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Author Topic: Verde Station - Already Greenlit, Coming soon  (Read 3325 times)

sorensilk

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Verde Station - Already Greenlit, Coming soon
« on: September 04, 2014, 08:21:44 PM »

Hello all,

I don't post on here very often but I read the forums constantly.  They've been a great tool for me whenever I get stuck.

I just wanted to share a game that I've been working on by myself the past few months. It's called Verde Station and it was made using 99% Playmaker. I am a huge fan of this tool, there's no way I could have made this game without it.

It's a discovery exploration game set on a space station where you are on a year long solo mission. You main responsibility is taking care of the greenhouse. As you explore you learn more about what's going on. Or at least you think you do. The game messes with the player a bit and reacts to how they play.

Verde Station was Greenlit on Steam about a month ago and I'm hoping to release if very soon. I'll be sure to update here when it's out. If anyone has any questions about the game or how I use Playmaker just let me know.

The trailer above is from the Greenlight so it's about a month and a half old. The main change since then is that I completely updated the computer terminals so it actually feels like an old school OS. Below is a screenshot of one of the terminals and what it's FSMs looks like. And there are tons that look like that. A bit complex but it makes sense to me, and more importantly THEY WORK.  ;)





Game Site
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4ppleseed

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Re: Verde Station - Already Greenlit, Coming soon
« Reply #1 on: September 05, 2014, 04:55:13 AM »
Congratulations! This looks great. How did you structure your Greenlight campaign?

sorensilk

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Re: Verde Station - Already Greenlit, Coming soon
« Reply #2 on: September 05, 2014, 11:56:16 AM »
Greenlight campaign here

tl;dr - Tried to make the best campaign video and description I could, stayed involved on the campaign's page, not a lot of press reach out, got one article on RPS.

For the campaign I focused on trying to create an interesting video that piques people's interest immediately but doesn't spoil the game. Since it's a discovery/experience type game I do have to be careful how much I share. The whole point of the game is to experience what's going on. If players know that ahead of time it loses a bit of weight.

So with this in mind I also made use of the spoiler tag in my game description. This meant that there were black bars after paragraphs with different info in them. People that were curious enough to mouse over the black bars got to read more. I think this fits well with the game and also makes the description more interesting to read than most because it creates a mini-game. I don't know that I'm the first to do this but I hadn't ever seen it done before.

I spent most of my effort focusing on making the greenlight campaign interesting because a lot of what I read said that traffic from outside sources (twitter, news articles, etc.) don't make up much of the traffic that actually gets to your campaign and turns into a vote. A lot of this is because if you're coming from a website, the links go to Steam's web version, you have to log in, and potentially go through the steps to authorize your browser if you haven't already, and potentially find the game's Greenlight page again. It's way too many steps for most people. From what I found of my analytics this was true.

As far as press reach out, I emailed a short list of journalists (only about 25) that I thought might enjoy this type of game. I think that is important. I didn't blast every site I could. I went through old posts, people I already follow on Twitter, etc. to find specific people that might be interested in my game. I sent short, to the point emails focusing on what makes my game interesting and what makes the development interesting.

I didn't get a huge amount of write ups from sites but the little I got was positive. The biggest was Rock, Paper, Shotgun. The game was also written up on a few small VR sites since it includes Oculus Rift support. The craziest moment for me personally was that right after the RPS article went up Steve Gaynor from Fullbright (makers of Gone Home) tweeted the article and we chatted a tiny bit over Twitter. Gone Home is definitely an inspiration so it was a bit surreal.

After that I just continued to post about the campaign's progress on Twitter and share the numbers. I always included a screenshot of the graph since I know I enjoy them from other devs. Compared to other campaigns, it wasn't getting a huge amount of votes but from Steam's graphs it said it was on track to hit the top 20% within 30 days. However, after just 15 days I was extremely surprised to find that it was greenlit! It was way faster than I was expecting but unfortunately Steam doesn't provide you with a definitive list of reasons why your game was greenlit. However, I did a news post on IndieDB talking through the stats and my thoughts in a bit more detail if you want to read that.

Overall I spent about a week putting together the video, email list, sending emails, writing the description, etc. (of course that doesn't count the weeks of reading articles, and post-mortems on other Greenlights and trying to brainstorm ideas for mine). After it went up I spent about half my day on the campaign updating Twitter, doing a few more press emails, and staying very active on the Greenlight campaign to answer questions. I added an FAQ announcement on the Greenlight page and updated it with questions/answers as they came up every few days. Then another announcement with more details on gameplay since that was a common question. And a short one about the RPS article.

That's about it. Let me know if you want any more detail on anything.

4ppleseed

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Re: Verde Station - Already Greenlit, Coming soon
« Reply #3 on: September 08, 2014, 11:56:03 AM »
Thank you, that's some really great information. Your approach seemed really focused and well researched – I’m glad it worked out. I’ll be following the progress on Steam/Twitter :)