Planet Driller Post Mortem (My first Steam Game)
Posted: Sat Aug 13, 2016 8:53 pm
This is the first post-mortem I made, hope it explains what I’ve been through in order to create Planet Driller, and how it went.
Planet Driller wasn’t created as normal games are. Typically someone has an idea, they do a prototype / concept and they see if it's feasible. This didn’t happen with Planet Driller.
I started by playing with procedural world generation, learning how to make it in Unity and optimize it. I did this because I was always amazed by procedural stuff, that appear random but they aren’t really 100% random, they follow a set of rules to create a final seamless random “thing”. One example of this, is Minecraft. If it was 100% random, you probably wouldn’t have those well shaped worlds with different biomes that actually look realistic.
So after that, I thought this world generation thing was very cool and not that hard to pull off, so I decided to “remake” one of my favourite flash games back in the days, Motherload.
Motherload is a mining game where you must explore a planet, mine its resources, sell them, make some upgrades and reach the end of the world to face.. Something (not going to spoil it).
So I started it. Just a note, I’m all alone in this journey. The budget for this game was 0$ (if you don’t count the power and internet bills of course). I have some basic experience in 3DS Max which I used to create the 3D model for the player ship, it’s all basic stuff, so it took me probably 10-20 minutes to do it.
I had a ship, now I need minerals for the player to collect. So I started with those basic ones like Dirt, Iron, Stone, Gold, Diamond, but I wanted to go a step further and I decided to search for the rarest minerals on Earth / Universe, and regarding that part of the game, it is as much as realistic as possible.
So I went to Paint.net (It’s basically MS Paint, but better) pressed the clouds effect button, and boom, mineral texture is done. All it would take is to change the base color of the material, some bump map strength and the minerals were all done.
Now, point of situation, I have a 3D ship, I have 3D textured minerals, all I need from the artistic point of view is some buildings so that the player can interact with the game. So, I did them on 3DS Max again, again pretty basic stuff, anyone with a few youtube tutorials could reach my modelling level, really.
From the artistic side, the game is done. Now let’s step into the programming world, my heaven. It was all straightforward to me, the gameplay elements are really basic too. The most challenging part of it all was to store the whole world. The whole word is composed of 25x1000 blocks. So if you had the whole world active, that’s 25000 blocks, a cube has 6 polys, so that’s 150000 (150 thousand) polygons being rendered at the same time. And yes, that’s a freaking lot. There had to be a way to make them disappear if they weren’t being seen by the player, and that’s where LOD comes in.
LOD stands for Level of Detail, it’s what every game uses to make heavy detail polys seem complete from a far distance, let’s say you are driving your car in GTA V, you can spot a plane in the distance, let’s say 20 miles, you know it’s a plane by its details, but as it’s in a distance, the game doesn’t need to render some details, like 100% the wing shape, or it being even 100% circular, because from that distance you can’t see those details, so the game detects that and replaces a fully detailed model, for a minecrafty version of it (of course GTA V won’t reduce it to a complete cubic model, but you get the idea). I applied this method, but with a twist, you can’t reduce much more polys on a cube… It’s a cube afterall.. 6 faces, not much to cut down, so why not make the cube disappear? That’s what I did, I detected the distance from the player to that cube (from the camera to the cube to be more precise) in a 2D space and compare it against a threshold and checks if the mineral should be rendered or not.
This helps a lot the rendering process as only the current chunk you are on, and the one on top of you and the one in the bottom are being rendered. Each chunk is 5 minerals deep so its a total of 25*15 which beats hands down the 25*1000 in rendered minerals.
