Green Lit

Well I can't believe it happened, but SBX: Invasion finally got Greenlit and will be on Steam on June 1st!

It's been a long time coming and it's been an awesome experience!  At first when I got the e-mail that SBX Invasion had been Greenlit, I thought it was a phishing scam, so I skeptically opened a separate tab and went to the steam page.  And then it hit me: a game I had made was going to be on Steam, a game that had sat in the Green Light process for almost 15 months.

I got excited.  And then I got to work.  I had to polish a few bugs I knew of, create new builds, get it compatible with the Steam upload system, create new art assets for the store, create a new promo video, and learn how Steamworks Builder worked.

I spent a couple weekends preparing and getting everything together and set the launch date to June 1st.  And now it's almost here.

I don't know what this will mean for SBX: Invasion, but a small part of me feels like I've succeeded, just a tiny bit.  That feels good.  

So if you haven't yet, check out the Steam Page, or check out my Youtube Promo Video

Or drop me a line on Twitter.

Cheers and hope to have some awesome things in store to share soon!

Jason C / WakeskaterX

A Week of Greenlight - New Project - Boston Post Mortem fun.

Well it's been a week since I've put SBX: Invasion up on Greenlight and it's doing... not as bad as it could be.  For the first few days the game sat at about 20% Yes Votes which honestly isn't that bad considering how niche tower defense games are, and there isn't a very good category to put them in.

Currently the game is at 14% Yes Votes, 3% Unanswered and 83% No Votes.  I haven't managed to get much publicity out yet, and I'm going to be trying to get some info out there about the game and see if I can drum up some excitement.  Hopefully driving some customers to the Greenlight page will increase the Yes to No Ratio and get more eyes on the project.

It's been tough getting the game out there, but I think it's probably time to shelf the project for a while and move on to new stuff.  I've learned a lot about game development and grown a lot as a developer on this project.  And I have already started on my next project as well.

The next project is going to be a smaller project in Unity called Tzarr.  I'll be working with a programmer I met in the GDU skype group, Derek, who will be handling the network side of things.  We're working on Tzarr in order to see how well we work together and make something smaller in preparation for a larger project later.

Here is a screenshot of what the board set up might look like:

The game will play similar to Shogi and Chess with some key differences, and we'll be going through various rule sets to nail down one that makes sense.  

The goal at the moment is to build a powerful flexible system to create all sorts of board set ups and rule sets quickly and effectively.  We're striving for a turn based playable build by the end of January to put out for people to try.

And then finally, last night was the Boston Post Mortem!  My good buddy Ben Taylor spoke on Game Jams and going into them with the right kind of mindset.  He gave a bunch of ways to "win" at Game Jams, whether it be coming out of it with a prototype, art, money, or new work partners, you should always focus on "winning" and planning on something you specifically want to gain from them.

It was a great time meeting people and networking as well.  I was introduced to Ken Rolston, the Lead Designer of Morrowind and Oblivion, and we got to chat for a good half hour and I was able to pick his brain on all sorts of things.  That was a great experience and it was fun talking to him about his start as a designer just making pen and paper games and how he got into the industry.

Boston really has some awesome companies.  One guy I know from Turbine told me I should check out Infinite Crisis, a DC Comics MOBA and it looks pretty interesting.  If you like League of Legends or DOTA you should sign up for the Beta too!  

It's been a very fun week and I'm excited about Tzarr and prototyping out a bunch of different game modes and rule sets.  Things are starting to come together in 2014!  I might even do a talk at BPM at some point about my first year as an indie and about the launch of SBX: Invasion! 

So subscribe to the blog for the weekly updates!  Cheers and Good Day!

WakeskaterX / Jason

SBX: Invasion is now in the Greenlight Process! - Update 1.2 is out too!

Well, I finally started the Greenlight Process for SBX: Invasion.  You'll be able to vote at the link below:

Also Update 1.2 is now out at Desura, IndieGameStand and will soon be out at FireflowerGames.

What's new in Update 1.2?

Well quite a bit!

• New Movement system:  The player will no longer bounce off walls and reverse direction and the movement system feels a little more slippery like you are in space.
• Upgraded UI and Planet Graphics:  The planets look a lot nicer now, I ran a Posterization filter over them to bring them in line with the games graphical quality and then added a glow effect.
• Updated Tutorial: The tutorial is a bit longer but the game lets you go free a bit sooner.  There a little less tutorial stuff after the tutorial, but more is included at the start.
• Optional Tutorial:  The tutorial is now optional to new players as well.
• New Loading Screen: The loading screen now says "Loading" and also gives a little tip about using Ghost Mode.
• New Voice Overs! My lovely wife voiced the entire monologue by AIUA in the game.  Instead of a computer rendered voice, my wife tried to stay monotone enough that the computer filters would work.  It was a pretty fun experience and we had to stop ourselves from laughing on a few occasions.
• Minor QOL Improvements across the board:  You can now use arrow keys to move between levels in any way, before it was locked for some weird reason that I can't remember.  It's better now.

And there is ALSO a new DEMO at IndieDB that you can play to try out all the changes!

Check out the demo HERE

Over the next few weeks I'll be doing some advertising and I'm really hoping we can get Greenlit as that would be a phenomenal boost!  I'll also be working on my NEXT project a little bit this month so stay tuned.

Cheers and Happy New Year!

Jason/WakeskaterX