Please forgive the cross-post from the Business forum, I wanted to make sure nobody missed this!

Some of you may have seen our Race The Sun one month Numbers Post. We talked about how not being on Steam and *just* selling our game through our website has proven challenging, despite getting pretty great reviews, and coverage from most major sites. We've been hearing "I'll buy it when it's on Steam" a lot.

The post kind of caught on fire, thanks in no small part to the help of the indie community.

So, we decided to run a "Not on Steam" sale, consisting solely of games that are available for purchase and not on the Steam platform. Not as an anti-Steam measure, but rather to send a message to gamers: "Hey, there are some really worthwhile commercial games out there that aren't available on Steam, that are worth your money."

The layout will be similar to http://www.gamesareglorio.us/ - a single page with a list of games. If you don't have a humble widget, we'd be happy to link to your store page elsewhere and just list the discount.

The only stipulation is that we ask that everyone put a 25% or more discount on their game, to make the messaging more clear and effective.

We hope to capitalize on the attention our post brought, and hopefully reach some of the bigger sites.
So far 21 25 developers have signed up.

If you're interested and would like some more details, please get ahold of me via email: aaron[at]flippfly.com and I'll send some more details.

Hey all, some of you may have seen our Race The Sun one month Numbers Post. We talked about how not being on Steam and *just* selling our game through our website has proven challenging, despite getting pretty great reviews, and coverage from most major sites. We've been hearing "I'll buy it when it's on Steam" a lot.

The post kind of caught on fire, thanks in no small part to the help of the indie community.

So, we decided to run a "Not on Steam" sale, consisting solely of games that are available for purchase and not on the Steam platform. Not as an anti-Steam measure, but rather to send a message to gamers: "Hey, there are some really worthwhile commercial games out there that aren't available on Steam, that are worth your money."

The layout will be similar to http://www.gamesareglorio.us/ - a single page with a list of games. If you don't have a humble widget, we'd be happy to link to your store page elsewhere and just list the discount.

The only stipulation is that we ask that everyone put a 25% or more discount on their game, to make the messaging more clear and effective.

We hope to capitalize on the attention our post brought, and hopefully reach some of the bigger sites.
If you're interested and would like some more details, please get ahold of me via email: aaron[at]flippfly.com and I'll send some more details. So far 21 developers have signed up.

Here's one we made for Race the Sun awhile back:

well this is the feedback forum so would expect the video to be indicative of the gameplay, otherwise what's the point in posting it here?

Haha yes, your feedback is appreciated, and I assume you've played the Kongregate version and this is what you're basing the gameplay critiques on?

I just found it a bit funny to see people jumping on the controls and "feel" of the game based on a 60-second teaser video.

Yeah I agree with CowBoyDan there in that it does visually look a lot more interesting, but the core gameplay still feels flawed to me for two reasons. Firstly the controls are very sluggish and the perspective makes it difficult to judge approaching hazards when moving hard left/right, which combine to restrict the gameplay to a very narrow corridor. Firstly I'd experiment with making the ship a lot more responsive, and look at altering the view code so when shifting to the edge of areas the ship doesn't remain in the centre of the screen, instead it goes slightly off-center which means there's slightly less of a perspective change.

Wait - how are you guys judging how the core gameplay and controls "still feel flawed", based on a 60-second teaser video of unreleased gameplay?

We've actually tried the look-ahead thing with the camera for turning, and it didn't quite feel right to us. We may come back to it at some point...

Hey all, thanks for the feedback!

@CowboyDan - true, the core controls haven't changed. I guess we're not so concerned about giving things a "reason for being there" as we are with just making a fun experience with simple controls. With the new dynamic elements though, we feel the game really takes on a new depth.

@Nasawa - thanks! Don't worry about not being able to contribute, I know the feeling

@Jisho - It's a fair point, we'd like to have more extended gameplay footage. This was put together pretty quickly, and we had a lot we wanted to fit in and not much time. As for the framerate issue - we do have a few hiccups at the moment, but our plan is to run at a smooth 60 fps even on older PC hardware. These past few weeks during our Kickstarter, our focus has been on rebuilding the game

Here's a little bit more of a detailed tumblr post about how we arrived at where we are now:
http://thesunwins.tumblr.com/post/43730978474/how-a-slow-kickstarter-launch-saved-our-game

Hey all, I've posted here a few times about Race the Sun before. Some of you may know, we launched a Kickstarter about 25 days ago.
It got off to a *really* slow start, and so what we did, was go back to the drawing board with the game's core content and tools, and essentially rebuilt all the content from scratch these last two weeks.

Here's an updated gameplay trailer:




Let me know what you think!

