Chuffed to bits

Rejected. The screen said hold a button. Testers didn't hold the button down long enough. Let the passive-aggressive post begin.

I'm not actually annoyed at that assessment. In fairness, the timer for that was set too high. Besides, I shouldn't ever use "hold button" for navigation. It's just easier to implement and I'm lazy on some of the uncommon player scenarios.

I am annoyed at reviewer number 2, who I came in afterwords, saw reviewer 1 asking whether it was an issue, marked as fail, and proceeded to write a quite condescending comment to me. Now I remember why I don't actually participate in online communities.

Mostly though, I'm annoyed with the process. It takes is two fails to be rejected. With only one, you're fine. I know one fail is fine because I failed a game, which showed up on the marketplace anyway (strangely, I failed for something described as one of the "Most common review failures". Really makes me wonder what other people tested...)

As near as I can tell, I can't really contest it. I would argue it's not a fail reason, but I can sort of see the arguments the other way. It doesn't really matter at this point.

The problem with failing is it delays the game a month. It's a week before I can re-post, and it will be in review longer. No one wants to review a game twice, especially when very little changes. This took two weeks, the next time will be longer.

I suppose in the interim, there are things I can do. I can add in some proper dialog and confirmation boxes in some places. A number of reviewers thought the game was too slow. It's already very streamlined for a tactical game. I suspect some of that may be down to expectations of the marketplace. I can speed some actions up here and there, and I can definitely include a go-faster button or menu option to speed it up more. I'll probably take another look at font choices and improve the pause menu since I have the time. I might also make a retro-manual for it.

Here, have an unrelated screenshot:

Back up for review

The 7 day timeout is up, and the game is back up for review. I was just going to do a simple change to make player specific save files, but ended up reworking a bunch of behind the scenes user account stuff. I'm glad I did, since I found and fixed one crash bug.

Now I wait. I'm not expecting this review process to go quickly.

Once a couple people review it, I figure I'll throw together a better promo video and do some amount of marketing. The extent of my marketing will probably consist of a couple emails to sites I follow that review indie games.

Breaking out past the usual indie audience is a lot like trying to get a record contract:
You hope some DJ (major gaming outlet) happens to come to your show (plays your game on a whim) and plays your record on air (writes a fabulous review). What generally happens is you beg and plead (send out hundreds of personalized press releases) to anyone and everyone who could possibly promote you (every 2-bit blogger with a pulse). And in the end, you don't make any money, but your mother tells you she's still proud of you (actually this bit might be exactly the same).

So yeah... If I sold enough copies to make back the XNA membership, pay for the music, and still have enough left over to buy a pizza, I'd be pretty chuffed.

Anyway, instead of marketing, I've already started in on a new project. I'll talk more about it later, but it's a puzzle/adventure platformer I initially designed a couple years back.