So, finally, Posable Heroes got into greenlight on monday morning.
Preparation:
I prepared my 512x512 logo, which has to be less that 1mb so some optimization had to be done. I decided on an animated logo for extra attention. But the animated portion was small (like 30%) so the weight would not be as high.
Tip: This website was very helpful to reduce the last 100kb.
I prepared my trailer:
The artist had a personal problem the last couple of weeks. I could not wait any longer for the extra levels we wanted to include, so I made them myself with parts I could pickup from other levels, and from free textures found online.
I got the soundtrack from audiojungle for 15 dollars.
I prepared the description:
Trying to use a short description at the beginning, and a main body to describe gameplay and show how the game works.
I can translate to spanish myself, and a kind person translated to russian for me. So 3 languages were supported.
Added google analytics.
Added links to twitter, youtube and facebook.
And then I pressed PUBLISH.
Inmediately after submitting, (like 30 minutes after), Posable Heroes was already 6th on the recent releases list. Damn! Want an advice? Don't publish on monday mornings. Compared to it, tuesday morning has been much slower as far as new submissions goes. I had manually tracked some values on thursday and friday, and everything pointed to 1.5 new games per hour. So this was a big bump I didn't expect.
But then again, I have no idea how Grenlight's algorithm works to show the game on people's queues. Is there a fixed number of impressions? Does yes/no ratio make you game more visible? Does falling to second page matters? I don't know.
26 hours later, I'm still on first page though, on slot 29th. By the time I finish writing this entry I probably have fallen into greenlight oblivion of the second page. Traffic has already slowed down and new votes (either 'yes' or 'no') have already stopped coming in. And I'm getting around 1 vote every 30 minutes... yikes.
How is it going so far?
I had a good run on monday afternoon, reaching around 55% yes votes. But today I woke up to a very low 40% approval.
This was not unexpected, as the game is not really mainstream (nor a "gamer's game"). But I guess I did have a little bit of hope of getting a better approval ratio. Don't we all?
But I'm not down about the ratio, I am worried about how few votes (overall) I'm getting. So I need to find a way to pump those numbers up. How do games in the top 100 do it? They have like 6,000 votes! Is that organic?
I have been offered some promotion by shady marketing groups/companies. I don't want to go that route.
One curious thing: In the first 20hrs+ I had zero "Ask me later". Then, all of a sudden, 9 votes appear there in like 15 minutes. What was that about?
Anyway, on the good side, I had a good laugh with this comment:
It made me chuckle.
I'm thinking what other things I could do to get attention. I saw some groups on facebook but it just seems developers voting each others project, no matter the quality of the submissions. I'm not fond of that. Is that the game we are supposed to play?.
Right now I'm preparing something and see if any website wants to say a few words about the game, although everyone says that getting greenlight coverage is very hard.
Feel free to leave me suggestion in the comments!
And if you like the game, here the greenlight link.
Best of luck with Greenlight.