Son of Nor - Action RPG

Our Steam Early Access is approaching and we're preparing things like crazy!

• So the game development process comes into its final stretches. We do a lot of things to wrap up all lose ends. Some examples.
• We're working on promotional material with our render artist Ruben doing new poses and new high resolution character models. See how the male character model evolved and how the female character looks. They look amazing!
• Multiplayer now works! We had some fun in multiplayer sessions. Splitscreen also works and we'll be able to show it in one of the next dev diaries.
• We're creating the trailer for the early access launch and Julian implemented some neat functions to be able to record cooler scenes from the game. If you have a game you want to do some videos for, plan in a lot of time and code some extra functions to make it easier for you to stage game situations. The trailer will only be about 90 seconds but we're on it already for more than a solid work week. Especially when you try to record features that are in a very unstable state still: Hello coders? Fix this please. Wait, update, try again. And then something else breaks
• More things we do to prepare for the launch is our localisation database. We use keys that then call the text in a specific language. Like in a poor man's database. This way we can translate text in different spreadsheets and just switch the file to completely switch the game to a different language.
• We also use documents that tell us who says a line and with what emotion. This will play a role once we do voice-overs for the lines. Every bit of dialog in the game will be voice acted! Yay! For a limited amount of languages, however.
• We are polishing cutscenes and level design. We added ivy flowers that help players spot interesting things.
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

This week we show some weird matrix IK movement bullet dodging. Steam Early Access will start July 24th! SPLIT-SCREEN!

• You can get Son of Nor on Steam Early Access from July 24th! We've been hard at work polishing the areas that will be released that day. Please note it's still Early Access, meaning beta. Not all the levels are implemented, not everything is polished to it's final state but we should be pretty close!
• Our Steam Early Access coming soon page is up! Take a look: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000
• Weird matrix IK movement bullet dodging
• Work on the main menu progressed. Note to developers: Don't underestimate the work it takes to implement all the menu functions. Resolution changes, gamma correction, sound volume sliders, fullscreen modes, controller setup, the menu's aspect ratio (oh my) and so on! It's a huge pile of work and we definitely thought it was going to be easier. Usability is also important. Don't frustrate people with a cryptic menu and a 5 level deep structure.
• Multiplayer via Steam is working! No port forwarding, no router configuration, no firewall disabling required. It's a very smooth and simple experience!
• Multiplayer via split-screen is working!
• We want to take some time in our SAS diaries to answer questions we get and turn them into a video FAQ or Q&A. Tune in, it's fun!
• Questions: Can you show us split-screen? Are backers going to get Early Access access? Any plans for final release? What about the Oculus Rift? Why carrots?
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

Great I think it will be a big success game on Steam.
Any consoles ports ? (such quality indie games are really lacking on consoles)

 

Consoles is a topic that is not to be taken lightly. Currently we're laser focused on the PC, Mac, Linux release and it gives us headaches with testing already
Consoles require rigorous testing with lots of test cases. Every platform is different and wants other test cases to be made. A large number of requirements needs to be met. This costs a lot of time and resources we currently don't have. We'll see how Son of Nor develops and is received by players. If we managed to make it right and we had some success, we'll consider ports to other platforms. Step by step is the right approach I think. Keep your fingers crossed

 

This project appears to have gone really far. The first time I saw it, I was thinking it was another very ambitious game with a loose team that will probably fall apart eventually.

Honestly, I think most people are to selfish working on their own dream projects that most don't want to commit to a group project (I'm guilty of this to). Anyway, good luck!

 

Son of Nor will be available on Steam Early Access Thursday, July 24th! Also: Lots of updates in this week's SASDiary!

