Plazma Being - IndieGala Friday Special Bundle

Hey guys,
just a heads up that Plazma Being and other great Steam games are now up for grabs over on IndieGala: https://www.indiegala.com/friday

Get 'em while they're hot!

Systematic Immunity Demo

Hey guys, I've finally gotten round to putting that demo together for Systematic Immunity :) You can download it on my website or on IndieDB.

The demo features the first 20 levels of the game, which should give a fairly good impression of what the game is all about.
The settings menus aren't polished at all yet, so sorry about the hideous interface there ;) Also, if it runs a bit slowly, I'd suggest turning the terrain highlights to low or off completely. Turning the bloom off will help as well. You can access these settings by going to the settings menu and clicking on Graphics Settings.

 I'd also recommend playing the game with an XBox 360 controller if you have one. If not though the game is perfectly playable with the keyboard and you can change the keybindings if you want by going to the settings menu, clicking controls and clicking on the control you want to change and then pressing the desired button.

To install it, simply download the zip file. Extract the installer and run it.

If you'd like to get in touch with me with your feedback/thoughts I'd appreciate it a lot :)

 System Requirements: Windows Vista/7/8, DirectX 9.0c and Shader Model 2.0 graphics support, 2 GB RAM, 2 GHz dual core Processor, 212 MB free hard disk space

Thanks and have fun!

February Update - My experiences with releasing on Steam and Greenlight

So it's been a busy and exciting past couple of weeks. Plazma Being went up on Steam on the 9th of February and Systematic Immunity went up on Greenlight on the 25th.

Wall of text time :P

I'll talk about Plazma Being first. Naturally I was over the moon to get the chance to publish the game on Steam (and I still am of course. I think it's bloody awesome!), and naturally I had some dreams and aspirations regarding sales figures and such. One can't help but read articles about other people's successes on Steam and think such thoughts as "well if I only sell half that many..." or "surely a few thousand sales should be possible...". But in the end I was a little bit disappointed by my figures. I put this down to a number of things (which could all be wrong, and are all my fault by the way).
First, I think I jumped the gun a bit (over-excitement) and released the game too fast. I was relying on the visibility of being on Steam to result in sales instead of putting more effort into contacting the press. Seeing as Steam has the "Popular New Releases" tab now instead of just "New Releases", you need to get them sales figures up fast to increase your time on the front page.
Second, the game has already been out for about two years and during that time I've sold about 10,000 copies (mostly through bundles). So many people who may have bought the game on Steam already owned it.
Third, there's a number of games coming out every day on Steam, so if you can't generate a bit of buzz yourself then your game will quite quickly fall through the cracks and disappear. As I said before I was relying on the visibility of simply being on Steam, which I now realise was a mistake.
All in all though, I'm still really happy about the whole thing. I feel it's quite an achievement to get my first game through Greenlight and I'm always happy when more people play/show an interest in the game :D

##

Ok on to Systematic Immunity. As I mentioned above I posted up the game on Steam Greenlight on the 25th of February. So far the response has been pretty good. I'm engaging in a bit more of a thorough email carpet bombing campaign of the press this time and in the first day there has been 3 news articles and one trailer post of the game. Not too shabby :) I put a bit more effort into trying to make a decent trailer as well and I'm quite happy with the result:



So what I found interesting was the difference between the view count on the first day between Plazma Being and Systematic Immunity. On the first day of my Plazma Being Greenlight campaign the game got about 2,300 views. On the first day of my Systematic Immunity campaign the game got about 600. That's just a bit over a quarter of the views. Whether that's down to a severe drop in Greenlight traffic or something to do with with my game logo being uninteresting I don't know. But I wonder how long Greenlight will last now with all the talk from Valve about moving in a different direction with it. It'll be exciting to see how it goes whatever happens.

Anyway, if you've made it this far I commend you. In fact I think you should reward yourself by going here and clicking "yes" ;)

And/or going here and purchasing yourself a quality piece of gaming entertainment.

All shameless plugs aside, thanks for reading as always and take it easy :)

New Year New News

So first things first...Plazma Being got Greenlit!!! 0_0 So I'm currently in the process of getting all that sorted.

I's nice to know that more people will become acquainted with Zeb and his adventures in the near future :-) I'm also absolutely delighted that my first ever game has made it this far. But I couldn't have done it without all the votes, so thanks a million for all the support!!!!!

As for Systematic Immunity, I haven't got a whole heap done in the last month what with Christmas/New Year madness and numerous birthdays to deal with...but I'm back at it now since the last few days. I've mainly been working on debugging/cleaning up my code, but I've also been working on juicing up the level complete screen a bit, so here's a look at that so far:



Better version on Gfycat: Link

Anyway that's kind of it for this post. so I'll just say happy new year and continue with my work :-)

Stomach Acid Liquid Physics

Hey all,
just a quick update on what I've been up to for the last days. Got some physics going for the stomach acid at last :-) So now when your cells fall in they create waves and splashes instead of just sinking down without effecting the acid at all. I used this tutorial to get it to work. So a big thanks to Michael Hoffman for posting it up!!

I uploaded a quick little video to youtube showing the effects in action:



That's it for this post anyways. As always thanks for reading :-)

Systematic Immunity Progress Update: Bosses :-D

So I've been working a lot on level design mainly for the last while. I've now got the the majority of the levels done for the game. That is levels that's I'm happy with ;-) I've also decided to add in boss battles at the end of each organ!
Initially I wasn't going to have any bosses (except at the end of the game) due to workload reasons. But now I think it seems a bit anticlimactic to just play through all the levels in an organ and just move on to the next one without anything special happening. So boss battles it is then!

Here's a quick gif of the progress I've made on the stomach boss so far:



Click here to view a better quality version on Gfycat :-)

Thanks for reading!
Take it easy,
Felix.

New Trailer, New Name (again), Progress Made

Hey all, so I couldn't help myself. I changed the name of the project again...but this is it now...I promise! Anyway, the new name is Systematic Immunity and for better or for worse it's staying. I made a new trailer as well for your viewing pleasure :-)




So as far as progress goes I've cut back the scope of the game a bit. The game is now going to have three organs/areas (stomach, lungs, brain) instead of the originally planned four. The reason for this is that I feel I'd like to release the game in the first half of next year. And I'd rather release a smaller but well polished game than one with more content but less polished. If it turns out people like the game I can always release more content in the future. I have the majority of the gameplay coding, graphics and sound for those three organs done now so my main focus from here on will be level design, testing, polishing and all that good stuff :-)

So thanks for reading and enjoy the trailer.
All the best :-)
Felix.