I’ve worked on Planet Driller for about a month, in my free time. This means probably 2h maximum non stop work per day, not every day. I normally tell people, and it’s not that far from the truth, but I can’t be precise, that it took me a less than a week to make the whole game, if you put the hours into 8hr/day. Some say it’s a ridiculous amount of time (too short) to make anything good, I disagree. The game is nothing special, but it’s not due to the time it took me to make it. I have more than 4 years experience with the Unity engine and that backs me up on getting things done quickly and effectively. I know many games that took 2 years to make, with a team of more than 5 people that I would create in the same week I did Planet Driller, maybe even less hours. (With this I mean only the Gameplay part of the game, as it would take me probably lots of time to create something decent looking as I’m not an artist)
Now the fun part, Steam Greenlight. I applied for Greenlight with the only hope to get accepted. That was it, the game could be a major flop in sales, not even selling 1 unit for all I cared, I just wanted to get in Steam! The votes begin to rise a lot, I only advertised on Portuguese groups of gaming and game development, and with friends. The rank kept going higher and higher, and I was very happy for some of the comments being good. Most of the comments were bad, and I admit, the thought of giving up was in my mind the whole time, but I tried to focus more on the good comments, and friends’ support, and that kept me going.
A little while after the campaign started, I started getting steam friend requests and emails about promoting my game, I would pay them and they would promote my greenlight page hopefully getting me “yes” votes. I told them I didn’t have any money to offer, and they quickly deleted me. This apparently is a normal thing, lots of people approach you with this kind of offers. I don’t know if they are legit though.
Be careful with "keys for reviews" mails and PM's, some are legit, some are not, just be careful to whom you give keys.
From the intel I gathered, Steam approves greenlight games by batches every 15 days (2 weeks), and they normally approve every game that is close to top #100. My game was ranked #42 with more than 1500 yes votes, but the top #100 had slightly less than 500 and they got accepted too. If you get your game on Greenlight, don’t look at the “No” votes, they don’t matter at all, you can have 10000 yes votes and 10 Million No’s, you still getting in!
Before Planet Driller was accepted, I received some emails for advertising as I mentioned, but I received one that beated all of the others, a publisher’s interest in my game! I was so overwhelmed by this opportunity I couldn’t believe it was true. Every detail is being taken care of, and hopefully Planet Driller will be published by anyone other than myself.
Finally, I got the best email anyone could ever wish for: The “Welcome to Steam” email! My goal was complete, I did it. After all the years working on various games, I made it to Steam!
The next step was Steamworks Integrations, like trading cards, leaderboards and achievements. This was done using the Steamworks.NET wrapper for Unity that does all the heavy lifting and their documentation is pretty solid on all aspects, definitely recommend it!
I was planning releasing the game on July 5th, I ended up releasing it a day earlier because I couldn’t wait any longer. I launched the game with a 30% discount, at 1.39$ (normal price at 1.99$) and I started receiving lots of feedback that would later result in lots of updates and the expansion of the original concept idea.
Some questions I found out on the internet for post-mortems:
Are you proud of our finished deliverables? If yes, what made them great? If no, what was wrong or missing?
I’m very proud of it. It’s very simple, but the concept I wanted is all there.
Did we get the results we wanted and did it make impact?
The result I wanted was to get accepted on Steam Greenlight. I did, so everything from there on, is a bonus!
Which of our methods or processes worked particularly well?
Never giving up it’s the best method of work. I think it sounds vague, and it is, but I don’t have any process or method, I didn’t plan anything to be honest, I just did it from my head.
What else could we do better next time?
Probably the planning part, or developing more the idea so that people can have more gameplay and enjoy the game more.
What was the most gratifying or professionally satisfying part of the project?
Getting good feedback from the community, getting a Publisher offer and of course, getting accepted on STEAM!
Now, with over 1000 copies sold, I gotta say, I’m very happy with the result of what I’ve achieved. Couldn’t have made it without my friends support, I would say my family supported it, but they didn’t, but that’s okay, I was strong to continue after most people doubting me and trying to bring me down, and that’s the lesson here, DON’T GIVE UP. Even if EVERYONE, not even your close friends believe, you gotta do it, because the only person who needs to believe in you, is yourself!
