Knuckle Cracker

Knuckle Cracker => General => Topic started by: knucracker on November 04, 2013, 02:32:22 PM

Title: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on November 04, 2013, 02:32:22 PM
This is the official greenlight topic for CW3.  I'll update this top post with any interesting information over the coming weeks.  

Nov 5, 2013:
CW3 surpasses 1000 Yes votes!  It did so in less than 24 hours after launch and on a Monday/Tuesday at that.  Now we just need about 10x that amount and I'll start to settle down :)

Nov 4, 2013:
The page is now live!
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=191501079
Please visit and vote yes.  It also helps to click the "favorite" and "follow" buttons.  And of course feel free to share the page using the social media icons for twitter, facebook, reddit, etc.

Feb 19, 2014:
CW3 is Greenlit!
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: florrat on November 04, 2013, 05:26:15 PM
The greenlight banner on the top of the forum links to the Knuckle Cracker main page. Intended?

Btw, is it possible for us ordinary voters to see how much votes CW3 has and where it is in the rankings?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on November 04, 2013, 06:05:25 PM
I'll post here with the stats after they have some time to fill in.  Since I've never done this before I am really surprised by the number of no votes that people make.  The average top 100 game has more no votes than yes votes.  That tells me that people vote no on game types that they don't like, not just on games that don't seem to be well executed.  Now, I don't think that no votes actually matter... Only the total number of yes votes.

To track in the top 100 games I need to land between 5000 and 10000 yes votes in the first 30 days.  I could swing that easily based on the number of CW fans... But only steam members who have purchased something can vote, and not all CW fans will vote or know to vote.  On the flip side the game will be exposed to plenty of new people through the process as well.

As for the forum header image... I'll try to fix that soon.  It was easiest to just change the one header image immediately.  To make the steam banner a separate item I'll have to manually tweak to theme.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: eduran on November 05, 2013, 03:40:48 AM
Quote from: virgilw on November 04, 2013, 06:05:25 PM
not all CW fans will vote or know to vote.

How about adding a clickable greenlight banner to games main menu screen with the next official patch? That would reach all players, even the ones who are not reading the forums.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on November 05, 2013, 08:59:57 AM
That's a good idea...  so long as it isn't terribly obnoxious (something small) it might do little harm but do the game a lot of good.  On the other hand, it's impossible to buy and update the game without seeing the greenlight banner's on the website currently.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on November 05, 2013, 09:37:43 AM
Quote
When i put in my vote, there was no comments, now there's 60+.

Yeah, the comments a fairly healthy right now (I think).  I honestly don't spend a lot of time on greenlight project pages, so I don't know if this is a good number or not for the first <24 hours.  I recognize many names in the comments, though, so I appreciate the help :)

Stats wise I am starting to get a few inklings of how the voting works and what stats might be important to Valve.  We all know there are "yes" and "no" votes.  People also favorite and follow the game.  Those show up in the stats as well...  So if you have not done those things and are reading this message, I'd appreciate any clicks on those buttons you can give.

I can also see a line graph of cumulative 'yes' votes over time.  Each point on the x axis represents a day.  Now it looks like the day runs from midnight to midnight on GMT.  It isn't 24 hours from the point the project is launched.  Since I launched at around 2:00pm EST, I only had 5 hours in my first 'day'.  At the end of the second day I will only have 29.  If I had launched at 7:01 pm EST Sunday night, I would have had a full 24 hours in my first day and a full 48 by the end of the second.  This makes their line graph of cumulative votes difficult to compare to other games (they show several other anonymous lines for top ranked games).  Over time the missing 19 hours (in my case) becomes less and less important, but I've already learned one lesson...

Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Jacobkolstad on November 05, 2013, 10:30:29 AM
Voted yes. But do you have limited time to get enough votes!?
EDIT: You know what steam workshop is? Right? Maybe you could let players upload their CRPL scrips to the workshop?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on November 05, 2013, 10:49:49 AM
I don't think there is any hard time limit, but my guess is that steam still looks at the acceleration.  For instance, a game could accumulate 5000 votes very slowly over a year.  Another game could get 5000 votes in 30 days.  I imagine these games don't score the same.  On the other hand a game could get 2000 votes in the first two days, another game could get 2000 votes in the first 4 days.  Does that mean the second game gets half the score of the first game?  I doubt it, otherwise a game launched at 11:59pm GMT and an equal game launched at 12:01am GMT will have different ranks.

My guess is they look at cumulative yes votes at more macro units (like weekly).  Maybe the 30 day total is significant for rank, though, I see evidence this may not be the case.

As for workshop, I would integrate with that and other steam services if the game gets greenlit.  They have cloud storage, achievements, and all kinds of interesting things.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Jacobkolstad on November 06, 2013, 07:42:57 AM
Yeah, but the cloud storage is pretty troubling, if you launch the game on two computers at once, only one of the saves will actually be saved. And somethimes (REALLY RARE) the cloud storage don't work.

Achivements would be cool, like "Get ending 1 in Arc Eternal" or "Win as Skarsgard Abraxis on Arca" or "Complete Alpha Sector" etc.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Crimson King on November 06, 2013, 11:42:10 AM
Quote from: Jacobkolstad on November 06, 2013, 07:42:57 AM
Yeah, but the cloud storage is pretty troubling, if you launch the game on two computers at once, only one of the saves will actually be saved. And somethimes (REALLY RARE) the cloud storage don't work.
Steam won't let the same account run at the same time on two different computers except maybe with one or both in offline mode. If offline mode allows you to launch the same game on two computers at once, the machines that are offline can't save to the cloud anyways since cloud saving requires a connection.

If you don't like cloud saving and a game has cloud saving you can disable that feature. Right click on the game, select properties and click on the updates tab. There is a check box (enabled by default) that allows saving to the cloud.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on November 08, 2013, 08:12:18 PM
After 4 days (give or take), we're sitting at 2600 yes votes!  This currently is tracking almost identically to the current #100 game on greenlight.
Now is when the real work begins.  I encourage anyone reading this to tweet, email, facebook their friends with steam accounts and encourage them to vote yes.  Lets keep up the momentum and show the world that the strategy genre is strong and growing stronger.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Ninointeli on November 09, 2013, 07:08:49 PM
Quote from: virgilw on November 08, 2013, 08:12:18 PM
After 4 days (give or take), we're sitting at 2600 yes votes!  This currently is tracking almost identically to the current #100 game on greenlight.
Now is when the real work begins.  I encourage anyone reading this to tweet, email, facebook their friends with steam accounts and encourage them to vote yes.  Lets keep up the momentum and show the world that the strategy genre is strong and growing stronger.

Congrats man ;)
Best game ever I played
I definitely will post this to facebook,and twiter and all of that :)
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Kilobyte on November 18, 2013, 06:12:03 AM
Hey,

Whats current vote count and stuff? Kinda interested to see how it develops on greenlight vote wise :)
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on November 18, 2013, 09:32:09 AM
Here's a picture of the stats the Greenlight developers can see.

Now, if you take a look at that line graph it shows cumulative 'yes' votes over time for some games currently in the top 100.  Most (all currently in the graph) have been on greenlight for more than 30 days, that's why they stretch all the way to the right.  CW3 has been there 14 days.  Note that the end of the green line (the CW3 line) is flat.  That's because the end of the line reflects today's totals and today won't end until midnight GMT (and I took this screenshot with around 10 hours left in today).  In other words the last segment moves up over the course of the day as votes come in.

The 'yes'/'no' ratio is basically tied dead even.  Interestingly, this is better than the average.  My bet is that this ratio is highly influenced by the genre of the game not the execution.  I bet hot game genre's have a better ratio, and some other genres have a worse ratio.  In other words I bet a twitch FPS with multiplayer gets a very high yes/no ratio from the native steam audience.  Strategy titles have been in a lull for the last several years, but they are starting to come back as their fans have started to wake up and make themselves known.

