As we are only a 2 man team, the game development has halted for a bit so that my brother can work on the trailer while I handle marketing. Marketing is basically my worst nightmare as there is no sense of achievement. No way to grasp if I am making progress. Something my brother won't even acknowledge exists (so he doesn't have to do it). It is such a dreaded task I always defer it as long as possible.
With our last game - Dog Fight - I basically gave up on any marketing shortly after release. The game was complete on release so only needed 1 or 2 quick patches so we found it hard to keep trying to stick our neck out to bring people to our steam page, and so after 1 or 2 hits with an axe to the neck one kind of retreats.
This time around we are following the Early Access model, aka games-as-a-service model, we will be continuing to develop going forwards and so will have stuff to show off and remind you all how cool Trains & Things is.
To that end, if you are a steam curator, game journalist or are involved in the games industry, marketing or game journalism you can contact us and make our lives a bit more bearable.
Do note that the game won't look as good as in the screenshots/trailer as we recently switched over to an experimental/work in progress branch (Vulkan branch, as mentioned in a previous post) of the engine we are using. It should be back up to spec hopefully by June.
For the trailer, it was mostly done and ready. But I noticed that when I moved my files to a new machine the kdenlive project fell apart. Unfortunately it seems kdenlive doesn't support relative paths very well. So after a bit of hacking around I found a simple solution was to render out the video clips I was using for the trailer, and use only them. This solved the issue with the proxy clips not being in sync also. We also looked at trying to record more footage for the trailer. We have been drawing footage from when the game was on the Godot 3 branch and in perfect condition. But since moving to Vulkan and loosing all Post Effects we canned that idea. Once Vulkan starts to look good again we will make another trailer showing off the other maps.
V0.1 Branched & Locked down
As we approach release, we have branched the master (aka development) branch into 0.1. This means 0.1 is basically locked down and complete and we have a week of testing. Only minor crash fixes or engine upgrades will make it into the first release from this point going forwards.
So far I have snuck in Bloom which reduz has just commited. I also added another game setting to help balance the game for PvP games. A supply/demand rate which can be used to bump up the rate at which resources are generated and the rate at which resources are converted from A to B. This was added as we have spent most of our time testing Cooperative games, and so set up the maps to be able to just scrap along and make a slim profit. Yet when we started playing some PvP games we found we were unable to gain a profit due to my brother stealing all my resources! As a result of his evil sabotage we both plummeted into inescapable debt!
Starting work on V0.2's primary features
With 0.1 locked down, and Marketing being a bit of a waiting game we have started some initial work on 0.2. I'll save what is in 0.2 until a future blog. We can't be giving you too many candies in one blog post after all can we?
And so, finally, we get to leave you with one of our own videos, the biggest candy of them all!
Remember to add us to your Steam Wishlist and to share the game with friends!
Build a logistics company from the ground up using trains, planes and automobiles in this real time multiplayer focused economic strategy game. Featuring Multiplayer via internet and LAN Real time economic strategy Manage a logistics company Build railways, airports and roads Transport numerous goods to meet supply and demand Custom map and mod support Media Head on over to the Trains & Things website to see some full sized screenshots. Connect with the community @bitshift we have been working hard on developing Trains & Things . We are wanting to open up our development to you, the public, so that you can stay in the loop and contribute. We want to form a community around our game, we want you to take what we make and modify it, add to it, have input in to it. So, follow us on Twitter or Facebook where we are currently posting monthly blogs. Or join us on our matrix channel #bitshift:matrix.org. Looking Forward
Today we have some exciting news! We are open-sourcing Trains & Things, as well as all our other projects. As many of you may have noticed, development of Trains & Things has crawled to a halt. A few things have contributed to this. Firstly, me and my brother (that is the whole bitshift team infact) have both recently got married so our free time to work on hobbies has been reduced significantly. Then we have been stuck waiting for Godot 4.0 (in particular GDScript 2.0) to become stable enough to use. As a result, we have decided to open up all our repositories to the public so that they might be able to finish what we likely cannot. Although we will possibly tinker on our projects from time to time we simply do not have the time we once had. The easiest way to find the repositories is to head to our website: http://bitshift.rf.gd/ Down in the footer you will see a link to GitHub and GitLab which will take you to view all the bitshift repositories. Our bigger repos are stored
Well, the Kickstarter is finally over and the results have been abysmal. We only had a hand full of backers, so thank you to those people. The Stats Lets look at some stats: In the last month, we have had about 1,400 people come to our Kickstarter page with only 12 people following through - a conversion rate of 0.857%. Reddit indicates that 43,800 people viewed our adverts, with 507 clicks - a conversion rate of 1.158%. Youtube indicates that 29,000 people viewed our adverts with only 29 clicks - a conversion rate of 0.1%. Twitter failed to even launch the advertising campaign and our attempts to reach out to them fell on deaf ears. Also our attempts to reach out to the gaming press also mostly fell on deaf ears with the exception of gaming on linux . From my research a conversion rate of about 1-2% is normal. What now? We have taken the last month to reflect and pester the press and twitter (with no luck). We lack the funding to be able to complete Trains & Th
