Blogs - hydra-interactive

Well, I recognize that we have not been updating for a while our blog at Indiedb, but I think that we have ac good excuse, as we have been working intensivly to prepare our upcoming Kickstarter campaign.

In order to be ready for an intensive month, in terms of communication and PR, he have been preparing a lot a of new materials, and planning carefully most of the steps that we will be performing as soon as we are live in the most successful crowd-funding platform.

We have basically two main objectives when going for the crowd-funding: 1) to be able to collect the funding that we need to keep developing the game to its conclusion at least in one or two of the platforms, and that will allow us from there to organically through the game sales to continue the development for other platforms (in case the game is liked): 2) To keep promoting the game and shoutout loud and clear to new audiences what an awesome game we have in our hands.

Planning for a kickstarter campaign is not an easy task, specially in a year where for the first time, the number and volume of kickstarter funding has been falling, part due to the failure of some projects in delivering the committed and part due to possible some tiredness of backers towards a lot of new projects almost in a daily basis. This makes, more crucial than ever, the need to get it right the first time and to be able to impact potential backers with the most vibrant and brilliant aspects of your game, directly into their hearts and get backing from the emotion.

30 days is a long time to prepare, and large list of actions, resources and materials to be delivered as to have the momentum rolling and the engagement with the community rising. But we think that it is no more complicated than creating a great game nowadays where lack of funding makes it harder to move games forward.

We will summarizing the process here in Indiedb, and we hope to have good news to share once we have gone through those incredible 30 days under the light of Kickstarter. Stay tune and gives us your support too, as without committed players and fellows developers we wouldn't be where we are currently.

It has been a fantastic ride since mid July we decided to take our game Upside-Down Dimensions to Steam Greenlight as a test, for the company and for the game, of being able to stand to the expectations of players and gather sufficient support from the steam community to be greenlit.

The answer has come today, as a surprise, through an email from Steam stating that the game had been greenlit and encouraging us to follow on with the process to make the game available to all players of the digital platform.

We thought that our game had the potential to become a great game (if correctly developed, which we think we will be able to do) but it always very hard to take validate that thoughts and insights with the players that will in the end decide or not to buy your game. So to see that he have received that trust from the community, and that the game is being eagerly waited makes us very pleased, and at the same time overwhelmed with the weight of the responsability of not letting down all the players that have awarded us with their positive feedback (negative and not now votes and feedbacks were very interesting and very pragmatic).

Now, new paths to new challenges await us, but we take with us the warm of thousands of hearts that love our game.

Well.

A little bit more than week since we have started the journey to greenlight our project Upside-Down Dimensions on steam Greenlight, and after the initial peak of traffic, more generated by the steam portal than really by the traction of the game, the pattern of traffic that we are now receiving is slightly better than the average projects in the queue, but moving very slowly.

Nether less, we are not very worried about, because our expectations were not focused in having a greenlght in a couple of hours of couple of days, but just to be there, to test the game capacity to be liked by players, to generate awareness for the game, and to start collect input and feedback about the game that will serve us well, as we move further in the development.

Until now, most the of the feedback, especially the critic ones, are in line with our own perception of the game, and we had already identified most of them, when playing the game our selves, and there so already made plans to fix it in further iterations of the game development, as to keep the overall quality of the game in the rank where we want it to be.

One thing that we have drawn from the public exposure of the game, is the possibility to check that a lot of people are thinking just like your about the game. When you work for a long time in a game, you start to get accommodated to what you are doing, and start either to think that you have the best game in world, or like in our case, you start to fail seeing those key attributes that made your loved the concept and plunge into a heroic journey to get a game into the market. So you need the external vision of people that have nether seen remembering you:"Hey that is great stuff ... This is really cool ..."

So I think that I certainly can say, that our personal objectives for greenlight are being achieved.

