First I’ll give you something of substance.

The posts I wrote last month (here and here) were somewhat laden with negativity – you could say legitimately – so I thought that for this offering I’d continue to talk about our gaming community and the relationship developers have with their audiences.  Most importantly, I’d like to highlight a couple of examples of those who are getting it right.  Or, at the very least – because no one can be perfect – who seem to be doing it better than others.

There are a lot of devs and publishers who have their plus points, and there are those that have their negatives.  Most have both, but some are more memorable for either one of these polar options.  For this post I’d like to look at the ones who are most famed for being a little bit awesome.

It being summer, those who know them will not be surprised that I’m going to bring up Valve.  During the Meet the Pyro update for Team Fortress 2, they announced the Source Filmmaker, and as the Summer Sale began, they announced Greenlight.

I jumped on Filmmaker and have quite enjoyed playing with it.  Here’s my one-and-only even-vaguely-close-to-finished short I made.  The tutorials started off simply enough but after a few of them, ‘Bay’ (our guide) seems to dispense with the explaining-it-to-a-layperson format and just starts blurting jargon at you left, right and centre.  Hence why I haven’t finished the tutorial video yet. (That and the fact I got distracted with my little Western-style showdown there.)

One other criticism at this point is that the Store Page (on Steam) for the Filmmaker has a list of minimum system requirements, but not all of these are accurate.  The page lists that you need a minimum resolution of 1366 x 768, which I had, but this creates problems with displaying all the necessary functions of the tool.  I had to bump up to the “suggested” 1920 x 1080 in order to get full functionality out of it.  But, hey, it’s free, it’s pretty fun and is a great way to get involved in the community.

Now, Greenlight is not something I expect to benefit from – as I’m not a developer – but I will definitely be checking it out from a voter’s perspective.  Here’s the basic premise: lots of games get submitted to Valve looking to be sold via Steam; they started to think maybe there was a better way of selecting games; having seen the success of the Workshop ratings system they thought of employing a similar thing for games; Greenlight allows developers to submit their games and be at the mercy of the community.  In theory, if the community likes your game(s), you get high ratings/votes, and your game gets to go to Steam and be sold through the client.

This is a brilliant opportunity for a lot of smalltime and bedroom developers to get recognition for their work, to build a fanbase and maybe make some money out of their work.  So, Steam users of BadRep, get behind this!  When it arrives, let’s make sure we show Valve this is a good tool to help out the smalltimers.

Competition Time!

In celebration of a variety of things (Valve being awesome, “summer”, I’ve been at BR Towers over a year now…) I thought a little gaming giveaway would be nice.  As BR is voluntary, this is me buying prizes for you guys, so given that I’m sure you’ll understand why this competition happens to follow the Steam Summer Sale.

Up for grabs:

• Torchlight – as mentioned June’s “…Playing” post.
• Bastion – also from June (see link above).
• LIMBO – recently part of Humble Bundle V (discussed here)

How to enter:

Leave a comment on this post (they do not automatically see the light of the internet so your details will only be seen by Team BadRep) and remember to include an email address linked to a Steam account or your Steam ID and which of the three games you’d prefer.

Early in August I’ll collect all the details, and using some funky random number generators to do some description of Name-out-of-the-Hat magic, I’ll then get in touch with winners to arrange the gifting of their new Steam game.

Simple as that, really.  Good luck!

But if you’re feeling generous, could you spare a couple of minutes to complete this little survey?