One other note about that line graph.  They pick out the #5, #10 #15, #20, and #100th game to show the lines.  So over time games shuffle around and the lines change.  Currently, CW3 is tracking better than #15 and #20 game did at their 14th day.  But note, the #100 game has a line that reflected more yes votes and tracked higher.

Clearly, there are some hidden variables of considerable consequence in Valve's calculation of position.  Maybe crazy stuff happened after day 30 and isn't shown in the graphs, who knows.  In any case, I think we are doing fine so far. 

I'd like to encourage everyone to click both the 'favorite' and 'follow' buttons on the CW3 page.  Also, contact your favorite game review site and request they do coverage or a review on CW3.  Both these things may help bolster the campaign!

Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Jacobkolstad on November 19, 2013, 05:43:37 AM
48% voted "no"?
Wow
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: eduran on November 19, 2013, 06:58:11 AM
A lot of people who want to support a specific game on Greenlight downvote everything else (or at least everything that looks like competition) in hopes of increasing 'their' game's chances of getting through. I don't think the no votes matter a lot, as long as you are not drowning in them.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on November 19, 2013, 08:48:19 AM
Yeah the biggest criticism of greenlight is that it's a thunderdome for games (Mad Max style). It puts games at each and creates this kind of potential down voting situation. I also choose to believe that the no votes don't really directly matter.  But indirectly they of course lower the potential yes votes since there are finite visitors.

And the no votes don't seem unusual compared to the average of the top 50. The ratio for cw3 of yes/no is slightly better in fact.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Grauniad on November 19, 2013, 09:00:50 AM
All games have a huge "no" vote. In fact CW3 seems to have fewer "No" votes than the norm. We speculate that the reason for that is that Virgil is not just relying on the players at Steam that may be unfamiliar with the game, but he is pulling in players from here and his Twitter followers who all vote "Yes", hopefully.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: CobraKill on November 24, 2013, 06:32:20 PM
Any updates? The Gemcraft post has already drove some people to the page.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on November 24, 2013, 07:47:00 PM
We're at over 4500 yes votes and at 50% of the way to the top 100.  That's in 20 days on Greenlight.  The sustained slope of our Yes line is at or greater than any of the other game lines I see.  That means that over time, we're going catch up to those top ten games.

Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: CobraKill on November 24, 2013, 07:49:10 PM
Awesome. Let's hope the rate of votes continues.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on December 07, 2013, 10:52:35 AM
A load of games just got greenlit a few days ago, so that clears out some of the queue (there are still over 1400 games in the queue, though).  Anyway, CW3 has enjoyed an increase in the rate of steam votes over the last few days and I have no idea why.  I normally send a steady, but minimal, stream of votes to the page because of that banner that you see at the top of this web page (and on all of the knucklecracker.com pages).  But right now the exposure must be coming from within the steam greenlight system itself.  Maybe CW3 is closer to the front of the list of game so it is getting more exposure.  But it is still more than 5 pages back from the front page.  Maybe there is some popular list that CW3 has been added to....  I'm just not sure.  Anyone else have any insights?

Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Clean0nion on December 07, 2013, 11:02:45 AM
Possibly word of mouth? Reviews by the gemcraft guy? Other online advertising that you had nothing to do with? Maybe some hotshot youtuber had a go at the game.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on December 07, 2013, 11:20:53 AM
For all of those I would likely see the same increase in knucklecracker.com site traffic (actually, I'd like see a much larger spike in site traffic).  I also don't see any google alerts for CW3 that point to anything that would generate this kind of exposure.  The source seems to be coming from within steam itself.

The closest correlation I have made to anything is to this collection : http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=93436534
CW3 was added to this collection a few days ago so it is on the last page of items.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Kingo on December 07, 2013, 05:33:24 PM
I am pretty sure CW3 has the most original game concept out of all the others... no bias!
I tried to vote, but because I didn't "buy" any games I am not able to vote :(.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Grauniad on December 07, 2013, 05:41:06 PM
You can buy any $0.99 game and get the ability to vote.. :)
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: amok on December 08, 2013, 09:28:59 PM
You do not even need to buy a game, just activate one.

