Steam Greenlight thread

[Nordicus]

So yeah, Steam Greenlight is a thing that exists and I found no other thread about it specifically.

 

We have our Kickstarter(/Indiegogo) thread where we raise awareness about the games we want to get funded, so why not do the same for the next step for PC titles, which is to help them get published on Steam.

 

Nobody wants their anticipated games to stay on Greenlimbo, so post here whatever titles you'd like to see on Steam, whether it's new indie titles, re-releases, ports or games that are wrongfully kept outside of Steam even though their developer already has stuff on there, etc. Greenlight is a horribly flawed system, but it won't get any better if we just sit and don't make any effort to help our favorites to beat the green sea of shovelware

 

 

 

Alright, so the game I'd like y'all to look at is Knock-Knock

 

The game's a weird take on the horror (they don't want to call it horror, but it looks pretty horrifying) genre, and weirdness is what Ice-Pick Lodge excels at, just play any of their older titles. I mean, if one of their Kickstarter updates looks like this, then what can you except from their game?

 

 

 

 

So, we had to extend the development period.

 

And now we’ll tell you why we had decided on that, and where we’re standing now.

 

The situation is rather symbolic. We’ve often said that true creative work is not about self-expression and making stuff up, it’s about finding a right shape for a story that exists objectively, outside the artist’s head. This story and the underlying problem constitute a recognizable archetype, and the artist’s job is to see it, tune in to it – and impart it to their contemporaries (spectators, readers, players) most accurately and adequately. We defended this idea – with too much fervor, perhaps – in several interviews, articles, and debates, rather presumptuously reducing the role of the author of a work of fiction to that of a mere interpreter between the heavenly and the earthly, so to speak.

 

But, as Morpheus tells us, “ Fate is not without a sense of irony”. The universe has listened to us, and shrugged, and sent us an anonymous archive with a riddle encrypted inside. The metaphor has become reality, the idea has become flesh. It’s like we’ve been told, “Well, if you truly do as you say – not making things up, not pushing your own issues – then here’s a subject for you. Elaborate.”

 

There would be no answers to the classic “What for?”, “For whom?” and “How?” questions to the customer. It was not a commission, it was an order. Not a call, but a challenge. The first line in a dialogue where our game should become the last.

 

We’ve felt that. And so, though it seems strange, we no longer wanted to learn what was behind that letter – a supernatural force, a hoax, an inventive take on the good old “make-a-game-based-on-my-idea” or just a prank. We’re not interested in that. Figuring out what it all is, exactly is much more fun.

 

Thus working on this game had become a hybrid of creative process and historical investigation. And the difference between historical investigation and press or criminal one is that your sources are limited. There’s no one to question, no witnesses to call, no convenient clues to follow. You’re given a setting, a statement, and following the game’s unspoken rules (and it’s clear the mysterious sender is playing with us, or he would tell us more) that is enough to figure out “who owns the zebra”.

 

The game’s genre is reconstruction, restoration of a situation, of which we know very little. To be able to tell what had happened there after all, we had to begin with understanding what, in fact, was happening there first. We just had to create an interactive model. So we set to work.

 

                                                                  ***

 

January 2012. Finished basic documentation for the game. Decided that the archive (which on the whole is vague and obscure) can, after all, be divided into “clear” and “not clear” parts. To start the process, set the “not clear” stuff aside for the time being and work with things beyond doubt. We have: a house in the woods, guests coming from said woods, a lodger (an assumption, but a very probable one). Dawn as the breaking point. It all brings Don Kenn’s drawings to mind. The obvious conclusion: the player in our model has “just to survive till morning”. Time is the chief enemy. The guests are vague, which means the antagonist is unclear and the more random and less defined his behavior is, the better. The house is just being “taken over”, like in a Julio Cortázar short story.

 

March 2012. First build, code name Here comes the bogeyman! (inspired by aforementioned Kenn’s work and Goya’s capricho Que viene el Coco). Our principle: we do not wish to terrify anyone, we’re not making a horror game, and so we adopt a counterintuitive cartoonish style, we specifically choose an uncomfortable “flat” view of a platformer – a world like this should not have many dimensions, and we do not leave ourselves space for understatement. We need utter simplicity and irony – our safety pole in the mystical quagmire (to which we are naturally drawn). The build’s shortcomings quickly become evident: that’s a good start, we’ve found the right materials and settled into the house, yet too much still remains behind the scenes. It’s time to address the “not clear” part.

 

June 2012. Second build, code name Not Afraid. We’ve given the player the ability to build the house: it’s understood that the house is more than a mere building. A questionable attempt to “show” the Guests within the two-dimensional house and give them simple “just find the Lodger” intelligence. You could see the results on our promo art. The attempt had been initially announced as a trial, and we quickly realized it was a failure – because of an utter lack of respect towards our subject. Like mice would see a deity as the Greatest Mouse, it was pretending that “they’re just like us, only with six fingers” and attempting to attribute human motivations to something non-human.