From a platform point o view, I think that greenlight fails to have mechanisms that allow developers to feed their promotion into the platform. Once the first peak of traffic has gone, and as you sink down out of the first landing pages, the traffic stops to flow, and it almost impossible to stabilize or to make it grow, because there is no direct relation between social or press resonance, and what is happening from a point of view of the traffic. This makes the tool very limited on the way it can serve the developers, and by the same way, the players that want to make great content.

I think that mechanisms like the ones we can found here in Indiedb and sister sites, could be a great addon to the steam platform as to allow developers to have some type of control with what happens to their games.

We still need your votes on steam to make the game a reality in the platform, so please vote us at our Steam Greenlight page.

Well as we approach the completion of the trailer we need to start thinking and exposing our next steps in the process of taking our game Upside-Down Dimensions forward into the market, and to achieve this goal, we are finally setting up the Steam Greenlight entry.

With this small step for the "humanity" of players but huge step for a small studio as Hydra Interactive Entertainment (HIE), we are hoping to finally put everything in motion in our path toward releasing the game over the first halff of 2015.

We have been fine tuning some aspects of the game, in terms of mechanics, animations, with a small rework of some elements of the game design that were not up to the level of the game. We think that the final results will make the game even better.

Stay tune for more information about this over the next days.

Hello All,

We are releasing the press release for our game Upside-Down Dimensions at Lnkd.in

Please share it among your contacts in the game industry as we are trying to make the exposure of he game grow as we think that its visuals and gameplay will make an unique gaming experience from players all over the world.

Thank you very much

Regards,

Daniel

We have upload a new set of two screenshots to show the progress on the game, although this week most of the work was put down on the work needed to create a trailer for the game.

A trailer that we want to be up to the level of the graphic quality and innovation of the game, and that can leverage in catching more attention and more curiosity from the players.

We think that we have some very interesting to work on, and we will be posting more information regarding it along the next days.

The Spanish press has featured the game in several medias, and we are now heading to the international one as to make the game to be noticed and build a strong community around it.

We have uploade yesterday a character sheet with a small set of the characters casted in our game Upside-Down Dimensions.
We have made our best in trying to create interesting characters with the limits of working with paper sheets, and that any of our characters could be build in papercraft or origami if needed.
This means that the character design process associated with it had to be changed and a new step to be introduced.
As always the first step was to design a first tryout of the character without following any specific restriction than being charismatic, attractive and colourful.
Once we achieved those goals, and doing turn arounds, we had to see if the charater could be converted into a paper model able to be made with paper, in which case, we would then moved on to the 3d Modelling, or if not directly to the drawing board again.

We are very happy with the results that we have achieved and we have some really cool and amazing enemis in the game that will unlock new game experiences.

Let me know if any question or if you want to know more about it.

Cheers.

We have uploaded two new screenshots to the media gallery.
This weeks was very intense, as we have started to be covered by the Spanish press, and which means that we have had to send out some press packages as to give further information on the game.

We have also been working in some parts of the game concept, as to start layering out a new part of the game level.

Developing an indie game in the current state of the games industry, is like looking over and over again, to the Forrest Gump's quote, while waiting at the bus stop.

" Life is a box of chocolates, Forrest. You never know what you're gonna get".

In this case, applied to videogames, you never know when your game will like or not to the audiences, r if you will be able to get the audience to know about your game, and you will basically alone in the "night" that an overcrowded market of videogames, can create around you and your game.

For now, the few screenshots that we have been showing have captured the imagination of players, and the game seems to be generating some curiousity on the mind of the players, so let's see how the adventure will unfold over the next days.

Well, If I am writing here in indiedb, it should mean that we have close a chapter in the life of our short life, and we are about to open a new one.

Until now, we have been working under the radar, avoiding any reference to us or to our work, avoiding any influence that could shift the course that we had defined when we decided to start this road into becoming an indie studio, and do we dreamed to do, without any interference.

Here we are now. We have reached the step, where we are now able to start to show the work of the last months with gamers around the world, and check if they like our work, the same way we have loved developing it, with them in the foreground of our minds.

End of Part 1. To be continued ...