[very]

I think with the rise of tablet devices more visual novels should appear, it's definitely the right platform for them.

It's the right platform but unfortunately it seems that it's not the right marketplace. App stores are essentially casual portals. You either have something cheap/free and mass market that can raise to the top-10, or you may as well not waste your time. VNs are by definition niche and they tend to be pretty expensive, so chances for more of them appearing on tablets are very slim.

Dunno about tablets, but there are a lot of (very shallow afaik) visual novels moving into the mobile phone market. Mostly in Japan, although there are a handful of them showing up in English as well. Since the companies doing these little otome ports keep putting out more of them I can only assume they're making decent sales.

They're set up where you get the character introduction free and then purchase individual character routes. This seems to have a strong limiting factor on the kind of stories being told.

[gore]

It's no secret that I've been on a Kara no Shoujo lovefest lately, despite the game being far from perfect. I would love it more if the gameplay elements were more balanced and the mystery actually played fair (that is, no making characters change their actions for no reason because of totally unrelated choices I made somewhere else). Anyone curious about it based on my mention should be aware that yes, it is 18+, the porn content seems designed to make you feel terrible about it so DON'T play it for that, and gore.

I wish there was more VN/adventure crossover in English. 999 is awesome, obviously, but it's strangely difficult to find games that combine branching story and puzzles that require thinking about things. My brief foray in that direction long ago taught me mostly that I cannot write adventure game puzzles for shit, so it's not a lack I can personally address.

I've mostly given up on the pure adventure genre due to too many empty worlds filled with piles of mindless brainteasers. I want story, preferably story I can affect. I also want some form of challenge, NOT just 'pick who you want to date'.

as an analogy, if you have a gut feeling about not liking someone's appearance, you might not date them. but you wouldn't actually write a forum post or send them an email about how unattractive they are.

You'd be surprised how many people will do exactly that. Even, or especially, about people who could not possibly care in the slightest whether J Random thinks their hairstyle is ugly.

Opinions! We all got 'em.

Personally I feel weird about games priced at $5 or less because I find it hard to imagine they're worth anything at all, unless they're only at $5 because they're on sale. But I'm not in the demographic for McPixel so I'm not going to pass any judgment on it. I have no idea how to gauge its worth.

It would be interesting to see if IGF submissions *drop* from people taking their hopes and dreams elsewhere...

Sorry, was in a bad mood at the time. I do not haet you. Really.

Ah, casual sexism. Just another reminder not to stick around these parts...

Yes, you can safely promise them that. Steam will give you keys to distribute if you ask them.

Of course, games which are more 'sticky' in that sense are also likely to sell faster. *That* is something that directly translates to the game's success once/if it passes into the full market.

As for organically finding an audience, I am relieved that Fly'N is finally starting to show signs of percentage movement. It was really depressing the other day looking at that languishing down in the ranks of 0%, and that's one of the things that was souring my viewpoint.

It's a hobbyist/fan community, so it's more focused on encouragement than criticism. I don't think that's a bad thing.

I think both are useful. Without encouragement many people will never finish anything. But without critique, many people will never improve anything.

I'm hoping that with anonymity in place and a wacky contest topic that nobody is personally invested in, we'll be able to get some critical discussion going without it turning personal and without flouncing. Perhaps I'll be proven wrong, but at least I will have tried.

i think this still ignores something: that an hour or a week of work isn't worth the same in different parts of the world. in places like indonesia, where wages are about $100 a month, you might have a full time job and still have 4-6 hours free each day to work on games, to prepare them for steam, etc., and yet not have $100 to pay for an entry fee

Which will also make it difficult for them to purchase any other equipment or services they suddenly need on short notice in order to complete the process, and would mean that they would likely NOT fit in well into the standard acquisition process.

They'd be a special case that needed special arrangements even if Steam wanted their game. They would be a terrible fit for most current conceptions of what Greenlight is. Thus why I said that not knowing exactly what GL is and how it's supposed to work is creating some problems.

I agree that $100 means different things to different people but honestly? I think it's a much bigger hurdle to IGF submission than GL submission. A viable GL entrant can find ways that aren't applicable to the IGF. Like, say, entering into business arrangements with someone in a slightly better position to handle them.

Browsing Greenlight it seems like the results have been a big mess so far. I see the highest vote scores going to a handful of really samey stuff with, apparently, little regard for their actual quality as long as they tick the right boxes for the five seconds voters spent looking at them.

This is the same process that users go through to buy games on Steam - look at video, screenshots, read synopsis. If you can't get upvotes on the Greenlight service, how will you get sales?

Not quite, though. A very small number of games are offered on sale on Steam, especially per-day. If you are a daily or weekly visitor, you get a small handful of new games to look at, not 700+. That naturally encourages people to take more time examining the new entry and deciding whether or not they're interested.

Beyond that, the fact that a game is on Steam means that it is already mentally interpreted by many as being of decent quality (and complete and tested). It is given the impression of having already been selected, rather than being yet another entry in the slushpile.

And as already mentioned, using your own money makes you more inclined to pay attention to the details of things that fall into the "blind upvote" category.

Several games have already been mentioned as examples of things that no one can believe would possibly have gotten through Greenlight and yet have made huge sales numbers. It's not quite the same process.

