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[nathy after dark]

oh Apple is still being a gatekeeping jerk to small developers I see

You don't know the half of it! I actually went through the notarization crap, and STILL, when anyone downloads my app from Itch and unzips it, they get the error message "application is damaged and can not be opened"! And it turns out, the app is not damaged in any way, it's just that MacOS throws this error for any app that comes out of a zip file! So Steam and the Itch client are able to install it and run it without that message, but direct download makes it look like I screwed up even though I payed the blood price and did their stupid notarization. (Direct download is not the ideal way to install it anyway because people won't get automatic updates including episodes 3-6 so I should probably discourage it anyway.)

Just got interrupted by the first trick or treater of the year knocking on my door! I was unprepared so had to rush to the store and buy candy, then intercept them further down the block and give it out. I will not be known as the house that disappointed trick or treaters!! Happy Halloween everyone!

The copyright thing merits a longer post and I'm waiting to hear back from Steam right now before I post about what the issue was and how I handled it (perhaps not successfully--we'll have to see).

[JobLeonard]

Well, here's to hoping things will go more smoothly than with Apple I guess

[nathy after dark]

My friend Charles has been writing a really neat series of posts on Substack, full of musing about games, life, vulnerability and inspirational good stuff. Reading the latest one today helped get me out of a funk--I'll write more about the funk and the horrors below, but first, here's the link to the post that made me feel a little better and figure out what to do with myself:

https://muditaheart.substack.com/p/how-to-be-remarkable-when-the-worlds

There's a lot of great links at the bottom of the post. Let's start with this one, then take a sharp turn:





I only really have 2 platforms I use to communicate on social media--this devlog/the FLIES FLIES FLIES Patreon page, and my personal Instagram which also posts to Facebook. I believe everyone should be using every platform they have, to speak in solidarity with Palestine and denounce the many world leaders who are complicit in Israel's campaign of non-stop bombing Palestinians in the Gaza strip, depriving them of food, water, and electricity, in an ongoing attempt to erase the entire people of Gaza, steal more Palestinian land, and profit off of the natural gas underneath it to the tune of 5 hundred billion dollars.

Ever since October 7, I've been using my personal Instagram (only 1 of my 2 platforms) to pretty much non-stop share information about the atrocities and the global resistance. This has taken an emotional toll every day for the last 34 days, but was pretty much a no-brainer decision (I have no career, full-time job, partners or dependents, who could stand to be threatened by retribution for me speaking out). And I don't really advertise or monetize my Instagram, so I have little to lose if I get shadow-banned on there.

But I wasn't sure how to use *this* platform to speak out--I honestly had thought that in the time it would take to develop season 1, the world would stay relatively calm aside from the natural disasters, and all the activist thought I put into the writing of the story, would speak for itself. But in this case, nothing in FFF has anything to do with Palestine or Israel, so, whether it's appropriate or not to say so in this devlog, I just have to come out and say it. Free Palestine!

(I speak only for myself, not for anyone else who contributes their money or labor to this project).

One option if you are moved to give your support, is to donate to the PCRF as recommended by People Make Games on that video. Though it seems at the moment those donations can't make it into Gaza because of how utterly horrific the situation is... So I don't know. Maybe raising awareness and breaking the silence is the biggest thing to do right now.

As far as this project goes, Valve has left me hanging in the review queue for almost 2 weeks at this point--I don't know why, other than this response in their first build review:

Your app appears to incorporate intellectual property from third parties. The Steam Distribution Agreement makes it your responsibility to provide Valve with all necessary rights to distribute your game. We can decline to ship your game if concerns have been raised about intellectual property.

Please provide us reasonable assurances that you are not infringing on the rights of any third parties whose IP is incorporated in your game. Those assurances could take the form of license agreements, or a legal opinion from your attorney analyzing the intellectual property issues and explaining why you don't need licenses. Without such assurances, we don't plan to ship your app.

