Review of Valve’s new publishing approval system: Greenlight

http://steamcommunity.com/greenlight

Steam Greenlight is an option we’ve been considering to release our game onto but we’ve been unsure given that the cost of releasing (possibly) to the platform is in the same ballpark or what it would cost to (definitely) release our game on the mobile market. A market that has a far larger install base. From reviewing steam green light I don’t have any tips to other developers because one can only speak from experience, but I can speak as to how I see this platform to be a tool in achieving success in the market. From my analysis I’m quite confident with the platform as well as being hopeful. I do have one problem with it however.

Market

Steam is a pc platform; for a new title that is still early in development, this a great thing. As it was, I was looking at developing predominately for the mobile space due to the fact that when it come to indie pc gaming, there wasn’t an approachable or visible pc market for an unknown developer, it seemed the only choice was mobile. This is in contrast to the lack of efficiencies in the development pipeline in generating code & content for said devices, and the expensive cost of tools to work around these inefficiencies. This appearance of an approachable pc distribution system was a gift that is going to make the development of the game for it’s first platform, now PC, to be far easier.

Interface

The interface the system uses for viewing and voting on games is perfect. I couldn’t imagine a better system to allow users to browse game marketing material and pick out what the want to see on the shelf. It’s the best games catalogue I’ve ever seen, I wish game review websites would catalogue their game reviews like this. Much better interface and it can only help sales.

Support

I can’t view the statistics in greenlight to see how well it has community support; but it definitely has press support. Kotaku has a tag for it, it’s a thing now. It’s a marketable thing. Think about when you heard about chrome’s native api, or it’s webstore in the press. This is where Valve’s reputation in the games industry helps, and when it comes to Greenlight; well, it marketing terms: its new news.

For the few games that are in a ship ready state that have launched along with this service; from a marketing perspective this would be a great boon and at the time of writing this, there is one game released. I haven’t read any news as of yet about this; I expect to soon.

It’ll be interesting to see how the press supports the service after the novelty of it has worn off though. But that can be cured pretty easily with valve hosting & announcing greenlit batch sales from here to the end of the universe. They will need to have enough products available via the platform before then to keep it in the public mind though.

Applying

I’ve reviewed a fair number of games in the catalogue so far I will not be in a hurry to put our game up for consideration to it. It seems like it can be unforgiving in one hand, but a great marketing opportunity in the other hand. A lot, as valve has already stated, is left up to the developer.

The developer needs to control the message about their game, the message needs to be about the game and the game needs to be in a state where it is ready for prime time, the red carpet or the green light if you wanted to use that analogy. If you wait until you’re ready and communicate you message well enough, I imagine one would do well.

But from a lot of what I’ve seen in the catalogue, I’m imagining many failures and many let downs for a pretty significant number of the entries that have been added for consideration. I’m seeing many concepts without content and games that lack depth of mechanics.

This is where Valve need to educate the developers about how they can succeed on the steam platform, and hopefully we’ll see material like this sooner or later from them. And this leads me to the problem I’ve identified with the system.

What is this? I don’t even…

Reading some of what Valve discussed recently at ‘Fantastic Arcade’ I’m getting some mixed messages from them as to what exactly the service is and isn’t. In my mind this system is for games that are ready enough to be shown to the public and allow indies and hobbyists to get their little gem out to the public and it’s a fantastic marketing tool if the submission is executed well. On the other hand it seems Valve are trying to achieve what has been achieved on some community funding services as well, except sans-funding.

““In addition to that, the section for concepts and future projects – we really envision that being an area that you guys can use to talk to your fans early on,” added business developer Augusta Butlin. “So even though we may have an established relationship and, yes, we would more than likely take the game when it’s ready, we still think that being able to talk to your fans super early is going to be of value to you.””

Source: Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Okay, so we have a submission portal for finished products sitting alongside a community engagement system. It’s nice that Valve tried to build these two systems, it’s not so nice it built them as one.

As a submission portal for indie games to get a chance in the spot light this system is the best thing I’ve ever seen and it gives me a heap of confidence.

As a kickstarter I have no confidence in it and it gives me the impression that something I perceive to be a beautiful feat of business and design merging as one is polluted with content that lacks content. This wouldn’t be a problem, people trying to do kickstarter on not kickstarter would be fine, if it wasn’t something that it seems valve thinks it can do. I don’t want to say explicitly it’s something valve can’t do and I don’t believe it affects developers in any way.

Developers who do the right thing with greenlight will succeed in getting onto the platform, I believe as much at least. But it’s not great for Valve or for Greenlight if the new brand they are creating isn’t associated as being better than the competition by the consumer; which is something I believe it can do.

At the end of the day

Valve have taken a risk being the first large gaming brand bringing this sort of system to the public. They are the first to do it where the system isn’t something that a new hardware platform depends upon. There have been open platforms before, but valves execution values a relationship with a developer that can only lead to success. But given that Valve’s greenlight service is a new new thing, it’s understandable if it’s incomplete or unsure of itself.

