Survey Monkey Results

When creating my survey monkey, I used www.Bitly.com, (an URL shortening service) to shorten the links to the images I was asking questions about.

This site made it much easier to paste links without them being too long for the people taking my survey to copy and paste into their browser. 

Once I had created my survey, I posted it in three places, To my Facebook, gaining my 10 responses, On my A2 Media blog (where I asked the other people in my class to go to my blog and take my survey) and through email to three of my friends that play video games.  

My first survey was about which magazine advert would most appeal to the questionee's if seen in a magazine, Poster 1 was by far the most responded to, meaning that the below poster would be the one i'd be making.

My second question was about which game cover was most appealing, Cover 2 was the most popular out of these, meaning that I will be making the below.

My third question was in relation to which gaming company logo out of my chosen ones, my survey takers thought was most effective.

The outcome is shown below. 

and finally, which logo they felt was best for the actual logo of the game.

With the below as an outcome

With this research behind me, I will be able to begin editing my Magazine advertisement and my video game box relatively easily, placing my logo's along with other iconography on this. 

Final Poster image

Poster Progression

After establishing what flatplan my audience wanted for my magazine advertisement, I began work on it in the program Paint tool Sai.

The first thing I did whilst using this program was to set the size of the canvas. I used 2480 x 3508 pixels, the size of international A4 paper and the size of most magazine pages.

I began my poster by creating a new layer, onto this, I sketched out the basic design for my poster, as seen on my flat plan, I used the pencil tool for this as it allowed rough and thin lines, suitable for sketching.

Once I was completely happy with my sketch, I began the outlining progress. For this, I created another layer and used the pen tool. My reasoning behind this choice was that the pen tool is very smooth and allowed me to create slightly thicker, professional looking lines.

I continued working on this layer with the pen tool until the whole of Wren was neatly outlined. I then changed the visibility setting for the sketch of Wren underneath, hiding it so only the pen outline was visible. After doing this, I created another layer for pen tool outlining ZED900 and another one after that for outlining the grass/gear.

I hid the sketch layers for both of these to neaten it up.

After this had been done, I needed a background. This had to be very simple in keeping with the common conventions I had observed with other magazines and in order to not distract from the foreground. I used dark blue for the background as it was simple and worked well with the foreground. For the background I didn't just flood fill the dark blue as I felt it would look too plain, I used a tool named the 'water tool' and coloured the page in with a large sized brush. I did this on a separate layer, blocked in some layers and left some parts of it lighter, so it didn't look to blocked in an plain. 

When colouring on top of this, I used the eraser tool to remove colour in the parts that I was going to be working on top of this, I did this was because the tool I was planning to use for colouring Wren and ZED900 was semi transparent and relied a lot on the backdrop being white.

 

Whilst colouring the characters, I used the 'marker' tool, this allowed me to colour as you would on paper and get a very nice effect to my work. This was rather time consuming, but I am very pleased with the outcome. When setting up Paint tool SAI, I coordinated the program with my tablet pen to make it so the harder I pressed on the pad, the darker the marker went.

Doing this helped me get a lot of detail and shade my work easily, I also feel it gave my advertisement a quirky feel which works well with the indie category of games.

I used the water tool Wren's face as it gave a diffused and simple effect needed for skin rather than the strands needed for the hair.

For ZED900 I continued using the marker but chose a larger brush size so I could still use pen pressure to change the colour but so it didn't look so strandy like I needed with the hair, I used a similar technique for the clothes.

Finally, I coloured in the grass and the gear to complete this image and saved it as a high quality jpeg. I will now need to import it to photoshop to work on adding text and iconography.

Survey Monkey

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Airing my advertisement

When it comes to airing my two TV Spot advertisements, I will want to choose a channel and a time slot that will allow me to directly appeal to my target audience of older retro gamers, people that have been fed on a diet of Nintendo and Sega and new gamers from the ages of 10 – 18 years of age.

When looking at video game advertisements within the industry and the air times following these, I found that games aimed at this audience and age are typically aired on ITV or Channel 5 in the evening, Most are aired around 5pm due to 10-18 year olds coming home from school/college and this is considered a peak time.

If my product was actually being produced and I was searching for an advertising spot for my game, I would want to use this time slot on either one of the ICT channels or Channel 5, doing this would allow me to best target my audience and get the word about my game out there.

I started by looking on the ICT website for information on what ages on average viewers for each of the ICT channels are. Their website was very helpful when finding out interesting and useful information about the costs and viewer ratings for advertisements on their channels. 

ICT had a box showing each of their platforms, this helped me a lot when deciding which one would be best for me to advertise my game on. 

As you can clearly see, ITV2 would be the best platform to advertise on if I am aiming for an audience of teens and young adults. 

When further exploring this, I confirmed this was definitely the right choice for my game. ITV2 is most viewed by young people between the ages of 16 and 34. It is one of the biggest non-terestrial stations and one of the top channels in term of freeview TV ratings. 

According to their website, advertising campaigns on ITV 2 can cost as little as a few thousand pounds and still reach the whole country. 

As you can clearly see from the day parts diagram I found on their website, the time i'd like to start advertising (5 onwards) is the early peak, therefore would be quite a lot more expensive to advertise on. ICT Advertisement campaigns involve the producing of my advert, this may bring my price down, as I will just need some air time for advertisements, rather than an actual advertisement. 


