MkI public release

This week has been one of the most important since the begining of BOMB’s development; we have uploaded the final apha MkI version of the game on Desura (after a struggle with the releasing software).

This early access version is available now.

This version features:

The first 6 missions of the adventure mode
Skirmish mode (Player vs. AI enemies)
Dogfight multi-player game mode
Team Dogfight multi-player game mode

If you buy the game on Desura, you will be able to get it on Steam once it is available on it. If we want this to happen, we need to get a certain amount of votes on Greenlight.

Greenlight

By the way, let’s talk about Greenlight! This system is shit. Yes, it’s real shit! We love Valve at La Moustache but Greenlight is really clumsy.

To be precise, it is the selection system that is dubious. Nobody really knows how it works, but based on my own understanding, it is based on the project’s statistics analysis to get its position on the “Top”. There is the Top 10, Top 50, and so on…

The analysis algorithm is very weirdly designed.

E.g. currently BOMB has 6400 “Yes”, after a little more than a year on Greenlight. But we have only 80% of the Top 100 votes.

What I’ve understood from others who’ve spoken about their projects, a game that has, let’s say, 50 “Yes”votes in a week will be in the Top 50, putting it way ahead ours.

Briefly, it seems like the position in the Top is determined by this formula: number of “Yes” votes / number of days of presence.

It is really unfair, because a game that is not validated in the following months, even weeks of a project announcement, has virtually no chance to be accepted on Steam.

Our only way to appear in the Top 100 now would be to get more than 1000 “Yes” votes in a few days.

As the Greenlight user interface doesn’t allow you to sort projects by popularity or by number of votes, but only by chronological order, the only way to get them is to obtain a lot of popularity in a short time window.

Press contact

We are currently trying to get us talked about in the specialized press. A big part of the week has consisted in emailing the different websites.

None of us is really a “pro” of this PR domain, so in order to get the journalists try and talk about our game, we send everyone a gift key with a pitch.

It is already starting to pay off with this fresh article from RockPaperShotgun.

MkII progress

MkI being released, we are now focusing on MkII development, put aside the time spent on the above duty.

The second cockpit of the game has improved greatly, I’m texturing and adding details on it. I’ve had a great time implementing a collimator, reminding me high school optical courses.

Since this cockpit – a real figher one – is present ingame, I enjoy doing quick dogfights in internal view with the Track-IR, even if the fluorescent tubes in our premises force me to adopt a very uncomfortable posture to avoid it to behave crazy.

Thanks for reading and see you next week!