Zolg (now on Steam)

http://store.steampowered.com/app/555710

Zolg is a minimalist top-down shooter where you explore, fight enemies, collect powerups, and defeat bosses. Move and aim with WASD + mouse or you can use a controller. Controllers can be configured from the main menu. There are 5 powerup types to collect, 6 bosses to fight, and various other enemies and obstacles in your path. This game also has Steam trading cards and 40 achievements of varying difficulty to unlock.

This is my third game on Steam.  Based on what devs in the Steamworks forum are saying about Steam's new store update, I'm not expecting good launch visibility, but we'll see.  Update visibility rounds have also been made useless for most games (scales with wishlist rather than being a flat 2.5M total impressions).

Nice!  I haven't seen  any income specs from steam... any money to be made from stencyl games on there?  And how hard is it to get green light?

There is money to be made on Steam of course, but just like every other game market it's becoming more difficult over time.  Getting greenlit depends a lot on the trailer and marketing.  Some trailers are good enough to get enough yes votes on their own though (that was the case with my first Steam game).  For Zolg and Kombine, those games benefitted from Greenlight bundles.

Sweet!! good to know!

The first day isn't good but that's not surprising when the only home page impressions were for the "coming soon" page.  Time will tell if I get any home page visibility at all under Steam's new system.

Day 2: Homepage visiblity is still close to nothing but sales are better than the first day.  If this keeps up it can still be a better launch week than Kombine.  Reviews are 100% positive so far (5 reviews).

Day 3: Comparing the first three days, Zolg has pulled ahead of Kombine in views and sales.  While there's a lack of homepage visibility, the launch visibility period is lasting for a longer period of time.  The review score is currently 90% (10 reviews).

Day 4: Zolg has surpassed Kombine's first week of sales, but daily sales are dropping fast so it isn't going to do much better in the next week than it is now.  Sales are still much lower than Dungeon of Zolthan though.

1st Week: Zolg's impressions are about the same as Kombine's first week, but higher clickthrough and install rates let it pull ahead in sales.  The review score is 84% with 13 reviews, which is OK I guess but I'm not expecting sales to change much due to it.  The game will likely be dead on the store until future sales or bundles.  Unfortunately the big winter sale is too close for Zolg to participate in due to Steam's rules.

Difficulty Tweaks

• Reduced difficulty of some of the earlier spike sections.
• Slightly increased player invulnerability time after being hit.
• Slightly reduced stalker speed.
• Stalkers now deal 2 damage but die after hitting the player.
• Added a hint to a couple laser rooms.

The game is also part of an Indiegala bundle that started today: https://www.indiegala.com/finale

Thanks for sharing rob!
Would you mind giving an update how the numbers developped?
Cheers!

Total sales are still better than Kombine but not by a huge amount.

Shaders, Music Fixes, Bullet Counter

• Added some shaders for extra effects. Can be disabled in menu.
• When in the room that connects the two main areas, music volume is no longer ignored.
• Exiting to the menu from the area connector room will now stop the music playing.
• Added bullet counter display. Unlock it by having under 100 shots fired after the first boss is defeated.

I finally implemented Stencyl shaders into a published game.  They work fine on my current PC, low end laptop, and the Macincloud Mac, and I hope I don't get complaints about the game crashing or anything like that.  Sales are surprisingly steady considering the game is not currently discounted, although it is in an active bundle with over 5k sold so maybe that is contributing to the steady sales?

Thanks for the updates Rob. How difficult would you say the steam set up is compared to iOS?

@rob1221: I like what you did with this game. Keep on creating. Don't get discouraged by negative reviews or low ratings. You can't please everyone. It's impossible.

Thanks for the updates Rob. How difficult would you say the steam set up is compared to iOS?

I think it's more difficult, especially for the first time.  There are more store images to upload, and supporting trading cards adds a lot more images on top of that (small cards, large cards, backgrounds, emotes, badges).  There are also more settings that need to be set in a bunch of different sections, but at least Steam has a checklist for all the required ones.  There's also the build system and Steampipe, which was really confusing to me at first but I'm used to it now.

If someone is ready to publish their greenlit game to Steam they can ask me for help if they get stuck, but I don't know if it would be OK with Valve to post a detailed guide.
Update: I looked through the steamworks forum and found a Valve rep saying it's OK to make tutorial videos, so surely a written guide would not be a problem.

@rob1221: I like what you did with this game. Keep on creating. Don't get discouraged by negative reviews or low ratings. You can't please everyone. It's impossible.

Thanks.  I try to not get discouraged by negative reviews, but if they result in sales dropping too low then I'm more likely to focus on new games or existing games that are doing better.  This happened with my other game Kombine recently where 2 negative reviews in a row dropped the game's review score to the "mixed" category and the daily sales just dropped.

Thanks for sharing!
This is very helpful!

I added Russian and Simplified Chinese translations to the in-game text and the store page description.  The language is set from the game's properties in Steam, and I updated the SteamWrap extension with a new block to support that.  The translations were done by Localize Direct and due to the low amount of text in my game it cost about $40 for both languages together.  Something I would suggest if you're thinking about translation is to keep all your text in one place and avoid using plain text in the drawing blocks.

Hey what screen size did you use for this game?  Any recommendations on the screen size we should be using for steam games?   Thx for this helpful info. A youtube guide on how to publish stencyl on steam would be AMAZING