Forgotten Games Started – Blog Housekeeping – Choosing Keywords

BeVampired became a first installation for the Forgotten Games project. I played this game about a year and a half ago and found it quite addictive. So it was naturally to write first about the game I know well. The plan behind the project was to start the day with downloading a game nobody heard or wrote about, play it for an hour or so, and then write a review summing up my thoughts and impressions. It would be a great way to study gameplay and design ideas by others. Alas, I have to push myself harder to stick to this plan. Maybe, one game a week will be a promising beginning. I can’t promise anything. At least, I didn’t want to have an empty page with such a loud title. “Number of reviewed games is 1.”

Yesterday I did some combing of the blog. First, I trashed all “pinging comments” that were automatically generated due cross-referencing in my posts. Then I played a little bit with built-in html tags. My posts are not long but many followers would find it nice that I added a “Continue reading” break for each post. The names of games are italicized now rather than encircled by quotation marks. I thought about highlighting the keywords in the text and I’m not sure yet. In the title of the post, I try to name all major topics but wouldn’t it be easier to find the desired paragraph if the keyword such as “Twitter” is highlighted with yellow?

Finally resolved the problem with scaling of the Russian flag by removing “?w=40” in the end of its link. I had big unresolvable troubles with uploading this picture. Sometimes it looked fine, but then you switch to another computer or browsers and blue stripes cross the image. From now, I’ll delete this “?w=” tail wherever WordPress adds it to my links.

One thing I can’t stop thinking about is the keywords optimization. I know that keywords for What Color is This Monster? suck but it’s not easy to find rare and at the same time relevant words to describe the game. OK, I used the word “quiz” understanding that there is no chances my game can be found by this search query among thousands of much more popular quizzes. Of course, I can use words such as “rhododendron” or “rhodium” but what do they have common with a color monster quiz? A user will look for rhododendron hoping to find a nice picture of a blossoming bush and my irrelevant game on the top of the search results will make him disappointed rather than intrigued. Things are even more complicated for the abstract games like Push and Match where I don’t have a real story and the game mechanics itself provide only trivial words used hundreds of times in other games. And remember about Apple reviewers who can reject the app if keywords do not relate to the game. Though it’s more likely if I use trademarks that I’m not going to do.