Greenlighting Continues

When I launched the Dehoarder 2 Steam Greenlight campaign, I had outlined three possible outcomes:

1. The game makes a huge spash and passes through Greenlight almost immediately.
2. The game takes a huge dump and gathers a huge percentage of No votes, project dies.
3. The game gets a good receiption, but just does not get enough views and votes before falling off the first pages of Greenlight. The project sits in Greenlight for a good while until enough votes trickle in.

I was really hoping for outcome #1, but based on my past experiences and my research, I knew that outcome #3 was more likely. That is exactly what is happening. It is also the hardest outcome to deal with. Though at least I didn’t end up with outcome #2.

It looks like Dehoarder 2 will probably get Greenlit… eventually… If I can find about 1,000 or so more people to view the page and vote along the yes/no/unvoted percentages I’ve been seeing so far.

In the meantime I am left with a dilemma – do I continue actively working on the game, and risk that Greenlight success is months or even over a year away? Or do I switch to a purely marketing focus on Dehoarder 2, and begin laying groundwork for the next project, knowing that at any time I may have to put that aside to finish Dehoarder 2 when it does get Greenlit? Or do I do some mix of the two? So far the mix seems most sane.

As far as that next project… It’s actually one that I started quite some time ago, but got away from me in terms of complexity and effort required. This next project will actually be developed under the label Ivory Skies, and will be a collaboration that includes developer Mike Arps from Upways Games, artist Patrick Jesson, and artist/secret marketing weapon StarlightSkies (who is not to be confused with my wife Gill). Our game is something that we just don’t see enough of on Steam: A simulation/builder with a unique and long-overdue theme.

So far we have the groundwork laid for the simulation engine, with moddability built in right from the start. We have some basic terrain and character rendering, and some really sweet scenario-level scripting capabilities. We’re all really excited about the project, and are looking forward to a joint booth presentation of what we have so far at GDEX in October.