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TIGSource ForumsDeveloperDesignWhat is your experience on releasing your first game on Steam?
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tankun
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Santima Games


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« on: March 10, 2018, 04:48:47 AM »

Here's my experience so far.

I had released my first game "A Fine Mess" on itch.io first. This was in December 2017.

I had got some good feedbacks from itch.io and even earned some cash out of it but as soon as my game went into "Coming Soon" status on Steam, I knew that I was going to be playing in the big boys' league.

On 23rd of February, the game was officially released on Steam.

After the release, two days had passed and no one was buying the game. I checked the traffic to the Steam store page and it showed about 4000 people visiting. There was something odd about this.

Finally someone wrote to the game company's facebook page saying why the game hasn't been released yet. I was like "huh?"  Who, Me? - literally.

It turned out that the page was there but there was no "buy" button. My heart skipped a beat. I was really frustrated. This was my first release and why was this happening to me?  Cry

Quickly I wrote to the Steam support about this issue, waited for 2 days but did not get a response. So I decided to write this to the main developer forum. They quickly answered saying they had fixed the issue.

I wrote back saying, "Thank you but now I have missed the "New Releases" exposure". Then they added a curator support around the page for 24 hours. Following this, twice as many people visited the page averaging around 8000. So it turned out that this error had been a blessing in disguise. Thank you Steam.

It was all good and fine at this point. The game started selling properly but there was another challenge waiting for me.

I wasn't sure I was ready for all the feedback, especially bad ones.

I've started my career as a musician and somewhat I'm not used to getting bad reviews. I make alternative music so to speak so I have never been too popular thus I was not exposed to a wide range of criticism.

I did not get horrible reviews yet and most of the bad-ish ones are really constructive. I'm learning a lot from them. There's a really good community of players out there.

Anyway so far it was going fine then something interesting started to happen.

A quick info insertion: "A Fine Mess" is an adventure/walking-sim game played in first person. The environment in the game is a big island but there's a specific walking path with invisible barriers/colliders. There are some larger areas here and there but it's mainly confined into this one linear path.

To my amazement, some players found a way to escape this barrier.  Shocked There was a glitch in the original release where walking over some objects would get you jumping into the air. So some players used this to escape the map and traveled all around the island. They even put screenshots from these unique vantage points and interestingly they are beautiful. Check out the links at the end.

After getting some good feedbacks from the players, I've updated the game. For instance one player complained that I hadn't put a "Invert Mouse Y Axis" option. How right he was. I had never thought of it. I thought people playing with inverted Y axis were all dead in the 90's.

Anyway, in this patch, I also built a very sturdy barrier this time and fixed the jumping issue.

Guess what? They escaped those barriers too, walked around the whole island and took pictures again WTF I've got no idea how! I thought I had closed every hole. In fact I had built one big barrier as a single object. It should have been impossible to penetrate it yet they did it again.

It's really amazing how dedicated players can be. Going through all that fuss.

I think this is what makes video games differ from the rest of the art forms. You create something and than there will be players who will take that and push it even further. The game becomes more than you intended to.

This is why developing games is so much fun.  Grin

I'm curious to hear your experiences like these.

Here are some links:

"A Fine Mess" Steam Page:

http://store.steampowered.com/app/793220/A_Fine_Mess/

Here are the players' screenshots. The latest ones are from outside the game barriers:

http://steamcommunity.com/app/793220/screenshots/?p=1&browsefilter=mostrecent

My "hello world" message on Tig Forums if you want more info:

https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=45.msg1368324#msg1368324


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