It took us a while, blame it on our fussiness of never feeling ready enough to make the Steam page public. Do we now? Of course not! But we couldn't keep on waiting further, the game HAD to go public on steam.
It is true that in these 3+ years of open development on social media, here on IndieDB and across all the platforms and pages that we did experiment with we did manage to get a bit of a follow, but where was all this follow now being funneled to?
I mean, it's totally fine to keep on interacting with each of them on the pages they use the most and the pages they like to hangout on the most, but what's our final aim of this endless journey if not to sell the game? And with all the good and bad that one can think and say about valve, what's the best place where to do that if not Steam?
It was time to pick all the best assets, the most presentable screenshots, the best possible gameplay videos, and prepare the steam page. It might sound easy to do for a game whose progress is now pretty advanced, but believe me, it's not!
Hey, shall I use this one? - Nope, look, it still has the placeholder UIs!
Hey can I add this one? - Only if you first re-write the text, look it's still full of typos!
Mind if I use this screenshot as the action displayed is perfect? - Damn, the one with the old explosion?
Story of 6-7 days of our life. And if the Screenshots were problematic, oh boy the gameplay videos and, above all and everything, the fear of each gamedev, the TRAILER! But let's proceed slowly, otherwise turn all this into a madman rant.
Screenshots
Screenshots for steam need to be: Eye catching, game explaining, nicely readable and teasing the users. Aye, easy ain't it? Try being a programmer and having to do that then you tell me! So I spent a few days taking full screen HD screenshots of the game (Lightshot be blessed, if you don't have the software, get it right away please, you will thank me later).
What I needed was pictures from all across the game, able to display the variety of gameplay we offer, but also trying to keep the placeholder lefts (we still have some, I must confess I thought they were less, but think about it, already having temporary UIs is spreading temporary placeholder all over most of the game). So, I walked the valley of pain and fear, but I got some decently watchable stuff up I admit it.
But anyway, long story short. I did prepare a nice page copy (had some help to double check a bit, but it was not too bad), I got all my pics up, took a deep breath and I did hit Publish page. We decided not to add the trailer yet given that the page was clearly stating the game was still a work in progress, sure that nobody would have complained yet. To make sure we did show some action, just to stay on the completely safe side, I did post an update right away with a link to a beta gameplay video I did record a few days before for a test.
It wasn't a trailer, but it was 4-5 minutes of Real gameplay, with quite a bit of action too!
Videos
Day 2 after release. First post on the page, I get the notification and I run to check excited like a penguin that sees its first polar bear. And man, face first right into our first wall comment :D
Ouch fella, you know how to boost the moral of a team, don't you? The thing is, if that's how a user feel when he gets to a game page, then having no trailer is really such a problem. We did think our page to be clearly a work in progress and as such understandably without a trailer yet, but obviously we did think wrong.
We did enter panic mode a bit, well, not really panic but definitely the "I am not gonna sit and watch" mode, and we did upload a made public the closer thing we had to a trailer. Is it beautiful? Nope, it's not.
Does it show the game? In a rough way but it surely does.
Will it do good or bad to the game presentation in its current state? No idea, but one has to act sometimes.
So here you go, our first trailer. Rough as hell, but hey, WIP!
Conclusion (for now):
So, with the public steam page, we feel like we are more "real", sorta like more "legit" into this. Mind, it's just the beginnin of the last, hardcore crunch, the work to do is a lot and polish is painfully slow as a part of the process, but hey, on we go!!!
In case you missed the links I did hide around:
Emiliano, H&R
Sweet ! :D Wishlisted :d
Gotta say, I missed that music from the trailer ! :)
Good job anyways, careful out there tho !
Oh yes, we should avoid moving with our usual "bull in a china shop" elegance and try to get a bit more careful. But on the other side, it needs to keep on being funny to, that's the only way to keep on pushing ;) Cheers Angel, glad to have you always there!
That Trailer is much better than 8/10 out there on Steam... Kudos! (strange little volume drop at 1:16 min but I guess it´s just a makeshift)
cheers,
can´t wait to get my hands on it
Dennis
Aha thanks mate! I still feel the trailer is currently quite awkward, I like the battle part, specially before the music starts kicking, but I find a lot of other parts very bad. Well, luckily it's not the final one. (And yes, that volume drop is awful, I hear you there :D )