• I added sounds to rolling boulders, lava being poured, moving the lava pourer, important things hovering and moving, assembly line shutdowns, Sarahul Seers throwing and catching their discs, regrowing crystals. And saving best for last: Enhancing throwable things with fire and wind!
• We demonstrate the music controller we made for Son of Nor. It controls what music is being played in exploration and battle situations, how tracks are crossfaded, stinger sounds can be defined, and boss battle areas.
• This week's share of bugs and strangeness happening: Falling through the ground, swimming, Sarahul Seers that suddenly fly away during battle, multiplayer sync issues, huge people turning up out of nowhere.
• "Circus Sarahuli" showing tricks while recording Early Access footage.
• Sneak peek at our upcoming Steam Early Access trailer.
• Son of Nor will be available on Steam Early Access: Thursday, July 24th. Mark the date
• Back of the book: Our Q&A session with questions from forums and comments.
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

Sounds and music make the game more alive, great work. Small team but talented one; no doubt we'll have consoles versions later.
ahhaha bug passage is hilarous

 

Hehe, yeah I'm really happy that I'm so much in the middle of the development as the sound guy. I hear it's this is not the norm

 

Finally we made it to this point. Son of Nor is now available on Steam Early Access. There's still a lot to do but this is a huge milestone and we hope to get a lot of great and useful feedback to fill our polishing lists

• Read our announcement here (http://stillalive-studios.com/2014/son-of-nor-goes-steam-early-access) or head over to the Steam Store page to have a look (http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/)
• We also made a brand new trailer! Enjoy!

 

Cool trailer, I watched the old trailer and its really come along! Will be playing over the weekend I'm sure.

 

Then happy weekend! Feedback always welcome!

 

Cool trailer, but is it just me or does it feel like its a bit laggy sometimes ?
Like at 0.38 - 0.40 sec.

 

Jim, we're still working on the performance. But we wanted to have that scene in as it shows that some buildings are destructable and it's nice seeing it break. But that introduced a small hicup.

 

And here we go to our next SASDiary for Son of Nor. Son of Nor is now available on Steam Early Access! We're busy listening to feedback from the community and implementing it.

• Son of Nor is now in the Steam Store: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/ Thanks for everybody's support in kickstarting us or buying the game now already! We're grateful!
• We're actively roaming the forums. It takes a lot of time but player feedback is extremely valuable. We hear about exotic bugs, not so exotic bugs that we just seem to have missed, and loooots and lots of suggestions we will discuss in our daily meetings. Extraordinary ideas. We certainly get a lot of value and can make the game much more fun. So far, all our community experience has been extremely useful.
• Our in-game error reporting tool is a blessing. By using F4, players can directly send a bug report from within the game. No account creating, no navigating to another website... This takes too much time and people don't do it. This way, we get exactly what the player's position is, what players look at, and the error log. Thus, making it easier to identify the error / bug and fixing it.
• Jason made new visual effects for when players pick up a wind, fire, or essence element.
• While the Early Access version of Son of Nor already has a lot of playable levels, the level list is not yet complete. In the background, we're working on the last levels of the game. One of the not so finished still is Taro. We have a rough level layout and are iterating on it to make it more interesting and fun.
• The placeholder Horastes statue that was in Yant'shaza now was replaced by the correct Lur statue, which looks godly.
• The Early Access version also has a placeholder intro video to kick-off the game's story. Ricardo is working on the finished intro with the final illustrations by our illustrator Simon.
• The Early Access build already sports a multiplayer mode. Ricardo shows some gameplay scenes.
• On the other hand, cutscenes in multiplayer sometimes suffer from strange effects
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

Interesting the multiplayer , it could lead to interestin exclusive coop levels, like one player levitating another to rech highter places, help both to pass throught a missing bridge, or levitating at same time physics objects for physic puzzles.

 

That's exactly the idea zenGarden

 

We're taking an in-depth look at how some of the core aspects of Son of Nor evolved over the past 3 years! This week: Telekinesis.

• As we're working more and more on end-game content we don't want to spoil, we think it's a great opportunity to zoom out and look at the development of Son of Nor in the past 3 years.
• We're going to look at the three core game concepts telekinesis, terraforming, and elemental magic and look at how these concepts changed during the development process. It's an interesting game design and technological view at making games, taking risks and changing things to make them better.
• In short: Telekinesis was an all-encompassing power. There was a telekinesis-meter that served as a life bar and - at the same time - it was the power you needed to lift items in the world. If you lifted heavy items, the power would go down significantly. If you let them go, your power regenerated, too. If you were hit while carrying something heavy, your telekinesis shield would not protect you and you'd die quickly.
• Telekinesis was also used to conjure sand balls. If sand balls were arranged in specific patterns, players could cast a spell. As if the spell needed to be charged first. But doing this action took time and made combat sluggish. Players were busier with arranging sand balls than battling each other. It slowed down combat to a halt. We scrapped this concept of casting magic via telekinesis.
• With telekinesis, you could also draw paths objects should follow. This feature should have been used to make multiple objects spin around you to form a physical shield. But you needed so many objects to make a shield effective and painting the paths for every object was again so cumbersome, that combat came to a halt as well.
• Today, telekinesis is a very basic, lean and quick power with many uses. You can solve puzzles, move items blocking your path, pick up rocks and use them as weapon by throwing them. It's easy to use and understand, and streamlined to fit an action adventure well. We're very happy how it turned out even though we still have to tweak it a bit!
• Son of Nor is now in the Steam Store as Early Access version. Thank you for supporting us: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