Which I responded to with a full write-up of where the assets come from, how they're licensed and why my usage of them is legally justified. Maybe their lawyers are too busy with the class-action lawsuit (which I myself have signed onto, ha).

This brings me to another point: If I hate Steam and their monopoly so much, why am I still trying to release my project on there?

Well... my original reason was, that I thought it was the best and only place to make a buck and find an audience for my thing. That still does factor into it, but I've started having legitimate thoughts of pivoting somewhere else where I can release without the go-ahead of a megacorp. The hangup is that, I'm publicly committed to releasing on Steam now, and by the distributor agreement with Valve, I've agreed not to release commercially anywhere else until I release on Steam. Would be pretty rough to back out of all this (if that's even possible) -- but maybe I just release the first 2 episodes as a free demo on Itch and that doesn't violate the Valve agreement. Who knows?

With everything going on, it might also be better to delay release so people aren't experiencing this story with a pall over it from the aforementioned Horrors. It's pretty crass to be worried about how genocide affects my VN release, but here we are.

[nathy after dark]

Anyone else boycotting Black Friday? 

On this cursed day of corporate greed and consumerism, don't give a single red cent to Disney, Starbucks, or McDonalds. Click here for more info about ongoing boycotts.

Instead of buying more crap, check out the free demo of FLIES FLIES FLIES now on itch.io: https://nqn.itch.io/flies-flies-flies. It includes the full first episode of a queer, indie, anti-capitalist sci-fi comedy.

[nathy after dark]

I did promise more details about the copyright situation, so here goes. If anyone reading this ever wants to remix public domain and Creative Commons assets into a Steam release, maybe this will help you avoid scary snags in the review process!

As I mentioned in a previous post, Valve had rejected my VN's build with this message:

Your app appears to incorporate intellectual property from third parties. The Steam Distribution Agreement makes it your responsibility to provide Valve with all necessary rights to distribute your game. We can decline to ship your game if concerns have been raised about intellectual property.

Please provide us reasonable assurances that you are not infringing on the rights of any third parties whose IP is incorporated in your game. Those assurances could take the form of license agreements, or a legal opinion from your attorney analyzing the intellectual property issues and explaining why you don't need licenses. Without such assurances, we don't plan to ship your app.

This was fair and valid of them, but scary and vague on my end. The first 2 episodes mostly included public domain and creative commons assets, properly attributed and very fair game for me to include. They also included 3 assets which I didn't have the rights for but felt were justified to use because they were pop-culture references that didn't steal anything from the original properties--they were there for homage, and also small images that didn't give the full experience of the thing itself. I felt my usage was fair (see the 4 considerations for Fair Use listed on the US Copyright Office's website) and was prepared to take the personal risk that if the rights holders did indeed object to my tiny project referencing their work, I would gladly remove it. In Valve's message, I couldn't tell which assets they objected to, or whether they were under the impression that I didn't have the rights to *any* asset in the build.

So I started asking around if any friends knew a copyright lawyer in case I would need one to review my project and appeal to Valve on my behalf. And in the meantime, I wrote my own document explaining the various sources where my assets came from. If you're curious, that document is here. This was a scary, high-stakes thing to write. It certainly would have been safer and more responsible to contact a lawyer first, and not risk getting myself in legal trouble, but who can afford a lawyer? Maybe I should have reached out for advice to that gamedev lawyer who did AMAs on Reddit a few years back--I didn't even think of that until just now, typing this post, though.

So anyways I took the stupid risk of submitting my own legal analysis to Valve. To be honest, I *hope* no one gets any ideas or inspiration from this particular dev log post. 

Valve responded to the next build review like this (several weeks later):

Your app appears to incorporate intellectual property from third parties. Please remove any content you don't have the rights to use.

