Hey everyone, My team has been working on a game for several years, and a few weeks ago we finally decided it was ready to submit to online publishers. The game is certainly not finished, but the gameplay is essentially done, and the level of polish is at least on par with most indie games. For a short description and screenshot, go to www.electropy.com. We've sent emails to both garagegames.com and totalgaming.net, but have not received any response, even after a followup email. So the question is, has anyone on here successfully submitted a game to either of these sites? Do you have suggestions for other sites to try? It's very hard to learn what's wrong with our submissions when we don't get any feedback, so any information would be appreciated. Thanks.

Quote: The game is certainly not finished

You answered your own questions before you even asked them.

Generally no feedback is a rejection. They get tons of submissions and don't want to "waste their time" on games they don't want (in their mind there's no financial incentive to do so).

In general, a publisher (online or otherwise) won't give you the time of day unless:

a) the game is completely finished (and i mean completely)
b) you already have published games under your belt to prove your reliability

-me

Maybe I worded that wrong. With the exception of sound effects, the gameplay is complete. We have almost 100 polished levels, a menu system complete with visual options and account creation, and a functional online score system. Even in its current state, the game is more fun than 2/3 of indie games I've played.

Is it possible that the publishers simply didn't even download our demo because we said it wasn't completely finished? How much does this differ from publisher to publisher? On PopCap's website, they say that they offer "direct aid in development, design, art, sound, music and QA", so obviously not all publishers expect a 100% completed game.

Is there anything else we should try when communicating with publishers, or just finish the game and try again?

Hello Infes, you wrote:
>Is it possible that the publishers simply didn't even download our demo

Of course that's possible! Please ask a different question.

>How much does this differ from publisher to publisher?

Totally. Every publisher has wildly different submission criteria.

>obviously not all publishers expect a 100% completed game.

Yes, but obviously all publishers are going to give a game a much higher degree of interest if the game is 100% complete, like, you know, with sound effects even.

>Is there anything else we should try when communicating with publishers,

Sure, I suppose. Can you maybe find a phone number? Or a snailmail address? Can you like you know, meet them at a game conference?

>or just finish the game and try again?

Sure, that's definitely an option.

The game should immediatelly interest the potential player by its graphics. In this case, there`s nothing like that. There`s no "cute" gfx/UI. The screen was empty - there were just few "sticks" on the background.
Check the latest games on BigFish for a taste of games look these days.
Unfortunately there was nothing interesting on the screenshot you provided on your website. Assuming it`s the best screenshot that you have, I wasn`t bothered to download it and guess it was the same for the portals.

You can still go the indie route and sell it from your own website.
If it`s original and fun it will find its user base. Just give it time and advertise it as much as you can.
Since there are over 25 big portals, it`s advisable you submit to all of them. Chances are someone bored will download it, play it and like it and give you tips on improving the chances of accepting the game.
But it`s going to be a hard fight considering the game doesn`t fit the current portal trends (i.e. Zuma/MCF/Match-3 clone). Still, some smaller portal should accept it.

I just noticed that you already made 100 levels before submitting the game.
I don`t know what you were thinking, but that`s totall overkill, doing that kind of effort before you even received a single line of feedback from portals.

Sure they expect the game to be finished, but if they like the game, they`ll wait until you make more levels. Therefore 45-60 minutes of gameplay is enough for a demo that you submit to portals. Sine usually you won`t hear from them sooner than within 2 weeks, there`s lots of time to produce more levels while waiting for the feedback.
Besides, what if portal requests a change in gameplay and you`d have to redo 100 levels ? Do you think you would do that ? That`s why you should give them the basic gameplay with few levels, up to one hour at most and wait for their feedback (or work on more rough levels).

And why on earth don`t you have sound in your game ? There are so many sound libraries that you just link to your source code and can play any sound using just a single line, that there`s aboslutely no excuse in not having the sound. That`s extremely far from being polished at first sight, no matter how polished the rest of game may be, but since they don`t try, they won`t know.

>> Maybe I worded that wrong.

Your new wording doesn't seem much different. But I'll also bite this one.

>> With the exception of sound effects, the gameplay is complete.

Sounds just like "The game is certainly not finished, but..."

>> Even in its current state, the game is more fun than 2/3 of indie games I've played.

Translation: "There are 50,000 other games you should look at before this one."

>> Is it possible that the publishers simply didn't even download our demo because we said it wasn't completely finished?

Possible? Sure, that's possibly the reason. It is also possible that you didn't follow their submission instructions. Its also possible they ignored you because they didn't like it.

>> On PopCap's website, they say that they offer "direct aid in development, design, art, sound, music and QA", so obviously not all publishers expect a 100% completed game.

So? If that is what you want, contact them.

>> Is there anything else we should try when communicating with publishers, or just finish the game and try again?

Yes, several things.

#1. You are dealing with a human being on the other end, not a faceless company. You help them by following their instructions, they'll try to help you.

#2. You are dealing with a human being on the other end, not a faceless company. Ask them for a response and what to do better.

#3. You are dealing with a human being on the other end, not a faceless company. Communicate with them.

Finally, this works well, keeping in mind that you should establish a personal relationship with the human being on the other end:

Thanks for the advice guys. Guess its back to the drawing board...

We made a trailer for our game. Check it out:

">Electropy Trailer