We decided to let our backers decide on a poster design. SamCube, our artist (who incidentally also created the official Minecraft poster) put together 4 sketches:
http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/19198q/want_to_help_pick_a_poster_design_for_race_the_sun/

I'm really loving all of 'em

I'm pretty excited to announce that we just put Race The Sun on Kickstarter, to help get us across the finish line, and to fund some community-oriented features:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flippfly/race-the-sun-endless-racer-with-mod-tools-and-mult

We've used Flurry and Google Analytics. Flurry is pretty great - easy to implement, easy to read stats.

Google Analytics was a bit of a pain - as you said it's not super readable, you definitely have to do a bit of work to get useful info out of it.

However overall, I think GA is a better product. It works cross-platform - we're using a Unity plugin that uses the http interface which means we can use it in web, standalone, mobile, anywhere.

GA also has realtime stats now, which admittedly isn't *super* useful; but it's great to be able to see how many people are playing right now, and what they're doing.

Thanks seandanger - good stuff!

We had mixed feelings on the Chihuahua too. In the end, we decided that maybe having some cheesy humor in there couldn't hurt. It might not be great, but at least it shows we're human, you know?

Really good point about the $8-15 jump and that we're not talking about the Soundtrack. That gives me some ideas

Yep! It's a pretty fun little feature. We actually developed the game's core controls using simple keyboard controls, and it also supports gamepads/joysticks.

There actually is a HUD with a score etc. but we disabled it for the videos just to show off the pretty visuals

Thanks for the feedback!

Thanks Gremlin! We're actually working on a new "Play Now" button, and we plan to make one of our first video updates an in-depth explanation of the mod tools with examples.

Hey all, we're launching a Kickstarter for Race The Sun to help us cross the finish line and get some cool features in there.

Anyone interested in giving us some feedback on the campaign page before it goes live this week?

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/flippfly/5353475?token=aa048207

Any thoughts you have would be great, but in particular:

- Do we do a good job of conveying the project vision?
- What do you think of the rewards and their pricing tiers?
- Is anything confusing/boring/weak?

Thanks!

Pure amusement, really. Or maybe they're bored, and want to discover a new iOS app by crashing into it?
Maybe some adverts are rare and only appear in later stages...

Yeah, for sure it'd be a curated list...

[The idea:]

Ok guys, I had this kinda crazy stupid idea for our game Race The Sun. We're going to be launching a Kickstarter, and we're brainstorming ideas for reward tiers.

The idea: a special selectable mode in the game called "Corporate Advertising Mode"

Description:
"A shamelessly tacky game mode where obstacles are randomly replaced by advertising billboards. If you run into one, the game will send you to the advertiser website - muhahaha!"

Then we sell add space as KS reward tiers. Maybe more money gets you a bigger billboard, which is actually harder to avoid hitting in the game!

I figured if anyone's going to tell it to me straight if the idea's offensive/stupid, it would be the TIGSource forums.

So, what do you think?

Could be alright, but why not just use the feedback forum here on Tigsource?

It's true, the feedback forums are a good resource.

Here are a few reasons though:
1. Visibility. If you're lucky, you'll get a couple hundred views on any given feedback request here, and maybe 5 replies.

2. Fairness. To be blunt, more popular games get more feedback, and the forum format means they push the rest off the front page. The idea would be to deliberately give every game an equal chance to get feedback.

3. Variety: This community seems to largely be developers. I think games benefit from feedback from a variety of sources.

Hey all, I've been thinking lately about how it's often hard to get eyes on your game, and get really good honest feedback. The feedback forum here is cool, but I'm wondering if there's a way to get games in front of a wider audience in a way that's easier to participate than needing to make an account here and seek games out.

So an idea I had: What if there were a group-run tumblr blog where anyone could submit an entry - just a link to a game with a picture, and maybe it'd be one game every few days. Maybe it would stay up for up to a week depending on how long it took for the comments to fill in before a new game was posted. We could setup a Twitter and maybe a Facebook account that could also help give it more visibility.

Would people here be interested in participating, either by submitting your game, or as a moderator of some form?

Hey all, my brother Forest is thinking of doing some commissioned soundtrack/fx work to supplement his income. He's creating a soundtrack for our game (Race The Sun) and so far, about 30% of our preorders are for the $10 "with soundtrack" version as opposed to the base $5 version. We also plan to use it in our Kickstarter as a backer reward.

I'm trying to help gauge interest from the indie community in this kind of thing.

Are there people here who'd be willing to pay for an original soundtrack for your game, or for individual soundFX?

For reference, music would probably land somewhere in the $500/minute range for original, exclusive music. Probably somewhat cheaper if you were to commission him to do an entire OST.