Octodad’s Green Light

Creating games can be the best thing in the world. In our case we all get to work with incredibly crazy and creative people who are relentless in making sure we’re crafting a world that others will also find intriguing. Then again at times it has triggered some of the most stressful moments in my entire life. Submitting to the Independent Games Festival…hell, submitting to any festival is always a very anxiety filled process. For me at least I am always left wondering as to whether they received the build of the game or if we screwed up in our submission process. Then there’s the incessant waiting. SO MUCH WAITING. A few weeks or months can feel like it’s been forever. Steam Greenlight has been the latest episode in this series of unknowns and what if’s.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch Greenlight page

Greenlight launched on August 31st of this year at about 10:00 am PST, and although we knew it was coming it was a bit hard to prepare for. The only thing the public really knew at the time was that the service was launching at the end of the month and that you would be able to vote for games you thought should be on the Steam store for purchase. I figured we would need some sort of description and probably various pieces of media-fill like screenshots, videos, avatars, etc. So I gathered a lot of promotional stuff we had off-hand and something that really helped was that we had previously setup a presskit using Rami Ismail’s awesome presskit() beta.

 That page has saved our asses in a lot of different situations like interviews, press releases, and in this case Greenlight. It cuts down on how much work we have to put into getting commonly asked for assets and information together. This way other people covering or talking about the game can either fact check or have easy access to assets by us simply sending them a link. It’s also helpful though because no matter where I am I also have quick access to the same stuff.

At the time we were at PAX Prime in Seattle and it was the first day of the show. Generally it’s a big enough stressor just in making sure that the game is up and running properly or that the booth is setup for everything we might need. Of course… this was the day that Valve chose to launch their new service that we had to blindly prepare for. They most likely just wanted to get Greenlight up and running as quickly as possible once they had something stable so I can’t really blame them, but it was sort of bad timing.

I purposely woke up about 2-3 hours earlier than I was going to and at first didn’t even know what time they were planning to launch exactly. Luckily I knew a few people who were part of the beta and so as soon as I got a hold of them we were able to figure out what kinds of things we’d need to get together to launch our page as quickly as possible.

One great thing about Greenlight launching during the beginning of PAX is that we could then tell everyone who came by the booth, “Hey! We’re on Steam Greenlight! Vote for us!” Of course, we were yelling every word of it as the exclamation points suggest. Kevin Geisler had a good idea to run over to somewhere that we could print out signs, aka letterhead paper, and so he created some simple Greenlight signage that we taped to our TV at the booth as well. This coupled with the big press boost from being a part of the fantastic Indie Megabooth really helped us come out of the gate with a strong start.

The first week all of us were obsessively looking at the page and its traffic attempting to discern how we were matching up with all of the other titles. For a long time all we knew was how many people had visited the page and how many people had favorited it. These two things don’t really do much as far as letting you know how you stack up to everyone else on Greenlight. We were happy the page was getting a lot of traffic, but still had no idea what was really going on. Simply not knowing is stressful in and of itself on a service that could potentially expose your game to millions of people.

We’ve tried a lot of different ways to reach out about the Greenlight page and most of them have at least helped out a little bit. Situations like this make you realize how important it is to have a community who believes in what you’re doing. (Especially if they are willing to push for your work to succeed as much as you are.) We set out to do a couple big outreach sessions on Facebook and Twitter, which seemed to boost us up for a while. Lots of retweets and sharing of the link to the page helped us get far, but eventually you run that network dry. Everyone can only vote once of course.

One thing I’m very glad we did was contact YouTuber Total Biscuit before PAX. He’s also known as the Cynical Brit and runs a really successful YouTube channel in which he has a series called WTF IS… in which he plays games he hasn’t before and commentates over them. I saw on Twitter that he was looking for games to checkout at PAX and so I shot him a reply. Eventually I got an email address and we worked out for him and his team to come by the booth early to play the game. We hadn’t let anyone put up any direct gameplay video before this, but we knew how much notoriety TB had. I also took some time to watch through a couple of his videos and I have to say I found some respect for his comedic outlook on the games he was playing. It all worked out and him and his team dropped by our booth during PAX. Recording went off without much of a hitch…or so we thought.

A week or so after PAX we found out that the footage might have been lost due to the hard-drive they had used being damaged.  This bummed us out big-time as most of us weren’t able to even be at PAX since we couldn’t afford it. Luckily after a week or so of waiting and wondering we found out they were going to be able to recover the footage. Once TB’s WTF IS… : Octodad: Dadliest Catch actually went up it turned out to be quite the hit. As of right now it’s reached 182,030 views. That’s more views than our first teaser trailer for the game! During the days which TB’s video had first gone up we saw a huge spike in our voting and I really can’t thank his team enough for placing the link to the Greenlight page in the video’s description.

The next reaping of titles to be on Greenlight is set to happen on October 15th which is in about 4 days. We’re currently sitting at 12th place. JUST outside of where we would need to be in order to be in the 10 games that will be selected. Honestly though this is still a great thing. If we aren’t greenlit this time around we’re in a prime position to be in 2nd place for the next selection of games. Help us hold strong or move up!

I want to thank everyone that’s helped us get to this point and all of our fans for taking the time out of their day to go and give us a vote. Without ya’ll we would not be where we are now. Keep spreading the word if you feel so inclined. :P

Best,

Phil