Inside Interplanetary: How to Greenlight?

As you may have noticed, Interplanetary is now on Steam Greenlight! It's doing pretty well too: as of this writing, we have 7,375 "Yes"-votes. Our goal of 10,000 is getting ever closer!

Today I thought I might give a little runthrough of our Greenlight process, so any other hopefuls may benefit from it. So, let's get started with...

Interplanetary's Greenlight Process

We unveiled our Greenlight page on December 2nd, but we've been building the page for a long time before that. The first thing we needed to do, was to pay Valve $100 to get access to the page. This payment mostly exists to stop trolls from sending in garbage. After we gained access, we needed a couple of things:

• An icon
• A video
• At least 4 screenshots
• A description
  

Mostly quite straightforward. Our artist whipped up a beautiful animated gif as an icon for the game. This icon shows up when people search for games on Greenlight, so it needs to be eye-catching. We ended up animating a planet under attack with the game's logo on top. It communicates the idea of the game pretty well and is flashy enough to get people interested.

The trickiest part was the video. We decided to produce a new trailer and a simple gameplay video to accompany it. The trailer is the first thing that plays when people open the Greenlight page, so it needs to be attention grabbing, interesting and explain the game fairly well. Our earlier trailer was very fast paced and full of information, but this time we decided to slow the pace down a little bit, so that a new viewer might have easier time digesting it. A slower pace also gives a more realistic image of the actual game.

The trailer tells a little story using gameplay footage. A couple of turns of gameplay, two planets warring with different strategies, "filmed" cinematically. Combined with fitting music, it seems to be a success; people seemingly get the idea right away.

We also wanted to make an in depth gameplay video for those who want more details. We simply filmed a match between team members and narrated it, explaining game mechanics and strategies. The video ended up being over 50 minutes long, but it was never meant to be watched all the way through, necessarily. Curious people may skip through the video to get a feel for the game. Some have been interested enough to actually watch the whole match.

We also wanted to actually give people something to play, so we released a version of Interplanetary alpha on our Greenlight page. No codes needed this time. This added a lot of value to the page, since people can immediately get their hands on the game and discuss its features and arrange online matches right there on the discussion page.

Publish!

When all the content was collected for the page, we published it. We had heard that there would be an approval process afterwards, and it would take some time before the page would go public - wrong! It was up immediately! Now we had to hurry to get the word out and to handle the initial flow of people. Comments started dropping in, and luckily, they were all pretty positive!

At this point, we got access to some very interesting statistics on the page. All the important stats were available: the amount of visitors, favorites, followers, votes. In addition to that, we could compare our process with the average stats of successful Greenlight projects. A very useful meter is a percentual value that shows how far are we from the top 100. At the moment, we've gone 90% of the way! We could also determine that approved games need about 10,000 votes. Unexpectedly, we're already quite close!

The mere existence of a Greenlight-page does draw a nice amount of visitors, but we wouldn't have been as successful if we hadn't had any kind of community around the game already. After the first week, Interplanetary has disappeared from the first page of Steam Greenlight. The flow of people will obviously slow down a little bit, but luckily we've managed to get some gaming press interested. Now we'll just concentrate on working on the game and spreading awareness. It's not over yet!

Big thanks to everyone who has voted for Interplanetary! If you have any questions about the details of the Greenlight process, ask away! We'd be happy to answer!

Check out our Greenlight-page here!

Interplanetary Alpha Testing and Gameplay Trailer!

Suddenly, a real gameplay trailer! Excitement!

We've been very hard at work these last couple of weeks, but it's been fruitful. We're proud to properly announce the alpha testing of Interplanetary! How to get in on this action? A couple of steps:

1. Contact us! You can do it in a lot of places, Facebook, Twitter, IndieDB, our DevBlog...
2. After receiving your nice message, we send you a code.
3. Go to our brand new website WWW.INTERPLANETARYGAME.COM, enter the code and receive your alpha!

