Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Headup Games are trying an interesting tactic to get more Steam Greenlight up votes for their game, Bridge Constructor: they’re giving it away for free. Expressing their frustration at not getting into the Greenlight top 100, the company have suggested that people might like to vote them up in exchange for getting the game entirely for no pennies (and DRM free). It’s a bold and brave move, and you can see from it just how important getting on to Steam is for companies like Headup, that they’ll give their product away to Greenlight voters in order to get noticed. It’ll be interesting to see whether anyone else employs similar tactics to get those vital upvotes as competition hots up.

After all, Steam is continuing to grow as a market, and recent peaked with six million concurrent users over Thanksgiving weekend. PC Gaming/Dead, etc.

I intended to keep at least one of my spider’s worth of eyes firmly affixed to Towns, the indie construction and management sim that makes you the mayor of an olde time Sunnydale. Turns out it was one of my many bad eyes and I haven’t played the game since Britain sipped a Pimms No.1 Cup with a dash of lemonade and wore a straw boater for a couple of weeks. I speak of the summer. Since then, thanks to its community and the magic of Greenlight, Towns has appeared on Steam and, as of last week, so has its demo. Jolly good.

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Fly’N, Ankama’s exquisite and charming botanical platformer, is due to launch on the 9th of November, which just so happens to be tomorrow. It’ll be available on Steam, as the the Green Light of commerce has reflected kindly upon it, and there’s a new trailer to celebrate the release. If I hadn’t played with Rayman’s Oranges this year, I think I’d be handing Fly’N the ‘platformer wot has the most colours in it’ award for 2012. If Fly’N was a broth, which is isn’t, then the ingredients might include a sprinkle of Rayman, a dash of Pixeljunk: Eden and a drop of Botanicula.

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Having successfully fought its way through the Greenlight lion pit, Miasmata is a first-person survival game, created by just two guys – brothers Joe and Bob Johnson (under the silly name of IonFx. Eyeonphnx?). And when they say created, they really mean it. This game in which you must survive on an island, pursued by only one strange creature, has been built from scratch. Take a look at the superb graphics in the trailer below, and then be somewhat amazed that they built the engine too.

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Have you recently tried to make a game for submission to Steam Greenlight, only to realize it wasn’t actually a game at all – but instead a piece of ruthlessly efficient productivity software? Well then, you’re in a far better place than me. My aspiring Greenlight submission turned out to be a toaster. Sadly, there’s no category for that. Your software, though, can now enlist the aid of a community more numerous than the number of stars that can be seen through the thick clouds of smog in the sky. Well, potentially, anyway. Also, remember that pesky $100 Greenlight fee? Valve’s introduced a “Concept” category to help devs sorta kinda get around it.

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Steam Greenlight isn’t perfect. Not by a long shot. It’s still very much a work-in-progress, and – at the moment – it’s making things harder on some developers than even the old, underdog unfriendly selection process used to. Valve has, however, made one thing abundantly clear: it wants developers to round up outside communities of their own and then take Greenlight by storm. Obviously, that’s far easier said than done, but the Green Light Bundle is – if nothing else – an interesting attempt at making order out of chaos. Better still, it uses the 100 Percent Guaranteed Indie Game Solution To All Life Problems (Including Relationships And Spiders): “When in doubt, bundle.”

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McPixel has exploded onto Steam and is the first game to reach Valve’s storefront through the Greenlight process. There’s a feature about the indies and Steam coming later, courtesy of Nathan who has been visiting Fantastic Arcade where he was witness to a Valve panel all about Greenlight. I didn’t go to Fantastic Arcade but I did wake up at 7.30 this morning, endure the difficult commute from my bed to my computer and put on my Serious Journalist Hat. Primed and ready, I sent a list of very important and serious questions to Sos Sosowski about being the Armstrong of indies: the first man on Greenlight.

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The Stanley Parable – that extraordinary Source mod from last year – is to receive a reinvention as an independent game, hoping to find its way to Steam via the Greenlight thing. And there’s a new trailer to prove it.

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The saga of Steam Greenlight has, thus far, been packed with unexpected surprises, whiplash-inducing twists, and sudden bursts of lava-like sensuality. Unfortunately, hardly any of it has been related to actual, you know, games. Instead, Greenlight itself and its (in some cases, not-so-well-explained) policies have hogged the spotlight, with Valve doing its best to tweak and modify the system as it goes along. Now, though, the first batch of community-tested, Valve-approved games is getting its chance to shine. Also, one of them is Half-Life.

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