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Steam Greenlight: TDM is ranked #1 atm.


Bikerdude

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Well, one point where TDM has an advantage over most other Greenlight titles is, that it is already in a playable state (I wanted to write finished, but I don't wnat to imply that there is no more improvement going on), whereas most other titles are in alpha state at best. If (or rather when) TDM gets through Greenlight, people will not have to wait for another year (or longer), they can basically start playing right away. This might also be worth mentioning in the description (maybe even with a link to thedrakmod.com, although I am not sure if this is allowed as it might be considered advertisement for a non-Steam product), as the current description can be interpreted as a "typical" Greenlight project, that will be done somewhere in the future. Trying to read it without my own knowledge in mind, the only thing that hints at TDM being playable right away is the last paragraph that it was voted mod of the year 2013.

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Re: the influx of people and opinions, we should just have a policy to say we have our Immersive Sim design philosophy. We'll hear out ideas respectfully given, but our decisions should be based on our philosophy... That's what our goal is in the end, doing what's best for the game and its design ideas, since it's definitely not for profit or popularity per se.

 

That said, I think meta-game things like achievements that are specific only for the Steam version (and external. Like they'd only come up on the Steam dashboard but not within the game itself), it might be that some fans are willing to make a system for that and maintain it. We could hear out that idea, but it may depend on the technicalities. They shouldn't be internal to the game IMO.

 

Gimmicky gameplay changes or a lot of bling in the UI, on the other hand, aren't what we do at all (IMO, although something like the inventory grid was a good addition). I think it's easiest to just say we're sticking to our design as a blanket policy. For reasonable ideas, I'm almost certain the team has already debated it at some point, but we can handle it just like we do here.

 

Of course there's also our classic response. If someone is dead set on a feature, nothing is stopping them from branching, coding it, and issuing a fan patch. I don't know about that answer to this crowd though. But maybe they're not thinking like modders anyway?

 

Point is, we should think about how to respond, and maybe being respectful and relatively detatched and staying cool headed--we have our design, it's won awards, and we're sticking to it--is the best strategy to not get pulled into stormy arguments.

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What do you see when you turn out the light? I can't tell you but I know that it's mine.

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I think I can safely say that TDM will remain standalone, but if we can integrate steam-workshop without having to seriously modify our code so much the better. I am excited however to see how we will integrate into steam from an update and FM point of view.

 

Yes: I remember there was a thing in the past where games for Steam had to be modified, in order to include functions for their proprietary libraries (for achievements, chat, etc). I hope we won't have to do this and add Steam stuff in TDM code... unless of course said functions are a common and open standard.

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I notice that the intro text doesn't mention that we were listed as #2 on PC Gamer's The 50 Best Free PC games list last summer. That should be mentioned in the first paragraph. Talking about winning "best mod" just reinforces the confusion over whether we're still a mod or not-- not to mention that talking about accolades from 4 years ago makes us look out of date.

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Yes. We need to mention as many awards as possible:

 

 


 

Votes alone don’t get a game through Greenlight, though. “We try to incorporate external factors such as awards, critical acclaim, significant Kickstarter success, press coverage, etc,” Valve’s Doug Lombardi told Kotaku. “At the end of the day, we’re trying to prioritize the games that customers are most interested in having on Steam. The goal is to keep refining the process to get better and better at making sure games customers want are available and discoverable on Steam.”

As of this writing, Valve has greenlit 3667 games. Of those, 2943 have been released. In order to attract votes, it helps to be a good self-promoter. That’s not every game developer’s strong suit, but the Greenlight gods demand it.

 

 

(new findings)

 

Chances are, our Moddb announcement of 2.05 might be enough to push us over the edge though. Anything notable in the gaming media will pressure their PR team to expedite approval.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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Maybe it should be mentioned that the mod contains zombies, you might get the crowd that only play games that contain zombies voting for it. Although you can't kill the zombies most of the time, its an avoidance thing, due to them sleeping in shallow graves and then popping up at the most inconvenient time.

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Yes. We need to mention as many awards as possible:

 

 

 

(new findings)

 

Chances are, our Moddb announcement of 2.05 might be enough to push us over the edge though. Anything notable in the gaming media will pressure their PR team to expedite approval.