The cost of advertising is mainly dependant on the time of day it is aired and whether the advertisement is played around high profile shows or not. On the Channel 5 FAQ, they define the most important time of day for advertisers as the 'peak' which ranges from 5:30pm to 11pm, for channel 5.

The guideline advertisement length for both ITV and channel 5 was around 30 seconds, 60 second advertisements will cost twice as much. I will need to keep in mind the length of my TV spot if I think TV advertising is for me.

Channel 5 does not have a definative price list for their advertisement slots, as they base a lot of the overall cost on specific target audiences (the more specific you are about the people you're wanting to reach, the cheaper it is to advertise to that target audience) season, regionality and the programs playing also effect the advertising cost with 5. This is because more people stay in during the winter and therefore they are more likely to sit and watch a TV program rather than go outside and do the gardening, as an example.

ITV on the other hand makes it much simpler, having a table with price ranges of different slots and regions, downloadable from their website in the form of a PDF.
Below are the two tables I found, displaying the pricing of ITV's stations.

 As you can see from these graphs, it'd cost me around £45,000 for just two 30 second transmissions of my advertisement on daytime ITV.

Because it is an indie game (not funded by a publisher), I think jumping into direct to TV advertising would be a bit much and too commercial for my type of product.

Instead, advertising online through google AD words or other youtube services such as Youtube, may be the best option for me, setting up a website for my game with an autoplaying trailer would be a very good idea, then advertising that through key words on google or on youtube could work very well.

I tried out google adwords to find out the amount of searches for the terms 'gear' and 'rift', monthly, to see how many people would see my advertisement if I were to advertise using adwords. I had to select what my advertised product was, through some menu's, then from there, I was able to search and see how many hits per month this advertisement would get if aired.

Finally, I was able to see how much it'd cost to reach people with these adds, by submitting figures of the maximum much i'd be willing to pay per click (6p in my case) and how much i'd set my budget as a day £500)

It would on average cost me arounds £52 a day to display my advertisement on google search for the keywords 'Gear' and 'Rift'. With google adwords, you only have to pay when your advertisement is clicked and viewed, therefore it is quite a cost effective way of getting your product out there. Thew only cost on top of that woulds be having a website to display information about the game and a video box with my TV spot in.

Finally, the most viewer effective way to advertise my video would be using google ads for youtube. This displays your video advertisement at the begining of a video, a popup during the video, or an image advertisement to the side of the video. This allows viewers to see your advertisement/video without having to click and the cost for doing this can be as little as £1 per 1000 impressions, targetting the entire site or £2 for 1000 impressions, targetting a specific audience.

Promoting specific youtube videos is also an effective way, choosing to bring my advertisement which is already displayed on youtube and place it to the top of the 'related videos' bar, this is rather more expensive but still a very effective way of working.

Overall, I think as an indie developer, advertising through youtube seems the most cost effective way to reach a large audience, and I think this should work well when promoting my video game. Using online advertising, I can reach thousands of people without having to worry about paying 45,000 for only 2 advertisement plays.

Designing my Logo

Equiptment List

A list of all the programs/hardware I will need to produce my final advertisements can be found below, I intend to use all of these when working on my final piece.

Software - 

• Graphics Gale 
• Adobe Flash CS4
• Sony Vegas 8 
• Game Maker 8 Lite 
• Adobe Photoshop CS5.1
• Safari 

Hardware - 

• Apple Macintosh Desktop
• Wacom Bamboo Graphics Tablet
• Keyboard
• Mouse 
• Windows Vista Laptop 

Websites - 

• Blogger
• Survey Monkey
• Prezi
• Slideshare
• Freeplaymusic

If I was producing this outside of school (not using the school equipment and programs) these adverts would have come to a considerable cost, which would need to be calculated up along with the viewing costs to find how much profit I would make from game sales themselves. 

Game Cover - Flat Plans

Working from the Cover Style Models, Cover Analysis and Game Conventions Research I designed three potential video game covers for my game. All three of these covers stick heavily to the conventions I had observed and feature the two characters I had designed for my game, the protagonist Wren and the helper ZED900.

This cover features my protagonist and helped in equal proportions to each other on the screen, both are shown at the front of the cover, connotating that they are equal and drawing interest to both of them. The Gear is shown on the bottom left hand side of the page, underneath the ESRB content rating.

Screenshots are shown on the back cover in following with video game cover conventions.

This second cover features ZED900 the Bat AI at the front of the cover art, this draws most of the attention to him, due to him being the largest thing on the cover. Wren the protagonist is shown star gazing from his home (as shown in the storyboards of my advert) and the Gear is shown falling from the sky. 

Screenshots are once again shown on the back cover.

Finally, my third flat plan shows Wren as the main figure, drawing the most interest to him, He is leaning on one hand and on his knee with the gear in his hand. ZED900 is shown in the distance, mysteriously looking out at the night sky. 

Screenshots are a convention I followed once again in this design.

I personally really like all of the cover designs, I think I will design similar flat plan pieces for my poster before creating a survey monkey aimed at my target audience. By choosing to design the Poster and Cover with the most votes, this should help to directly appeal to my target audience and in turn this should help attract the people I want, to my game.