Still pretty vague, but no longer indicating that I might need a lawyer or require further legal writeup. I took this to mean (despite it not explicitly saying so) that the public domain and Creative Commons assets were fine, I just needed to remove the Fair Use assets and resubmit. This was kind of a leap on my part--notice that the message doesn't even indicate that they actually read through the document I sent. I assume they did, but who knows?

But I decided to just replace the Fair Use assets and try submitting again. Anything to avoid having to pay a lawyer, although, if they were gonna require me to remove EVERY asset that wasn't explicitly my own creation, this would have been the best option, because there are dozens if not hundreds.

This:



became this:



The dinosaur silhouette came from openclipart.org which is an awesome resource I've used a lot.

This:



became this:



(the creature art also came from openclipart).

The hardest asset to "originify" was this screenshot of the character Pops from Speed Racer:



For the purpose of a very stupid joke in episode 1 (see the 6-minute trailer) I needed to have a recognizable image of Pops himself. No one under a certain age is even gonna get the joke or appreciate the reference, but I wrote it in and I'm standing by it.

I just made an upper layer in GNU Image Manipulation Program and drew on top of it but pixely by using layer transparency to help trace:



Should this be considered any more legal than just using the screenshot? Who knows. Hopefully no one ever needs to answer that question in court.

Valve approved the build with these 3 assets replaced. 

[nathy after dark]

tl;dr the last post--The first 2 episodes have been approved for Steam launch! So I'm excited to announce that I will be pressing the big green button on the afternoon of Friday December 1, right after I get home from work.  

The first 2 episodes will be available on Steam Friday December 1!

[nathy after dark]

It's out!

For the next week, grab a season pass to FLIES FLIES FLIES for $4.01 on Steam or itch.io. After that, it will cost $5.99.

I hope no one finds any bugs in it--pun intended. But if you do, there's a button in the menu to send feedback so I can get to fixing any issues ASAP over the weekend.

[nathy after dark]

Launch weekend

Launch weekend is coming to a close. Steam sales numbers and analytics come in at a ~24hr delay, so I can't say exactly how things are going. But basically, there's good news and bad news:

The good news - It seems like the game works. I didn't have to spend the weekend fending off bug reports, complaints, or anything like that. It was actually pretty peaceful.

The bad news - I wanted more people to buy and experience it! The number I'm seeing on the dashboard right now (which is possibly not accurate because of the delay) is smaller than the already modest upper limit I had in my estimates. Maybe it was a bad weekend to release. Maybe I need to do waaaay more legwork to get it in front of people. Thinking back to my first Steam release, I'm realizing I've done a LOT less this time around.  My situation is different now, so I need to pace myself and break the marketing work into manageable chunks or I'm not gonna get anywhere.

Got my first user review on Steam, though!



My brother wrote it but I think he really means it.

[Tangleworm]

Congrats on launching! No matter the numbers, it's a huge achievement seeing a project through to completion. "IMBUE CREATION WITH THE SPARK OF CONSCIOUSNESS" really got me.

[nathy after dark]

Thanks Tangleworm! You're very right, launching is a big deal and something to be proud of. It's tough that part of being a creative is needing so much emotional maturity when milestones that "should" feel great, are sometimes underwhelming because brains and hearts are so weird! My family and friends have been great about sending congratulations and making sure I recognize the celebratory aspects of the process as much as possible.

I want to frame this review and start calling it my Game of the Year award:



Note: There is only ~1 hour of content in FLIES right now. They must have left it open with their computer on for a very long time to log 43 hours, lol.

[nathy after dark]

Can't predict 'em all!

When I write sci-fi, I try to base my concepts on real trends and research, to expose my audience to cool or scary new ideas, etc. Even if I'm not writing "hard sci-fi" I still think taking inspiration from reality is the best way to go, because that's the kind of sci-fi I like to consume.

I've written sci-fi story beats that have come 100% true, like the idea of an AI therapist in my short story "I Think" (now it seems like there are dozens of AI therapy apps! And I don't trust any of them).