 

Opposed to the Guests interpreted as “monsters”, the Lodger – willing or not, but having to follow laws of the game – had to become a “warrior”, too active and too skillful. That was an obvious lie, there was nothing like that in the original setting. The build has turned into some kind of tower defense with the player required to build the house as an efficient obstacle line.

 

That was a wrong direction, and it had to be rejected. We got carried away with the simplifications and could not stop in time. The Guests ought to be addressed in their own terms, so we take the game into the familiar field of symbolic imagery – we cannot “think for them”, but we have the right to assume what our protagonist thinks of them and how he interprets the situation within his head.

 

September 2012. Third build – No-one Escapes. Righting the list. The game is transferred into the Lodger’s head. The necessity to create AI for something by definition uncontrollable remains a problem, but we seem to have found a way around it. The emphasis is on the fact that the Lodger does not even have to understand what it is and why it acts like that – for any contact with the Guests, even a “mental touch”, leads to certain death.

As a result, the “if I don’t see it it’s not there” principle becomes the player’s only viable strategy. Main objective: stay sane, set your falling apart world back into logical chains. A separate interface introduced for “thinking”, the player is given certain parameters (Fear, Migraine, Fatigue), which are constantly changing, depending on where he is, what he sees, what he does.

 

The result is a fussy logical puzzle. Seeking in logic salvation from insanity, our hero is playing with himself and acting as though nothing is going on. There are no inner contradictions – and quite a few interesting situations in such a game, but it’s definitely not what the Originator wanted from us. We have just avoided the problem for the sake of playability. Reject.

 

End of 2012. We just need to stop and think. In October we suspend all work for about a month. This month passes in attempts to reconcile game logic with the obvious illogic, irrationality of the initial situation – interspersed with our curses along the lines of what in blazes we got ourselves in. These attempts prove fruitless, we realize there can be no such compromise, and in November we make a decisive step aside, because at the very same we come to a new level of understanding what happened to the maker of the archive. All this year long we’ve been researching creepy tales and urban legends of all manner, looking for hints and similarities, and looks like we’ve found our answer.

 

Fourth build or Build-13. We design a new build, this time going not general-to-specific, but vice versa. We put in specific situations, using the original data, and then carefully add on the game, letting the player decide what to do outside given situations. A “narrative” game (where you have to solve the riddle and find a way to win) turns into an “existential” one. The stakes are on the believability of the model and of everything in this model being in its right place. The Guests’ AI is as unpredictable as is possible to have – and still have a game.

 

In January 2013 something strange happens. We find another mysterious message – on paper this time, in our mailbox. Nothing links it to the initial sender. It can well be a prank by someone who already knows what kind of game we’re making. Yet in the context of our “two-line dialogue” theory we can assume that the investigation is over and we’re on a right track.

 

So we go with this last version. Now we’re doing the fine tuning – building inner dependencies, regulating many non-structural yet very important factors: travel speed, lighting intensity, the Lodger’s ability to do this or that in a certain situation (e.g. in a dark or lit room). The genre remains the same – a game of hide-and-seek.

 

                                                                ***

 

You may ask why we had to make all those erroneous builds to realize we were moving in a wrong direction. Couldn’t we have figured it out at once, composing the very first documentation?

 

No, we couldn’t. First, this story purposely touches on the builds’ flaws, but don’t forget there was quite a lot done right in all of them – and we keep that, and each build leaves a kind of “cultural layer” in the game. We leave that information behind the scenes, because revealing it would be a spoiler. This story looks too much like a premature post-mortem as is.

 

Secondly, developing a game is not like solving an equation. As you are making a build, a lot of in-game factors pop up, like “too much fuss is killing the mood”, “here’s a distracting motivation”, “the actions are getting too automatic”, “inaction becomes the best strategy” etc., and all these factors depend only on how the various gameplay elements, both programmed and interactive, “get along”. If you’re working not with a ready game clone but with a new version, the process is unpredictable.

 

You may also ask whether all that work up to October 2012 was in vain. Of course it wasn’t. Because in the end, the answers to all those unasked questions to our supposed customer have been found.

 

 

 

Edited April 18, 2013 by Nordicus

[LadyCrimson]

The game I wanted, Planet Explorers, just became Greenlighted, so I am happy.

 

Knock Knock looks like an interesting game tho.

[Gorgon]

I don't get it. What's the downside for STEAM in selling any and all of these games. They already have tons of old, well I wouldn't say crap, available. If you count the free section quality surely can't be a deciding factor in  whether or not something is available through STEAM.

