A year and a half later, back on Greenlight

and tbh I still don't know what the game is about

 

@Martin_H
My approach is not straight forward or well organized. What I do is iterate. I iterate in a crazy, manic fashion. I try things out. They have problems. I try to tweek the problems. I throw things away. I went through two other trailers before the one I posted. I scrapped those also. I will scrap this one as well.

I iterate to discover my goals, and I iterate to clarify my misconceptions. I think it produces very good results in the fastest time possible. For example, I misunderstood my goal for the trailer. I kept thinking "teaser trailer" and this was fundamentally the wrong goal for what I need to accomplish.

In most cases, it's an incredibly effective process, but it's really unfair to expose other people to it. I could never do it as relentlessly if I wasn't working solo. It would drive other people crazy. Sorry if you ended up seeing a little too much of my inner workings. I don't mean to be difficult, frustrating or unappreciative, this is just how I work.

The process can be quite painful, but I think it produces good results, especially when I'm still learning in an area I don't have a lot of experience with (trailers, making video games, etc).

EDIT: It's worth noting, not only did I scrap the original design for the game, I built around 2 other designs in the interim. I built these out to be perhaps early alpha quality. I needed to do this in order to learn about my own strengths and weaknesses as well as to give myself an moderate level understanding of game design.

I also edited this post 4 times.

 

No Problem! I can relate a fair bit to the iterative process, much of my own gamedev work is like that too. It's good for learning and exploring. It's just that you're slowly crossing into communication design and marketing territory here, and for that I need clear goals and deliberate decisions, because that's what my education and experience in the area tells me is the more efficient way to go about it.

 

Just to address this - showing a simple cursor manipulating the pawns on the board, and some kind of quick transition to "world view" would show viewers this is gameplay not just a trailer prop.

I believe we (mostly) devs work this way, however it's not a good workflow to expose to the customer (public) facing side. I'd like to read about your development workflow sometime from an interested developers perspective, but people who are looking to buy your game will be turned off by this workflow, because they will not be sure what the final product is going to be, if they like it, if they want to buy it, and if they are interested. They will be confused.
This workflow is perfectly fine and expected - but the only iteration the customer should see is the last iteration. The perfect one.

 

I'm going to disagree a little bit here in that of course fast iteration is a good thing, but there must be something to anchor the development. For example, a functioning 'public build' at every step of the way. @frosted the way that you described creating several different iterations of your game almost to alpha build stage, comes across to me as suspiciously symptomatic of 'projects that never get done'. And I'm going to agree with @Martin_H that it seems a little like the project direction is a bit unclear.

Several times in my space combat kit I unfortunately scrapped everything and started over, and found that I ended up somewhat close to where I was before, and the thing that made the difference was relatively minor. It was a huge waste of my time as well as those who unfortunately had been expecting it to be 'finished soon'.

My current way of doing things is to try to make code as modular as possible, and regularly create a new project, import the code that I'm dealing with, and mess around with ideas to see if they work out. It seems difficult to extract the code from the bigger project, and sometimes it's a little untidy, but in the end (if the code has been written properly) it's usually just a case of writing some dummy scripts and commenting out stuff here and there.

It really works out well for me this way in the end, since by making the code modular in order to extract it easily, it also makes it easy to put back in something that I've added.

 

I think we agree mostly - but this type of iteration isn't what I was referring to.

This type of iteration is what I was referring to. Iterate fast and small, not fast and huge. Customers shouldn't see every iteration, they should see the final one. And a functioning alpha build is a final iteration for that cycle.
And always with the note "alpha build - everything can change tomorrow".

@frosted in addition to all other helpful advice above this post - have you considered storyboarding the trailer and creating an animatic before producing it? Could be a time saver while iterating on the video in the long run - and a better "in-production" video to show other devs to get feedback on.

 

Definitely agree then.

Also agree with storyboarding the trailer, it really needs a solid, defined structure.

 

Oh god, I should have never mentioned iteration.

When I'm approaching an area I don't know much about, I iterate to learn.

When I am dealing in a subject matter where I'm an expert, there's no need for iteration, because I have enough understanding of the subject that I don't need to explore alternatives or experiment.