Welcome to another special edition dev diary. We're taking an in-depth look at how some of the core aspects of Son of Nor evolved over the past 3 years! This week: Terraforming.

• We're having a look at how Terraforming changed during the development of Son of Nor and we're showing lots of in-editor footage. It's an interesting view at game design, technology, taking risks and changing things to make them better.
• Terraforming was the second core game mechanic planned for Son of Nor. The game was designed with these 3 powers in mind: Telekinesis, Terraforming, Elemental Magic. And they're still present in the game.
• We had Terraforming implemented in our own home-brewed game engine that took advantage of DX11. Sand already flowed around objects and behaved very naturally. The underlying algorithm and tech for this is still the same. Only the implementation changed as we moved from our own engine to Unity 3D. We evaluated a bunch of engines and finally settled for Unity as it fit the requirements and licensing model of our team the best.
• Off-the-shelf engines all had a problem though. For optimization reasons, game engines rely on a static terrain to pre-calc walkable surfaces for path-finding. Unity, too, actually only supports static terrain for enemies to concentrate on "how" to get there rather than "how's the terrain looking today, do I need to take an umbrella?"
• But with our Terraforming feature, terrain looks one way now and completely differently the next moment. All enemies need to constantly be informed about the terrain to make decisions about how to get to the player for an attack. We had to bend Unity in various strong ways, basically implementing our own terrain to make it work.
• The way was not without further challenges. For performance reasons, we needed to break up terrain to keep calculations only to a small portion of the terrain. Which caused the terrain to sometimes break up and leave holes for short amounts of time. Another incident happened when we optimized the Terraforming to be multi-threaded for more than one CPU.
• At first, Terraforming was only meant to "create your own stairs" to get to higher places. But we found more and more uses for it: make craters when you shoot rocks with high velocity into sand, craters when fireballs explode, carve out passages when you hit a pile of sand with wind magic, terraform below enemies to make them lose balance and give you time to think about your next move, push very heavy objects you couldn't lift with normal telekinesis, destroy watchtowers by terraforming below them, hide behind terraformed terrain to avoid a fight or use it as shield in combat to avoid arrows!
• Son of Nor is now in the Steam Store as Early Access version. Thank you for supporting us: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/
• Watch the previous episode on Telekinesis!
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

We're taking a look at how core aspects of Son of Nor evolved over the past 3 years! This week: The Magic System.

• We're having a look at how the Magic System changed during the development of Son of Nor. It's an interesting view at game design and changing things to make them better.
• Magic was the third core game mechanic planned for Son of Nor. The game was designed with these 3 powers in mind: Telekinesis, Terraforming, and Magic. And they're still present in the game.
• Magic System v1: Spells were charged for a one time use by conjuring balls of sand in geometrical patterns (triangles, squares, stars etc.) This made the combat very slow since people were busy conjuring sand balls instead of using magic for the fight.
• Magic System v2: We moved from a pattern-based casting system to a gesture-based system in v2. Draw magic lines on the ground to conjure fireballs, wind spells and shields. This worked more or less quickly. But it still took too long to do in combat.
• Magic System v3: This one only exists on paper, fortunately. Since conjuring spells and combining magic was so slow in previous versions, we thought the solution to this problem was to let players create "macros" in an editor before you start the game. Sort of a Crazy Machines for spells. Instead of conjuring a fireball, make it stronger, add another type of magic to it for magic combination, we wanted to let players do that in this editor in advance and then only cast the final product. We quickly scratched this idea.
• Magic System v4: Today's magic system is quick, fast paced and works great in combat. You don't have magic abilities from the start. You need to get the power of absorbing elements in the temples you explore during the game. Once you got the ability you can absorb the fire element from a fire place, the wind element from a dust devil and so on. Once absorbed you can use the power immediately 3 times without drawing, conjuring or arranging patterns. After casting a spell, an area of that power remains active to interact with other spells. This is important for spell combinations. Cast a wind push and immediately after it a fire burst to combine wind and fire for a fire tornado. It also interacts with the environment. Add fire magic to rocks to make fireballs. Cast fire on sand to get glass for additional ammo if you run out. You can also enhance this glass shard with fire magic, of course and thus, basically create your own fireball if needed.
• Son of Nor is now in the Steam Store as Early Access version. Thank you for supporting us: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/
• Watch the previous episode on Telekinesis.
• Watch the previous episode on Terraforming.
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