 

Is the STEAM seal of approval supposed to make us buy them, is it some kind of tactic to garner more comunity buzz for said games. How does this work ?

 

Lots of interesting stuff on the waiting list though.

[Keyrock]

Is the STEAM seal of approval supposed to make us buy them, is it some kind of tactic to garner more comunity buzz for said games. How does this work ?

Only Uncle Gaben knows for sure, but my guess is that the hope is that developers of games will encourage their fans and supporters to go to Steam and vote for their game, whether said fans plan to purchase the game through Steam or not.  In the process, said fans may see something else on Steam they like and buy it.  That's my theory, anyway.

 

I'm just happy Shovel Knight (Now that's SHOVELware.  Heyoo!) got greenlighted.  As for Knock Knock, it definitely looks creepy and interesting, but I don't really understand anything that's happening in that video.

[Agiel]

Along with this, the big one I was keeping my eyes on was Cradle, which was also Greenlighted this past week. 

 

 

Absolutely loved what the Eastern Europeans have been doing for PC gaming. One of Ice Pick Lodge's previous games, The Void, was one of my absolute favourites despite its design issues. In spite of them, speaking as an artist it helped me out of a creative rut and kick a bout of depression (which is weird for a game that's as seemingly soul-crushingly depressing as it is). That game goes criminally unrecognised by gamers at large.

 

Edited April 19, 2013 by Agiel

[AwesomeOcelot]

Valve said they don't have the people to vet the games, they're not happy with Greenlight and plan to let any publisher/developer open their own store on Steam. They seem to just sell any game from a publisher (apparently even if they've never published a game and they're just a P.O. BOX front for a developer), any game that uses Source or Steamworks, and then vet as many others as they can. Greenlight just seems to be an extra layer so they can prioritize popular indie games, just an indicator for which games Valve should be vetting, the voting probably just works as relative to the other games on the queue before they get green lit.

[BruceVC]

I don't get it. What's the downside for STEAM in selling any and all of these games. They already have tons of old, well I wouldn't say crap, available. If you count the free section quality surely can't be a deciding factor in  whether or not something is available through STEAM.

 

Is the STEAM seal of approval supposed to make us buy them, is it some kind of tactic to garner more comunity buzz for said games. How does this work ?

 

Lots of interesting stuff on the waiting list though.

 

 

Valve said they don't have the people to vet the games, they're not happy with Greenlight and plan to let any publisher/developer open their own store on Steam. They seem to just sell any game from a publisher (apparently even if they've never published a game and they're just a P.O. BOX front for a developer), any game that uses Source or Steamworks, and then vet as many others as they can. Greenlight just seems to be an extra layer so they can prioritize popular indie games, just an indicator for which games Valve should be vetting, the voting probably just works as relative to the other games on the queue before they get green lit.

 

 

For me this is a way that  Steam is just giving something back to the community and supposed fans of the games on Greenlight, they don't need to do this as some of these games are rubbish. Its almost altruistic but not quite as it does garner attention and marketing for Steam

[alanschu]

I wouldn't call it altruistic.  It still takes time (and hence money) to properly set up a game and support it.  If they do that for just any game and that game sells 50 copies in its lifetime, then it was a waste of Valve's time.

 

They basically are using buzz to direct where they spend their efforts, because ultimately games with lots of buzz are the ones most likely to have associated sales.  It provides a criteria for the vetting process and just comes across as smart business IMO.

[BruceVC]

I wouldn't call it altruistic.  It still takes time (and hence money) to properly set up a game and support it.  If they do that for just any game and that game sells 50 copies in its lifetime, then it was a waste of Valve's time.

 

They basically are using buzz to direct where they spend their efforts, because ultimately games with lots of buzz are the ones most likely to have associated sales.  It provides a criteria for the vetting process and just comes across as smart business IMO.

 

I hear you but how much investment is it really to get a game sanctioned on Greenlight? They basically listen to the votes by the community and then let Steam  become the distribution mechanism, or am I missing something around hidden cost? 

[alanschu]

Unless I am mistaken, isn't the "Greenlight" simply an page that says "do you want to play this game?"

 

I'm talking about the costs of actually putting the game up for sale.  Granted it's probably not a lot of work, but it's not like it's going to be a simple switch flip.

[BruceVC]

Unless I am mistaken, isn't the "Greenlight" simply an page that says "do you want to play this game?"

 

I'm talking about the costs of actually putting the game up for sale.  Granted it's probably not a lot of work, but it's not like it's going to be a simple switch flip.

 

Yeah, okay I see what you saying

[Nordicus]

I don't get it. What's the downside for STEAM in selling any and all of these games. They already have tons of old, well I wouldn't say crap, available. If you count the free section quality surely can't be a deciding factor in  whether or not something is available through STEAM.