It's never ideal to scrap work. But when you're learning and your aims are high, you either gotta aim lower or you'll be scrapping quite a lot of work. It's just ... reality.

_____

I'm not going to post each video idea or script I have here, I will burn out a really good source of feedback.

Feedback is precious and hard to find. I've gotten valuable feedback here, the least I can do is show respect by not wasting your time. So if I post another video it will be reasonably close to finished.

 

So I've come up with this video. I think this one might be good finally.

I'd love some feedback, tomorrow I will do some final cleanup and editing on it, so any input is really helpful!

 

"They were everywhere so we fled to the ridge."
Okay. "They" is a little vague, but okay.

"Two peasants saw us."
Okay.

"They engaged us as panic spread."
The peasants engaged you? Why?

"They were many."
Hang on, I thought there were only two peasants.

"Too many."
Okay.

"So we ran."
Okay. But why do you face the way you're "running" from and then come back round to the side of the battlefield?

"Not good."
Maybe it's just my taste, but way too stream-of-consciousness for me.

"I will not go quietly."
Very, very nice. The scream is fantastic.

Also I really, really hope you're intending to add your game's name, company name, all that to the end of the trailer.

I want to point out that this might get me interested in more, but it wouldn't sell me on the game itself. It would get me interested in the setting and story of the game. For that the info on the page needs to be solid.

 

Somehow I missed this thread.

And for some reason Steam doesn't think I've bought anything, so I can't vote right now.

But I'm still looking forward to trying it out!

 

I think it looks fantastic, and good to see a game going its own way rather than the following existing game systems + mechanics. Voted yes btw

 

I'd just make the video that YOU want to make for YOUR game. You are never going to make a video that every person here likes and is also effective in getting gamers interest out there.

You'll waste weeks and months on this and in the end may go back to what you first had. The thing is one person here would do it "this way" and another would do it "that way" and if yours is different then it won't ever be as good as what they expect.

IMO this is just the way it goes with feedback especially from devs. So just do it and call it done.

 

hmmm...
how about something like this:

"we left the town and the screams of "murder!" behind us"
*characters running away from a town*

"we ran as fast as we could, but the townspeople were furious with what we just did"
*looking behind, seeing townspeople running after them with pitchforks and torches raised*
....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
now it depends what your gameplay is about after the introduction of the situation...
one could be:

"oh god, they got us surrounded somehow!"
*show a scene of them fighting for their lives and then die tragically*

"the life of a mercenery....it can be a curse, die young or a life full of riches"

....or
"I didn't choose this life! I was born into it! I have to fight the mighty that force me to do this!"


etc.
alot less vague, alot more emotional, more personal. You want people to somehow identify with those mercenerys which is probably hard, because alot of players probably think of themselves as being "good" so IF they would do something that is considered morally bad, you need to give them a good reason to do so...which can be using greed, but that "need" for greed is usually born out of poverty or seeing others poverty and not wanting to end up like that.
It could be defeating the oppressors by killing off only high ranked people...etc.

 

This is really true. But I actually find the trailer feedback to be really useful in general. It's fascinating to see how people respond to changes.

I originally was using a map that had fall colors and overcast grey skies. Many, many people commented on how drab and boring it looked. "Unappealing". I shifted to a map with blue skies and lusher green summer colors, and suddenly "it looks great". People are hard wired to love summer and those rich blues and greens. It's important for me to keep that in mind beyond just the trailer.

One of the main problems people have with this version is actually the game's HUD.

"The game looks so amateur"
"what about the game looks amateur?"
"that eyesore of a hud"

Is a comment I've gotten a few times already. I had just 'fixed' the hud considerably, but the feedback lets me know it's still not good enough and I can improve it more.

It's a different kind of feedback from raw playtesting feedback, it's more just about the feeling/impressions people get from looking at the game for a few seconds. But still really important.

 

If you're having fun with it looking at it as a series of experiments... you do this and get that result... then by all means continue. I was thinking you were getting a little frustrated at this point.

Me I'd throw one out one time get feedback... apply what I thought made sense and call it done. For release I mean. Then sure as gamers commented on it asking to see more I might make another video. Like if they really wanted to see something very much I'd be sure to show a tiny glimpse of that so they can better assess but not spend like 2 minutes on it because after all I cannot give them what they really want only enough to pique their interest. In your case though I think gamers probably want and need to see some meat and potatoes. How much is the question.

