Steam Greenlight Release Dead Spawn

Hello all, hope you are well. I am fairly new to the game development scene and have just posted my first proper game to Steam Greenlight. The project was meant to take 3 months but ended up taking around 8 and is still ongoing.

I have just launched the campaign and its not gone great so far, obviously i don't know the norm. If you could check it out and give some advice on why its not going so well that would be much appreciated.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfile.../?id=933142791

Thanks for your time, Lucas.

Not that I've ever put up a greenlight project, but it seems to me you may have gone too early. There's a potential there to the game - the shooting mechanic as a base looks fun, just needs more -stuff- overall to make it feel more than a simple project. You have to give people a reason to part with cash, and this kind of game can be found on newgrounds for free multiple, multiple times over.

More guns. More enemies. More variety in what the enemies are doing, and how they appear. Construction stuff is a good path - add in a variety of turrets/shields/utility buildings. Add in different terrains - go urban, go rocky, go desert...

Just - more.

Thanks very much for the advice.

I have to agree with 4burner and a lot of the greenlight comments. You need to standout from other top down horde shooters. If the construction mechanic is your unique hook then flesh it out and show it in your video. Also, make sure to show variety of areas and enemies otherwise it will look bland to most first time viewers. One of the comments also pointed out the backward walking that occurs ultimately in these games. Maybe see how you can change that up a bit?

Thanks so much, great help :)

for being new to gamedev you have pulled off some impressive things (im most impressed with the zombies bumping off eachother and not walking in the same spot haha).

Keep polishing, I voted yes of course :)

Thanks a lot XD

There are two things that, in my opinion, are essential for games like this to be really fun. The first thing is gamepad support. Even though I'm a snooty PC Master Race™ guy (gaming exclusively on computers since about 1988; haven't owned a console since 1983), I'd refuse to play any twin-stick shooter (eg. Dead Spawn) with a mouse (which, looking at your video, appears to be the control scheme here).

The second is multipliers. Shooting loads of the same enemy and seeing your score go up by 20 points each time will get boring quickly, even in the most polished of games. But add in multipliers, and the excitement is hugely ramped up. A well-made multiplier mechanic adds time pressure, greatly incentivises improving one's skill, and transforms gameplay into a high-risk/high-reward scenario where playing it safe doesn't pay, while constant movement and quick decision-making does. All of the good twin stick shooters use multipliers for this reason (eg. Geometry wars, Waves, Ion Assault, Renegade Ops), as well as games like Darksiders and the Batman Arkham games (which could arguably be classified as 'twin-stick brawlers', as they share many mechanical similarities with twin stick shooters).

There are different ways to use multipliers, so you could choose out of a number of styles for a different feel. For example, Geometry Wars increases them when you collect geoms, and once accrued you can't lose them. Ion Assault's multiplier only remains active if you keep shooting enemies in quick succession (and is further increaased if you shoot multiple enemies at once), while Batman's multiplier is predominantly based around not getting hit.

Thanks a lot, Volnaiskra. I do have controller support but its only using the joystick 2 object, not using your crafty system which i was thinking of implementing. As for the multiplier that is first on the agenda.
Thanks for the help.

ok, I wasn't sure. I was looking at the cursor in the video, and it seemed look like it was being moved by a mouse, but obviously I was wrong (or maybe you just chose to use mouse for the video) :)

Yeah it wasn't too clear, i think i may have used it twice.

Upvoted!

The genre is an evergreen, I think you can't really "abuse" something like that X)
but yeah, maybe you can add some more stuff/variation,
some more characterization to environments,
some building/obstacle that would add to gameplay strategy

good luck :)

Thanks my man. I guess i wasn't expecting the community to be so harsh, but i guess that comes from inexperience. Next time i will initially polish my game more and have more content. Its also clear people are not too keen on zombie games XD. Anywho i will continue to add things and hopefully one day it will make it.

Thanks for the help :)