Greenlight | Gamedev Brain

Steam Greenlight, It Can Be Fun

Posted on November 12, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I’ve been live with the Violent Sol Worlds team on Steam Greenlight for a few days now. It is fun, and stressful. We are really enjoying it so far. The first few days we hit hard and were at a great trajectory and traffic was massive. Now it is slowing down right as I expected it to. So now comes the slow climb to the top 100.

The thing is we really wanted to get to at least 50% of the way to top 100 in the first high traffic time, and we did. Now I would like to see about 2 percentage points a day go up, not sure exactly how hard that is to get. The amount of traffic after about 3 days on Steam Greenlight goes way down. You really need to drive traffic there yourself after that it seems.

So I am pushing a bit of Twitter today to see if I can get more voters there in that manner. It always boils down to marketing. If anyone tells you anything about indie game development it should be about marketing. Get good at it and you will be fine. If you are shy or think everything you do is not interesting you are doomed.

Anyway, Greenlight is going great so far I just hope it does not take 6 months to get there. One thing I noticed is a lot of people really want only completely or near finished games on Greenlight. This kinda stinks because that is the reason why a ton of games never even get to take advantage of things like Workshop, or acheivements etc. They get so far in to their design, then here comes valve 90% into their project, with awesome things to integrate that everyone wants and they are hard if not impossible to integrate in.

We want to be greenlit early, so we can have that working relationship with Valve and their APIs early as to have a tightly integrated experience on Steam as soon as we can and not have people having to wait on or never get things like Workshop mods. To get there We do need your vote so please do come by our greenlight page and join the cause to get Violent Sol Worlds Greenlit.

New on Kickstarter – Violent Sol Worlds

Posted on November 9, 2015 by magicrat_larry

We are proudly announcing Violent Sol Worlds has been launched on Kickstarter. Now everyone can see the top-down scifi survival shooter where you can craft cars, weapons, and buildings. You can help us increase the awareness of Violent Sol Worlds and help create the momentum it needs to become an amazing reality. If you find the game to be of interest please help us promote it by telling the world about it. Take a look and discover what we are so passionate about.

Violent Sol Worlds on Kickstarter – we need your support

Violent Sol Worlds on Steam Greenlight – we need your yes vote to get into the store

Violent Sol Homepage – keep informed about the Violent Sol Universe

I personally am so excited, freaked out, and a bit nervous all at the same time. It is by far one of the most interesting feelings to work on something this hard and then finally launch it to the public. For those who follow me on Twitter you already know that this process has taken a long time for our team. We have put a ton of work in to get to this point. We really look forward to the next phase of the project which is very exciting for me.

We have already began to design the final game so it can be expanded greatly over the next few years. This is truly a dream project to work on and I hope you will join me in my journey to bring it to the world. We are creating something magical here that I love and hope you will too. If you are a scifi fan and love a good survival game I am sure you will be pleased with what we are putting together.

Thank all of you who follow my blog and everything else I do. You are the best and I am truly grateful for each and every one of you.

Am I a Failure, or No?

Posted on August 28, 2015 by magicrat_larry

Fear of all this work not paying off is looming. As we push to Kickstarter and Steam Greenlight it does cross my mind that people may not support us or even know about us. I’ve been working hard for a long time now to try and make that not happen. I suppose the fact that you are reading this is a sign that my fears are at least not 100% solid.

It will be a slightly crushing blow if our efforts do go unseen or even worse un-liked. Well our best is all we can give. I do appreciate everyone for supporting, following, and just being there through our hard work. Game development is not hard, the workload is the hard part.

Holding down the full-time job and performing on game development at the same time will kill a lesser person. I have the largest amount of respect to those who have made it before me and hope like heck that hard work pays off and I follow them in stride. All of your support is appreciated and there is a much longer road ahead. I’ll keep digging in as long as I keep getting up in the morning. I love this stuff.

As always here are some links to learn about our game Violent Sol Worlds

Violent Sol Worlds home

IndieDB

Facebook – join the conversation

Game Development, It’s what’s for Lunch

Posted on August 2, 2015 by magicrat_larry

I tend to work through lunch. Yes, even on the weekends. The one thing that weekdays have going for them is that I actually eat a lunch. The weekend I tend to just grab the computer and start plugging away as my daughter eats her food. There is just so much to get done.

See, Violent Sol Worlds is getting close to launching a Steam Greenlight, and Kickstarter campaign both in relative closeness to each other. The thought is we will launch Greenlight first and refine anything we need to in a couple of weeks. Then launch Kickstarter and hopefully have more than my mom go to both of them. I love my mom and all, but I kinda want to have somebody other than our families support this awesome title we are making.

So I am putting together the final coding of the game-play demo, which is just a little bit more. I am also tasked with the Greenlight page which I would like done by end of day Tuesday so we can hit “GO” whenever we like on it.

Well wish us luck, and if you have not seen the game yet please go check it out, we have a webpage now – Violent Sol Worlds