SA’s Rooks Keep Steam Greenlight, hard lessons learned

SA game developer RuneStorm has been hard at work on its brutal action game, Rooks Keep, which has made it to Steam’s Greenlight program, and MyGaming caught up with the local developer to find out more about Rooks Keep’s progress on Valve’s platform.

Rooks Keep is an Unreal Engine-powered single and multiplayer deathmatch arena game, which is described as “Unreal Tournament with swords”, as it takes the traditional elements of multiplayer games, and cuts the head right off with some sheer brutality and gore.

Regarding the progress on Steam’s Greenlight program, Runestorm’s Arn Richert says that it’s a on-going process.

“It is quite slow, unfortunately,” said Richert. “It seems to be stuck in the ‘50%’ mire with many of the games on Greenlight that struggle to get promotion. It’s a far cry from our Viscera Cleanup Detail greenlight, which is going very well indeed.”

Richert was referring to the studio’s other game, Viscera Cleanup Detail, which takes a classic alien-invasion-kills-everything story, and tasks you with the job of not eradicating the aliens, but rather cleaning up their mess.

When asked about the challenges faced when putting together a successful Greenlight plan, Richert explained that the biggest hurdle is getting exposure.

“The challenge is getting people to look at the game. Trying to get eyes on Rooks Keep has been a battle. Getting it on Greenlight in the first place is really easy, but driving eyes to it is a challenge.”

Rooks Keep

With regards to Rooks Keep making a jump to platforms other than PC, Runestorm said that such versions aren’t in the pipeline.

“At this point in time, it’s unlikely. It is UDK [Unreal Developer’s Kit], so that rules out everything except PC, Mac and iPhone/iPad. But at this point it isn’t worth the time to port the game to those platforms”.

Richert also spoke about the community’s feedback to Rooks Keep, and how that has shaped the studio to focus on their next project.

“Some people have been quite enthusiastic, they enjoy it, but alas, sales are quite low, so it makes sense for us to focus on Viscera Cleanup right now,” said the dev.

“Rooks Keep taught us a bunch, and if it wasn’t for the hard lessons we wouldn’t have made Viscera Cleanup. Mostly it taught us how not to develop a game. We spent a long time on [Rooks Keep], we made risky design decisions that made it hard to market, and iteration times were long due to the nature of the mechanics of the game. We won’t be going into any 2.5 year development cycles again anytime soon” concluded Richert.

To find out more about Rooks Keep, check out the Steam Greenlight page and watch the trailer below.

RuneStorm has released the free alpha version of Viscera Cleanup Detail through IndieDB, so grab your mop and roll up your sleeves, this is gonna be one messy job.