And it seems to me like videos should focus on what are the most unique and strongest points of the game. I always figured this is why most AAA game videos focus on the cinemas. lol

 

Don't get me wrong, i'm totally miserable! It's brutal having people tell you your work sucks over and over (and trust me, they're all telling me my work sucks - some guy even logged into youtube to thumbs down a video with 5 views at the time).

But feedback is really key to improving. So you square your shoulders, take the punishment, and try to look for the positive.

"I can improve the hud"​

not ​

"My hud is S***. My game is S***. I am S***. I give up".​

 

More like "this guy is obviously a freak. This hud is awesome. You mr commenter sir.... suck!"

Anyway good luck with it.

 

it is awesome! I even have the weapons as 3d meshes that rotate slightly with camera movement! It's friggin sick!

I just need to figure out how to make sure people see the awesome, not the weird bulge over the ability icons in the background image or there being too much dead space under the attack text. Or the placeholder icons, etc. Man, there's a lot to do.

 

Yeah I dont like the stock art icons in the trailer (just pay an artist to do it properly), and after the music dies out and you show gameplay. Maybe keep the music going the whole trailer.

 

just to be clear - the entire thing is gameplay - does the trailer not make that clear ?

 

Much better than the last one, feels like it has a message and the ending feels great.

Things I didn't like were mainly the dialogue:

• "They were many" well, maybe relatively speaking. I would say "they outnumbered us" or something like that.
• "Panic spread" where? It sounds like you're talking about a city or something.
• "Not good" kind of just fell flat to me. I'd say something more dramatic, like "A bad mistake" or "A futile effort" or even something descriptive like "We were not fast enough".

But yeah the ending really has a punch, and I would personally be more compelled by that trailer compared to the last.

One big thing though is that it doesn't demonstrate the game very well in terms of showing the variety of what the player can do, the breadth of the game, the map etc - so I would use a trailer like this in a place that had a link to Steam, and use a more demonstrative trailer on the Steam page.

 

Well the problem is once you got rid of the music you really start to look at the problems (because theres nothing else to focus on). I would also try to pay for a voice actor as well.

 

Congratulations on getting greenlit! Hope that brightens your mood a bit again. Hang in there!

You didn't even get to use the new trailer for greenlight, right? How was your yes/no vote ratio at the end when you got greenlit?

 

Thanks man. It really does. There's so much stress. I know that getting greenlit these days isn't that huge of an accomplishment, but knowing that I didn't fail at the greenlight stage is a huge relief.

Ending votes broke the 50% yes barrier and ended at 51% upvote. I was not close to top 100 at all (39% of the way iirc).

Total visitors: ~1800
Total votes: ~1150
Total yes: ~590

The forum here helped push it over the 50% mark, as did indiedb featuring bsg on the front page + tweet. It's hard to say exactly, but I think the forum + indiedb accounted for about 10% of my yes votes. 18 days total.

Pure steam traffic was down to about 2-5 visitors a day at the end. Which is pretty scary. Last time around I was averaging closer to 10 visitors a day long haul.

I am almost certain that steam will seriously bias your exposure depending on how you do initially. So it's really important to start strong.

 

As a note of comparison - my first greenlight - I had more upvotes on the end of day 2 than I did at the end of 18 days this time. I had over 760 upvotes on day 2 the first time around, with no press, exposure, etc.

Some of this has to do with the market shifting. Some of it might have to do with timing (close to xmas). I think a lot of it just has to do with the fact that I had a more cohesive presentation last time, with a much easier game to understand and categorize. I could just post 2 screenshots of the last game and people "got it" - or at least got it enough that they could fill in the blanks with whatever they wanted. This time, its so much harder.

The "nice skyrim mod. ha ha ha" thing was a real problem this time.

 

I disagree. I feel the music fade does an excellent job of focusing the moment and making the scream that much more visceral. It's absolutely necessary for that final moment.

