First 12 hours on Steam Greenlight - Thoughts so Far

Wailing Heights, our body-hopping, musical adventure game, went live on Steam Greenlight this morning at 10am GMT. Rather than do the sensible thing and wait for a post-mortem, I thought I'd just jump with some thoughts after the first 12 hours.

Link: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=604235605

First, I'm really glad we took the time to prep properly. We delayed launch until this week, after our initial, internal schedule was pencilled in for last week. There was a few sleepless nights cutting and re-cutting the trailer, capturing new screenshots and getting all the assets together. Now that we are live, I feel satisfied that we've prepped the Greenlight page as best we could, and didn't take the shortcuts we considered - up until 2 days ago we had problems exporting the animated gifs and were tempted to switch to static PNGs - but I think the final page has a nice bit of character to it.

Pre-launch feedback was essential. When you're deep in gameplay and story production, it's easy to take aspects of the game as clear and obvious, when it's the opposite. Our first cut of the trailer didn't explicitly describe the body-hopping and instead, expected the viewer to know that green flashing particles means you're now controlling another character. Intuitive for a player that is controlling the characters on-screen as you start moving around. Not as straightforward in a video trailer. The re-cut and subsequent re-export was, of course, exhausting, but all feedback has been that people get a much better idea of gameplay from the final edit.

We're pretty happy with the launch so far. Great support from the Twittersphere and the community of devs, artists and writers on Facebook. It's great to have that support for the initial push.

Most surprising thing - it's really exciting. After a very stressful week, I was nervous about the potential Steam feedback and there was that nagging fear that the Greenlight would launch into silence. Seeing the 'YES' numbers tick up steadily, and reading SUCH positive comments is a really nice feeling.

Might be time to catch up on a bit of sleep, but looking forward to seeing what the night  and morning brings…

Well, maybe I’ll hit refresh just one more time...