But again, we don't know what's actually going to happen yet. We have our own attempts at processing data, but we have no idea what they're really going to do going forward. (Also, I may be proven totally wrong about my blind-upvoting grumble, as it was something I was seeing based on the titles I encountered while doing some up/down voting of my own, NOT a spreadsheet. Thus, possibly huge confirmation bias and crankiness on my part.)

It's pretty hard to imagine yes.
The 100$ one time fee to get onto Greenlight isn't the part that's going to cause the most trouble for anyone trying to get on Steam. If you have a computer, internet access and the education to make a game with even a chance of getting on Steam then you're already among the privileged in this world. That doesn't mean that 100$ is an insignificant amount of money to a every indie dev, but it's certainly an amount they should be able to come up with if they really need it.

iow "I didn't read the article and I'm sticking with my opinion."

Look, for anyone who is in a position to release a game on Steam in the near or even semi-near future, $100 is completely not a big deal. Even if you don't have the money yourself, if you have a working business and are prepared for all the stuff you're going to have to do to manage your launch, you have or you can get it.

However, that's not the same as saying that anyone with a computer can get a hundred bucks, or anyone who can't get $100 isn't a real indie developer.

The real problem is that nobody, including Valve, seems to know exactly what Greenlight is supposed to be. If it's meant to be picking out proven games by people with their feet under them who could have the product ready to launch within two months of acceptance? Then the $100 is a perfectly reasonable gate to cut down on submissions from people who are not in that situation. Don't have it on hand temporarily due to shitty life circumstances? Probably not the time to be diving into a stressful new business relationship.

But if it's meant to be finding promising games, ideas, things that could become great if they just had more attention and funding and the like... then suddenly the $100 becomes a huge issue. To those people hoping and dreaming for success while not having $100 to their name, it's a huge cost for a lottery ticket.

Trouble is, Greenlight's been described in so many ways that no one seems to know exactly what they're supposed to be doing with it. At times, they describe it in ways that makes that second position sound like what they had in mind.

Browsing Greenlight it seems like the results have been a big mess so far. I see the highest vote scores going to a handful of really samey stuff with, apparently, little regard for their actual quality as long as they tick the right boxes for the five seconds voters spent looking at them. (This doesn't mean that they all suck! Just that the results don't seem to reflect which ones are better than others.) I see really awesome games that are proven in their field languishing with 0% or 1%. (No, I don't mean me - I've seen games a hell of a lot better than mine doing worse in the votes.)

If Valve took these results as they stood and turned them straight into a release strategy, their system would be flooded with crap and anything niche would be ruled out forever. I can't imagine that's really what they want, but until they figure out what they're doing and how to adjust it, there's not much to do but wait.

The 'judging' will be done by anyone who cares enough to take part in it, since getting people to talk about what works and what's terrible is one of my major goals. When we actually have finished entries, I hope people will jump into the discussions and provide their own opinions in great detail. You're all welcome!

make it $100 so that the winner can stick his gaem on greenlight

Considering it's 10.000 words max, I doubt this will be any good for commercial purposes.

Considering the resource licensing involved, trying to use your entry for commercial purposes wouldn't work anyway. This is just a bit of fun and writing practice.

Well, the problem is that then it wouldn't be able to be packed together at the end. By using the same engine and the same resources, the whole competition should fold up into one small package for judging. So this time around, no. After this contest ends we'll look at what rules are a good idea to keep or modify should this be run again in the future.

I'm running a little-bitty writing competition over on the Lemmasoft forums, using the free RenPy development engine.

Basic idea is that I hand out a stack of resources and a prompt, and people have to write the best story they can within those constraints.

If you've never used RenPy, it's sufficiently simple that people have picked it up for the first time in order to do Ludum Dare entries and still completed on time. Basically, if you're not afraid of computers or things labeled "code" it is dead easy to get a basic story up and running.

That's not a really good comparison, on the App Store and XBLIG  your game is guaranteed to be published.

That's not true at all.  You pay a fee to join the iOS Developer Program, then make the game, then Apple has to review the game (and all future updates) before they'll let it go onto the App Store.

Well, as long as you follow their guidelines and don't do anything illegal they're not rejecting your app. Even then, there's been some cases of games using copyrighted material that were approved (and taken out after some complaints).

... except for cases where games have been pulled because of questionable values decisions that were handwaved as 'guidelines', or because a large company complained that an indie's game was Too Similar in some way (that is, NOT copyright violations but same-genre gameplay)

For that matter I have been told they can be pretty picky about letting games into the iPad listings, much more so than the iPhone ones, even with the huge long list of nitpicky weird decisions they want you to follow to qualify for the iphone.

Any time you have someone making that sort of decisions, there are going to be games that get yanked for unfair reasons, and games that should have been yanked that aren't. Life isn't fair. Even if your guidelines were something like "We will publish EVERYTHING unless we have a court order telling us not to!" that still won't end up being fair because some people are much better at working with the court system than others.

I heard elsewhere that it is a one-time fee, but I haven't thoroughly investigated it myself as I wasn't planning to rush in and post more games at the moment anyway.

It's not much of a cost if you think you have a chance of getting through. It is, however, a pretty good reason to hang back and see how this whole thing works out for Ye Average Indie. Does anyone want to throw fistfuls of cash into the pot before they've seen what it takes to 'win' this game?

The average greenlight voter is probably going down the list of games looking for something to impress them, they may not give your page more than 10-20 seconds of examining before making their decision,

Now, see, compared to that, doesn't the IGF judging seem a lot more generous?

(ducks and runs)