Knowing valve, they will probably work to improve it, this is the sort of thing Valve is very, very good at doing. I can’t think of anything, even the $100 fee, that would prevent me from seeking successful submission with our game when it’s in a presentable state.

Foreword

I’ve been researching the EC architecture ahead of continuing my blog series and what I’ve read online is that it seems a lot of places where the EC model is used, there is a caveat added where an entity can only hold one instance of any class of component. I though about this for a while and it actually makes a surprisingly large amount of sense to do it this way. It may seem like a limitation that would be a barrier in tasks such as adding more than one turret weapon to a space ship, but that problem can be easily worked around by turning the turret component into a stack of turret components. This achieves the result of adding more than 1 weapon to hard points on an entity, without violating the no-component-duplicate principle of the EC system where that limitation is in effect. So what is the point of the no-duplicate restriction? For me, or at least the sense I can make of it, is that it makes the communication between components in an entity much more simple. In the case where you do not have the duplicate restriction you have trees of components and component dependencies for each entity, that’s right, trees, plural. Where as in the duplicate restriction case you have chains. These chains could become a tree, but they wont become a complex graph.

Continue reading ‘There Can Be Only One’

Completion Report

Continue reading ‘Standing Desk Part Four’

This time I just spent not much time really porting the code from the c-style to class styled programming. All of the code is added below. It improves upon the c-style by having everything organised into classes as sort of a more human readable way of programming. For the best way to explain what the difference between this little hypothetical game’s difference in c and c++ is you can watch this video from c++’s creator:

Bjarne Stroustrup: Why I Created C++

Which is a very good video that explains what has happened between the c-style iteration and this one. Basically, not much, nothing incredible. It’s a bit more human readable now that’s it’s organised into classes, and there’s some data protection in their as well, but that’s about all. The next cool bit to this is going to be the entity component model, which is pretty much a full fledged architecture, whereas the class style programming is pretty 1980′s, it’s not really an architecture at all as much as it is slightly more human readable c code.

This video is pretty cool too: Bjarne Stroustrup: Advice for c++ Programmers

Was busy for a few days as well as having spent a couple of days on the monitor elevator. It took more time because I was doing it more carefully so that I wouldn’t have exposed dowel joints like in the first mini-table. Got a couple of pictures and I’ll update this post tomorrow with pictures of it in a finished state. Glued it yesterday evening but it hasn’t quite been 24 hours yet so I’m going to leave it be for now.

I’ll put the finished bit as the front image for this post when it’s done.

Continue reading ‘Standing Desk Part Three’

Fair bit of work on it today. Screwed up my saw lines for the monitor elevator and had to go buy some tools in order to clean it up. Which is fine because I needed those tools anyway for the next part of the project. But if you can’t justify buying more tools for the current and then later projects, best buy excess wood instead. That should be the lesson learned here.

The glue finish setting on the first desk and amazingly enough I can stand on it and it doesn’t budge. The dowel joints on it may be hodge-podge hacks, but they bloody well work. It didn’t take very long to get that first table together. But since I’m trying to improve my carpentry skills and thus the quality of the results as I go along, the second mini-table is taking a bit longer.

Continue reading ‘Standing Desk Part Two’

I was complaining to a friend yesterday evening that all the sitting down programming was giving me lower back pain. To the point where each week I had to take a couple of days off of sitting down because the pain would be so great and would take a couple of days to calm down. I believed that this was a result of my chair being somewhat non-level, but when I get home and jacked on to the blogosphere I found an article about a gamer who has switched to a standing desktop.

Continue reading ‘Standing Desk Part One’

I am currently building a game, which is at time of writing in what I call the utility phase, when we write utilities and tools to build the game with, or add to the utilities and tools we already have. And I find that my main focus is on creating a transparent sort of link up between C++ and scripting, that allows customization of level logic and a.i. behaviour by the designer with minimal intervention by the program to support the designer trying new stuff. And I find myself stuck at the crossroads as to what game architecture to choose. It’s a pretty important choice this, in any case I want to have a good code base out of the game that can be reused.

Continue reading ‘Game Architectures: Day One’

I’ve been thinking about the concept of 20% time. For the past few days I’ve been writing a parser for C++ classes. This parser has given me a greater appreciation of just how complex C++ is, and how that can be daunting to newbies. But while I’m starting to appreciate the complexity of variable modifiers and so forth in C++, I’m also growing weary of the work. So I decided to try and find something new to code.

Continue reading ‘Redesigning My Porfolio’

Build Games, Not Engines

I now finally believe in this concept. Here is why, how I believe this is a good idea and why it gives me a warm feeling that is akin to what people say they feel when they find Jesus. Sit down brother, here’s the ‘Good News’.

Continue reading ‘Engine Evangelism’