Or the idea of a tech billionaire buying and demolishing a beloved internet community in my stage play, Survival Instinct. Elon Musk made that dream a visceral reality by buying Twitter. Still hoping to get Survival Instinct produced some day, maybe as another visual novel or in an outdoor production because live theater unfortunately is still a big COVID risk.

Well, I made a prediction in FLIES FLIES FLIES Episode 2, which was that if you trained a language AI using Twitter posts, the result would be an insufferable robot troll. And it turns out I was wrong about that:

Forbes: "Elon Musk’s Grok Twitter AI Is Actually ‘Woke,’ Hilarity Ensues"

I'm not mad about it. 

[nathy after dark]

Whoa, thanks for helping FFF pass 10,000 devlog views! And happy new year! 

I'm back at work (I'm a high school teacher's aide) after a pretty nice winter holiday. I had a list of winter break goals, and I was able to accomplish most of them! I do wish I had gotten more rest, but to be honest, no amount of rest is ever enough. I am devastated that the freedom is over. 

One goal that I didn't quite hit--reaching 10 user reviews on Steam, which have to be from people who bought the VN directly on Steam. As of today FFF has 11 reviews, but 6 of them are from beta testers and Patreon supporters, and Valve doesn't count those reviews towards algorithmic success.

This post is how I found out that there is a secret 10-review threshold in Steam's algorithm. Pretty messed up that this is like a secret requirement for getting good exposure.

In case you haven't seen it, I'm just gonna pop the teaser trailer in here:





If you like what you see in the trailer/devlog, please consider buying FFF on Steam and writing a review! Positive or negative, just speak your truth. 

I recorded voice lines with an actor friend who will be portraying the big bad villain of season 1, to be introduced in episode 3. He knocked it out of the park and I'm really excited for folks to hear his voice work. He brings the number of trained actors in the cast to 2! Most of the voice talent (including me) are a scrappy bunch of creative folks doing our best and having a good time. I think more people should take this approach to adding VO to their indie games. I pay $20/hr which keeps VO affordable on my nonexistent budget and with a relatively small amount of voice lines per episode because the VN is fully linear. It feels wholesome and in the reviews that have come through, people have actually had good things to say about the voice-over, not just the roles done by professionals. One drawback that I'm aware of to my VO approach, is that since we're doing it remotely and with different sound equipment, the quality and volume levels aren't the same. Right now my priority is finishing the rest of the episodes, but down the line I might do some re-recording or pay someone to equalize and clean up the audio better than I know how to.

[nathy after dark]

Win some, lose some

After a month and a half of pestering my friends and acquaintances, FLIES FLIES FLIES hit 10 direct-through-Steam user reviews!

Sure enough, impressions from the Steam discovery queue are way up now. It seems the rumors are true and Steam cuts off exposure shortly after launch, only turning it back on once you hit this 10-review threshold. That's pretty sucky, but at least it validates how much legwork I put into getting people to review it. It seems the trailers and Steam page are good enough to get people curious when they see it--this wave of impressions has corresponded with a dramatic uptick in wishlist additions. I was hoping it would also come with a sales boost, but I was forgetting that Steam users only buy on sale--Even I almost never pay full price for games unless I've been following them through development.

Another little victory for marketing -- getting the first Curator recommendation from Nonbinary Haven here. Their reviewer wrote this:



A somewhat less effusive review than some of the ones my friends and family members wrote, but still positive, and fair!

I'm glad I found this curator because now I can follow their recommendations for other cool queer projects. 

One piece of bad news for the project--IGF announced this year's finalists, and FLIES FLIES FLIES didn't make it.

With where my financial situation is at, I'm very grateful I was given the entry fee waiver. My hope was that entering the contest would at least bring some attention or interest from contest judges who might also be involved in publishing or press. So far, none have reached out to me, so I think that's been a bust. As far as the effort goes, submitting to IGF was about 100x easier than the labor involved in publishing on Steam, so I don't regret taking the swing.

