Steam Greenlight and a brief status update

Last week, Valve brought us some big news regarding Steam Greenlight: they’re planning on getting rid of Greenlight “in the next few months” to make way for a new system called Steam Direct. Personally I think Direct seems like a reasonable move to fight the waves of shovelware that have been pouring through Greenlight for the past few years, but it will also most likely have a major impact on small indie devs like me. Developers will be required to pay a fixed fee for each game they submit through Steam Direct, and while the fee apparently hasn’t been set in stone yet, there have been discussions of a price from $100 to as high as $5000. If they end up going with a fee at the higher end of the spectrum, it will be a major setback to Barotrauma and my meager student budget. So, I thought it might be a good idea to try and get the game greenlit while it’s still possible!

Tl;dr: Barotrauma is now on Steam Greenlight!

In other news, despite the recent lack of updates we’ve made quite a bit of progress with Barotrauma. We’ve mostly been focusing on rewriting the networking code from pretty much scratch in order to get the multiplayer smoother and less vulnerable to hackers and fix to the desync issues the game’s been experiencing since the very first versions. The netcode is starting to be in a pretty good shape: less desync, less teleporting characters, proper authoritative servers and all in all everything is much more robust. We’ve still got a few features to reimplement, some issues to iron out and a lot of testing ahead of us, but we’re not that far away from being able to release at least a test version of some sort.

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10 comments

  1. I think this is a good change, although brtma needs work it is just fine to get into greenlight before it’s too late.

    Especially without the reinforcement of kickstarter or development funding(which is a hint, you should probably do something like that), you never know what will cost what on steam. Worst case scenario it’ll get denied, but i’m sure it’ll be accepted and probably thrown into early-access paid.

    I look forward to seeing brtma on steam, just hope that the rest of steam’s community does too.(lots of hate on early access lately)

    1. I guess I should’ve made this clearer on the Greenlight page, but the plan is to keep the alpha/beta versions of the game free and wait until the game is finished (or at least very close to finished) before the Steam release and putting on a price tag. So this Greenlight campaign doesn’t change much from the players’ perspective, it’s mostly just a way for us to ensure that we’ll be able to release the game on Steam eventually. Once the game is greenlit we’ll also get an Steam App ID and can start integrating some Steam features into the game.

  2. Just an FYI, whenever I try and access your Steam Greenlight page, nothing loads and the page essentially locks up. It is preventing me from voting on your game. Not sure if a Steam or dev issue, but wanted to give a heads up anyways.

  3. Hey, I just found this game through the /r/ss13 channel. As someone who loves SS13 and lovecraftian horror, I gave it a shot last night, and I am super excited about the potential this game holds. Keep up your work!

  4. Hey, been a fan of the game since oct 15′ and still loving it, phenomenal work!

    Unfortunately, sometime around v.2.0 my performance heavily dropped. I’m only getting upwards of 10 or so FPS, which is strange because before I’d average 35 (60 with the sub power off). Would this be due to changes in the lighting system, or the new physics thing that controls your character? Any way to toggle this stuff?

    Thanks for any reply

  5. This game is a blast and I hope you keep developing it! Definitely hit it up on Greenlight and the alpha thing is an absolute blast with a bunch of friends.

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