If you have ever bought / got gifted for example a Humble Bundle, Indie Royale or something similar, the chances are that there is steam keys for at least one game there. All you need to do is activate it.

------------------------

may I also ask VirgilW what the stats are now after the latest batch got greenlit?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on December 09, 2013, 08:43:09 AM
That last image I posted a few posts back is pretty close.  It was taken after the last batch got greenlit.  As of right now, the yes total is 5894.  That total needs to be in the 7000-8000 range before things start to get interesting.  Currently, less than half of the potential steam users (based on the average number of visitors of the top 50 games) have visited and voted on the game.  Once the full lot have visited, CW3's total should be over 10000 yes votes.... the trick is getting the full collection of potential voters to visit and vote....
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Jacobkolstad on December 10, 2013, 06:24:44 AM
Quote from: virgilw on December 09, 2013, 08:43:09 AM
That last image I posted a few posts back is pretty close.  It was taken after the last batch got greenlit.  As of right now, the yes total is 5894.  That total needs to be in the 7000-8000 range before things start to get interesting.  Currently, less than half of the potential steam users (based on the average number of visitors of the top 50 games) have visited and voted on the game.  Once the full lot have visited, CW3's total should be over 10000 yes votes.... the trick is getting the full collection of potential voters to visit and vote....
Still lots of no votes I guess?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Kilobyte on December 10, 2013, 10:45:10 AM
Quote from: Jacobkolstad on December 10, 2013, 06:24:44 AM
Still lots of no votes I guess?
Quote from: Grauniad on November 19, 2013, 09:00:50 AM
All games have a huge "no" vote. In fact CW3 seems to have fewer "No" votes than the norm. We speculate that the reason for that is that Virgil is not just relying on the players at Steam that may be unfamiliar with the game, but he is pulling in players from here and his Twitter followers who all vote "Yes", hopefully.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Jacobkolstad on December 19, 2013, 06:24:06 AM
Stats now?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on December 19, 2013, 10:04:28 AM
Here are the stats as of this morning.  There was a recent spike in traffic (internal to greenlight) which drove up the votes for a few days.  Best I can tell the top 100 starts in the 7500-8500 range (currently).  If there is another batch greenlit in early January, I doubt cw3 will be in that batch.  February... maybe.  It depends on what games are in the queue (or promises of games), exposure, the tides, gravitational fluctuations, butterfly wing flaps, etc...
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: snadasky on December 22, 2013, 04:26:37 PM
i do not like how so many games that are basically just pie in the sky ideas get green lit, while games that are complete and released just never get out. 

They should have two green lights one for ideas and indev games and one for released games. 

Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: asmussen on January 01, 2014, 03:35:49 AM
I'm guessing you may very well have already seen this, but just in case you haven't.

http://indiegames.com/2012/10/greenlight_tips_and_tricks_for.html
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Yinan on January 09, 2014, 11:02:35 AM
One Question:
If I buy CW3 now, do I later get a free Steam-Key when it's on there? Or would I have to buy it anew (which would mean that I would probably wait to buy it until it's on Steam)?

Loved CW1 and CW2 but really want to have CW3 on Steam.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on January 09, 2014, 11:09:14 AM
I will give steam keys to existing customers one it gets greenlit.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Yinan on January 09, 2014, 11:18:59 AM
Greate! Thanks for the fast reply :)
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: timotimo on January 18, 2014, 05:50:49 PM
what do the stats say now?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on January 18, 2014, 07:03:36 PM
97% of the way to the top 100.  This means the game is ranked between 100 and 200 out of the 1500+ games currently on greenlight (one assumes).

Getting in the top 100 is a MadMax Thunderdome activity.  The only way to get there is by pushing some other game out.   Now when some games get greenlit everybody moves up.  New games are always appearing, though.

