It’s been a fair while, but my fractured arm has finally (mostly) healed itself.

I still have some minor trouble with my elbow’s range of motion, but I’m pretty much back to full productivity in terms of writing code and everything, so the project is finally moving again!

When last we talked, I was talking about prepping a Greenlight campaign for the game, and that’s still in the works;  the trailer video is really the only stumbling point.  (The image here is a screen from the current cut of the trailer)

The trouble I’ve run into with the trailer is that what I’ve built so far has been in the format of a release trailer;  it’s about 90 seconds long, it’s highly atmospheric, it tells a bit of a story, and so on.  The main problem with it is that it doesn’t really work for Greenlight;  on Greenlight you need something much shorter and punchier.  The marketing folks I’ve been speaking to recommend that a Greenlight trailer be somewhere in the 30-40 second range.  This means that I need to dramatically cut my trailer down.

Additionally, they correctly point out that I should assume the viewers’ audio is turned off, because Steam mutes trailer audio by default.  So I can still do the heavy audio + vocals I’d planned for the real game trailer;  I just can’t rely on it being listened to for the Greenlight trailer.

So I have a plan for the cut-down version of the trailer, and it shouldn’t take me too long to shoot 30-40 seconds of usable footage, particularly since I can salvage a lot of footage from the longer cut of the trailer.  I expect it’ll probably only take me a day or two of work.  (I’ll try to do that this weekend)  And once that’s done, I’ll send it off for music.  With any luck, Greenlight will happen in early March.

I’ll post about it here when it happens, of course!  And mail to the mailing list (to which you can subscribe from the MMORPG Tycoon 2 website, if you wish).  I haven’t yet sent a single mail to that list, so don’t worry if you’ve already signed up and haven’t received anything;  I expect the first mail will be a “get ready” mail to that list a couple days before the Greenlight campaign goes live, and then the proper announcement (and request for ‘yes’ votes) will happen immediately once the campaign has gone live.

Also, those who are signed up for alpha/beta testing, that’s a separate list which also hasn’t received any e-mails at all, yet.  So don’t worry if you haven’t heard anything!  That’ll turn on once we’ve gotten through Greenlight.

Thanks for your patience, everybody!  I don’t think this last six-seven weeks of broken-arm-related silence has been fun for any of us.  But stuff is at last starting to move again.  :)