Thomas Shahan talks about the origin and process of his art for Incredipede in this video. Rather skillfully produced, and I think he did the music as well. Such a talented guy, Thomas.
Incredipede and Steam Greenlight
Colin and I released Incredipede one month ago on October 25th. It’s available for sale from our website (via the Humble Store) and also on Good Old Games. There’s a Flash demo version now making its rounds on the internet, which is apparently quite popular in China and Spain. We’ve had great press in Rock Paper Shotgun, Gamasutra, Indie Game Magazine, Verge, PC Gamer and Edge Magazine. People love Thomas’s beautiful art and the game’s quirky original mechanics.
Vote for us on Steam Greenlight.
But it feels to me that most of the world is still waiting to discover Incredipede, because it’s yet to appear on the One True PC Distribution Platform: Steam. There’s no doubt about it: they won. Even I (Sarah) use their store to find new games, and often buy games through Steam rather than directly from developers. The most common question we get from people looking to buy Incredipede is “will I get a Steam key when the game is released there?”. The answer is yes. When!
As you’ve probably heard, Valve recently changed the way they accept indie games like Incredipede onto their Steam store. It used to be you’d email them directly and hear back yay or nay or (more often) nothing. It was obviously an understaffed and un-ideal system, and to Valve’s credit they’re trying to improve it. Incredipede has been one of the first games to use their new submission system Steam Greenlight. On Greenlight, games are voted for by the general public and the top 10 are accepted onto Steam every month. Being a relatively unheard of unreleased game, Incredipede had little chance of getting enough votes in time to launch with Steam. The onus is on the developer to bring players in to vote for their game, a challenge that IMO makes the controversy over Greenlight’s $100 fee seem downright silly.
Incredipede flew up the ranks after release and is hovering at #20, which means it’ll likely be accepted in a couple months. Colin’s planning some improvements for the Steam release and we may push it back to February or March to avoid the post-Holiday hole. We’re both quite confident that this is going to happen, but it’s been demoralizing to have to wait, checking that number every week to see if it’s moved.
So if you haven’t yet, please go vote for Incredipede on Steam Greenlight. And yes, if you’d like to buy it now, we’ll give you a Steam key as soon as it’s on there.
Rebuild: Sales abound as winter’s come early
Rebuild mobile’s on sale for 99 cents as part of the indie #superstrategysale. If you’re looking for real mobile strategy games, now’s the time to get Rebuild, Hunters, Call of Cthulhu, and Tactical Soldier – Undead Rising for a fraction of their usual prices.
Rebuild’s been on sale quite a bit lately. October marked the one-year anniversary of Rebuild 2 (Oct 6th to be exact, with the mobile version on Nov 17th). To celebrate I did my first big content update for Rebuild, and ran a 99 cent sale for most of the month. The main new addition was seasons – now you could start the game in winter and play with an extra challenge: farms produce no food (no, not even winter melons!).
Of course, although it’s possible to get through by just tightening your belts and doing daily scavenging trips to food-marts, that wouldn’t be as exciting as, say, eating human flesh. For example. So I made that an option: if it comes down to it you can eat your fallen comrades. Of course, once you try the other-other white meat it’s hard to be satisfied with anything else, and cannibalism has a tendency to escalate to much darker places. You’ve been warned!
Another advantage to this winter mode is that it comes up naturally if you start a fort in spring and make it to day 200 or so, well past the point that the game gives you interesting content. So you can now try to save up enough food to feed your 100-person fort until spring (hint: you’ll need 100 * 30 * 3 = 900 day’s rations). Or, you know, just see what happens. Winter might be a good time to get in that helicopter and get the hell outta Dodge.
The October sale and new content afforded Rebuild a round of press mentions and a New & Noteworthy feature on iTunes. It surprisingly didn’t make it into any Halloween-themed features which was what I was aiming for with my brazen new pumpkin icon. Downloads slowly petered off after the initial spike, and the curve didn’t seem to change when I put the price back from $0.99 to $2.99. In all the event doubled my expected profit for October. Probably it was worth the trouble, although the iPhone5 release and some Google Play bugs made it far more stressful and time consuming than it should have been. Not to mention that month I had to finish Incredipede with Colin!
By happenstance Rebuild also got rolled into Google Play’s 25 cent sale in September which was rather interesting (55k downloads in one day whaaaow). It seemed to have no effect whatsoever on my iOS sales, but Android sales appeared to triple because of it. It was interesting to see them try such a daring “Steam sale”, but I hope to hell players don’t get used to it and start waiting for 99 cent apps to “go on sale”.
How to Make a Spider in Incredipede
This is a quick tutorial on how to make a Spider in Incredipede. Spiders are my favorite thing to make in Incredipede.
It took me a while how to figure out how they work, but like most things in nature they are surprisingly simple and elegent.
How to Beat a Level in Incredipede
I had some requests for a more structured playthrough of Incredipede. I couldn’t just play the game since I know how to beat all the levels so I made a new level and beat it for the first time on video.
This was risky, because you never know how long it’s going to take to beat a level. Here it is!
I actually thought up this level on the bus. I also thought up a nice solution to it. Unfortunately the solution I thought would work didn’t work at all so I tried various things in this video until I got it. It’s not a great level and didn’t have the showiest solution but it gives you an idea of how to play.