Hope this post-mortem helps anyone in the same position I was.
Planet Driller wasn’t created as normal games are. Typically someone has an idea, they do a prototype / concept and they see if it's feasible. This didn’t happen with Planet Driller.
I started by playing with procedural world generation, learning how to make it in Unity and optimize it. I did this because I was always amazed by procedural stuff, that appear random but they aren’t really 100% random, they follow a set of rules to create a final seamless random “thing”. One example of this, is Minecraft. If it was 100% random, you probably wouldn’t have those well shaped worlds with different biomes that actually look realistic.
So after that, I thought this world generation thing was very cool and not that hard to pull off, so I decided to “remake” one of my favourite flash games back in the days, Motherload.
Motherload is a mining game where you must explore a planet, mine its resources, sell them, make some upgrades and reach the end of the world to face.. Something (not going to spoil it).
So I started it. Just a note, I’m all alone in this journey. The budget for this game was 0$ (if you don’t count the power and internet bills of course). I have some basic experience in 3DS Max which I used to create the 3D model for the player ship, it’s all basic stuff, so it took me probably 10-20 minutes to do it.
I had a ship, now I need minerals for the player to collect. So I started with those basic ones like Dirt, Iron, Stone, Gold, Diamond, but I wanted to go a step further and I decided to search for the rarest minerals on Earth / Universe, and regarding that part of the game, it is as much as realistic as possible.
So I went to Paint.net (It’s basically MS Paint, but better) pressed the clouds effect button, and boom, mineral texture is done. All it would take is to change the base color of the material, some bump map strength and the minerals were all done.
Now, point of situation, I have a 3D ship, I have 3D textured minerals, all I need from the artistic point of view is some buildings so that the player can interact with the game. So, I did them on 3DS Max again, again pretty basic stuff, anyone with a few youtube tutorials could reach my modelling level, really.
From the artistic side, the game is done. Now let’s step into the programming world, my heaven. It was all straightforward to me, the gameplay elements are really basic too. The most challenging part of it all was to store the whole world. The whole word is composed of 25x1000 blocks. So if you had the whole world active, that’s 25000 blocks, a cube has 6 polys, so that’s 150000 (150 thousand) polygons being rendered at the same time. And yes, that’s a freaking lot. There had to be a way to make them disappear if they weren’t being seen by the player, and that’s where LOD comes in.
LOD stands for Level of Detail, it’s what every game uses to make heavy detail polys seem complete from a far distance, let’s say you are driving your car in GTA V, you can spot a plane in the distance, let’s say 20 miles, you know it’s a plane by its details, but as it’s in a distance, the game doesn’t need to render some details, like 100% the wing shape, or it being even 100% circular, because from that distance you can’t see those details, so the game detects that and replaces a fully detailed model, for a minecrafty version of it (of course GTA V won’t reduce it to a complete cubic model, but you get the idea). I applied this method, but with a twist, you can’t reduce much more polys on a cube… It’s a cube afterall.. 6 faces, not much to cut down, so why not make the cube disappear? That’s what I did, I detected the distance from the player to that cube (from the camera to the cube to be more precise) in a 2D space and compare it against a threshold and checks if the mineral should be rendered or not.
This helps a lot the rendering process as only the current chunk you are on, and the one on top of you and the one in the bottom are being rendered. Each chunk is 5 minerals deep so its a total of 25*15 which beats hands down the 25*1000 in rendered minerals.