The rank lines they show flip around a lot.  Sometimes there are 4 lines of game tracks that were all tracking less than CW3 did at this stage.  Sometimes there are track lines for younger games that have 2000+ more votes than CW3 does currently.  And yes sometimes the games that have the most votes and are taking top spots aren't even real games yet... they are just promise-ware.

Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: pawel345 on January 19, 2014, 06:44:49 AM
While reading the Greenlight page I noticed that it has outdated info. The Colonial Space is still to be done according to it and there was no announcement that there is now a Linux version. Maybe updating the info and making some screenshots of the new user created maps and units(or even a Colonial Space trailer) could increase the number of votes to push CW3 to the top 100?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Michionlion on January 19, 2014, 12:48:28 PM
I think that that is a great idea.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on January 19, 2014, 02:05:48 PM
This can't hurt so I've updated the description and posted a news item on the greenlight page.

That said, it is exposure the gets votes.  The content of the page is just what converts visits to yes votes.  What I need is visits....
The main ways that is accomplished is by driving people to the greenlight page via some marketing activity or having people find the greenlight page from within the greenlight system.  For instance, if one of the very highly ranked collections were to add CW3 to it's list, I would get thousands of visits in just a few days and move into the top 100 with ease.

If I had a teaser game right now promoting CW3  (or any CW title) I would bring in tens of thousands of new visits to knucklecracker.com and would send thousands over to greenlight...
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: pawel345 on January 19, 2014, 05:41:28 PM
Can't you make some kind of a CW2:User Space in a jiffy?.....Guess it's not so easy? :P Or even another CW1:The Best Of?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on January 19, 2014, 07:33:36 PM
Yeah, I will be making another 'web' game.  I have not decided if it will be CW2 based or CW3 based.  It takes a few weeks to roll one plus the release has to be timed properly within the month.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: cooltv27 on January 19, 2014, 08:18:58 PM
I just posted a thread on the off topic of the Chuckle Fish forums telling people what games I play a lot and to check out all of them, and mentioned the creeper world games
hopefully that should get some attention for the game
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on January 19, 2014, 09:10:21 PM
Awesome... thanks.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on January 20, 2014, 09:27:12 AM
This morning all of the comments on CW3 at greenlight are gone... Wonderful.
Over 300 comments all wiped out.

What appears to have happened is that someone posted a comment on the most recent announcement.  When that happened the count that showed in the game's tab started showing "1" as the comment total.  If you clicked that tab, all of the 300+ comments would still show.

This morning I deleted the single comment under the most recent announcement hoping all of the comments would return.  All the comment said was "Nice".  Now all comments are gone... 
Can you say "greenlight platform bug"?

Hopefully, they are still in their DB and can be restored.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on January 20, 2014, 03:59:20 PM
Well... awesome.  I wrote to Valve about the comment issue and they fixed the problem and wrote me back just a few hours later.  I honestly wasn't expecting that.  So props to them for support...
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: MadMag on January 21, 2014, 01:11:21 AM
puh... Great!
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on January 23, 2014, 09:34:06 AM
Now, things are getting interesting....
The recent greenlighting of 50 games cleared out some space for other games to move up.  Plus, something is promoting CW3 at greenlight and the visit volume has increased.

Right after the recent 50 games were greenlit, CW3 moved into position #72.  Because of the increased exposure it has now moved into position #55.  This position will no doubt bounce around... other games come in, they catch their own exposure waves, some drop out...  so we will see how things evolve over the coming weeks.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Michionlion on January 23, 2014, 10:55:54 AM
Nice!  We might have a chance in the next batch!
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: SandwichKed on January 23, 2014, 09:12:08 PM
Quote from: virgilw on January 23, 2014, 09:34:06 AM
Plus, something is promoting CW3 at greenlight and the visit volume has increased.

This is just a theory, and I don't know anything for certain about the guts of Greenlight:

The bump in your graph is coincident with two events. 

1. The event which was under your control was your updating of the CW3 page.  Though I thought I remembered your changing some of the page text in December, the Colonial Space availability announcement was the first announcement you put in the system since dropping the game there back on November 4.