Watch what we're working on no that we released Son of Nor on Steam Early Access.

• We've gathered a ton of input and feedback from the Steam Community Hub, Let's Players, and articles about Son of Nor. See what action points we've taken in this week's dev diary.
• Son of Nor is now available as Steam Early Access version. Thank you for supporting us: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/
• Featured Indie Title: Ace Ferrara. http://www.aceferrara.com

 

We've got new animations and a very special surprise for telekinesis users!

• Again this week we gathered a ton of input and feedback from our forums and let's players. See what action points we've taken in this week's dev diary. PICKING UP AND SHOOTING SWORDS!
• Our main question to you: How do you think we could improve close combat so that it doesn't feel clunky?
• Son of Nor is now available as Steam Early Access version. Thank you for supporting us: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/

 

Here's an exclusive sneak peek at the Essence Temple and the city of Taro that we're currently working on.

• We've gathered a ton of input and feedback from the Steam Community Hub, Let's Players, and articles about Son of Nor. See what action points we've taken in this week's dev diary.
• Our main question to you: How should we show that NPC are quest givers as opposed to passive NPCs?
• Son of Nor is now available as Steam Early Access version. Thank you for supporting us: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/

 

We're so proud this week We've got an AWESOME UPDATE FOR YOU! Bury enemies, destroy trees, dragon! If anything, watch this week's dev diary.

• We finally managed to implement some more complex things (that also took more time) you guys were commenting on and requesting! If anything, THIS dev diary is the proof that we're listening and keep improving Son of Nor bit by bit!
• HUUUUGE content update coming this week! New main menu, new customization options, new playable characters, featured map, new loading screen, loading screen tips, new fun sandbox map, visual improvements, much better player guidance and improved gameplay in level 1, destroyable trees, pick up branches and use them as weapon, and BURY ENEMIES! And new levels will be available with this content update, too.
• Our main question to you: What do you think of the new sand-burying mechanics?
• Son of Nor is now available as Steam Early Access version. Thank you for supporting us: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/

 

Just watched the video that sand monster looks like its going to be a good battle, Nice stuff

 

The NEW update is here! It has many changes, fixes and lots of improvements to the earlier levels. Revamped main menu, pick up and throw Sarahul swords, shields, bows, take dry trees apart. We totally revamped the first levels according to player feedback!



Notable things in this update:

• The Main Menu has been revamped! Check it out, tell us what you think!
• New "Featured Level" option in the main menu. This allows you to jump right into the action of late-game levels. This will only be available during Early Access with the purpose to get more feedback of the latter levels in the story.
• Three new levels are now available! these come after the finishing up the Yant'shaza chapters. You will find a BIG surprise in here.
• We have improved and changed lots of things on the first few levels, including the tutorial. Can you see the difference? Do you think it is better?
• We have improved the short-range combat by combining MASS TK with TK Shockwave, also now pressing the LMB will create a TK PUSH.
• More things to pick up from the environment! Tear dry tree branches or use Sarahul swords and bows as throwable weapons!
• And many many small fixes for quests that were not working under certain circumstances.

For even more info, see the complete changelog here:
http://steamcommunity.com

 

Sweet. i have been waiting for this since seeing your video in the beginning of the week! Awesome!

 

A huuuuge update to Son of Nor's Early Access version has landed! See what's new in this video!