I’ve worked on Planet Driller for about a month, in my free time. This means probably 2h maximum non stop work per day, not every day. I normally tell people, and it’s not that far from the truth, but I can’t be precise, that it took me a less than a week to make the whole game, if you put the hours into 8hr/day. Some say it’s a ridiculous amount of time (too short) to make anything good, I disagree. The game is nothing special, but it’s not due to the time it took me to make it. I have more than 4 years experience with the Unity engine and that backs me up on getting things done quickly and effectively. I know many games that took 2 years to make, with a team of more than 5 people that I would create in the same week I did Planet Driller, maybe even less hours. (With this I mean only the Gameplay part of the game, as it would take me probably lots of time to create something decent looking as I’m not an artist)
Now the fun part, Steam Greenlight. I applied for Greenlight with the only hope to get accepted. That was it, the game could be a major flop in sales, not even selling 1 unit for all I cared, I just wanted to get in Steam! The votes begin to rise a lot, I only advertised on Portuguese groups of gaming and game development, and with friends. The rank kept going higher and higher, and I was very happy for some of the comments being good. Most of the comments were bad, and I admit, the thought of giving up was in my mind the whole time, but I tried to focus more on the good comments, and friends’ support, and that kept me going.
A little while after the campaign started, I started getting steam friend requests and emails about promoting my game, I would pay them and they would promote my greenlight page hopefully getting me “yes” votes. I told them I didn’t have any money to offer, and they quickly deleted me. This apparently is a normal thing, lots of people approach you with this kind of offers. I don’t know if they are legit though.
Be careful with "keys for reviews" mails and PM's, some are legit, some are not, just be careful to whom you give keys.
From the intel I gathered, Steam approves greenlight games by batches every 15 days (2 weeks), and they normally approve every game that is close to top #100. My game was ranked #42 with more than 1500 yes votes, but the top #100 had slightly less than 500 and they got accepted too. If you get your game on Greenlight, don’t look at the “No” votes, they don’t matter at all, you can have 10000 yes votes and 10 Million No’s, you still getting in!
Before Planet Driller was accepted, I received some emails for advertising as I mentioned, but I received one that beated all of the others, a publisher’s interest in my game! I was so overwhelmed by this opportunity I couldn’t believe it was true. Every detail is being taken care of, and hopefully Planet Driller will be published by anyone other than myself.
Finally, I got the best email anyone could ever wish for: The “Welcome to Steam” email! My goal was complete, I did it. After all the years working on various games, I made it to Steam!
The next step was Steamworks Integrations, like trading cards, leaderboards and achievements. This was done using the Steamworks.NET wrapper for Unity that does all the heavy lifting and their documentation is pretty solid on all aspects, definitely recommend it!
I was planning releasing the game on July 5th, I ended up releasing it a day earlier because I couldn’t wait any longer. I launched the game with a 30% discount, at 1.39$ (normal price at 1.99$) and I started receiving lots of feedback that would later result in lots of updates and the expansion of the original concept idea.
Some questions I found out on the internet for post-mortems:
Are you proud of our finished deliverables? If yes, what made them great? If no, what was wrong or missing?
I’m very proud of it. It’s very simple, but the concept I wanted is all there.
Did we get the results we wanted and did it make impact?
The result I wanted was to get accepted on Steam Greenlight. I did, so everything from there on, is a bonus!
Which of our methods or processes worked particularly well?
Never giving up it’s the best method of work. I think it sounds vague, and it is, but I don’t have any process or method, I didn’t plan anything to be honest, I just did it from my head.
What else could we do better next time?
Probably the planning part, or developing more the idea so that people can have more gameplay and enjoy the game more.
What was the most gratifying or professionally satisfying part of the project?
Getting good feedback from the community, getting a Publisher offer and of course, getting accepted on STEAM!
Now, with over 1000 copies sold, I gotta say, I’m very happy with the result of what I’ve achieved. Couldn’t have made it without my friends support, I would say my family supported it, but they didn’t, but that’s okay, I was strong to continue after most people doubting me and trying to bring me down, and that’s the lesson here, DON’T GIVE UP. Even if EVERYONE, not even your close friends believe, you gotta do it, because the only person who needs to believe in you, is yourself!
Hope this post-mortem helps anyone in the same position I was.
Wouldn't be here without your tutorials!
). 
So I can ... make... better games 