 

You will get the majority of your votes/views and even sales on the first day you launch your game, either on greenlight/steam so the better your game does the more they will promote it the worse it does the quicker they will bury it (within the system).

how the hell do you get external views, or traffic, I dont know since I dont have good results with that part of it

 

I think that last trailer has a lot of potential, and you could just iterate over that until it's exactly what you want. I would go through each line and tweak it until it's as expressive as it can be without sounding weird. For example, you might replace "not good" with:

"But it was too late."

I personally would be more picky about my grammar ("But, it was too late..."), but the lack of a comma flows much better with all of your other lines.

 

Honestly, I think you just do your best to make it easy for other ppl to promote, and roll the dice.

@GarBenjamin did me a huge favor and tweeted my game. He has a few hundred followers. Not a single one liked it, nobody retweeted. That means that I didn't do my part. Gar gave me an opportunity for others to see it, and I dropped the ball on my end.

Every time anyone, anywhere, mentions your game, that's an opportunity for more exposure. If it doesn't resonate a little, then you need to do better work on making it appealing.

But who knows, i am no pro at pr.

@EternalAmbiguity,
I think you're right that the text is weak. Thanks for the optimism!

 

@frosted in fairness the majority of people on my Twitter (other than maybe a dozen or so from here) are not your target market. They are people almost exclusively interested in retro games particularly 2D pixel art games. I started building the following for my own efforts back when I first considered maybe doing the Indie thing.

 

There is one thing i don't like is the Loot action taking part in combat,it would be better to receive or collect Loot at the end of the battle instead, it must be borring to spend actions to Loot.
Anyway, i like a lot your gameplay, it's fresh and dynamic.

 

I agree with EternalAmbiguity, for a teaser trailer this one is good (not quite there yet but the foundation is solid).

But you have a real challenge which is to find a way to quickly explain your game to people. Find the right terminology, find the right demonstration, add more or less explanation and see if what helps get the message across. Try a million different things here, on youtube, and anywhere else and see what people think.

I wouldn't be surprised if GarBenjamin's followers didn't hit the like button simply because they were confused about what kind of game they were looking at. And maybe a lot of people on Steam too. And if you don't figure it out, a lot of people won't hit the buy button when it comes out for the same reason.

I think you need to bring out the mechanics with VERY obvious UI and effects (such as for example desaturating the screen and blurring the background and enemies while you switch between your team members or something, and bringing up a big UI full of whatever skills they have when you select one, bright and clear outline shaders, etc etc.). At the very least, try it out and see what the response is.

I don't want to sound like a downer, but the fact is you just got over the greenlight line barely. You're good for now, but I imagine you'll agree it's not an ideal situation at all.

If I had to guess, I'd say that the main problem is that it could easily look to a casual eye like a 3rd person realtime combat game that plays too slowly and intermittently, and people hit the dislike/downvote because they think it would be boring to play. Which is why I think you need to really pull out the mechanics visually with screen effects. Make the turn-based strategy element the star of the show, make it look fun to simply prepare for the battle, choosing what you are going to do next. Drive the point home that this is what the game is all about.

Anyway good luck and its good to see things better each time you post!

 

Well what you want to do is try to drive targeted traffic, so if your making a sports game target a blog that covers only sports games, otherwise its untargeted traffic which is actually pretty useless (see steams clicktrhough rate). So you should try hitting youtuber/twich streamers, and blogs that only cover RPGs or whatever.

For example when gar tweeted your game, how many people actually saw it, and how many people are even actually interested in that type of game. You need to try build up a following that likes RPGs

 

Exactly. It's always possible a few may have liked it or a few may have a friend who likes such things. So that can be helpful and is why I did it. But targeting is so important. 1,000,000 people who only like modern FPS games seeing a post about a retro platformer would be near useless for example. Totally agree.

 

Gar is building up a following with his little retro games and thats the type of thing we should be doing. I havent used my twitter in so long and only have 15 followers

 

I haven't used Twitter much in a while but that was the idea. If I can build up to like 5,000 followers most of them being like me... "old school" style game lovers... it would then be worthwhile for me to make an Indie game and release on Steam.

Because with that "list" I could probably count on getting several hundred "yes" votes in a few days and 100 sales just from them which I suspect (don't know for certain) would trigger Steam to give the game more exposure. Basically I would be just getting the snowball moving the initial push.

