u/hunty

I have a couple games up on Steam and just found out about Steam's DRM system today. As far as I understand, to apply it you have to use the steamworks web interface to upload your game's exe, wrap it in the DRM, and then download it and put it back. Or there's also an option to automate it as part of your steampipe pipeline, but you can't do it via SteamPipe GUI or MacPipe GUI.

So between devs just not knowing about it and it being a hassle to implement, is anyone actually using it?

From the cover image and the blurb, I was expecting something along the lines of TCM or Hostel.

But it wasn't that at all. In fact, I wouldn't even call it horror. It is interesting and impressive though, as a dreamlike art film all shot in one take with a looping plot, which is a unique and unconventional combination. (I'll have to add this to my list of "one-take" feature films.)

But the blurbs really makes it sound like it's something completely different:

On Kanopy:

>A group of attractive young Iranian kite-flying enthusiasts gather at a dismal lake, near a restaurant where two sinister characters are serving up grisly fare.

I mean, those are things that are in the movie, but that's not what the movie is about.

On JustWatch:

>A group of students travel to a remote region to participate in a kite-flying event. Next to their camp by the lakeside, they find a restaurant with cooks that treat the students with suspicion. Bizarre events lead to a complicated situation, from which the students cannot escape.

"Bizarre events lead to a complicated situation, from which the students cannot escape" is a big stretch, and definitely misleads viewers to expect something closer to a slasher movie.

and the cover / poster:

https://preview.redd.it/7cccjk6qzndh1.png?width=265&format=png&auto=webp&s=2a5240cc16182e4273a83a9a5e3c7e897e792a7c

I was kinda in the mood for straight-up horror, so I was disappointed with this, but if I was in the mood for something Tarkovsky-esque, this would've been a great choice.

I just finished watching Voces (aka Don't Listen) and I thought it was great.

It has a post-credits scene that teases the next movie, but the next movie never happened. Did it get killed by covid, or something else?

I have fond memories of smoking djarums in my gothy youth long long ago. I recently heard about djarum bliss, which are nicotine-free clove cigarettes, and I'm curious about them. But I haven't been able to find any. Are there any local stores that carry them? I've asked a whole bunch of smoke shops and 7-Elevens (I read elsewhere on Reddit that people were able to find them at 7-Eleven).

A mindless but decent movie, but I can't stop fixating on two "Chekhov’s misfires" (i.e. Chekhov's guns that are strongly telegraphed, and then aren't used).

The first Chekhov's gun is that >!Peyton shows up at the house, tells everyone he has an app that can track Evan, and then leaves. At the end of the movie, when Peyton is driving off with Evil Evan, I knew the ending was going to be that he checks his voicemails, hears the one from Evan, and then uses the app to discover that real Evan ('s body) was back at the house!<.

But then the credits rolled and I was very confused.

The second one is that Zoe is always taking pictures. >!Her camera gets broken, but then there's another camera later. When Evan does his websearch, it seems like it's saying that photographing the monster reveals it. But Zoe the Photographer taking a picture of the monster never happens!<.

This movie almost felt like watching a game where the player misses obvious hints and keeps doing the wrong thing.

Without those Chekhov’s misfires to fixate on I think I would've enjoyed it a lot more.

There are a lot of very small interactable things in Stay Out of the House (and some other Puppet Combo games) that are hard to select even with the mouse (I'm looking at you especially, vent screws). Although it certainly serves a great purpose by ramping up the fear as you try to do something precise while you never know when an enemy is gonna pop out at you.

On controller, though, which is notoriously way less precise than mouse (to the point that a lot of FPSes have aim-assist turned on by default on console), are these tiny interactions insanely difficult? Does zooming make it easier? Or are the hitboxes bigger?

Some curators have reached out to me asking for a copy of my game to feature on their curation page, and they give me a link to the curation page.

However, I don't see any way to go directly from that page to curator connect to send them copies. I know the normal way is to choose curator connect from my steam dashboard and look them up there, but there have been several times that, for some reason, I can't find them in the curator connect lookup. Or typing their name in curator connect lookup brings up a whole bunch of curators that aren't them, and I have to scroll way down and compare the icon shown to the icon on their curation page in order to find them.

Is there a better way to do this? Like some way to offer curators a copy of my game right from their curation page? Or use their curator ID to look them up instead of their name?

My vegetarian kid got some really good bean taquitos in Albuquerque, and we've been looking for some here with no luck. Does anyone know anywhere in SGV that has them? The only taquitos we've been able to find anywhere are ground beef and occasionally chicken.

Someone on here recommended MADS as a good example of a movie about the beginning of a zombie apocalypse, and I watched it last night. It was fun, and about 1/3 of the way in I finally noticed that it was all one cut! (with a few seamless cheats that I only noticed specifically because I was looking for them, and even then I'm not 100% sure they were cuts)

So it's fun, has a good plot, is about the start of a zombie apocalypse, and has a ton of REALLY impressive one-cut work including following three different characters, four different vehicles, and some great vfx.

I had no idea this was a one-cut going on, and I'm a fan of one cuts and long takes, like One-Cut of the Dead, and the long takes in I Am Cuba and Children of Men.

my screen looks like this in edit mode, with the timeline going all the way across the bottom of the screen, and the media pool in the top left:

https://preview.redd.it/bgrg8dgwdw6h1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=8bd222c5b09bb7e6034047cba8182af3642d2d6a

I'm setting up Davinci on my kid's computer, and it looks like this, with media pool taking up the full left side, and the timeline scrunched up:

https://preview.redd.it/5j16vnq9ew6h1.png?width=1920&format=png&auto=webp&s=30ef866356c6c6f27789e1831decce98255f41aa

how did I "fix" it on my computer to have the timeline all the way across the bottom? I can't figure out how to do it on my kid's computer.

