Steam Greenlight: "Parallels" - The Experiment :)

Phases, Darthy, and Parallels are helping us all break through to access the Steam markets - pretty exciting.
Kev, I am going to like RisingHigh on Facebook and blast out to my Facebook friends asking them to upvote. It's not a lot of people, but any bit helps; you should see the share on Facebook soon. Like @Collin Wade Thiessen says, keep pushing! Hopefully others in the community can help you spread the word

 

@Jamie - Dude, that's too awesome, thanks so much for the support, just amazing! I just hope this post can inspire others whatever the result. The response from everyone has been so incredible, hoping to get a build out to streamers soon and will post any/all results as I go.
You rock man, thanks again

 

Update time on the 14 days mark - Overall, hmmm!

So it's fair to say that we've pretty much stalled in terms of traffic which was to be expected, but it's clear that unless we do something, things are unlikely to pick up organically. We have moved up, which is great, but disappointing in terms of unique visitors for sure.



Ratio's are pretty solid and from researching online, we're in kinda good shape. We've been approached by Groupees and a few other smaller sites to run offers which would certainly increase traffic, however I'm reluctant to do this yet, but again, I'm not discounting anything at this stage. Our Screenshot Weekly Feature in "Indie Game Mag" had little to no impact at all which is a bit sad, but cool nonetheless.

I'm considering hiring a marketing firm to push us out there and now waiting to hear back from them. There's alot of mixed views about this, but from what I can gather, their results seem solid - It will really come down to cost.

So, there it is - Not sure slow and steady wins the race here, but as we launched the campaign without having a game built, and still a good couple of weeks from completing, the exercise and education has been good

 

Your stats are really good. Granted, I don't have experience with STEAM, but given that your game is 61% of the way to the top 100 and having an almost 50/50 split on yes and no votes, seems like a positive indication that there is a market for it on Steam, and that funneling the "right traffic", not just traffic, could help boost the campaign towards the green!
Before you spend more money, you might also check these out for any resources you may not have exhausted yet:
http://www.pixelprospector.com/how-to-contact-press/
http://www.pixelprospector.com/the-marketing-guide-for-game-developers/

 

A little bit of topic, but I always wondered how you do the nice and very particular tail effect. It seems it is floating even though, it doesn't relate to the physics settings of the world(?).

 

Yea I was about asking same question about the tail particle effect. Would be nice if someone could do a demo of it.

 

Thanks for the links @Jamie - We've done quite a bit of press outreach for our apps in the past with a good deal of success and being featured on Appadvice, iMore, Toucharcade, Appspy / Pocket Gamer etc so this has certainly been on my mind.

However, from all I have read in the last 2 weeks, and I have read alot, press coverage even on most of the bigger PC gaming sites like Rock, Paper, Shotgun et al really don't have as much impact as you may expect. Most blog posts, postmortems etc stating traffic driven from within Steam was by far the winner. I will probably throw some out even so, although it's a bit of a tough gig due to the nature of the game, there's not a huge amount to say on it in itself.

@Christoph / @sysads - this is just a spawner attached to the character with a variable - Play with the settings - if I post mine all the games will end up looking the same

 

Currently, there seem to be three ways to do a "tail": (1) use the Trail effect and attach it to the character, (2) use the flag effect and attach it to the character, or (3) use an object that spawns at a certain spawn rate and attach it to the character.
@Christoph / @sysads Sorry to be kind of blunt back, but It would be great if you could show support for this person's game on Steam, given that you seem to admire how this person chose to create the "tail" for their character in their game. Help answering questions and help with campaigns are just two kinds of support this community can uphold together

 

Yeah, I know that it is a spawner effect attached to the character. What I don't understand is how it is floating like that in the space without gravity. I am not asking because I want to copy it, but rather to understand the logic. This effect probably can be used for a lot of other things, not only the tail. I tried something similar with a animation png sequence (+spawn), but the problem is that on older devices the game gets rendered useless (and it never looked like yours). And no worry about a lot of games looking the same. Eventually someone will find it out and copy anyway, but none of them will get the quality games RisingHigh has.

And sorry Jamie, I don't even know what Steam is. I most probably am very useless helping with this.

 

@Christoph - Flattery will get you everywhere haha! and thanks, really appreciate your kind words
You kinda answered your own question The game does have gravity, so we set the spawner on a variable -gravity. So in theory it's an anti gravity decoration - It will be different for every game depending on the world settings.

I hope this helps - we used a similar effect in our game Chaos Chambers, but that had different world settings, so we had to change it accordingly.

 

@Christoph consider joining steam and voting for Kevin's game. You can look back at the initial post of this thread of posts to learn more about Kevin's steam campaign and steam.

 

Oh yea, I knew I had seen something similar in another game and as per steam, I am not even sure i still have an account there but will check and if i do, will certainly give you all the votes you need.
As per the tail effect, I only needed to understand the physics behind it for learning purpose as it could come in handy someday

 

It's all good folks, no worries - and thanks

 

Just tried it by clicking Yes and I get this

 

@sysads Click on their "visit steam support" link it shows when that happens and then it will tell you what you need to do to be considered an active steam member with voting rights. It gives several options

 

I voted Yes, good luck!!
By the way, I want to create a similar effect like your tails, but its a mess. I just joined Buildbox today so bare with me
Do you just have 1 spawner image and use Angular Velocity? If I do this it will work what I want but then the images are coming back, making it a circle which I do not want. And about Linear Velocity, when I add a number next to ~ the images are going the wrong way.
This is what I have:

This is giving me a headache.. Thanks!

 

I think you will get there by playing. I can understand that Kevin won't post a screenshot of his settings. And even if he would, his settings will not give you any results. You have to check your general settings and go from there. Also, as said by others, do not copy the effect, but search and create one of your own that - most importantly - fits your game design. This is actually the fun part. Thanks Kevin for having me understand the logic of it. Great playing and creating to you all.

 

Nice work @Kevin W! Keep pushing my friend (as I know you will) thanks for sharing the whole Steam experience with the class . I can see this one could kill on Apple TV.

 

Yes @Christoph I know and I agree. I don't want to copy that particle effect and following the player. I actually wanted to know how to do that effect so I can create effects like fire in my game.

Could you give me some tips? No need to if you dont want to

 

@douglasmarketer - I think it would have been better if you had said that straight from the off and created a new thread

So the way I'd build an effect like that, as with anything that we try to re-create, is to study exactly how a certain object behaves.
Look at a video of a fire, what happens? How does it move? What are its main characteristics?
I would then breakdown its parts and try and piece it back together bit by bit.
If it was me, I'd probably start with a static image of a fire, then maybe add some fairly transparent wave trails and a couple of variable spawners to create the effect of bits flying up.

As I said above, my settings wouldn't help as the world settings would be different, much like how a person would walk on the moon would be very different to walking on the earth

Hope this helps