I would not make an Indie game (as in game for sale) unless I knew I had at least some market reach I could count on immediately being available directly to me.

 

Apologies if this borders on self advertisement, but I wanted to show the final video.

In the end, making this took an immense amount of effort. Something about making a trailer forces you to look at (and think about) your game very differently.

I had to stop directly working on the trailer to improve some of the game features. I rewrote the camera system for both more stability, camera shake based on actual impact, and interesting and dynamic angles.

I also added a considerable amount of work to the combat physics.

These things may or may not have been sidelined, delayed or never implemented - but working on video made me really see how important these items were. Gamer feedback to earlier versions made me really grasp how important the 'meta' game was. "What do I do?" "What's the story" "Who is my character". So I designed the trailer to answer these questions first and foremost. I also added considerable notes in terms of prioritizing this side of the game as much as possible as I push for release.

Making video is an interesting process, if you're deep in and you sometimes lose sight of the forest, looking at your game in a different medium like video can really help refocus you.

If any of you are in a similar boat (solo effort, too much work) - I would strongly recommend taking a stab at a trailer or similar video in the earlier phases of the project. I think the process is invaluable for getting high level feedback from gamers and prioritizing work at stages where the game play itself is not ready for public playtesting.

 

I like it! You would have my vote.

Also, nothing wrong with self promotion on your own thread. I'm interested in the game and would definitely like to know when it comes out.

 

I know I'm way too late since this is the "final" version, but in case it's useful or helps others in the future I'm going to give feedback anyway.

Also, take all of this with a huge grain of salt! It's feedback from a watcher of trailers, not an experienced creator of them.

Camerawork later in the trailer seemed to show how the game works quite well. However, in the intro shot the camera was all over the place - there seemed to be no logic or visual focus to its movement, I didn't know where I was meant to look, the jumpy movement was distracting. I think a custom camera sweep or slow zoom/dolly or something would be better here. To me it honestly felt like "look what we can do with the camera controls" rather than deliberately showing off a cool scene in the game. Also keep in mind, particularly for intro shots, that good composition for film is very different to good composition for an interactive camera!

Strategically you look for "high ground", not "Highground". I know that's nitpicking, but I'm sure I'm not the only person editorial errors stand out to. (To be fair, too, when people point out editorial errors in our work we think "hey, we're doing well if the thing they notice most is a typo!")

I think the text you've got is generally good, but its presentation could use further refinement in two particular areas. First, some of the early text doesn't stick around long enough to comfortably read it. Either it should be super short so we don't have to consciously read it to know what it says, or it needs to hang there a bit longer so we have time to both comfortably read it and see the visuals around it. Secondly, some of the text could really "pop" out from the background much more than it does. There's a shadow under the text already, my first thought would be to make that a bit darker and bigger to push the text out from the background (which in the case that sticks in my mind was of similar colour to the text).

Finally, I'd do something to build more anticipation for the title reveal at the end. I absolutely get what I think you're going for there (associating the game's name with the emotional note of fallen warriors), but I don't interpret it as the game's title immediately because when it shows up it's too much like the previous piece of feature/flavour text that's still hanging around. I think I'd personally let the previous text completely fade out, wait a beat or two, and then show the title as its own thing.

- - -

All of that said, the trailer does a pretty decent job of introducing the game, I think you've covered the main gameplay and thematic concepts reasonably well, and the game itself looks pretty neat!

 

I thought overall it was much better. Agree that the intro was a bit unfocused, and I think the ending was a little bit flat, but the middle 80% was great.

 

This is so funny. So the intro footage is switching from active character to active character. I thought that character switching was probably the single best way I could communicate the game being turn based - as the absolute main problem has been that 90% of the viewers think its an action rpg because of the free form map, smooth animation and 3rd person camera. The two main tools ways I can 'show' it being turn based is top down view and character switching.

I didn't think this would be another point of confusion. But taking a step back, I can see how it might not be obvious to the viewer what's going on there, since I am switching character while using the camera in largely 3rd person instead of top down.

This was a constant struggle throughout the production of the video. The amount of time it took to communicate key points, the beats of the music, and the time on screen was immensely time consuming. I may have made an error in the final timing. I tend to agree with you that it's very important to have enough time to read, as well as, comfortably digest text before the next line or more movement happens on screen.