That's it! We will be updating the alpha every couple of weeks. We'll give you a heads-up on Twitter and Facebook every time that happens, so stay in touch!

Have fun testing and remember to send us comments. The most useful feedback wins a little prize!

Inside Interplanetary: The Music

Sasu, here! The HQ of Team Jolly Roger has been quite busy recently. Closed alpha testing is supposed to start very soon and here we are, still implementing some features! I hope we can keep up with our secret timetable.

It's been very nice to hear people reacting positively to Interplanetary. We were pretty surprised to see it featured on a Japanese entertainment blog, Damonge News! Well, it's not like we mind negative reactions either; they can offer some interesting viewpoints. So comment, praise, criticize, whatever you feel like! We might even draft the most enthusiastic people for the alpha testing.

This time, the main subject of this blog post is something that's still very much a work-in-progress:

The Music of Interplanetary

We've been struggling with the music for some time. Everyone has been very busy in actually making the game playable, so inevitably, things that give the game flavor, such as music, have sometimes ended up taking the back seat.

Music in games is, however, a very important feature. It creates the mood, keeps things dynamic and can even guide the player. In Interplanetary, we need music mainly to give the player some kind of pace: different game states, such as building and action, will have their own kinds of music, showing player their progression and making the whole experience much more powerful. As important as good gameplay is, the feelings a game gives to the player, can be considered equally important.

We managed to grab a musician, Vince Parrish, to help us with the music creation. The problem was, we didn't have a clear consensus among the team on the exact feelings Interplanetary should give to the players. The way we decided to go about with this, was to create a short teaser trailer to get a sense of the atmosphere of Interplanetary. Vince was given only vague instructions, in addition to a mock-up teaser, so he had lots of freedoms with creating the music.

Listen here!

Vince's music hit exactly the right notes, but there was disagreement with the actual feeling of the music. This wasn't surprising, considering the lack of collaboration. At this point, we begun to discuss the music more. We changed things around slightly, and managed to create a somewhat satisfying teaser for Nordic Game.

As we explained in the last blog post, we decided to redo the teaser drastically after the convention. This time, we planned exactly what we wanted the teaser to communicate. We finished the video completely, with final graphics, and then started to draw an exact idea on what we wanted the music to sound like.

Within the team, we collected reference music to send to Vince. While going through Youtube, looking for ideas, we came across the soundtrack of Inglourious Basterds.



This gave us an idea. What if the music was very serious and warlike, but in an old-fashioned way? Interplanetary itself is a bit of a mishmash: traditional gameplay combines to create something new and realism collides with the kind of a ridiculous idea of interplanetary artillery war. The music could be old fashioned, but mixed with modern instruments. It could also be so serious that it can turn a bit humorous.

The new music was soon mixed and it fit the teaser perfectly.



With the teaser to guide us, we've started to produce music for the actual game. It'll be stylistically similar and fit the gameplay situations. We haven't yet decided if the music will change a lot dynamically; it would be really cool if it would fit the actions perfectly when the missiles fly towards the warring planets, but this would be difficult to do properly. Time will tell.

I hope this was an interesting look at our process. See you next time, and meanwhile, enjoy this unfinished concept piece of Planet Building music!

Listen here!

Free Your Play 13, thanks Supercell!

At this point we realized the event was a bit bigger than we had expected.

Hello again! Finnish Midsummer festivities made us drop out of our regular blogging schedule, but we're back now with a little description of the excellent Free Your Play-event.

We had a chance to travel with unusually large portion of our team this time. Supercell was generous enough to provide four of us with tickets, and that's everyone who applied. We considered the possibility of traveling by train, but eventually decided a road trip would be the way to go, and that turned out beautifully.

The crowd gathers and the event is about to start.

The event started in the early afternoon, so we had plenty of time to check out, eat breakfast and even do a little bit of shopping before heading to the event site at tapahtumakeskus Telakka. There was even a free buss transportation from Kiasma, which made things a little bit easier for us non-locals.

