GAMEDEV BLOG: 006 - The Steam Greenlight experience... [Wormhole Ventures]
New builds, and Valve's Steam Greenlight process. It took some time but Wormhole Ventures was greenlit.
PREVIOUS GAMEDEV BLOGS for Wormhole Ventures:
001 - Influence of Board Game Mechanics
002 - A Prototype Board Game is born
003 - Prototyping on computer leads to a new direction
004 - Attempting to kickstart the game
What is Steam Greenlight?
Steam Greenlight is a program that Valve started for the Steam platform several years ago. For $100 you can then submit as many game titles as you want to be curated by the steam community for release onto Steam. If you are familiar with PC, Mac, or Linux gaming getting your game onto Steam can be a very big deal.
The reason they created it is that Valve is known for having a small team doing a lot of jobs. Part of that job involved reviewing submissions for Steam. With the Unity Engine coming out free that was much like the invention of the Gutenberg Press. Suddenly anyone willing to put in a little time could take a stab at making a game. There are pros and cons to this. The pros are obvious. Anyone can attempt to make and produce a game without having a huge studio's budget. The cons I like to describe as handing someone a pencil and paper for the first time and telling them to "Write me a story". Because, the tool is free does not mean everyone is going to be good at using it. It is also easy to aim far beyond your skill level when making games. It is a very technical and involved discipline so it does take a lot of learning through mistakes. Aiming big and talking about it before you've learned some key things usually leads to problems. Unity is not the only engine that went free. They simply were the one that kind of forced the hands of all the other engine makers.
HERE ARE SOME GAME ENGINES THAT YOU CAN USE FOR FREE:
Unity
Unreal Engine
Cryengine
Amazon Lumberyard (based off of Cryengine)
There are others, but those are the big ones.
Greenlight starting to be unpopular
Greenlight started to get a bad reputation for a lot of Steam Users. The problem wasn't with greenlight, it was actually with the community, yet as with anything they want to blame anyone but themselves.
A lot of REALLY bad titles kept getting greenlit. This is because it is really easy (like an hour or less) to make something that looks really good on a video or screenshot in any of these engines. Yet it has absolutely no gameplay. So people were promising big things in their greenlight and showing off fancy visuals and such and people kept voting on it without doing any research. "Oooh that looks pretty" UP VOTE. "That doesn't look fancy" NO VOTE. Yet perhaps the most important thing to a game is whether it is fun to play or not. This depends a great deal on game play. That is not something you can determine from a screenshot.
To make matters worse there are lots of cases of people buying what is intended to be a framework for a gamestyle from the Unity Asset Store, Renaming it, putting it on Greenlight, and pitching it as a game. It was not a complete game intended to be as such and you end up with a lot of the same game with different names.
648 Days Ago we submitted Wormhole Ventures to Greenlight
The initial few days we were in the new to greenlight feed was interesting. We received about 22% yes, and 78% no votes. That is totally fine as our game is kind of a niche game and 22% in a market as big as Steam is great.
Yet it just kept on a mostly a flat line.
We moved onto a more ambitious project and began gathering assets and tools in earnest for it. We had gathered virtually every tool we needed for our next project and done a lot of prototyping and testing.
570 Days after submission I received a surprise email...
Congratulations Wormhole Ventures has been greenlit. This was a Saturday and at that point it came as a complete surprise. We immediately stopped work on our next project (for now) and switched gears back to Wormhole Ventures.
I actually had a ton of work already done on the next iteration of Wormhole Ventures, I simply had not been devoting a lot of attention to it. This greenlight is what I consider Version 5 of the Wormhole Ventures code and design base. I had quite a lot of work into Version 6. I will begin blogging about the current state of the project in Wormhole Ventures Gamedev blogs after this. I wanted to build up the backstory, and history of this project.
So what happens after you are greenlit?
You agree to a very detailed NDA. I can talk about the game, but I cannot tell you specifics of behind the scenes at Steam other than to say it is pretty cool.
