Something a little bit different for this long overdue update, I thought I'd talk a little about the Greenlight experience as I guess it's going to be relevant to a ton of you guys who haven't done it yet.
Now you'll have read up on it before diving in, there are lot's of great articles out there, and they pretty much go along these lines,
"When we launched on Greenlight we had a nice boost from our 1000 Facebook fans, and then we got featured by RPS and then Jesus returned to earth and mentioned the game, hey presto, we passed through in a week. Oh, and make sure you have a good icon and trailer."
Now I'm going to sound a little butt hurt here, it's unavoidable I think, but I'm not ( Really ). This isn't going to be a "Why don't people like my game ?" post, as those are just a waste of time, it's more a "It's fucking hard to get people to even look at your game" post.
I launched early on Greenlight, with hindsight maybe too early, so I didn't have a lot of strong gameplay videos to show never mind something playable I could get played on YouTube. What I did have was a working HTML5 "version" of the game, so I could say "If you like this, imagine it a lot lot better". I hoped that would be enough.
Rob at Miniclip was excellent, when he heard we were on Greenlight he posted a link to it on the games page,
To have one of the largest gaming portals actually link out of their site is so rare.
That generated around 50 views, not votes, just views.
We recently posted Rot to newgrounds, we always do well there, the NG crowd dig our games, and we got front paged...
Ah, turns out we don't always do well there. In fact this is our lowest rated game on there ever. Oh.
From the near 8k views at the time of writing, we've got another 5 Yes votes or so ( On the positive side, no new No votes, so hurray for us ).
Now you can argue that it's different demographics ( I think especially in regards gamers on Miniclip ), that I'm targeting the wrong people, and with a game that wasn't exactly sprayed with love by all who played it. I'm really not hear to argue, there's no argument from my side. The point of this post isn't all about woe is me, it's to try and add an alternative side to the Greenlight process. You know when you read a postmortem about mobile games, how they got featured on the appStore and really took off, you don't often read about the games that did nothing at all. And that's the vast majority of them.
So my advice, for what it's worth from someone whose game is currently at a 171
If I concentrate really really hard, maybe it'll climb up the charts.
Don't launch too early. I thought I could plough on with the game whilst it was waiting to pass through GL, but it means you just pressure yourself into always needing something new and shiny to show to keep up the momentum.
Exposure is good, but it needs to be good exposure. Twitter gives you around a 1:100 click through rate, think of your most popular tweet views then divide that by a 100, that's how much help Twitter is going to be to getting your game out there
When you first launch you get all those sexy front page views, once they go you need a plan B to bring fresh eyes to it all the time.
And that's it, here's a gif of an exploding barrel to finish off with.
i've found it tricky because when you're working on your own game you have a blind spot for issues, so you subconsciously avoid doing things that you know are less than great when playing, and when it comes to controls you adapt to them really quickly, even if they're not great.
Enough woes, after struggling on that I've treated myself to adding in the grenades ( There will be other throwable weapons too, so it was worth taking some time to get the feel of this right )
And I think that's it. I set up a site for the game, http://rotpurge.com just a simple thing, but it needed doing. Also we're on Greenlight ( I'm not going to flood the thread with comments about that as it's boring for me, never mind you guys. If you'd like to check it out it's here: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=507887546. We're 78% of the way to the top 100 so that's going well, I couldn't be any more grateful for everyone whose supported the game ).
I've just been snowed under with putting a site / press-kit together, so there's not been a great deal of progress. Did get the shotgun in though, and here it is in super slowmo not enough colours gif form.
I can't wait to finish off the drudgery that is everything but the game and get back to it properly.
That's looking awesome mate, the swings grab is a thing of beauty ( I was just googling about Greenlight tips and saw your post on Gamasutra and then seeing this post, it's a small world ).
I'm afraid I don't have any input regard the gameplay side of things, it's not really my go to genre, but damn that looks stunning mate. Excellent work.
Different areas, as many as I can face doing for launch. There are currently two levels, the town square and the bridge ( I just posted a new dev video the other day which is a 3 min play through of the first two levels,
)
Also there will be different game modes, so it's not just a constant horde / wave based thing, like "King" where you can only shoot in designated areas which shrink as soon as you go in them.
Thanks for taking the time to check out the thread and reply
I thought I'd quickly go over how the collapsing works, as in the above gif of the street light, as when I started this and looked around there was very little out there about how to do this.