Ben Cousins, about to present his theory on the future of gaming.

The official program of Free Your Play consisted of a couple of keynotes, interviews and a panel discussion. A recording of the program is available as a webcast here, but feel free to take a look at my nutshell'd version.

Sadly Peter Molyneux couldn't make it to the event, but Ben Cousins covered his former boss very well with his own presentation.  In short, Ben introduced us the idea that game industry seems to be following the cyclic pattern of disruptive innovation, and it helps us to predict the future direction of development. 

After Ben Cousins we had a chance to listen to an interview of Daisuke Yamamoto from GungHo, the creators of tremendously successful Puzzle & Dragons. Turns out GungHo does many things in a more traditional way and even by the feel instead of collecting metrics and trusting them blindly. 

The next part was a panel talk with some hot names working with F2P model, like Lassi Leppinen (Producer of Clash of Clans), Tom Putzki (Director of Communications, Wargaming.net), Tommy Palm (King.com) and Daisuke Yamamoto as previously mentioned. There was way too much good stuff to cover in this blog post, but the general feeling seemed to be full of anticipation and there's still a lot more room for growth for F2P as a monetization model. Is it going to be the only one in the future? Probably not.

Official program is over, time to mingle!

As usual, the most important part of the event started when the official program ended. The guys at Supercell seem to know this very well, and they provided a very good environment for socializing. The food was good, the bands were great and yes, there were free drinks. Again we had the opportunity to meet a great number of interesting people and make new connections. 

It appears that the event website is not accessible anymore, but in addition to the webcast linked above, there is more info and pictures available at the Free Your Play event page at Facebook. Once again thanks to Supercell for hosting this awesome event. Let's hope we can be there next year as well!

Ludun Dare 21 and Spiritual

We just got a shiny new promo video of Spiritual, our Ludum Dare 21 Jam entry, and I realised we have not mentioned the game here at all.

"Spiritual is a game about a mischievous Wisp who gets thrown into a world of swamp and mazes as a punishment for slacking off from his divine duties. Your mission is to guide him through the everchanging network of duckboards, collect the Wisplings he needs to reactivate the Seal he came through and take one step closer to home. To be honest though, the levels are procedurally generated and the difficulty increases indefinitely, so the road is quite long. Maybe we need a sequel to relieve the Wisp from his torment? "

That's the original decription from the Ludum Dare site. So now that you know what Spiritual is about, here's how it works: Each procedurally generated level in the game consists of tiles that form a maze. Rows and colums of these tiles move randomly back and forth every few seconds to open new routes while blocking old ones, and player's goal is to find a way through this mess into the exit tile. The levels get bigger as the game advances, and during each level passable tiles are gradually changed into impassable ones. (Honestly the video and game itself explain this way better, check the links after this babblage.) The game was made with XNA, surprise.

We are happy with the result, for once we had a full team and could make a game with beautiful graphics and sound instead of having our programmers waste time figuring out how stick figures work. Our new assemblage paid off rather well too, as Spiritual was voted to have the best graphics and second best audio out of all Jam gategory games! We got third place in innovation too. Thanks to everyone who voted if you're reading this!

To be honest there were some less awesome features in the game as well, for an example player sometimes has to wait way too long before the platforms move into desirable positions to advance. We really want to work on this game some more to correct these faults and add new stuff to expand Spiritual into somethig that can be considered a full game. If all this works out well enough, we might even publish it on XBLA or something. Thanks for your support!

PS. We already ported the game on Windows Phone just to see how it works, and it was better than expected. We'll get back to that later I hope. ;)

TL;DR: We made a game called Spiritual for Ludum Dare 21 and people liked it. We will make it even better and maybe publish it on XBLA and/or Windows Phone 7 if all goes well.

And finally, the video can be seen here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00Mv00n-gwc

Spiritual can be downloaded directly here:
http://goo.gl/MNua2