99999 is now renamed as Gunkid 99
Why the name change? Well, I’m sure a fair number of you have thought that 99999 was a bad idea for a name. And you’d be right.
Let’s first put aside things such as a sense of identity, ‘catchy-ness’ and other more subjective aspects of a name. For most indiedevs, we simply to not possess the marketing capabilities to “make a name ours”. That means if the name of your game is generic, you’d risk being drown out by similar words/term from other search results.
Take my game for example, if you search 99999 in youtube, you’d likely end up with a whole list of videos of other games with 99999 in their titles (with a particular Plants vs Zombies being especially popular). Even if you intentionally search for my game by pairing ‘99999’ with ‘game’, it’d be useless as the other popular videos with 99999 in their titles are already that of games (just not my game). That means the few play-throughs that I got from releasing my demo are already lost in the sea of youtube videos (sorry guys). You might do ok with a generic name if the name doesn’t appear often with the word ‘game’. Take for example, the game Bleed. Bleed, on its own, has terrible SEO. But it is mitigated by the fact that if you search for ‘Bleed game’, it becomes a more unique title, and most gamers are smart enough to do just that.
Googling Gunkid on the other hand, gives you near zero hits on anything videogame-related, so it has a higher possibility of standing out from the get-go. The 99 is mostly a remnant of the previous name, but by pairing it as Gunkid 99 it will hopefully be more easily searchable. I guess I’d find out soon enough.
So to fellow indies out there, spend more time to mull over your game’s name. Do some basic research by seeing what comes up in your google searches. Don’t be like me (lol).
*if you already have a Steam-page, you can still change the name of your game easily enough. BUT if you’ve already released a demo, you’d have to contact Steamworks developer support to change the name of your demo.
On to some updates for the game:
I’ve made some changes to the Training room! Along with unlocked weapons, weapons that are ready for sale in the Shop will also appear in the Training room with a little note above them.
This will allow players to have a taste of the weapons before deciding if they wanna buy em. Makes a lot of sense to me!
Health UI has also been tweaked to make it less cluttered.
I’ve also recently added Steam Achievements into the game. But I know achievements by themselves are rather meaningless to some players (I’m one of them). So I added actual in-game rewards for said Achievements!
Some of the more quirky Achievements add real tangible effect to the game by unlocking unique Ability Items. There’s only 3 now, but there will be more to come.
That’s it for this update. If you interested in Gunkid 99 it’d help a lot if you can wishlist!
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