• There are so many new things in this update that I don't know where to begin Completely overhauled tutorial and first level to give it a lot more OOMPH, improved graphics, improved quests, improved cutscenes, bury enemies, better close combat, pick up enemies' weapons to shoot them. We listened to feedback a lot and implemented as much as we could into this update. Try it out!
• Our main question to you: What do you think of our improvements in this update so far?
• Son of Nor is now available as Steam Early Access version. Thank you for supporting us: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/

 

In episode 99(!!) we're showing how the sum of Son of Nor's features come together to form a fun game!

• We've focused so long on showing single features we've been working on on a week-by-week basis that it's now time to have a step back. Before our Dev Diary turns 100, we're giving you an overview of what type of game Son of Nor is.
• Our main question to you: What cool feature have you discovered while playing Son of Nor?
• Son of Nor is now available as Steam Early Access version. Thank you for supporting us: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/

 

Great work guys.

 

Thanks!

 

Enjoy our festive dev diary #100! We've come a long way!

• Julian takes you on a journey through our project.
• Our main question to you: Now that we turned 100 and mostly work on polishing the game, what would YOU like to see in future dev diaries? Any topics of special interest? Dev questions?
• Son of Nor is now available as Steam Early Access version. Thank you for supporting us: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/

 

Thanks for showing character polishing throught time
Will the game allow to choose different heads or faces ? I don't like the last one, the kickstarter character head and clothes looked better it just lacked some colours.

 

You guys have done such an awesome job. Ooh the draw bridge. What great times.

Do not know what to add to your videos. They have been pretty awesome already.

 

hi there,
i like he character from march 2013 best.
it just fits the environment as far as the coloring and the materials of clothing is concerned.
his face looks pretty textured and the eyes just fit well.
the character from june 2014 is a big step backwards in my opinion: clothing is just to colorful for someone living in the dessert. and the face looks pretty cartoony and not only the eyes.

eyes: to make them fit better you could think about adding "ambient occlusion" by adding an additional "layer" (more geometry...) on top of the eyeball that darkens the underlaying eyeball towards the twinkles.
you may have a look at the lux eye shaders or the cryengine docs about their eye shader.

lars

 

Hmm, thanks for all the suggestions already

@zenGarden unfortunately not. Only different main characters and then clothing options. No face changes. This would have been too much for us to add. Regarding the Kickstarter character. Yeah, it's my personal favourite, too. But we really had a lot of technical issues with this model and rig and after we changed the animations basically it didn't work at all anymore. We kept running into problems, that's why we had to let this character go, even though we liked it.

@larsbertram1 Thanks for the tips. We're currently working on all the characters and tweak. I'll forward your comment to our devs. Regarding clothing and colors: We now have many more options to customize colors. In the first version you only could chose from really strong colors, now you can also customize saturation and make nice and deserty clothes.

 

And, how to better watch a game come to life than seeing a pro YouTuber play it? We're happy that Blame the Controller (BTC) picked up Son of Nor for a let's play spin! (This guy really gets our “The World is Your Weapon” tagline!)

 

Could the saving screen be replaced by some icon ingame instead ?
Another point watching the video , the player seems over powerfull in last fight trhowing anything at ennemies. Will it be more dangerous ennemies or some challenges like less rocks and trees in some areas forcing you to fight in a more tactical way ? Anyway , the level design is just great allowing fun gameplay

 

Hey Zen. Yes, basically this is only the tutorial and we didn't want to make it too hard here. There will be more enemies and also harder ones later. We also have a difficulty slider that you can set to high, which makes enemies harder to kill.

 

Let's Player BTC is still on it and has lots of fun with Son of Nor

 

Take one of the closest looks into the development of Son of Nor!

• On popular demand, we're showing our development process, daily routine and the tools we use to collaborate despite living on different continents. THIS is how we develop Son of Nor.
• You'll see in this video that we're working on Oculus and emotic EPOC integration. Briefly. To all people waiting for that: We're on it Yeah!
• Son of Nor is now available as Steam Early Access version. Thank you for supporting us: http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000/

 

We show you how we are giving more life to the world of Noshrac. We also take a look at TRI in our Indie Corner!