And of course, the games that WERE chosen as finalists, surely deserve every bit of congratulations and hopefully I'll find time to check some of them out.

[nathy after dark]

The stars are aligning as there are 12345 views on this devlog! 

Right now FLIES is 33% off on Steam!

I timed this week-long sale (which is also happening on Itch but I know y'all are cowards who won't buy it there) to align with two experimental marketing events. So here's some juicy background info about marketing.

I wanted to get the word out to a large number of people who would be more likely to occupy the small, teeny tiny niche of humans who would be willing to pay for the experience I've created. I've never spent money on advertising before and I wanted to give it a shot, but I am extremely broke. So I opened my ears to opportunities where I could advertise with some of the weird, independent creators that I listen to/follow, who are queer and likely to want to support my project by cutting affordable deals.

I was listening to the Gender Reveal Podcast hosted by Tuck Woodstock, and noticed that every episode not only has trans guests talking for a trans audience--My main character is trans & a lot of the VN is about that--the episodes also feature Theymail messages, which are little messages submitted by audience members sharing about opportunities, small businesses, events etc. that they want to promote. I thought, hey, I should write a Theymail message! This was back in December right after release. It turns out I was way behind on the podcast and didn't realize they were out of season, so my message wouldn't go out until after the new season started. Well now it has, and my message was released to the Gender Reveal audience yesterday in this episode.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll turn into a fly: FLIES FLIES FLIES, a queer, sci-fi comedy visual novel is now on Steam and Itch.io. When Finn Flynn, a closeted trans man, wakes up as a housefly, he'll have to come out to his dads and solve the mystery of his transformation--all without having a voice.

Tonight I went and listened to hear the message read. It happens a few minutes in. Driving at night to get dinner and feeling kind of groggy, hearing the words I wrote read out, I was able to hear them in a weird, detached mood, and ask myself, Did I effectively capture FLIES FLIES FLIES? If I had never heard of it, would this message entice me to look it up? And I honestly don't know. Word limits are hard. Describing anything is hard. Marketing is hard. I guess let's wait for the numbers to show!

The other promotion came about by sending a Steam code to an Instagram content creator, Leanne Yau who runs Polyphilia Blog which I support on Patreon. I think reaching out to them via Patreon, as a patron, must have cut through the barrier that happens when trying to get games journalists who've never heard of you to try to write about your projects. I can definitely say that if one of my Patreon supporters messaged me saying they had made something cool, I would be inclined to return the favor by at least reading the message and whatnot. It'd actually be really cool to hear.

Anyways, I sent them some Steam codes because they had streamed some games and VNs on Twitch and I thought maybe they would be interested in streaming FLIES. They told me they weren't streaming anymore at the moment but that they would be open to collaborating on a Steam key giveaway for their followers. I made some slides, which they combined and cleaned up to optimize for social media attention spans, and we ran the giveaway yesterday. Folks who won Steam codes got this message:

Hey, thanks for entering the giveaway. Congratulations, you’ve won a Steam key: XXX.
If you enjoy the game please recommend it to friends! Steam is currently running a sale so the game is 33% off -
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2330490/FLIES_FLIES_FLIES/

Folks who didn't win codes got this message:

Hey, thanks for entering the giveaway. Unfortunately you didn’t win, but turns out the game is currently 33% off on Steam - you can check it out here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2330490/FLIES_FLIES_FLIES/

That was Leanne's idea, to send the link to folks who don't get chosen, and that way you get impressions from everyone who signs up for the giveaway, not just the small number who you end up sending codes too.

Anyway. I hate marketing, and coordinating just these 2 things to happen, plus the steam sale to line up with them, is just about all I have the energy for. (I've also been sending out codes to journalists etc. trying to get coverage but nothing has come of that.) So I'm gonna call this the end of phase 1 of marketing, and put my attention solely on finishing episode 3. Which is gonna be awesome.

