Steam Greenlight: Visual novels & Other Ren'Py games

Discuss visual novels and story-based games that didn't originate on this forum.
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LateWhiteRabbit
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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels

#31 Post by LateWhiteRabbit »

jack_norton wrote:To be honest I'm regretting putting some of my games there now. They can call them flash games, shit art, whatever I don't care. Now they start calling them "games for pedophiles". I'm considering removing them all. If that's how is the Steam public, I don't care to get there, never got such comments before anywhere else.
I wouldn't pull your games. Your Loren:Amazon Princess is one of the more successful games on Greenlight at the moment! I mean, you have nearly 13,000 unique visitors in the 24 hours your game has been up! And very few games have hit the 1% mark yet - yours is one of them. By most people's estimations, that means you've had over 1000 people give your game the thumbs up on Steam! (Yes, most developers have figured out the number to hit 100% is 100,000 votes. This is likely to change, and was probably set artificially high by Valve just so they could gauge numbers before granting approval to a title.)

So you only have 138 comments, and I'd say fewer than half are negative, but so what if ALL of them were negative? That means that less than ONE PERCENT of the people that have viewed your game have left a negative comment, and more than ten times the number of people leaving comments voted YES to your game. I know it hurts to read negative comments, but they need to be taken with a huge grain of salt.

The negative comments will only go away once enough VNs are on Steam - and like you said, it isn't anything personal to your games, just the fact that a lot of Western gamers view any anime or VN game as porn. Go read Gamasutra - developers - some MAJOR developers, are complaining about what asshats the Greenlight commenters and Steam-goers are being. Basically a lot of Steam users basically thought Greenlight was going to be about voting for AAA games to be on Steam, not indie games. (Because they are stupid and can't read.)

This is just the first 24-48 hours of the service. Eventually the people that don't care about indie games will stop commenting and voting, and you'll start getting better judges. I imagine Valve will also remove the "Thumbs Down" button, as it seemingly just exists for griefing and trolling.
Now they start calling them "games for pedophiles".
This is just a generic insult to anime and VN games in the West, nothing specific to your games. I already told on the forums here how my former project leader at the studio I worked at referred to a VN he saw pop up in his newsfeed as "one of those games pedophiles play". Just because he saw it had anime art. And this was a gamer who worked in entertainment and development!

So don't take it personally, and go treat yourself to something nice, because you're on path to be very successful on Greenlight in the long run.
yu1988 wrote: My game has a comment like "Creepy-ass sh!t". Really? I don't remember my game artworks have any ass show in them =D.
Don't read the comments! Half serious here. The "squeaky wheel gets the grease" as they say, and all the comments you get will either be super enthused or super negative. You know, the whole 1 star or 5 stars and nothing in-between rating mentality. There are a TON (tens of thousands) of Steam users like myself who are rating games Thumbs Up and not leaving any comments.

I learned from the movie industry not to read reviews of your work. Get opinions from people you trust, don't read the "trades". Otherwise you'll go insane and become paranoid with indecision and doubt.
yu1988 wrote: The only thing i use Greenlight is for its awesome advertising tool. Nowhere i could find 6000 views in less than one day...Everything has its drawback.
It won't be a good advertising tool for long unless they make some changes. It's on track to where you'll have to generate an outside fanbase and send them to Steam to vote. The service had 200 games on it yesterday morning. 500 last night. 650 this morning. In a couple of weeks it will have thousands. And Greenlight's sorting system sucks. It was hard for me to find Hanako's and Jack's games to give them the Thumbs Up and I knew they were on there! You can't search by developer, only game title. Loren: Amazon Princess is listed as an RPG but doesn't appear when you search for RPGs.

But ultimately Greenlight is a great service that I'm sure Valve will polish to a shine like it does everything else. It also gives us insight into just why it was so hard to get a game on Steam - those poor saps were having to dig through hundreds of titles like this everyday on their own . . . .