• We are starting to implement the animal system which will spawn random animals in the environment to give more life to the world and create more immersion.
• As always we are polishing our work, this time we show how we are fixing the animations that cause overlapping of clothing with the bodies of playable characters.
• CALLING FOR REVIEWS: If you are playing and enjoying Son of Nor, please write a review of our game on the Son of Nor Steam Store Page, we would appreciate it very much!
• Indie Corner: We take a look at TRI: Of Friendship and Madness. Pretty awesome game!
• Get into the discussion and join our forum: http://forum.sonofnor.com

 

Have an inside look at our real life hack week and see some code from the pro!

• Our main dev Julian shows some code of how he implemented mass telekinesis. How do we manage to keep a clear line of sight? How does it work that rocks don't end up in front of each other?
• CALLING FOR REVIEWS: If you are playing and enjoying Son of Nor, please write a review of our game in the Son of Nor Steam Store Page, we would appreciate it very much! http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000
  

 

Butt-watching's over Sorry. It was fun while it lasted!

• Try and play 4 new game jam games made in 24 hours and look deeper into our daily routines. This week: Making the dev diary and our regular testing sessions. And since some people could only talk about the huge butt outside the Radir, we now gave the Horastes statue some clothes!
• CALLING FOR REVIEWS: If you are playing and enjoying Son of Nor, please write a review of our game in the Son of Nor Steam Store Page, we would appreciate it very much! http://store.steampowered.com/app/264000

 

I think it's exagerated putting 8 hours to make regular dev diaries each week.
Why not condensing them in essential stuff or make on per two or three week ?

 

Hey zen. Well, we sometimes made special editions of our dev diary, like the looking back series where we showed how Son of Nor's game design, and the powers telekinesis, terraforming and magic completely changed over the course of development. This was mainly because we were greenhorns and didn't have a proper pre-production phase for such a complex project. Now we know better, still it's entertaining looking at the episodes. It was very time consuming looking through past dev diaries and old video material to decide what to take and how to tell a coherent story that's short and interesting. We're story tellers to some degree.

The problem we have from time to time is that we really don't have anything to show, as we only worked on minor stuff that's not good to show off (lots of code changes behind the scenes, or bug fixes) and yet want to make an interesting episode. So we need to come up with some other things to show and tell. Meta episodes, background info... And this takes time. We cannot simply fire up the game, record 2 new game features and call it a dev diary.

We also thought of making dev diaries only every 2 weeks or every month. Especially now that we do more and more polishing-only work that's not so interesting to show: we added 50 new trees to level x, it looks better now...

But at the same time we fear that we will lose viewers. We fought extremely hard for the 600-1000 views we have per diary. Lately more 600 that 1000, as we did in the past. The views have gone back a bit and plateaued. Which is frustrating. We put a lot of time into the videos, but we don't get more exposure. We're doing these videos of course to attract people interested in the game. It's marketing. In the hope that people are interested in our game and team and support us by buying the game. Building a name and a brand for ourselves. But we're stalling at 600 views currently. And we fear that if we do videos even more seldomly, that even more people will leave because there's not enough content to come back to every week. After all, Let's Players are successful because they release videos regularly, sometimes every day. So when you get back home from work you turn your computer on, do some admin stuff, and watch a Let's Play in the background. You know you'll have an episode when you come home. When we switch to a monthly period, I think we'll lose a lot of viewers, then we don't need to do the diaries at all anymore.

What do you think?

 

You should not think that the success of your game is based on youtube only

There is infinite matter to dig when you make a game for example :
- modeling outdoors, assets, characters : tools used, methodology, why not some videos special "tutorial" for new game makers
- characters animations problems and solution
- others purely about art research for levels and characters

The problem of showing too much on videos like some companies do, is that will break the magic of the game in some way showing the secrets of the making of, generally a making of is made when the game have shipped already. For example "gof of war" on PS2 was a massive hit, and the making of showed but really later.

Another point : you show a lot on your videos, it's like we have seen all game content and all gameplay tips , i don't know , but somtimes it feels like i already seen all game content, small teasers would have a better impact i think also. Showing great passages, but showing less.

Take example on Nintendo, they craft awesome games and they just tease the best passages, and all people are crazy when new infos or pictures,images appears , it's the art of teasing.
There is some indie games that was very awaited like Shivel Knight for example , they teased and have some trailers, but didn't show all.