I'll update later with whether any of this pays off!

[nathy after dark]

The results are in!

In the last post I talked about running a 3-part promotion of FLIES, which included a brief advertisement on a trans-centric podcast, a giveaway partnership with a polyamory educator via Instagram, and a 33%-off weeklong sale on Steam and Itch.

Throughout that week, FLIES only sold 1-2 copies and wishlist numbers went up by ~50. With a combined price tag of $150 for the 2 promotions, I consider this a failure. But we keep on moving.

Wishlist conversions are at 3.4% over time. I thought with the VN being quite cheap, $4.01 on the discount, a solid few of the  wishlisters would shake loose from the tree and become customers, bumping that stat up. They didn't--probably for a mix of reasons, one of which being "it takes seeing a product multiple times before people will buy it" (I've heard this called the Rule of 7), and another of which being "the screenshots really don't look cohesive or appealing, so it's gonna take strong word-of-mouth recommendations to get people to go from 'this looks like a janky project I feel sorry for' to 'I've heard it looks janky but it's actually really great'". Those are my two main theories.

I am increasingly thinking to myself, that it might be easier to invest in a graphical revamp, spending a fair deal of money to get the assets redone in a cohesive style, than it will be to convince people that "Oh, the graphics aren't great but you actually get used to them" (which is basically as close to being harsh as anything a reviewer has said). Still, since sales numbers are low I don't have enough of a reason to believe that investment would pay off.

But I'm curious--if you're following this log and/or have it on your Steam wishlist, can you give me a peek into your thoughts? Are you put off by the screenshots? Waiting for more reviews from gaming press so you know it's good? Waiting for more episodes to release? Just busy with other games/life/global political upheaval so you haven't had a chance to grab it? Would be very helpful to know what prospective customers are thinking.

I'm chugging away on making episode 3. 

[nathy after dark]

I watched the first episode of Double Fine PsychOdyssey this morning. I heard it's really good many moons ago, but I hadn't yet made time to play Psychonauts 2 and I didn't want spoilers. Now that I have played it I'm gonna be making my slow way through the documentary. I had no idea there were 32 episodes--yeesh gonna take a while.

Anyways, the first episode had a lot of really good stuff I didn't know about, about Psychonauts 1 not hitting commercial targets and the team feeling proud of their work but sad it didn't take off more. Fitting and cathartic for me right now--I feel good about my work but hope to grow the response to something much bigger. Anyone else feeling discouraged might wanna watch for inspo.

[nathy after dark]

DO NOT mourn or worry about the missing Satanists!

[nathy after dark]

I swore I would never advertise on a social network owned by Meta ever again.

But here I am with a new official Instagram account for FLIES FLIES FLIES!

Follow me please

[nathy after dark]

Free demo is up on Steam!



For a while, despite having a demo built and available on Itch, I was putting off on getting the demo up on Steam, because it requires basically as much work as setting up the build, store page, etc. the first time, which as I've talked about before is a horrible pain.

Anyways, I finally figured I should put in the time to do that. And I did! So now, if you wanna get a feel for what this project is, you can get the demo on Steam.

Here's the promo text I came up with for the Steam announcement:

If you've been on the fence about buying FLIES FLIES FLIES, here's something to help you make the right choice: a free demo! This demo contains the complete first episode of the 6-episode season. I hope you like it.

And if you've already played & enjoyed FLIES FLIES FLIES, please consider sharing the free demo with all of your weirdest friends! <3

[awetos]

Congratulations on finishing your game and putting it up on Steam! It is a huge milestone to have it played in the public's hands, don't discount yourself! You've been working on this since 2021 according to the devlog!
I am sure more reviews will come in time.

Question, why is the devlog icon only at 50%? Are there more things you want to add?

And I really think the graphics are holding you back. The story and humor seems charming. Games are a work of art after all, and the art is part of what draws us in. How many times have we seen a boring game with great art get lots of hits!