But when you achieve it, planet mars tastes so good.
Making a game on your own (or even a team) is like trying 2 eat the planet mars with a plastic spoon
Game dev is life
Sure is, after months of struggling finally I manage to get my steam account working right, my game is now in the concepts section http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=746002642&result=8 . 1 step closer to the final goal 
Btw, I got a new, better voice actress.
This is amazing, people in the same boat as me kinnna, I don’t often hear from this side of game developers who are just starting out, I did a big project, still doing it, will take ages to do but I aint doing it for revenue, just for fun as I have to do most of the work myself, piece by little piece it slowly comes together, perfectionitis? can’t be bothered aiming for absolute perfection because I don’t yet have the skillsets to reach that level. So I have to make do with what I can do until I can find someone who can do it better than I.
That I had that issue as well with a couple of voice people who are still dragging themselves to those other projects instead of finishing mine.
although they nearly finish, just not quite but I still got 8 more main party characters left to do. I like finishers, not those who quit. It is exhausting work for them when those companies ask them to do a lot of retakes. So perhaps they needed a break.
@tozan Yeah, personally besides the problem I was having signing up for greenlight I think composing music, voice actors and marketing are the most difficult areas for solo dev’s to tackle.
Well after a month I think my greenlight concept stats are okay, not too much traffic but the votes were good 131 yes vs 31 no. (81% yes) @mikepurvis ever compared the performance of your games on greenlight concepts to your actual greenlight campaign? do you think they are similar in terms of votes and traffic?
The two Models look good, the scene reminds me of Tomb Raider. But this sort of thing is ALOT OF work especially in Unreal, I find that this engine is very tedious to work with. What takes me a few seconds to type up in windows script form, takes 5-7 minutes or longer to turn each segment of script into blueprint code in the Unreal Engine because of all this much much hooking up of the pins that you have to do to for every little tiny component in the engine with all these many different type of blueprints. It took me 4 hours just to hook up the dialog for the Security Lady Card Issuer. And its only just a couple of minutes of plain simple dialog (without facial animation, because I 'haven’t got the software for doing face animation yet )… But I have heard of faceshift, but I don’t think it works on a normal webcam. But this I don’t like, all this heavy daisy chaining that Unreal Blueprints likes…
As for Greenlight, i don’t know a whole lot about it… I decided the best place for random make human models is the Grulesomes. Grulesomes are Humans affected by the plague, that’s the best place for them… I know how to do simple dialog, got that working but I need to know how to do simple dialog choices…
And I need to know how to get one blueprint to remember a certain variable , like rescuing Loana at her labs facility then when you rescue her, it records her as existing in the party, and then when I load another level, it will remember that variable and check if she is in the party.
Easy to set up in windows script, but hard to try to do it in Unreal Blueprints.
then in all areas of your game, you just check to see if she still exists in the party.
And then up pops all her dialog if it does…
No. I have launched 2 Greenlight campaigns and both were successful. In both cases skipped the concept phase. I waited until main game features could be shown in video until launch. Doing it over I’d probably wait even longer, until the games were actually very nearly ready to publish.
interesting.
this is the same as my current approach as I believe showing something needs to cause a very good first impression. so either you’re very good at doing a vertical slice with near final quality and polish, or you better wait till your game is actually near final quality and polish.
however I struggle with the marketing side of it: it’s hard to build momentum (or hype) 6-12 months before your release if you’re not actually showing stuff because it’s not ready to be shown :eek:
Then 6 to 12 months out is probably wrong for your situation.
well how early/late do you build momentum on the community? or in other words, when do you start your marketing?
On the big games I’ve worked on Marketing did all that and I had nothing to do with it. I don’t know their reasoning. What I believe is, that the more market space you already have, means you can build community successfully early. The games that I see doing it do all have large budgets and full time community managers.
For Indie games. I don’t know. Personally, I haven’t published yet. The Indie games that built momentum that I purchased, had playable early access versions available at the time I became aware of them. The KickStarter projects that I was interested in and paid to fund still haven’t published and I lost interest.
I don’t think there is a “science” to this. It uniquely depends on your game and the group you are developing with. We won’t consider paying for marketing until after release and we’ve dealt with the majority of bugs. I believe that a bunch of bad press early on is worse than little attention where you can work the issues out, and once it’s good and available for purchase, then focus on marketing. But, this is just my current thought on it. I don’t have data to back it up.
Yes, because it seems the human is making the alarm noise, not the alarm.
The last thing you want is to blow money on getting eyes on a sub-par experience. Biggest mistake you can make is mismanaging the funds you do have. If you can get 1000 eyes on your game now, but it’s not worth showing now- then that’s worse than showing 200 people a really cool game.
I definitely agree with this. Putting money into marketing should be after bugs and ironed out. Might be better to spend that money on a Development Tester. They aren’t very expensive, like $10 to $15 an hour unless you get a very experienced one. Just 10 hours a week has made a huge difference in the process for Lemons Must Die.
Our goal is to have as bug free possible experience when we do publish, even Early Access. We can’t control if someone likes the game, but we definitely can control how much effort we put into finding bugs, tracking them, fixing them, and then making sure they stay fixed as new things are added.
Planet mars is starting to taste really good
One thing to look at is Indie booths at conventions. It is a great low cost way to get some exposure as well as unbiased feedback.
Last weekend we had Lemons Must Die shown at the IGN Middle East. Because there were only 4 Indie games there it got a lot of attention. The booth manager organized a contest with a few shirts as prizes, first 3 people to get to and beat the 1st Boss got a shirt. The convention organizer liked the game and gave it a mention in his talk.
We had a survey, which about 40 people filled out. It was nice to get very clear A/B feedback about specific features.
We applied to PAX East and also the IGF, both early next year.
I don’t want to list prices up, each one is individual. Google for IndieMegaBooth, IGF, etc.
Hi again guys, I just uploaded a new trailer video. I only realized I missed a lot of things after uploading, must be all the pressure lol. But Its already got a good number of views so I don’t think I’ll re-uploaded. Please check it out and let me know what you think 
These are my stats for the Greenlight campaign, most traffic is coming from steam & youtube. Was also retweeted by Mark Rein and a few others.
@mikepurvis how do you think its doing so far