How about you ask the same of every online game distributor ever? Why don't they just let anyone put their game up there?

 

I personally don't want Steam to end up as looking the same as Xbox Live Marketplace's Indie section. Such an oversaturation of complete garbage even among the top rated list that it'd be really hard to find anything worth while unless you went through all the games one at a time.

 

Even Desura, who mostly sell in-progress indie games, have some standards

Greenlight just seems to be an extra layer so they can prioritize popular indie games, just an indicator for which games Valve should be vetting, the voting probably just works as relative to the other games on the queue before they get green lit.

Yup. From what I've seen on individual Greenlight update pages, Valve puts an emphasis of reaching Top 50 in terms of Yes votes. While they probably look at the games in order, it seems that there's at least a minimal amount of cherry-picking involved, because at no point have they Greenlighted 50 games at once Edited April 19, 2013 by Nordicus

[Blarghagh]

Steam has Greenlight so they don't have to wade through mountains of crap and have to check the legal side of selling all of it. Case in point, a billion Slenderman games have been posted and all of them would have been denied due to not owning the rights to the character nor having permission to use it, but now Steam only had to deny the two or three that were actually popular. It saves literally mountains of work.

Edited April 19, 2013 by TrueNeutral

[Redonkadonk]

Hey, The indie game I'm working on could use some Greenlight love.  It's a pinball RPG called Rollers of the Realm being put together by a killer team of people you have never heard of.  We are a small indie who has been doing service work for years and this is our first IP... and Greenlight experience.  Community feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, but we are having a hard time getting discovered and we have flatlined.

Here is our Greenlight link

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=136473033

 

Vote if you like it!  

[IndiraLightfoot]

@Redonkadonk: Thanks for telling us about your hard work, and I'm bizarrely fond of computer pin ball games, and now to get an RPG take on them would be just great! So I happily voted for it. 

 

Also, If you'd do a KS on this, it probably would do well if you just asked for a reasonable amount and valid reasons for doing a KS at such a late stage. If anything, those KS I've seen that didn't have Greenlight when they entered Kickstarter sure soon had it after KS came to an end (sometimes even during KS).

[Redonkadonk]

@Redonkadonk: Thanks for telling us about your hard work, and I'm bizarrely fond of computer pin ball games, and now to get an RPG take on them would be just great! So I happily voted for it. 

 

Also, If you'd do a KS on this, it probably would do well if you just asked for a reasonable amount and valid reasons for doing a KS at such a late stage. If anything, those KS I've seen that didn't have Greenlight when they entered Kickstarter sure soon had it after KS came to an end (sometimes even during KS).

Thanks for the support and feedback.  We were looking at doing a KS on this, but being from Canada makes it complicated for tax reasons.  This will hopefully change in the next year.  Would l love to Kickstart a level editor and let people share their own board designs.

[Keyrock]

Hey, The indie game I'm working on could use some Greenlight love.  It's a pinball RPG called Rollers of the Realm being put together by a killer team of people you have never heard of.  We are a small indie who has been doing service work for years and this is our first IP... and Greenlight experience.  Community feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, but we are having a hard time getting discovered and we have flatlined.

Here is our Greenlight link

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=136473033

 

Vote if you like it!  

That looks pretty cool.  Voted. 

[melkathi]

Hmm RPG Pinball? Ok that's just my kind of bizzare, voted

[Katphood]

Will show off my point and click graphic adventure game in this thread once it's presentable.   

[Keyrock]

So I bet you woke up this morning thinking "I really wish there was a co-op twin stick shooter featuring cute android girls for PC, Mac, and Linux".  Well, you're in luck, or you will be later this year when Assault Android Cactus comes out.  Hint: This is your cue to head over to Steam and vote for it.

 

Dibs on Holly for future co-op shmup madness. 

Edited July 22, 2013 by Keyrock

[Nordicus]

Steam greenlights 100 games at once

 

Still no Cloudbuilt, but at least this should put a smile on a lot of indie gamers' faces

[Guest Slinky]

Kinda weird Silent Storm had to be greenlighted to get to steam.

[LadyCrimson]

Steam greenlights 100 games at once

 

Still no Cloudbuilt, but at least this should put a smile on a lot of indie gamers' faces

8BitMMO - "Fight evil Lawyercats." lulz, I want that game. It looks like silly 8bit fun.

 

ExoPlanet, ForgeQuest, and Underrail look interesting....

[Keyrock]

Kinda weird Silent Storm had to be greenlighted to get to steam.

Not as weird as this:

 

[alanschu]

I guess this isn't really a "Greenlight" but I had a chance to play this indie at PAX and actually really enjoyed it.

 

Life Goes On