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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels

#32 Post by yu1988 »

LateWhiteRabbit wrote:
yu1988 wrote: My game has a comment like "Creepy-ass sh!t". Really? I don't remember my game artworks have any ass show in them =D.
Don't read the comments! Half serious here. The "squeaky wheel gets the grease" as they say, and all the comments you get will either be super enthused or super negative. You know, the whole 1 star or 5 stars and nothing in-between rating mentality. There are a TON (tens of thousands) of Steam users like myself who are rating games Thumbs Up and not leaving any comments.

I learned from the movie industry not to read reviews of your work. Get opinions from people you trust, don't read the "trades". Otherwise you'll go insane and become paranoid with indecision and doubt.
Haha. I could careless though. Avan Story at this point is not playable at all and still we've got the dramatically increasing in website's view yesterday. It's a small fee to pay.
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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels

#33 Post by jack_norton »

LateWhiteRabbit wrote: It won't be a good advertising tool for long unless they make some changes. It's on track to where you'll have to generate an outside fanbase and send them to Steam to vote. The service had 200 games on it yesterday morning. 500 last night. 650 this morning. In a couple of weeks it will have thousands. And Greenlight's sorting system sucks. It was hard for me to find Hanako's and Jack's games to give them the Thumbs Up and I knew they were on there! You can't search by developer, only game title. Loren: Amazon Princess is listed as an RPG but doesn't appear when you search for RPGs.
Yes I had difficulties finding titles of fellow indie devs myself! they definitely need to change it better otherwise is going to become like iOS, where is impossible to find anything unless you exactly know the game name...!
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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels

#34 Post by yu1988 »

jack_norton wrote: Yes I had difficulties finding titles of fellow indie devs myself! they definitely need to change it better otherwise is going to become like iOS, where is impossible to find anything unless you exactly know the game name...!
And that is just one in thousands things Steam needs to change haha.

I really hope Steam will get right with Greenlight. It is a very fun gameyard for us VN makers, to see and compete with other devs in different fields. And VN is still having much love than many types of games in that project...
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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels

#35 Post by PyTom »

I kind of hope that Valve will add a visual novel category to Steam - so as to better manage expectations.

Of course, that might bump into the hard problem of deciding what a visual novel is. Even though a lot of people treat them as VNs, I consider games like Analogue and Long Live the Queen to be simulations.
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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels

#36 Post by jack_norton »

I'd say that if a game has a strong narrative component, it could be defined at least as VN hybrid... again Loren is definitely not a VN since has a very complex RPG gameplay, but I've seen many people refer to it as "VN/RPG hybrid". I agree on what you say about those two games though.
It's always hard to come up with those definitions! But I honestly don't think Steam will add a VN category, they would probably put those games under "Indie".
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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels

#37 Post by Anarchy »

papillon wrote:No, Magical Diary is already on Steam.

I haven't put Long Live The Queen into Greenlight yet because I'm trying to get some more artwork done for it, and the art in question should be helpful in getting certain people's interest piqued. So I definitely intend to list it eventually, just not at this moment.
*scream* OMG SO HAPPY

Because it totally deserves to be on Steam, man. I mean seriously. I think you should've submitted it to Indiecade as well, I mean, hey, if Analogue managed to be a finalist...

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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels

#38 Post by papillon »

Of course, that might bump into the hard problem of deciding what a visual novel is. Even though a lot of people treat them as VNs, I consider games like Analogue and Long Live the Queen to be simulations.
Steam does support ticking multiple genre boxes; I'd put LLTQ into both VN and Simulation if it were an option. The narrative decision-making and the stat-management are both important. (I wouldn't put Analogue into Simulation though, but I probably mean something different by it than you do.)

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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels

#39 Post by Blane Doyle »

Looking through all of this I have realized a few things:

1) You guys have amazingly tough skin and are awesome.
2) Steam is an amazing program and super convenient and I still love it but...
3) Greenlight has major issues because the search is broken, there is no way to see what are the most popular games so far, no "categories", and the games repeat themselves multiple times when you keep going through it (as awesome as No More Room In Hell looks, I don't need to see it 4 times). And-
4) A good majority of Steam's users have the tact and maturity of the worst 4Chan users. Not the average one, the bad ones that became infamous online.