I even tried exporting the layout on my computer and importing it on theirs, but for some reason the full-height media pool is still there.

I just finished Lorelei and the Laser Eyes yesterday, and one of the things that most stuck with me was the wonderful "SH / RE homage" faux PS1 game you play. The music, the sfx, the tank controls, the ambience, it's so perfect.

TLDR: No matter what I do, the only time I see appreciable upticks in my game's numbers is when steam promotes it. I expect to see another uptick during the summer sale, but I have zero idea how much that will be.

My game has had a steam page for a LONG time, and I've done some minor promotion off and on to try to improve my wishlists, which slowly crawled up to about 700 before NextFest. Half of those wishlists I got from doing "stealth NextFest", where I promoted my demo during the October NextFest without actually participating in it, so I could save my actual participation for the Feb one.

Leading up to NextFest, I ran reddit ads and facebook ads, and even though I talked to a reddit advertising agent and they said that my reddit CTR was exceptionally good, my wishlists over that month of paid advertising only went from 700 to 1,000. During NextFest I continued those campaigns, plus I reached out to 270 people over bluesky who had posted that they were playing NextFest games. Still, something like 90% of the traffic to my game's page during NextFest was internal to Steam (via the NextFest page). I went into NextFest with 1k wishlists, and ended it with 2k wishlists. So I got the typical "NextFest wishlist doubling", but I was expecting better results with all the paid advertising and direct contacting I was doing. And because players really enjoyed the demo, and the demo had an unusual number of positive reviews for just a demo.

I continued to run reddit ads and facebook ads leading up to launch, and I bought a pre-launch campaign on keymailer. The keymailer campaign, I think, helped the most out of anything -- primarily it helped build a community for the game, and wishlist-wise it gave me 1k more, which is pretty good, but that's a grand total of 3k wishlists which is a far cry from the 7k needed to have any visibility on steam at launch (I think I read that they recently changed it, but this launch was a month ago, before they changed it).

So my game debuted WAY down on page three of the New Releases list. But fortunately Steam does some promotion of games during the first 30 days of launch, and it was showing up in players' discover queues, so according to the charts 70% of traffic to my game's page was coming through discover queues. My wishlists also tripled during the first couple weeks after launch, and again all of that traffic was coming through discover queues.

I did another round of reddit ads during this period, and now that I was comparing CPC to actual sales rather than nebulous wishlists, my conversion cost was terrible, so I ended those ads.

So, the only times I saw spikes in wishlists were during NextFest and launch, both of which quickly fell afterwards. And I had decent launch sales (nowhere near what I was expecting from my wishlist size going into launch), which also quickly petered out, even during that first 30 days when Steam was promoting my game.

My sales are effectively zero now, but since paid reddit and fb ads have been ineffective there's no sense in doing more of those, and I also don't want to buy another keymailer campaign so soon after the last one. I am buying a keymailer campaign during the summer sale, and even without it I'd expect my sales to spike again, but I have absolutely no idea how much they'll spike; since launch, my 3k wishlists have gone up to over 11k, and my isthereanydeal stats say that the players they're tracking are waiting for a 20% discount, so I'm hopeful that the 25% discount I'm doing during the summer sale will help convert some of those wishlists. But -- here comes the refrain -- I have zero idea how many sales that will be. I also know that those wishlists won't factor into how much steam promotes my game during the sale, but hopefully the OK sales I've had will at least move me a little further up the algorithm's list.

Meanwhile, my game is extremely popular with those who have played it, with 100% positive from over 100 reviews, which puts it in "very positive" (for a few days it was "overwhelmingly positive" when the "recent reviews" was over 100, but the "recent reviews" have fallen off so now it's down to "very positive"). I actually have an inordinate number of ratings, to the point that my Boxleiter number is WAY higher than reality. I also have the unheard of stat that over 70% of players play for over 10 hours, which it apparently way above the average, and further suggests to me that it's a "good game" which is beloved by those who have found it and played it, but very few people are finding it.

As a side note, a week after I launched it, 4 different festivals that I'd never heard of (despite checking the pages that list upcoming festivals) announced their line-ups, and of course it was too late to get my game into any of them, despite it being a perfect fit for at least 3 of them. I've since applied to several other upcoming festivals for which the submission period is still open, but unfortunately those aren't happening until fall. I have no idea how much those festivals would've helped, but since devs most often mention festivals as the biggest source of interest in a game, I'm sure they would've at least helped a little.

I've also reached out to a ton of press and streamers via email, with no responses, although I'm sure my email is just getting lost in the deluge of spam they get constantly.

So there I am; with the experience that there's only movement on my game when The Eye of Steam falls upon it, with nothing I can do on my own even if I throw money at it, and with no way to calculate how numerically beneficial The Eye of Steam will be. And the next time The Eye of Steam will fall upon my game is during the summer sale, and there's nothing I can do about my flagging sales in the meantime but sit and wait, and nothing I can do about my steam summer sale numbers besides keep my fingers crossed.

And meanwhile I'm waiting with baited breath to see if my sales from this promotion are good enough to justify working full time on improvements to my game and working on the next game, or if it's time to get another day job.

I've also asked this on the game's discussions page, but I thought I might get a faster response here: is there any way to turn off the "glitchy flashing" screen effect for when Lorelei's eyes flash? It's seriously giving me a headache, and I can't imagine how bad it must be for someone with epilepsy.

I didn't see any options in the settings menu, or any mods for it.