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[Schrompf]

Yeah, that was very fortunate. When the guy wrote to me I first checked the background because I never heard of them before. But there are soooo many bundles out there, and the Groupees Bundle seems to be one of the larger ones, so I consider myself to be lucky :-)

I'm currently at the Gamescom, so time is scarce right now. But the feedback so far has been great, I got in touch with some larger review websites here, and I might even get a publisher. And all that after I gave up on the game and signed a contract just to be able to pay my bills again. Interesting times indeed.

[Schrompf]

Wow. Just wow. I'm back, I brought back the flu with me, and I just want to sleep for two weeks. But hell that was worth it! I camped at the booth, showing Splatter to any bystander, watching them play, showing off a bit from prepared savegames. And most people coming along actually enjoyed it! It was a blast. It's heartwarming when you watch someone discovering little details in your game and go smiling, or saying "Oh, now that is interesting". Thanks to everyone for this phantastic time!

This, and probably even more so the bundle, also made our Greenlight page jump ahead significantly. And even though I completely missed scheduling meetings with important people, I met some publishers and press people and got them on my side mostly. Splatter might get voice recording, it might get Story Coop, and it might get additional content... I'm really eager now to see how it turns it.

[Schrompf]

We're greenlit! This is a weapons-grade YEAH situation! I'm so happy right now!

We are working on a new update already. New content, new functions, some reworked details. And now this update got even larger, now it includes all the fancy Steam stuff: achievements, friendlist-filtered leaderboards, trading cards, cloud savegames, maybe even Steamworks integration if I get around to tranlate the (quite comfortable) campaign editor to English.

When it's done I'll also start handing out Steam keys to everyone who already purchased the game. The bundles we took part in hopefully have a mechanism in place to do this automatically. Otherwise I'll do it manually like I did before with Desura keys... but probably a tenfold more. Well... a promise is a promise.

[Udderdude]

Congrats on getting greenlit!

[Schrompf]

I'm still more of a technican than a game developer... and it shows :-) The most visible among all the new stuff we already created for the Steam release is a simple Global Illumination shader. It traces a cone through the deferred light render target of the current frame, so parts in neighbouring rooms light up a bit, too. Technically it's First Bounce only, and the occlusion by walls and such is a bit rough because of the large sample areas necessary to make the effect cheap, but well... once you played with it, you don't stand the version without anymore

It's very subtle, but indispensable.

[joe_eyemobi]

Well done Schrompf! I'll be sure to pick up a copy - I love top down shooters. I've made a few as well in my time too.  I'm working on a GL project too so hopefully I can follow in your footsteps in a couple of months!  Congrats once again, you guys are an inspiration to other starting game devs like myself 

[Schrompf]

Wow, thanks! 

[Schrompf]

Trailer! Splatter is heading for Steam as completely revamped version called Splatter - Blood Red Edition The trailer shows some of the new stuff you'll get at beginning of June. Free for all current owners, for sure.

[Schrompf]

We're on Steam! On Steam! On Steam!

It has been a wild ride! Yesterday evening we received the voiceover. We adjusted all dialogue to fit the voices and fixed two million details, and now we're online! Still a lot of work to day, but it's beautiful to see achievement progress in your friend feed.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/281920

And in just one hour I received about ten requests for a review key, halve of them bundled with requests for additional keys for GiveAways.

We also made a new trailer for it. I think we improved the pacing and the information-time ratio this time. But see for yourself:

[Schrompf]

It's finally done. Splatter is now available for Linux and OSX. Had been an interesting fight, I sure learned a lot. One library turned out to not be as portable as it promised to. So after nearly 10 years I ditched OIS and rolled my own input library. Meant to do that for years, but now I had to since OIS kept crashing on Linux.

If you need nice input, look for SNIIS on GitHub.

If you want to see a crude Film Noir story and splatter zombies, go to http://store.steampowered.com/app/281920

[ezraanderson]

~
Hey really dig the lighting you have done in your game.

Congrats on getting it ported to Linux & osx.

[Schrompf]

Thanks 

Now on to something completely different.

[bauer]

That's a really cool lighting effect, great work! Also congrats on being Greenlit

[Schrompf]

Thanks to you, too. I guess that's a hint that I should clean up the start post :-) Greenlight was two years ago, Steam Release one year ago.

I still ponder if I should melt the shaders into a Unity plugin. For topdown or mostly-topdown games this would give smooth penumbra-correct shadows and global illumination even for GPUs with just a few dozen shader cores. The illusion breaks quickly, though, once you leave the topdown view or expect to see detailed shadows, e.g. limps.

[Schrompf]

I wonder why everyone is so hesitant to post numbers. I'll do, even though I still have a nagging fear that this will backfire in some way I don't know, yet.



I'm doing a sale just now, the game would usually be 10 bucks.

Peaks in the sales from left to right:

• Initial release, 15% discount, listed in the "New releases" list which was on the Steam front page back in the days
• See the hardly existant noise at the end of August'14? That's the Gamescom booth.
• Halloween sale 2014, for which I put out a small themed update
• The small ribble at the end of 2014 is the Winter Sale - it's useless to make a sale if everyone else is sale'ing too.
• Jan 2015 we did a weeklong sale, with only 60 other games in that week. Way better results.
• Feb/Mar/Apr 2015 some noise again at the level of the Gamescom booth, but this time I didn't do anything.
• Linux/Mac release at the beginning of June 2015 - no result whatsoever. Found some eager fans, but was useless in terms of revenue.
• June 2015 Steam Summer sale - again a sale together with ~70% of the Steam games, but with okish results.
• Peak at the end of the graph: the current sale at 60%. Doing fine.

Also observe the flat lines at any Press Coverage, exhibition booth or publisher marketing action. It's really that useless by now, at least in terms of direct results. LetsPlayers are the only relevant media today. Unfortunately they know this, too, so by now they're swamped with Indies begging to be covered, and most of them removed/hid their contact data very well. Still press coverage is somewhat useful in the long run. As the saying goes: a player has to see your game mentioned at least five times before actually noticing it on Steam.

[joe_eyemobi]

Hey Schrompf!
Thank you so much for sharing your revenue data.  This is hugely helpful!
Yeah I totally understand what you mean about feeling paranoid about revealing the info.  If only more people had the courage to do what you've done here, it would really help the community in general about some of the things we can expect to see.  Once I've collected enough data, I'll have to muster up the guts to do the same too!

Thanks again, and look forward to hearing more in future

[CarbonHack]

Thanks man, highly appreciated info - very helpful and informative!
 

[Schrompf]

I'm glad it was useful to you. In the meantime I learned why everyone hesitates to publish numbers: I signed a contract with Valve which - among other things - required me to keep financial details a secret. But well... Valve has been a pretty cool company upto now, especially in comparision to UbiSoft, EA and all the others. So I'll leave it like it is.

[joe_eyemobi]

yikes, I should probably re-read the contract too 

I have seen a lot of devs publish their stats though and haven't seen Valve enforce that clause though

[eyeliner]

For my point of view (naive as it is), I believe it is GREAT to see people's number out there. It's nice to see how detailed Valve is concerning sales, geographical breakdown, returns (and the reasons for the returns) and sales spikes.

I'm not entirely sure why they would frown upon the release of the numbers, but companies can be strange.

either way, thanks for posting numbers and I hope no harm comes your way from Valve.