It would make some sense that announcements/activity would refresh the "preference" level for a game showing up in our evaluation queues.  A game that is showing something new should get more eyeballs than some vaporware that got posted months ago and was never updated.  They can keep this from being abused in a number of different ways, the least of which would be a project getting crappy vote ratios doesn't get the same pop from an update as something that has a healthy profile.  And it would make sense for overfrequent updates to be penalized.

If this is the case, then I would recommend:  Find something - anything - to announce there a week or two after the current burst flattens out.  Maybe get someone to do a gameplay demo and narration of some of the basic CW concepts and add the video to the page.   And announce it.  This is a good idea anyway, since the creeper itself is a bit... static if you don't know what you're looking at and while all of us veterans are suitably impressed by your screenshot selection people coming at this with no experience have been leaving some less-impressed comments from time to time.

If you're putting together a demo game, that's another thing to announce when it's ready.  Or if that's going to take too long put up an announcement and link to, say, one of your CW1-derived demos (I suggest User Space) at Kong or wherever.

(And update your demos to include direct links to the greenlight page, not just CW3-is-out links.)

2.  The other obvious event which tracks with the current burst is simply the bump into the top 100.  Getting to the top of the heap could trigger queue priority elevation to get the people who haven't even seen it yet to vote.  A sudden rush of disproportionate no votes at that point would indicate that someone was gaming the system to get to the top, and a smart algorithm would push your ranking down in response.  ...I don't think it works that way, but it's possible.  In which case enjoy the ride.   :D :D :D

Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: pawel345 on January 30, 2014, 01:34:14 PM
Weekly update of greenlight status? :D
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on January 30, 2014, 02:41:04 PM
We're in the top 50.... so good progress so far.  The numbers can bounce around, but things are headed in the right direction.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: thejoe66 on January 30, 2014, 04:27:05 PM
let's hope they greenlight another batch of 50 games for the start of the next mouth if that does happen and your game do not inconvenientley bonce around you should be greenlight  ;D
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Kilobyte on February 03, 2014, 04:28:13 AM
Wow, i should check this thread more often... also YAY :D Now lets just hope best :) The recent updates made me quite happy
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on February 03, 2014, 03:37:29 PM
We've moved up just a tad in the rankings to #39 currently... and if you look below you might note that we are entering an interesting time this week or next.

The funny thing is that my wife was asking me earlier today if I thought CW3 might be greenlit soon. "Maybe", I said.  "What day of the week would you guess?", she asked.

Having worked with developers and tech types my whole life, I said "Tue, Wed, or Thur".  "Why?", was her response.  "Because they work M-F and you don't do anything on Friday you might regret Saturday morning.  And you don't do anything on Monday because you don't remember what you were doing on Friday until Tuesday".

So I've looked back at Steam's announcements over the last year and noted how many titles they greenlit, the dates, and what day of the week.
Here are the results I found:


Num GreenlitDateDay of Week
4May 1, 2013Wed
6May 16, 2013Thu
5May 31, 2013Fri
7Jun 13,2013Thu
11Jun 28,2013Fri
16Jul 24, 2013Wed
15Aug 8, 2013Thu
100Aug 28, 2013Wed
25Sep 18, 2013Wed
32Oct 2, 2013Wed
37Oct 16, 2013Wed
100Oct 29, 2013Tue
40Nov 12, 2013Tue
100Dec 4, 2013Wed
50Jan 7, 2014Tue
50Jan 21, 2014Tue

What conclusions can we draw from this (within reason)? 
- Something changed in Aug of last year.  They suddenly got serious about increasing the volume they were handling.
- Since that change, they had always greenlit on a Tuesday or Wednesday.  Before that date they were on Wed, Thur, or Friday.
- They tend to greenlight every 2-4 weeks.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Grauniad on February 03, 2014, 04:36:38 PM
It's easy, before August, they were in an internal beta and released when they had a new build. Now they're in production and they're releasing on the most common day for changes to take effect. Tuesdays or Wednesdays. Gives them the best shot at fixing messes before they have to work on weekends without pay. :)
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on February 05, 2014, 05:20:53 PM
50 more titles got greenlit today... as you might predict from looking at the previous greenlight totals.  CW3 was not in this batch, despite being #34 at the time the batch was greenlit.  That means we are now #6....
As I have always suspected, they look at more that just placement based on votes.  What, who on the outside knows.  I suspect it might be time in the queue... but that's a guess.  At least 5 other titles had more votes than CW3 but also didn't get greenlit.