We're using Picavoxel from the Unity app store to handle all the voxel stuff ( It let's you import vox files from MagicaVoxel really easily, and creates a mesh out of them ), and it stores all the voxels in nice easy 3D arrays for us.
To handle the collapsing, it's pretty convoluted so stick with me. We have generic shootable objects in the game,
When one of those is shot, we run a quick test on the 3D array to see if there's a whole empty row where the bullet impacted the object, if there is then it's meant to collapse under it's own weight.
From there we call our VoxelCubeHolder which handles "Clusters". There are 10 pooled clusters so we can only ever have 10 collapsing objects at once, which should be fine. Each of these clusters has 255 cubes with rigid bodies pooled in it.
Every frame we work up the array vertically from the collapse point ( i.e. the hole we've just shot through the object ) a row at a time and request our rigid body cubes. Luckily Unity physics just handles these for us, we just give them a colour and position and the engine does the tricky job of making them fall into a pile.
We do this every frame until we've reached the top of the voxel array and we're done, we can kill the static object off. There is also scope for optional particle effects, so in the case of the street light we trigger some dust and some sparks, as well as firing off sound effects.
After a short delay the cluster kills off the collisions in all the active cubes for a short while, allowing them to fall through the floor and then returns all those cubes and itself back to the pool.
Doing it this drawn out way may seem slightly insane, but we're only ever triggering a small number of cubes per frame ( Plotting this is cheap, they get batched for us, but the number of rigid bodies has a high cost until they all sleep ) and with pooling we know we're not going to fall foul of the garbage collector and cause stutters at heavy times.
Hey everyone, I guess I should start with a bit of background to the game.
I wrote a game called "Rot" in HTML5 using PixiJS ( Which is so great ) as Flash is basically dead and I wanted to learn new skills / tech for that all important client work that pays the bills. I spent 5 months on it, and it turned into a bit of a monster in terms of scope. I realised, far too late, that I was never going to earn my money back through licensing it so I started pulling it in a little.
Obviously that's frustrating, hamstringing your baby like that, so I thought doing a full blown version with Unity would let me realise everything I wanted, and so here we are. Rather than calling it Rot again which would just be confusing, and because I don't think it's really a sequel, rather a directors cut / mega mix, I went with Rot Purge ( R:P ).
It's basically SmashTV with voxel zombies. I'm not going to try and flower it up with some rich backstory, it's a shooter pure and simple. There are unlockable weapons with upgrades, because that's the law, and you can unlock various outfits, some of which directly affect the visuals. It's never going to take itself too seriously.
State of Play:
So where are we with R:P two months or so in ? Obviously going from pre-rendered sprites to actual real voxels has been a massive luxury, not just in terms of workflow but what we can do now, which basically means destruction.
If anything I think I spent a little too long on that aspect, I added it before the baddies so that's all there was at the time, but I think it was worth it. As a gamer if I see a bottle in a game I want to be able to shoot it and watch it smash, as a coder I should provide the same.
The game is actually playable, with the first two levels in and working quite nicely. There's still a silly amount to do, like the original Rot I've avoided the UI for now, as UI coding is the worst, it's the anti-Batman. Also I need to drop the weapons / outfits in there ( Writing this is making me realise how much there is left ), and I'm aiming to add a lot more to this one.
I'm in two minds about how to do the weapons, it would be easier to stick with my COD type approach, buy a weapon, buy upgrades for it, or just have random drops or even blue prints / crafting.
Spent for now:
I think that's probably enough as an intro to the game.
I'd like to give a shout out to @mikelovesrobots https://twitter.com/mikelovesrobots for being brilliant enough to open source his voxel art that I abuse so heavily.
If you want to read a constant barrage of swearing in a 140 chars or less, @gamingyourway https://twitter.com/GamingYourWay which will in all honesty be updated more that this devlog.
Thanks for reading and I look forward to hearing your thoughts on it ( Only the good ones. Obviously ).
So much for me keeping this up to date like I planned.
I really don't know how to embed a YouTube clip in here, so here's a link to a capture of a couple of levels
I've finally finished all the player power-ups, and recording all the little clips showing them ( Video work is sheer hell ).
All the music is in now too, there's 22 bass tracks, 23 drum tracks and 10 lead tracks, and we mix those up randomly to really fill out the soundtrack ( With each level being so short / mobile friendly, it felt the best way to maximise our resources ). Also we mix that up a little more by randomly triggering the different voices at different times, e.g. sometimes it'll just start with the drums then the bass will kick in. It seems to be holding up quite well, I've not heard a nasty combination yet.