I had 4 main goals:

• build a story arc: a beginning, middle, end
• explain the core game play mechanics clearly
• stay 'in character': present those mechanics in proper theme
• time everything to music

Keeping "in theme" was very hard to do, especially around GUI heavy screens in the beginning. Showing GUI heavy game play without resorting to "feature list" style text is crazy hard:

• "hire"
• "equip"
• "level up"
• "dynamic map"

GUI driven game play is immensely difficult to work with in a format like this. GUI naturally has a lot of text on screen, and on screen text creates craploads of dependencies, restrictions and challenges. Trust me, I spent probably over 60 hours trying to free up a third of a second here or a half second there to give the text more time.

Given the goals that I set for myself, I met each point in that list as well as I possibly could. During the process of putting that video together, I hit my personal limits.

I may not have done well enough in terms of giving the text additional time, but trust me, it was not for lack of attention to the issue or effort to address it.

My mistake may have been trying to hit too many goals all at once. Maybe I should have dropped the pretense of narrative and theme - or maybe I should have dropped the attempt to stay very true to the mechanics as implemented.

The trailer is not perfect, despite my best effort, it still looks like a low budget indie trailer. Hopefully it looks like a kick ass low budget indie.

 

Oh, I'm not knocking it. It looks "indie", but that's not a bad thing, and when it comes to niche games people don't want you focusing on a great trailer, they want you making a great game.

 

@angrypenguin gave a indpeth critique I can't add anything to, and agree with most of his points.

I'll say - I think this is a good trailer - better than the others, largely - imo- because of the improved camera controls. The improvements are actually evident over the controls from the previous trailers, and I'm glad to see you've kept the 3D map which I think is a good 'feature'.

 

I think the way @angrypenguin penguin put it really sums it up perfectly. It's a good trailer and had me quite hooked, but just little bits of polish here and there that could seal the deal.

Also about what angry penguin said about the name of the game at the end, you could try creating the distance between the game text and normal text by having a short 5 to 10s segment with no text and just quickly montaging various game play footage, but get some other opinions on that idea cos it could be complete crap

And If you don't want to work on it more, don't, because it's good enough

 

@frosted, what are you using to edit the video?

I agree it's still hard to see that it's turn-based but otherwise I think it's pretty good. And your progress is pretty amazing compared to the clips you shared about a year ago.

 

I got a month subscription to Premiere for the video editing. I mixed the music in Audition with a free trial (just expired, so no more audio tweeks). When I say I am low budget, I'm not kidding around. ;D

I think the absolute biggest impact was probably fixing the HUD. The UI went through three stages while working on the trailer:


STAGE ONE
So horrible that it could not be shown in video at all.





STAGE TWO
- Me: "I fixed the HUD, now I can actually show it in video!"
- Gamers: "Your HUD is a massive eyesore. God it's horrible"





STAGE THREE
- Reasonably professional looking.



Don't underestimate UI and HUD. It's a major element in polished presentation.

 

Just want to point out, Audacity is a decent free audio editing program. And if you have a little money, like 50 bucks, you can buy Sonar or other audio editing programs on Steam.

 

I run audacity for touchups and stuff. It's a good program.

Maybe I am not skilled enough with audacity - but I think it would have taken me somewhere in the range of 2-3x longer to do the audio in audacity. Audition is really, really good for mixing audio like this - it also has direct export into Premiere (maintaining the separate audio tracks - there are about 5-7 tracks in this example).

Mixing the audio probably took around 4-6 hours - about 2 up front putting together the core - then around 2-4 in tweeking and trying variations (I need another 2 beats here, this needs more intensity there, the horn needs another 2 seconds solo, etc).

Sonar looks pretty good. Reaper also came highly recommended. Audition was just easiest since I had the free trial and was already using Premiere.

 

Premier makes me want to gouge my eyes out. But aggressively opposed to software subscriptions, and particularly so with Adobe, so I'm also stuck on the older version we own (not "rent") -- which is unfortunately not high-DPI. I was just hoping there was something else good out there which didn't cost an arm and a leg.

So where's that beta copy?