On the good side at least I can now get back to work since I don't have to worry about integrating steam API's for at last a couple to three weeks :)
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: pawel345 on February 05, 2014, 06:40:29 PM
Too bad :( But being nr 6 might get more people to the greenlight site and here.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Kingo on February 05, 2014, 09:14:06 PM
Seeing the variety of games (take a look at "Dadliest Catch http://store.steampowered.com/app/224480/"... can you honestly tell me that THAT is better than creeper world?) that are on steam these days, it will be incredible if they don't greenlight it.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Flabort on February 05, 2014, 09:41:38 PM
Well, that game is certainly hilarious. Watching a Let's Play of it now. So better than CW3 or not, it's still darn funny.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Kilobyte on February 17, 2014, 10:24:06 AM
Given its now on #6 i could imagine quite well that it is released in next batch :) - I kinda can guess how much work it might be to integrate steam, but who knows, i don't know their API. Anyways, lets hope the best
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on February 17, 2014, 10:46:18 AM
Maybe, maybe not.  It was in the top 50 last time and was not released.  There are several good reason you could speculate as to why it wasn't released in the last batch, but your guess is as good as mine. 

That said, I do sort of expect it to get picked up this time or next.  I can't imagine games will float in the top 100 forever... eventually they will clog up the top 100 for everyone else so they must be cleared out.  And that is my best guess as to why CW3 wasn't picked up last time (And other lower ranked games were).
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Jacobkolstad on February 17, 2014, 12:13:11 PM
Just a question, why can't we check the Greenlight stats ourselves?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on February 17, 2014, 01:46:10 PM
Valve just has it setup that way.   Only dev's can see the stats and only for their games.

The theory, I think, would be something along the lines of not wanting to affect people's choices by showing them other people's choices.  But the comments and discussions already do that...  For instance, you can look at the comment count and tell if the game is tracking highly or not.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Crimson King on February 17, 2014, 01:49:21 PM
If CW3 gets greenlit, would one be able to purchase the CW trilogy and get a steam key for CW3?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on February 17, 2014, 02:41:14 PM
If the game gets greenlit all existing customers (that have bought CW3 or the trilogy from here) will get a steam key for CW3 if they want it.  So if you buy the trilogy from here, that of course counts for purchasing CW3 and you will get a steam key for CW3.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Crimson King on February 17, 2014, 02:49:33 PM
I'm aware that one will get a Steam Key for a purchase made before CW3 gets greenlit. I was asking about purchases of the trilogy made after CW3 is on Steam.

Sorry for not being very clear in my previous post.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on February 17, 2014, 03:00:13 PM
That's a good question...
So my intent would be 'yes'.  It's only fair to give a steam key away for CW3 made after greenlighting same as before.  I'll have to work out the mechanism for doing that (the mechanics of how to issue the key), but assuming Valve allows it I'll do it.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Jacobkolstad on February 17, 2014, 04:27:08 PM
But, if you are not allowed to share the stats, and you are doing it.
O_O
What will Valve do if they find out?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: pawel345 on February 17, 2014, 05:02:51 PM
I don't think it's not allowed more like the stats are there for the author and what they do with it is up to them.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: thepenguin on February 19, 2014, 02:34:14 PM
I think CW3 just got greenlit.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: asmussen on February 19, 2014, 02:35:35 PM
Yup, it looks that way. Congratulations, Virgil!
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: thepenguin on February 19, 2014, 02:38:04 PM
Quote from: asmussen on February 19, 2014, 02:35:35 PM
Yup, it looks that way. Congratulations, Virgil!

