"Let Me Solo Gabe"
"It's REVIEW time, Author-kun!"
"No, Gabe, no!"
It Was Harder Than I Thought
“You want upload geimu? Here get ashed!”
Two weeks ago, I saythed "Let me solo him. (Gabe)". This is hardly my first rodeo with Gabe, so I thought it would be an easy process... Turns out it took up a lot more of my time and attention than I wanted to admit! Most of it had to do with me not really knowing how I wanted the storefront to look like, and a whole bunch of obstacles in the way.
Small Obstacles
This time I skipped over the first part of the process; namely the whole identity verification and credit card process. While that saved me a lot of grief compared to the first time, I quickly ran into the problem of credit card payment.
In order to put your game on Steam, you need to pay a hundred bucks to Gabe. No, you can't use Steam store credits for this. I'm not sure why my credit card got rejected at this point, but I have a suspicsion that it was because I live in the most censorious place in hellworld. It took a bit of wrangling, but I finally had to hide behind seven proxies before I even took the first step.
Store Assets
“She regens health every time slashes you with her katana? That’s fucking broken!”
Quickly I am led to a familiar place, and Gabe tasks me with setting up the store page and all the assets. I thought; no problem, it's just a bunch of photoshop work. In truth, I had to tangle with a bunch of decisions along the way.
First, I had to think: how do I show what /Conspiracy/ Girls is about in one image? It can't be wordy, and it has to be really distinct. I think the original Conspiracy Girls pilot really didn't do this well, the store cover is an image of the title and a girl in black, unless you KNEW who Madison was, you really wouldn't be able to tell from the silhouette. (part of this was to replicate the GFL logo, so that's gone too)
I guess I really wanted something to do with anonymous message boards on the cover. Most of the writing appeals to someone who came from there, after all. But what? Initially, I wanted an image of Madi-san and Ayano popping out of a demotivational poster, but that was a little hard to do, so I changed it to a circle (it's actually something from /pol/), but that was still not eye catching enough. Cute anime girls are on store pages all the time. Doushio?
I started looking to the store pages of visual novels I like for examples. Umineko has a really clear indication that it is a classy novel about witches, Danganronpa is fun and crazy; but the real big break was looking at Kagura Game's style of presenting their H-games. I find that the style of just presenting story, characters, and some small notes in images was really important, so I mocked up some images to substitute for words. Hopefully this doesn't lag anyone while reading the page.
Then came review time. Somehow I managed to get past the reviewers in two gos', with the only problem being the header capsule not having the same logo as the others. An easy fix, but since I always submitted near the weekends, it took two weeks.
I quite liked the end result. People who know about the chans will definitely see the greentext in the background. If there's some odd criticism about it, it looks vaguely like a gamestop advertisement (laugh). But I think it does bring out the personality of the book well.
Where's Sachiko?
"The most sus person in the room."
As I am doing up the store page, the last pieces of art are coming in and being ordered. There's an important character that's missing from all the promotional art. I say important in the storyline sense, but her role in these chapters is pretty limited, despite being the main antagonist of "Arrival". So... where's Sachiko?
Truth is... Sachiko isn't ready for her debut (laugh). I really wanted to have the main characters be drawn by one artist, but in the end I have to use my backup plan since I am having some art problems. Sachiko and Morgnanna will be handled by a different artist. I'll have to rev up the old Art director's chair and get her and Morganna done.
That being said, this will mean that I will be missing the Oct 5 deadline. I'll push it back to the 20th to make sure that the art can be done properly and I have time to find a new artist. In the meantime, I'll use it to tweak Ep5 and finish the arc properly.
Do You Even Need Game?
“So that’s how you do it...”
One of the most shocking things that I discovered after stressing out over Gabe's review process; You don't even need a game to publish. I've been wondering how I am releasing earlier than a certain space hentai game I am looking forward to, and it turns out... you only need to submit the promo material to Steam for the whole thing to work out. Game is optional. THEN WHAT DID I AGONIZE OVER MAKING THE GAME PERFECT FOR RELEASE THE PAST TWO WEEKS FOR?!?!
Over the past two weeks, I really struggled to make things perfect for release. Aside from the store page, this was one of my big stresses. If I am going to send things in for review, I would like it to be perfect. Unfortunately, reading through EP5 made me quite dissatisfied with the later half, so I modified the game to only show up till EP4 for now. I'm very, very satisfied with how the first 4 episodes came out, and the version that I sent to Gabe was the version that goes up until EP4.. And it turns out... Gabe senpai didn't even read my game...!
Truth is, whether the store page comes up or not, you just need promo material, and the game itself is a separate review process. I didn't remember it this way, and really stressed over too much about making the game perfect. I have a bit more time now so I am less stressed, but boy was that terrifying.
Oh, and I also discovered that the Steam review process has a shortened release date now; you can release 2 weeks after the store page goes up instead of a month, so instead of the page having to come up on the 5th, I can have it come up 2 weeks before Oct 5th if I followed my old deadline.
So one of my regrets of this process is that I could have just did the store page, and then moved on to working on the remainder of ym game, instead of having to perfect both sides at once. It did make me make sure that everything is perfect for release at least up until EP4, so there's that.
I also wasted a lot of time trying to agonize over achievements, and I am waiting on a tutorial on how to make them work...
BACK to writing! There is work to be done…!
Last Scene
“Uwwwwooohhhh, Nilou-sama’s...! Nilou-sama’s... *sweat*”
The story of me soloing Gabe is a lot of time lost trying to get things right. Now that I think about it, I kind of failed a lot of that, but the store page is up at least, so I'm glad for that. But I think the process was still important. I am still searching for a way to integrate achievements into the game;
In order to prepare for release, I will need to:
Order the last two sprite arts
Finish Up Ep5 and 6
Upload Game to Steam
Wait for Release Date (probably do something in the meantime)
Written 220911
