Spring 1944 looking for marketing/PR person

[Nemo]

Just what the title says. We're looking for someone to help us with putting out newsposts, screens, and videos on outlets like moddb, spring1944.com, and various others. This would involve a few hours a week (or so) of putting together screens or videos and uploading them, and weekly (ish) newsposts to various locations.

So far we've been just having one of the core team do it, but at this point we'd really like to focus on polishing the game for release.

Some things we're looking for:

• Strong written English skills.
• The ability (and sufficiently powerful computer) to take nice looking screens.
• The ability (and sufficiently powerful computer) to make/edit gameplay/promotional videos like this one.
• A sense of humor and patience. It's all a hobby, when it stops being fun it stops being worthwhile.

Huge bonus if you have any of the following:

• Banner/general 2d graphic design abilities
• Brilliant marketing ideas, particularly ones that help people to understand how different this game is from CoH/Sudden Strike/the bazillion other small scale WWII RTS games.
• Interest in the subject matter (WWII history)
• A pony

If you're interested, shoot us an email at spring1944@gmail.com, or send me a private message on these forums (button at the bottom of this post).

If you can only do some of the things we're looking for (if you can make awesome videos and screens but English is a second language so you don't want to write newsposts, for example), please still email or message us. We can fill in gaps as needed, but we're really trying to lessen the promotional workload on the game devs so we can focus on making a game.

Thanks a bunch. Stop by #s44 on the lobby if you have any questions.

Edit: We'd also love someone who's good with LuaUI elements so we can polish up a lot of the placeholder UI bits we have currently, slash put together our own GUI.

[Argh]

Heh. I hear ya on all of that. Doing it myself on top of Everything Else is a royal pain in the arse. I am hoping that the Media Beasts will be well-fed after spending 7 hours making a 3-minute crappy gameplay video(granted, 4 hours was spent trying to figure out how to make it correctly). I just can't dedicate a lot of time to that, and have a hope in Hell of getting P.U.R.E. cleaned up before the 26th.

We don't have enough people around here with those skills and the self-motivation required, seems like. Question is, I have no idea how to recruit such people. Maybe it's just a factor of having a critical mass of rabid fanbois or whatever. I doubt that- there have to be wanna-be marketing gurus who are looking for the right project- pity it seems they all work for FPS teams touting vaporware mods with pretty screenshots but no releases and no real timeline

Given the materials you guys have, though... <looks through ModDB posts>

Hmm. I don't want to offend you guys, I love what you're going, don't get me wrong... here are things you should look at, in terms of ModDB presentation, in my opinion (cues hate machinery). Keep in mind, though, that I really have no idea what I'm doing that has worked with P.U.R.E., other than reading through ModDB's own guides about how to attract interest in a project and a lot of blind luck. Basically I just RTFM'd and did what it said, and we seem to have gotten lucky and made something people want to see more of.

1. The screens need improvement.

They're too close to the objects.

They have Spring's lame "grass", which, to my eyes at least, makes them look toylike.

The lighting on those maps is not dramatic enough- the shadows aren't dark enough to really create that nice, dramatic look that you want in a screen.

The camera angles need to be more interesting. Don't show me a shot of a truck- show me a shot of a truck driving along, kicking up dust, on some gorgeous map where the truck fills the POV but you see the map, too.

Show lines of troops walking, with a low shot where you can literally see it's a hundred guys, with the close guy's details and the far guys just little specks, with some tanks / trucks / whatever to grab our attention.

Show battle, in a dramatic fashion. Don't show little specks from a typical distance- zoom in, show a tank disintegrating from a hit, soldiers keeling over, etc. Like P.U.R.E., dealing with sheer distance is a problem- you have specks fighting specks. Zoom in, show the destruction.

Don't get focused on "this unit is in da game" shots. They just look like progress reports, which is not a very good use of a resource like ModDB- save that for your internal 'site, since you don't post a blow-by-blow here.

2. None of your cool videos are up, even though ModDB can handle YouTube and your own videos nearly-natively. The only reason I didn't put up any video for P.U.R.E. was that pretty much everything was out of date and didn't reflect the gameplay anymore- Pendrokar made that awesome trailer for 0.55, but it just didn't fit the current gameplay.

3. You have released versions. If they don't have massive problems, put 'em out there. I dunno, of course- I haven't played it since that "lite" release some time ago, which felt very rough.

4. Don't apologize to people in your posts. Don't treat them like a Forum audience- you're The Man, when posting there... be The Man, don't try to be Joe Average. It's propaganda, treat it like propaganda.

At any rate, feel free to ignore all of this, and if you find a PR wizard (who actually knows what they're doing, since I surely don't), more power to you, I am 100% behind you guys, I like what you're trying to do, and if there's something that I can do to help that won't suck up a lot of time (say, a cross-promotional thing, link-sharing, whatever), I'm game, I'd like to help everybody trying to achieve a breakthrough here.



Oh, and... you're more than welcome to use any elements of the P.U.R.E. UI you want to. Sorry that it's not a complete UI replacement, and obviously it's still evolving- with the new Tooltip code, it should become possible to make a UI that's totally arbitrary in size / position, though...

[AF]

i think that would be better dircted at whoever takes up the post of marketting person.

however this is the sort of thing other projects need to be doing, and for that I applaud you nemo for this thread

[Neddie]

Also, know that I did not blow my brains out in the position for the time I filled it ineffectually, so you need not wipe grey matter off the (pleather) seat. I'll be, of course, still contributing so you won't be entirely alone.

[Vadi]

Edit: ignore that, thought you needed pr not an artist :)

I recommend PM'ing AI on the ubuntu forums: http://ubuntuforums.org/member.php?find ... r&t=359842 he's a pretty good artist, i've seen several of his game-related artwork.

[Nemo]

We're looking for both. We've had people get in touch with us who are more interested in the art side of things, but only one with any sense of the marketing end of it yet. If you have skills to offer, we're looking for help in multiple areas on this particular front.