Devlog #6: Episodic Adventure or Full Game?

These past days we've been thinking a lot about our plans to make this game into an episodic adventure. Previously we talked about releasing a new episode of a five episode season every few months. However the fact that this will be our first game release as a studio makes us struggle with calculating the expectations for a project like this. There are also certain risks involved with releasing a game, then continuing development and hoping for more money once you're done with that. While we certainly want to explore this project format, working on our precise financial plan has made us believe that it's too risky for a first project.

Episode Selection Screen in Life is Strange

This means the new plan is to release a single full game. However we also thought about why we wanted to make an episodic adventure in the first place. We like episodic adventures, because they give you chunks of gameplay that you can play in the evening even though you have to go to school or work the next morning. Much like tv series, they fit into the schedule of people with working hours much better than 100-hours-long RPGs. I can't remember the last time I finished one of those. However I can remember the last six episodic adventures that I finished, because I didn't have to fit my schedule to their pacing - theirs fit perfectly into mine.

While we now plan to release a single full game, we want to keep the episodic identity by dividing the gameplay into about 90-minutes-long chunks. This way working people can play the episodes in the pace they want in the evening after work and nobody has to wait three months for the resolution of a cliffhanger. It is notable that content-providers like Netflix or Amazon have been releasing all episodes of their new seasons at once lately, because it fits the needs of customers. We think so too and want to try this.

Daredevil Advertisement by Netflix showing All Episodes being released at the same time

What do you think of this new plan? Do you like episodic adventures? Do you like getting all episodes at once? Please leave your comments below.

PS: Next weekend we'll be opening our twitch development stream. You can watch us develop a game for Asylum Game Jam in 48 hours: http://www.twitch.tv/goodwolfstudio

Our Experience with Steam Greenlight

So as of today, Code 7 was greenlit by Steam and we couldn't be happier. If you don't know what Steam Greenlight is, it's the pathway for little indie studios like us to get their games on the biggest video game sales platform "Steam". You have to open a game profile, show your screenshots and videos and let the Steam community vote if they'd buy the game. It took us 60 days and about 900 "Yes"-Votes to get through. Here's the problem though. The message came at a time when I had thought that I understood what our goal would be and that we'd need at least another two months to reach it.

There's a lot of texts written about what your game profile needs to get through Greenlight. About one year ago it had still been about 18k Yes-Votes, which changed in 2014 to getting into the Top 100 and hoping for the best, which would still not be a guarantee to get through.

So i thought our goal would be to get into the Top 100 and then wait for Valve to notice us. On the Statistics Page there's always a big percentage shown how much of the way to the Top 100 we had already left behind us. So the percentage slowly rose over the months and finally reached about 50%, then 51%, then 52%, then got back down to 50%. So we were kind of stuck at that percentage and would have needed a new impulse for people to vote to get through.



In addition you also get these fancy statistics, which show you how many votes the items in the Top 100 have, so you can at least anticipate how many more votes you need to get there. In this case most items have about 1500 votes and the top 5 spot has about 2600. The top 15 spot has actually more than that - about 2800. And the Top 10 Spot is in the bulk with the others at about 1500. So it seems the "Yes"-Votes alone aren't accounting for the position in the Top 100. But what else is?

Last but not least, you get a graph that shows you how many "Yes"-Votes you get in comparison to "No"-Votes. While you may think that it's bad that 4% more people voted no, you should look at the overall statistics for all the games in the Top 50.



Actually the average ratio for those games lays at about 28% "Yes"- to 72% "No"-Votes, which I think mostly makes the community look bad, because these are supposedly the best games on there. In the end we can almost be happy about the fact that we got almost the same amount of "Yes" and "No" votes.

However to me, the community is the best thing about Greenlight. If you get through or not, doesn't really seem to be connected to any of these statistics, because shortly before we got greenlit we were only about 56% of the way to the Top 100 and therefore - as mentioned before - thought it would take a while. The response of the community however was what really made this profile worth something.

The about 70 comments on the page were almost all very positive.  So here's what I'm taking away from Steam Greenlight:

If your product is good, don't worry about getting through. You will get greenlit eventually. Nobody will be able to predict how long it will take anyways. Instead, focus on the people and hear what they have to say. Stay active. Write announcements and discussions and show your game as best as you can. What comes after could be much more terrifying - trying to actually sell your stuff.

We're of course really excited to take that next step and go on working on the five episodes that we'll try to bring to Steam next year.