DawnBringer3D Tips & Tricks, Personal News, Game Development

Learning Marketing : Chapter Four

Alright, first month of Dawn Bringer 3D blog is over and it is time to sum up some statistics!

• Unique Visitors : 1458
• Number of visits : 2206
• Pages : 9237
• Hits : 35018

So as far as I’m corcerned I succeeded on marketing my blog for the first month, my goal was to reach 500 unique visitors, but instead I tripled it. I was very careful where to do marketing, e.g. this blog is mostly for programmers so I tried to keep that in mind.

For next month I’m going to go for 3000 unique visitors, let’s see how that will go.

Why Iterations Are Good

Clinton Keith posted this nice story to his blog :

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A ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of the work they produced. All those on the right would be graded solely on their works’ quality.

His procedure was simple: On the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the quantity group; 50 pound of pots rated an A, 40 pounds a B, and so on. Those being graded on quality, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an A.

At grading time, the works with the highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.

It seems that while the quantity group was busily churning out piles of work — and learning from their mistakes — the quality group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of clay.

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Original.

First Experience Then Money

Juuso Hietalahti wrote in his blog about 7 Most Important Decisions You Need To Do For You Career.

I agree with Juuso in many of those. One of the things is that you should not follow either money or passion. If you always go for passion 100% you will probably miss the opportunities to get money.

Now when I’m a bit older and 11 years of programming experience I can say that I used passion 100% for the first almost 10 years. Yep, I didn’t get any money. But instead I gained a great deal of experience and a good portfolio. Now when I have that experience and that portfolio I can ask money, and trust me, it has paid back every cent.

I’m only 20 years old and if you look at my portfolio I’m pretty sure that there aren’t many as young as me who has that kind of experience. Gaining experience takes time and if you always ask for money you’ll loose changes to gain experience and that makes a difference. Of course it requires hard work, but it can be done. I’m also a father and I’m still able keep up my skills, do hobby projects, have good time with my family, relax, etc. It just needs discipline and hard work. I work 18 hours a day, passion keeps me going.

Books To Read

Well, as I mentioned a book I may as well give a list of books to get :

Code Complete: A Practical Handbook of Software Construction

The Pragmatic Programmer: From Journeyman to Master

The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition (2nd Edition)

All of these books are timeless and about programming in general – it means you should read them whet-ever you were a C or Python programmer.

Creating Usable Software

Problem I usually come across is that software is not usable. I would buy more cool software if it would be usable, but most isn’t.

What do I consider as usable software? Let’s take an example of not usable and usable software.

Not Usable

I found this really cool 3D engine but I can’t use it as it doesn’t have any content path – a way to create content to it through some other software like max, maya, etc. How the hell I’m suppose to use it if there is no easy way to create content for it?

Usable

I found this really cool 3D engine that has full content path for max, maya, etc.

Also it support custom displays for all of these which enables me to work on just with my model editor as long as I need to get the model done for my game. Custom display enables me to see the result running on the engine at max, maya…

Conclusion

So, usable software is something that is Easy To Use, e.g. content creation, etc.

Software usability is something that I have been thinking a lot lately as I’m currently writing 2D graphics engine and I want it to be very easy-to-use, which means having some kind of content creation tools. I’ll write about it at some point more, when I have something cool to show.

If you don’t want to kill your software make it usable.