But I am a rather hopefully naive individual so fingers crossed.

And papillon, I am sorry, but it looks like Science Girls is more popular than Date Warp over there by a good 17,000 visitors and 400 favorites.
((On the bright side... while I do not believe in "there is no such thing as bad publicity", this at least gets you some publicity and hopefully at least a few people interested in purchasing your games off Steam. A chance is a chance, so he're hoping for everyone again.))

Also, if the devs post their games I will be more than happy to keep adding to the list on the front page. I am editing it now with all the games I have found thus far.

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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels & Other Ren'Py games

#40 Post by Mirage »

Still not convinced of putting my games up there. If WW and Hanako games can get such horrible comments, let alone mine. I had enough from Newgrounds, and what an irony that my games are in fact made in Flash, and probably fit Newgrounds better, but the comments I got there is about the same level as Steam. ^^;

I wish my skin is thicker...I would love the free publicity, but I doubt my heart can take it. ^^;

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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels & Other Ren'Py games

#41 Post by jack_norton »

Well surely (as was to be expected) pure VN/dating sims are getting the worst treatment! My RPGs didn't get too many insults so far :lol:
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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels & Other Ren'Py games

#42 Post by Obscura »

I dunno, I think it was a positive experience for me even if my game got trashed.

Basically having people tell you your art sucks will lead you to trying to improve your artwork.

(The gay thing and the visual novel thing...I can't do much about. But the art...I'm trying.)
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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels & Other Ren'Py games

#43 Post by Mirage »

Well, I doubt saying you suck at art would help anything. If they give you something constructive, like telling you what the problem is...I wouldn't mind.
But the majority is like "anime, ew, porn", "VN should be in FB/Newgrounds!1!!11".....That really doesn't help anyone, does it? ^^;

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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels

#44 Post by DeeKay »

Blane Doyle wrote:4) A good majority of Steam's users have the tact and maturity of the worst 4Chan users. Not the average one, the bad ones that became infamous online.
The general consensus of what a "gamer" is nowadays is, sorry to be blunt, "An idiot easily frustrated whenever there's an obstacle in the way of his progression (including story), looking for simple yet rich gameplay that won't hinder his thought process (Derp ! I can't figure it out if it has more than 2 button combinations !)" , all thanks to these select few who are, again sorry for my words, a pain in the butt.
They even think they know what a game should be like but don't give any pointers... Obviously they haven't touched older games (10 year old or more) before making these statements, not open minded and patient enough.

There's not A clear definition, different games have different strengths and different audiences as a consequence, they're just not open minded enough to acknowledge anything beyond their limited perspective.

Sadly, in this modern age, some people think they know all there is to know since everything is handed to them and they take it as granted. Don't be confused by all this nonsense going on, products made by passionate people will always have their supporters who will give constructive comments.

As PyTom said, better categorizing the games would help greatly in terms of expectations and filter out lots of these stupid comments. You know what to do Valve (or not if you don't care :?)
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Re: Steam Greenlight: Visual novels & Other Ren'Py games

#45 Post by jack_norton »

Mirage wrote: But the majority is like "anime, ew, porn", "VN should be in FB/Newgrounds!1!!11".....That really doesn't help anyone, does it? ^^;
They even failed to understand my basic explanation how downvoting/abstaining from voting is pointless. Valve wants to know about potential buyers, not annoyed teenagers that group together with the only purpose to downvote all the VNs they find (some people are really doing that) :lol:

Making a VN category for Greenlight would solve nothing in terms of voting, since people who hate VNs (plenty of them it seems!) would go there and downvote all games.

Anyway everything is still very work-in-progress, many games that yesterday were at 1% now are back to 0%...
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