independence, the image will be half size on the smaller devices.
You can have them auto prompt or have the player trigger from a button. You'll get more responses from the auto prompts but some players will find this annoying. So you have to decide which is best for your game.
The idea is that the messages adds to the experience of the game. You don't want them to interrupt or get in the way of the flow of the game. So think about when and where the prompts should appear.
One of my games, McBank, just went free again. And it has humorous twitter messages implemented all the way through it.
If you search twitter for 'mcbank' you'll see what I mean. It had about 7,000 downloads yesterday so some of those players are clearly using the twitter messages.
You can download here to see how I've implemented the twitter posts.
Here's an example.
In the game you can choose to free the people or to control them and get money for yourself. If you go for the money you can then buy comical shiny gold items that fit the theme of the game. One item is a gold plated car.
There are 3 save slots so the player will get a different twitter message depending on which save slot they are using.
So when they buy the car one of 3 messages will auto prompt and they can chose to post or not.
1. "Why aren't ALL cars gold-plated?"
2. "Outta my way buddy! I'm on the way to get this thing buffed!"
3. "If a vehicle isn't gold plated, I'm not interested"
And then in the text I also have a tiny.cc web link that points to the McBank page on my site where the download links are listed. If you don't know, tiny.cc is a service that lets you make a short version of a url so you can fit it into twitter messages or just make it easier to remember.
There will be loads of creative and entertaining ways you can implement twitter messages. I think it's worth spending some time thinking how to add them into your gameplay experience.
As part of the twitter message you should include a link to where the game can be downloaded and an interesting/fun/cool image. You can choose an image that you use in the game to save space. Or import an image especially for twitter. Keep in mind that if you are using retina independence, the image will be half size on the smaller devices.
You can have them auto prompt or have the player trigger from a button. You'll get more responses from the auto prompts but some players will find this annoying. So you have to decide which is best for your game.
The idea is that the messages adds to the experience of the game. You don't want them to interrupt or get in the way of the flow of the game. So think about when and where the prompts should appear.
One of my games, McBank, just went free again. And it has humorous twitter messages implemented all the way through it.
If you search twitter for 'mcbank' you'll see what I mean. It had about 7,000 downloads yesterday so some of those players are clearly using the twitter messages.
You can download here to see how I've implemented the twitter posts.
Here's an example.
In the game you can choose to free the people or to control them and get money for yourself. If you go for the money you can then buy comical shiny gold items that fit the theme of the game. One item is a gold plated car.
There are 3 save slots so the player will get a different twitter message depending on which save slot they are using.
So when they buy the car one of 3 messages will auto prompt and they can chose to post or not.
1. "Why aren't ALL cars gold-plated?"
2. "Outta my way buddy! I'm on the way to get this thing buffed!"
3. "If a vehicle isn't gold plated, I'm not interested"
And then in the text I also have a tiny.cc web link that points to the McBank page on my site where the download links are listed. If you don't know, tiny.cc is a service that lets you make a short version of a url so you can fit it into twitter messages or just make it easier to remember.
There will be loads of creative and entertaining ways you can implement twitter messages. I think it's worth spending some time thinking how to add them into your gameplay experience.
Comments
And while we are chatting, what are your thoughts on Free apps vs Paid turned Free apps. Meaning the price drop sites would promote your app if it goes free - for free! Whereas if your app is free to start with - nothing.
@Doguz Here's a page about hashtags: https://dev.twitter.com/media/hashtags
But yeah, as the tiny.cc url has "mcbank" in that gets picked up by the search engine. I think if you're trying to get something 'trending' on twitter a hashtag would be better to use?
Carriage return? You mean line breaks? I have everything on one line, not sure why you'd need more in a tweet?
It does seem that switching to free is like a relaunch. So a second chance if launching as paid didn't work out so well. Twitter bots will pick it up if you switch and you have the chance to get on free app services too.
I'd say it's good idea to build in the possibility of going free even if you don't think you will at the time of launch. So to include an attribute that tracks if the player bough the game. That way if you do decide to switch to free and e.g have levels that are unlockable with iaps - you can make sure the person who bought the original version doesn't need to pay for the extra stuff.
Freemium is a hard one for me to understand as I grew up with a 'normal' model of: you buy something and that's it. No updates, no messing about. You play it and it works indefinitely. But as an indie dev you can't ignore that you get so many more downloads as free, especially if you switch from paid.
http://forums.gamesalad.com/discussion/51427/tweetsheet-doesnt-wrap-correctly#latest
Do you think you could isolate a sample tweet from your mcbank into a clean project so I can how you've written it?
I haven't checked what they look like in different twitter feeds though, I've only see on twitter.
Hope that makes sense