Yeah, congrats V!  Thanks for confirming that, asmussen.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: kwinse on February 19, 2014, 02:48:27 PM
Way to ruin Grauniad's surprise guys. :P

(Congrats Virgil!)
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Grauniad on February 19, 2014, 02:49:57 PM
It wasnt' my surprise.. :) Virgil's more likely.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: EllisInWonderland on February 19, 2014, 03:28:29 PM
Congrats! Finally greenlit!
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: pawel345 on February 19, 2014, 03:36:59 PM
Congrats :D
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: thepenguin on February 19, 2014, 04:03:50 PM
Quote from: kwinse on February 19, 2014, 02:48:27 PMWay to ruin Grauniad's surprise guys. :P

Nobody reads this thread.  Except for the people who do, of course. :D
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on February 19, 2014, 07:11:01 PM
Indeed.... we are now greenlit!
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Flabort on February 19, 2014, 08:23:48 PM
Cool. What's having access to the API like?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on February 19, 2014, 08:58:37 PM
The API I already had access to... but I'd not really looked at it much.  So now I'm installing Visual Studio and will relive my C++ past tomorrow :)
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: thejoe66 on February 19, 2014, 09:21:56 PM
So now that you got greenlight is the process of uploading the game to steam going to be a long one or some quicke things here and there
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on February 19, 2014, 09:30:52 PM
Medium length I think.  Think in terms of a few weeks perhaps.  I have some things I need to add to the game to take advantage of some of the steam functionality...
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: asmussen on February 20, 2014, 01:03:16 AM
If you add any steam achievements, I nominate "I dropped a line of shields with a nullifier at the end!" to be the name of one of them. :)
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Kharnellius on February 20, 2014, 02:06:50 AM
Oh, wow congrats!!!  That happened much quicker than I expected.  You should be proud! :) ;D
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: Clean0nion on February 20, 2014, 08:35:15 AM
Quote from: asmussen on February 20, 2014, 01:03:16 AM
If you add any steam achievements, I nominate "I dropped a line of shields with a nullifier at the end!" to be the name of one of them. :)

And make my pic the achievement icon!
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: miquelfire on February 20, 2014, 09:54:51 AM
Maybe post some blog post of progress if possible (unless what takes the time is the programming stuff that 90% of the blog readers wouldn't care about. I'm in the 10% BTW)
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: thejoe66 on February 20, 2014, 07:08:19 PM
I would also love blog posts, but one more thing are you even allowed to have steam achievements on your game i don't know if it's just me but i remember reading something about how your game has to surpass a certain mark in steam sales or something like that to qualify for achievements
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on February 20, 2014, 07:57:14 PM
I am working on achievements, stats, and maybe a few global leader boards.  I've spent most of my time so far getting the technical footings in place so the game can talk to their system.  That has moved along nicely... so I will spend the bulk of my time defining stats, achievements, and the such.  It's a time consuming process since I have to define the achievements (there is a thread where people are making suggestions... some of which are helpful), make a little icon for each, then code up the game to calculate when to award the achievements.
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: JF-T on February 24, 2014, 05:03:17 PM
I JUST found out that CW3 got greenlighted on steam, Way to go! :D
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: MadMurphy on March 23, 2014, 11:30:42 AM
Will you be sending out Steam keys to  the emails we used to purchase the game?


EDIT: Just searched the forum and saw this link.
http://knucklecracker.com/creeperworld3/steamkeys.php
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on March 23, 2014, 02:09:35 PM
Yep, see this blog post for full details:
http://knucklecracker.com/blog/index.php/2014/03/steam-keys-for-cw3/
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: miquelfire on March 25, 2014, 08:57:53 AM
Those who got the beta keys don't need to get the new ones right?
Title: Re: Official Greenlight Topic for CW3
Post by: knucracker on March 25, 2014, 09:49:20 AM
No, your beta key is the same as a regular key (Except for opening access to the game prior to March 27).  So you are good to go.