Topic Steam Greenlight
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In Response to Clonkonaut
Overall gameplay has improved a lot with 7.0 and the frustation level eased. That's good! It has been mentioned in this thread that Greenlight is a one-time-only chance, so we might not want to blow it.
We should assess what OC has to offer without overly glorifying our efforts (which have been high nonetheless). Right now, OC is a single player game with occasional multiplayer. We offer a couple of hours of single player content. The best way to advertise our game would probably be to stress a little more on that than on multiplayer features. We can't just tell everyone that we offer great multiplayer rounds with super-duper competitive aspects and as soon as you go into the network screen there are 0 games. Furthermore, you cannot simply host one because most likely no one will be able to join (because of ports). However, I have played a few games on Steam that required port forwarding, so that's not a no-go per se.
I think if we really are honest, OC is at first a single player game and being one makes it hard to compete on a platform which focuses on online multiplayer gaming. Not impossible but a little harder. Moreover, a few hours of gameplay isn't great. I don't want to undermine our efforts but really, it's not great. You can argue that OC holds potentially endless hours of fun and while that might be true, coming from a player-only (and not developer) perspective, you can't see that. There is no good way to customise scenarios except the few scenario parameters. Replay value is low. Editing things into scenarios is cumbersome and will feel like unintelligible hacking to a lot of players just because you have to open stuff in text editors.
As I already said, multiplayer isn't our strongest feature. Even worse, coming from a lot of nicely working online games, our multiplayer will appear broken to a lot of people (lags??ß OMFG how can a game with bad graphics lag?). On a platform like Steam, you have zero to no chance to tell people why multiplayer in OC is like it is (and the explanation doesn't make you feel better when your game lags, anyway). Even more worse, some (online) features are simply broken. While runtime join is something you don't necessarily need, multiplayer savegame resumption is something that will be ridiculed. "Online coop" is broken without a save feature. People that are not experienced developers often spend a couple of hours solving some of our missions and forcing them to do it in one go when playing with friends is something they won't understand.
In the past, splitscreen was a unique feature in Clonk. I think, OC could really stand out against other Steam games if local coop was supported. But, as you probably know, it's broken. :(
My personal list of 'Features For Greenlight' would be:
- Working gamepad support
- Working splitscreen support
- Working network savegames
- Possibly thinking about improving single player experience / replay value / playing time
- Nice to have: An easy development tool at least for Windows users that allows for slight scenario modifications
- Nice to have (what Zapper said): Mod-management
Of course, I cannot say if any of these features would turn the odds in our favour or if we might even succeed without them.
We should assess what OC has to offer without overly glorifying our efforts (which have been high nonetheless). Right now, OC is a single player game with occasional multiplayer. We offer a couple of hours of single player content. The best way to advertise our game would probably be to stress a little more on that than on multiplayer features. We can't just tell everyone that we offer great multiplayer rounds with super-duper competitive aspects and as soon as you go into the network screen there are 0 games. Furthermore, you cannot simply host one because most likely no one will be able to join (because of ports). However, I have played a few games on Steam that required port forwarding, so that's not a no-go per se.
I think if we really are honest, OC is at first a single player game and being one makes it hard to compete on a platform which focuses on online multiplayer gaming. Not impossible but a little harder. Moreover, a few hours of gameplay isn't great. I don't want to undermine our efforts but really, it's not great. You can argue that OC holds potentially endless hours of fun and while that might be true, coming from a player-only (and not developer) perspective, you can't see that. There is no good way to customise scenarios except the few scenario parameters. Replay value is low. Editing things into scenarios is cumbersome and will feel like unintelligible hacking to a lot of players just because you have to open stuff in text editors.
As I already said, multiplayer isn't our strongest feature. Even worse, coming from a lot of nicely working online games, our multiplayer will appear broken to a lot of people (lags??ß OMFG how can a game with bad graphics lag?). On a platform like Steam, you have zero to no chance to tell people why multiplayer in OC is like it is (and the explanation doesn't make you feel better when your game lags, anyway). Even more worse, some (online) features are simply broken. While runtime join is something you don't necessarily need, multiplayer savegame resumption is something that will be ridiculed. "Online coop" is broken without a save feature. People that are not experienced developers often spend a couple of hours solving some of our missions and forcing them to do it in one go when playing with friends is something they won't understand.
In the past, splitscreen was a unique feature in Clonk. I think, OC could really stand out against other Steam games if local coop was supported. But, as you probably know, it's broken. :(
My personal list of 'Features For Greenlight' would be:
- Working gamepad support
- Working splitscreen support
- Working network savegames
- Possibly thinking about improving single player experience / replay value / playing time
- Nice to have: An easy development tool at least for Windows users that allows for slight scenario modifications
- Nice to have (what Zapper said): Mod-management
Of course, I cannot say if any of these features would turn the odds in our favour or if we might even succeed without them.
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