Logging in to Steam Greenlight today I found this…
The comments said the problem was with the visuals. I agree. But visuals aren’t everything. I mean my game had more animation and gameplay options then Receiver (by Wolfire games) and that was one of the very first games to be Greenlit. The problem is people just look at the graphics. They just look at the “original” parts of a game, and even though I spent 300+ hours on complicated animation matrices, coding, and AI development, the visuals weren’t enough for people to take interest.
You know it bothers me when games with screenshots like this:
Get more votes then games with screenshots like this:
I picked a random game to compare with mine. While the random game had somewhat impressive backgrounds and an interesting character design, they showed 30 seconds of repetitive walking gameplay. Looked like they had about 3 animations. And then they showed off some of their models and called it a game. And yet people are 300x more excited for it because their design is similar to that of popular mmos. Their game probably won’t have complicated animation matrices, AI systems with multiple states, and stealth scenarios that put you crawling inches from enemies. Their game probably doesn’t even have any complete levels. Now which game sounds more promising to you?
A lot of comments said “You shouldn’t have put this game out in Alpha. You should’ve waited until Beta.” Well take a look at the game above. 30 seconds of walking gameplay, remember? Yet people weren’t even bothered by the fact that their systems weren’t developed at all and all they could show off was a walk-through demo. This has started to make me think… Do people base development progress on visuals? Because it doesn’t make any sense for people to just skim over mine because the graphics didn’t look so good. Did people even see what my game was about?
Now call me a baby for complaining like this, but Greenlight is a flawed system. Personally I’d like to see how much work was actually put in to some of these entries. And by how much work I mean how many hours did they spend working on art and how many hours did they spend on actual gameplay. Sure the two go hand in hand, but people only look at the art, so what’s the point in working hard on the other part?
I took the game down from Greenlight. Sorry, but the results have just proven too horrible for now. I don’t want to just trash 300+ hours of work, yet I see no other option. Sure, I could increase the visuals of the game. But that’s something I’ve always been bad at and it’ll probably take another 100 hours or something to properly do. By that point who knows what people will think. They probably still won’t like the graphics, and by then they’ll start worrying about the gameplay or something. Overall it’s just too risky for me to put any more time into this game. There’s a chance it could be accepted after an aesthetics overhaul, but that’s a chance I don’t know if I want to take. Now that I know what people are looking for, it shouldn’t be hard to develop a new game, it’ll just take a really long time…
What do you think I should do?
Happy gaming!
Lip syncing for my game is actually proving quite easy — because the individual sound sources play independently, using code I can detect the volume of just one character’s voice file and then smoothly move the jaw bone to represent the audio data. Sure, it doesn’t look the best, but with a little more tweaking it will be at the quality I want for the finished version of the game. (At the very least his mouth will move in sync with the words) 
