Hi everyone! Currently we’ve been out looking at properties, working on the Collapsus weekly builds, putting the finishing touched on a game jam game that went a smidge over time called MOTION.rest (it’s now hopped to this years Kentucky Fried Pixels jam), and putting more work into CaveWorm, Radarkanoid3000, and Burst Lancer. There’s really not too too much to talk about on those fronts, though. There is something very topical we wanted to touch on this week, however: the death of Steam Greenlight and what that means for Collapsus! After that, some other bits of news.
One of the things we learned from Greenlight was that more often than not, a game (especially puzzle games) were met with anger, skepticism, and trolling. With the poor reception Collapsus had initially received, at first we thought that it was us; maybe we had misjudged the quality of Collapsus. Thankfully, after poking around many, many other Greenlight pages (and talking with quite a few current and former Greenlight devs) we found that that was just how Greenlight had become. This was more than likely due to a lot of shovelware and vaporware that pushed its way through the system.
Fortunately we did manage to get successfully Greenlit in the 11th hour after a couple very strong weeks leading up to Greenlight closing down. We just want to give a HUGE thank you to everyone who voted and shared! We really couldn’t have done it without you!
What will come of Steam now that it’s gone and Direct will take its place, though? Really, I’m pretty sure it’s too soon to tell. The barrier for entry is $100, same as the submission fee for Greenlight, so who knows if it will keep out the shovelware (although Valve has said that the uploaded games will be curated and moderated more closely now).
Just something to think about… either way, it’s great to know that, once done, Collapsus IS making its way to Steam! So, on to other news!
On the 12th, Lance and I were invited to go up to Future Awesome Camp, a STEM-based summer camp in Columbus where we got to give some great talks to some aspiring game developers! It was a really cool camp. They had robotics, programming, fashion, design… all sorts of things for young budding minds. It even helped spark an inside joke about modeling rocks! Good times! We hope to work with the programming director, Malia, again very soon!
Afterward, we got to hang out with some of the Multivarious and AbleGamers teams since they invited us to come in and see their space/ hang out while we were in town! Oh, speaking of giving talks to game devs…
Tomorrow, on the 29th, I will be giving a Skype lecture “at” Louisville Makes Games about the business side of indie development. In many ways, this is part 4 of a series that I’d been working on since 2013. See, back when we first went to Pandoracon, I gave a talk about how to be an indie game developer, then, when we returned in 2016, one of the talks I gave was the sequel, revising and expanding from what I had learned having actually established a studio. After that, a few months ago, I gave a couple talks at Vector which were on raising funds for starting your studio and what to expect in your first few years… now we have this!
<img src="https://jaycd291f974096.files.wordpress.com/2020/10/2fed0-img.jpg as well, but we're not 100% on that… which leas us into later today (I'm typing this out at 7am). Later on, we're having a big Cave Worm meeting to see if there's anything that can be done for Indy Pop this year. We've been doing a meeting every month or so for the past few months and we're pretty sure we're moving along nicely. So, keep you fingers crossed!
With that, I’m off! Hope to see you all at Indy PopCon!