Greenlight Build of Wormhole Ventures
The greenlight build of Wormhole Ventures features a playable single player random game. It is fully playable, but it has no tutorial (other than some videos I made later) and is pretty alien to most people in terms of game play. I also have no clue how many people actually downloaded it and tried it out.
The next version addresses what I believe are shortcomings in the release there. Tutorial, story, etc.
IF you wish to play old builds I still have them sitting on Google Drive:
Windows Version of WHV Greenlight
Mac Version of WHV Greenlight
Linux Version of WHV Greenlight
Hey @dwinblood what do you think about Unity joining forces with facebook to build a similar platform to steam? Will that platform cater better to independent developers?
I doubt it. Valve is a very FREE company. They don't do a lot of the negative things that most corporations do. In fact most things people complain about Steam are due to developer decisions. Steam does not tell you that "you must sell your product for X", "you must put your game on sale", etc. Those are all developer/publisher decisions.
Plus, I have close to 1300 titles that I own on Steam. Why would I even consider giving up my library to go to a Facebook platform? I also see Facebook on the opposite side of the spectrum, spied on by government, people thrown in jail over it, lost jobs over it, etc.
As to Unity joining forces. Unity tries to target as many platforms as possible so it does not surprise me. I can tell you that if Unity ever FORCED me to use Facebook for my programs I'd stop using Unity almost immediately. I am engine agnostic. I use Unity due to experience and having a bunch of assets for it. I could switch to any other engine if I really had to and I'd suffer some setbacks as I relearned how to do certain things.
I am a huge fan of Valve and Steam.
They are welcome to try to compete, and they likely will get a lot of business. Tying in with social network Facebook will give them a lot of exposure. So they will likely get a lot of new users. I don't see anyone with a sizeable Steam library switching to another platform anytime soon unless they had a way to port their games over.
GOG.COM let you link up with Steam and bring some titles over for a couple of weeks. GOG CONNECT. Yet they haven't done that for awhile. I like the mission of GOG and the company behind it as well.
Cool stuff! I'll have to check it out this weekend.
Kind of reminds me of EV Nova, which I played a bunch back in the day: http://www.ambrosiasw.com/games/evn/
Heh.. I hadn't seen that one. That one seems to have a LOT more action than my game. My game is kind of like Civilization in space, real time, and where technically you only control one ship, but the things you do create more ships and the area comes alive with ships flying around doing things.
It's hard to describe. I certainly was inspired by a lot of different sources. It is very ALIEN to play. You actually need to play through a few games before you understand it, or perhaps watch my tutorial videos and then play it.
I am addressing that though. Version 6 of the code is based on Multiplayer from the ground up, and it will also have a single campaign (multi-branching) story that will also function as the tutorial.
Nice! I love Civilization, been playing since Civ2 as a kid. I actually like steep learning curves in games. Game like the new Xcom force you to play through a couple time in order to fine tune your strategy as you learn what works and what doesn't. If done right, I think this adds loads of quality replay value. I know that it took me years to really "get" Civilization as a kid and I enjoyed the whole ride. Best of luck with this project!
Well that greenlight game is actually playable. Really the only goal at this point in THAT build would be to try to get the best score you can at the end of the game length, and not have the place be a cesspool.
There is no tutorial really other than some built in help screens in that build... so pretty much just a learn by playing.
Goal = make a good score which is taken from wealth, but also other factors.
Also the games where an alien infestation truly gets going and they start cranking out warships can really crank up the excitement (perhaps frustration for some). :)
I forgot to mention this earlier, but I wanted to introduce you to my friend @jbaker585. He's going to school for digital media technology and game programming:
https://steemit.com/introduceyourself/@jbaker585/hello-world
He's new to Steemit and crypto but I know you two will have a lot in common, and who knows, maybe you guys will make a game together! :)
Cool I added him to my follow list. You never know what might happen. :)