 

This endeavor wasn't supposed to be just about getting approved though. This is supposed to be about advertising TDM to new audiences and letting people know what a high quality project it is. That requires putting our best, most professional face forward, and that is not what has happened.

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Well, certainly there were some foibles. I haven't yet even delved into editing the Greenlight page because I've not had much time

in the evenings and I've spent most of it canvasing social media and forums to encourage visitors. I will recommend that Biker give

you edit privilege on the Greenlight page.

 

Still, our GreenLight presence looks far more professional than some of the "approved"

projects. I guarantee I could find a Greenlit project that looks worse than some amateur Moddb "projects".

 

It was my understanding that the point of this process is to capture players who "refuse to play games that aren't on Steam"

or are not savvy enough to install games without Steam helping them. Then, by gathering this larger audience, more contributors

will be attracted to the larger audience. The players who we are attracting are not going to have the same criteria for "professional"

as (for example) if we were using the page to apply for a job at a commercial game studio.

Please visit TDM's IndieDB site and help promote the mod:

 

http://www.indiedb.com/mods/the-dark-mod

 

(Yeah, shameless promotion... but traffic is traffic folks...)

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That requires putting our best, most professional face forward, and that is not what has happened.

Its only been 2 days, The description, videos, pictures can be edited. And with respect I have been asking for help and input for a while now. So with the in mind and the uncertainty of the release date of 2.05 I made the decision to just get it done, that and wanted to do it while I had the spare cash.

 

So moving forward -

  • Goldwell is kindly making a new trailer,
  • Nbohr1more is kindly making a better description,

What other other things and suggestions do we have atm..?

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Regarding the mod thingie it might be the best to state that this is an actual standalone game and not a mod anymore in the first sentence. I fairly doubt most people visiting the page really read through all the text. And the votes might not say that much as many of them are probably of forum members or persons who already play the dark mod and noticed that we have gone on greenlight. So in the end it might not mean a lot.

 

Regarding steam workshop: As far as I noticed it it is mainly a platform to distribute commitments be the community, like maps or mods if the game supports it. In our case these are mainly the FM's so I don't really see how we would benefit from that.

 

All in all I share Springheels opinion that this is mainly for advertising purposes. If we get greenlit then maybe one or another person who likes to play stealth-games (has played games like Metal Gear Solid:A Phantom Pain or the latest Hitman titles for example) gets the dark mod shown on his suggestion list, tries it out and gets addicted (Join us, join us nooooooooooow). And maybe a few of those become contributors.

 

This whole steam achievement, workshop etc. nonsense doesn't mean much to me, though.

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I use Steam almost exclusively for games now, so I understand that it would increase TDM's visibility a lot. I never used Steam Workshop, but if it means better visibility for FMs, why the hell not? I just hope the folder structure won't be a problem for the engine, as it's something like Steam/something/steamapps/something/common/gamefolder. Oh, and the savegames are backed up in a cloud, so having saves for multiple FMs might be a headache.

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Its only been 2 days, The description, videos, pictures can be edited. And with respect I have been asking for help and input for a while now.

 

 

Uh, where exactly? Last I saw was your post from a week ago listing the steps one would need to go through if we wanted to get onto Greenlight. You never said you were going to put a page together, or asked for any content for it, or showed it to anyone, until it was already publicly released.

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This whole steam achievement, workshop etc. nonsense doesn't mean much to me, though.

There is a lot of worth with Steam Cloud however. Pragmatic. If it's possible to implement in due time.

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I use Steam almost exclusively for games now, so I understand that it would increase TDM's visibility a lot. I never used Steam Workshop, but if it means better visibility for FMs, why the hell not? I just hope the folder structure won't be a problem for the engine, as it's something like Steam/something/steamapps/something/common/gamefolder. Oh, and the savegames are backed up in a cloud, so having saves for multiple FMs might be a headache.

 

 

I think Workshop is a MUST for TDM. Giving Mod/Mission Creators a chance to advertise, interact, get feedback, troubleshooting, likes and feel proud of their work.

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