So this week Steam announced (Blog) they would be replacing Greenlight with a fee based submission program. The fee could be anywhere between $100 and $5000. I am naturally a little concerned that although my game is already Greenlit they may decide to charge the fee for all games that have not gone live by the time they institute this change. I consider my game to be in a fairly niche market and was never expecting large sales. So a possible fee of $5000 would certainly block me from releasing on steam. Time will tell on this.
In the meantime I have been continuing to work as much as possible on my game and just today finished implementing artillery bombardment which is a feature of combat. This took longer than expected and wasn’t helped by me being undecided about how to implement it in the UI.
So how complete is the game? I almost have a two player (sharing a PC or someone solo playing) working completely from end to end. I believe I can get this finished in the next two weeks with some rough menus in place. The next really big item after that is AI… Once I have that conquered it would be polishing and final bug fixing before releasing the game. My target for all this is May – June 2017.
Big question for me is do I release an alpha version once I have a two player game working? I am still undecided on this. On the one hand I want some feedback on how things look now and any bugs that are found. On the other I don’t want to face a disastrous release of the game too soon due to too many bugs.