I realised I should have expanded on the game a little more, I know iPad games don't have a natural home here. It's going to be free and with no IAP, there's really nothing in there to justify trying to sell things to people, and that whole "Upgrade to turn off ads" approach is a bit shit isn't it, it just means the dev has gone over the top with ads and made their game ugly to try and force the upgrade ( I can think of few things worse than a banner ad in-game ).
Also we were so lucky to work with Glauber Kotaki / @unseven before he went onto much bigger and better things, who did all the sprites for the game, and they look stunning.
So now we're looking at just over a week left before we soft launch. I've got to finish the last 4 levels and the boss run game mode. There are two other game modes planned, a retro C64 type mode and "Infinite" which will be random levels, but there's no way I can get those done in time so they will be a post release update.
One major thing I've learned doing this is, making a game for iOS isn't just a case of making a nice game and a pretty icon, there's a shit ton of other things, like looking into keywords, all the various ad networks etc. It's a much larger learning curve than I imagined at the start.
Well that's more than enough, as always any questions don't be shy, and thanks for reading.
And so here we are, I'm fleecing that bad boy for all it's worth*
* I'm being slightly over cynical, I wanted to get my feet wet on mobile, and this is a pretty good game to do that, I'm not having to re-invent the wheel or throw 6 months dev time at something, it's best to get my mistakes out of the way on a port.
From a technical standpoint it's AS3 / Air, using Starling instead of ND2D as in the original and away3D again for the 3D background. It's running at 60fps on my iPad3 which I'm pretty pleased about, and rather than this just being a big advert if any Flash devs are interested in the hoops I've had to jump through to get it running at that framerate then please just ask.
And as introductions go I think that's it. The past couple of days have been spent sorting out the ad integration, as I don't want to leave that last minute and just shoe horn it in, also I've added the Game Over sequence, so it's almost a complete game loop ( I've just got to think of something cool for the game complete, I got called "Puerile" for what I did last time, and even though that makes me happy, I think it'll need a little something more ), and today is pause mode coding day ( There really are less sexy parts of making a game ).
Hopefully I'll be able to maintain this as a kind of diary, and avoid being lazy and just cross posting from the blog.
And again, if anyone has any code related questions please don't be shy.
My name is Squize, and here's my brief potted history, like a drowning man.
I started way back with a ZX81 ( I'm old ), moved onto a Spectrum then a C64, where I finally learned how to code in assembler, then the Amiga 500 and finally the 1200, which is still the best machine I've ever owned.
On the Amiga I released a Uridium clone called "Torque", and I think this is the only picture of it online anywhere ( You can tell it was a massive hit )
Soon after that I discovered I prefered real life and all it's vices to computers, so I didn't touch one for years.
One day I stumbled upon JavaScript, and I was sucked back in. Shortly after I discovered Flash ( Flash 5 was just coming out then, with it's at the time sexy dot syntax actionscript ) and that's been me ever since.
I knocked out a couple of games, this was way back before sponsorship and in game ads were a thing, and reading about the dot com bubble thought I was going to be a millionaire, drinking Unicorn tears on my gold boat never having to work for anyone again. Ever.
I started working at Preloaded as a Flash game dev shortly after. In spite of it being a tread mill of adver-games I was lucky in that they're weren't the usual faire, they were actually huge projects that were for the most part great to work on, and I was fortunate enough to be there when the company were agency darlings.
I left there after 2 years 2 days, as quiting has to have some sort of symbolism to it. From there I was a founding member of Stimunation, which eventually lead my friend Olli and I to splinter off to form GamingYourWay.
The first year of GYW was spent being freelance whores, we'd take any and all games thrown our way. There's nothing like making something you're really proud of only to have a client take a big steaming dump on it at the 11th hour, so broken by that we pretty much turned our backs on all that filthy filthy agency money and followed the sponsorship route.
We've had varying success, from bombs like the stage3D powered DN8:Pulse,
Never one to milk an IP, we also released Outpost:Swarm and we're currently working on Outpost 2 ( And after finishing that you'll have to put a gun to my mothers head to force me to make anything even losely connected with shooting aliens ).
And that's me. I'm hoping to be a useful productive member of the community here, but in all honesty I probably won't be.
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