Your game is awesome, pro quality, you have just to believe in it , be more confident on it's quality. I never seen a game making so much videos diaries, personnaly it's too much personnaly i think , this is not videos that will make entire success or failure.
But if your team enjoy making them, and if it's pleasure only to make a break from game making , then it's ok, but you could limit the rate perhaps ?

If your testers are happy and enjoy it, have fun then this is a first win.

But perhaps i'm wrong , and perhaps your weekly episodes attract different people each week, and perhpas it's the best way to show the game is highly going on , perhaps it's better to show lot more ,and it's perhaps the best advert possible for the game
(but 8 hours i just find it's a bit too much ;-) )

 

We surely don't think YouTube defines the success of our game. But I think in times where traditional gaming magazines and sites struggle a bit and Let's Players have viewers in the millions, people just like to watch videos, it seems. Short videos, or long videos (letting them run in the background). During our Kickstarter it was not the gaming sites that brought us many backers, it was the Let's Players. They brought backers that propelled us over our finishing line. And so we think YouTube is a good indication if people are genuinely interested in the game or not so much. It may be that our game is not a good fit for YouTube. Not crazy like Goat Simulator and thus maybe a great game but it's not spectacular enough for the YouTube viewers. I don't know. That's why this is actually an experiment for us. We're experimenting with the dev diary, with the content, with YouTube, see what works. But we don't take it as THE indicator of success.

That is all nice and well. It would strengthen our brand as game makers, as stillalive studios, and maybe people would then get interested in the game as well. But making these videos is yet a lot more complicated than dev diaries as we do them. You need to have a concept of what to show, how to best teach game making skills, a lot of planning, and you have to search for a lot of material to show. Or you do it by yourself. Showing how to model or do animations, develop the structure of the video. It's not quickly done and would take even more than 8 hours.

Agreed, but I guess with a marketing department that has massive budgets this is a different story. When nobody knows about your game and nobody is interested in your studio in the beginning, then releasing some vague teaser will interest nobody at all. Only things that are highly anticipated or have a huge marketing budget to create that anticipation profit from vague things where everybody can stamp their own dreams on. Showing almost nothing allows people to believe whatever they want. But for that you need anticipation, which we in the beginning didn't have. At least I think it works like that.

That's a valid point I think. Maybe we've gone too far. For too long. And now people have just seen it and are not interested anymore. I think for somebody who followed the project for a long time that might be true. But we wanted to make new people curious. People that maybe only find out about our game now. But this didn't work too well in my opinion. People that already like our project follow it, but we rarely get new subscribers. So we basically spoil the game for our existing fans but the content doesn't draw in new interested people. Interesting.

As I said, Nintendo has a huge marketing machine behind it. They can do such things. As for Shovel Night, I didn't follow that project closely. I also think that, besides being a great and polished game, it also hits straight on the retro pixel platformer and does it well. It's not a modern pixel platformer from the optics, it's a super retro looking one. Including the sound. So it's something many of us know and love. The good old times of great jump 'n runs. It's very well made from a marketing perspective. A genre that people already love but are underserved these days. Our game cannot tap into unfulfilled desires. Our optics are too modern. We need to build all the excitement ourselves, as there were almost no games with terraforming capabilities and so people are not waiting for a game like that. There is no pent up demand for a game like this. From a marketing standpoint, we didn't chose the best topic to make our lives easy

I just found a video of a cracker that shows where to get and install a cracked version of Son of Nor. Seems we're interesting enough though for crackers to distribute pirated copies...

Anyway, thanks a lot. I find this discussion extremely interesting and you've given me a lot of new impulses to think about. The discussion is also important to have in the indie sector. How can we make better marketing so we can all profit from a growing community and healthy business Thanks a lot zen already! But please, let the discussion continue.

 

Don't worry, piracy havea good side as it will make your name lot more known, some people playing it will talk about it, and people with some money will buy it if they like it, as they will prefer to support a little studio

Yep, go on

 

Hi Chris - First time I've seen Son of Nor, but I'm impressed by the real-time terrain deformation! I just watched your dev video about the history of the system, but I'm curious, did you end up using any of Unity's terrain APIs or roll your own system entirely?

Thanks! Paul

 

I would love to help you with marketing/advertising . I could offer a lot in terms of getting thousands of people to sign up for beta tests and such. Please add me on skype : utansdefenderofmavas I would love to have a conversation with you