I’m releasing my first Godot project on steam over the course of the next few months. Showcasing a demo at the upcoming Next-Fest in June.
Are there any known gotchas with the Godot engine that people know of that would be useful to tackle before releasing?
Also is there any general advice that those who have released media on Steam have around publishing?
I have the page up and running as linked below, as well as the demo page and all processes reviewed (I was very aware of their potentially long review times, especially around early access content).
For anyone else looking for advice, here’s what I’ve found so far with steam releases.
The review process takes a lot of time, especially if you go back and forth a few times. Each mistake you make can set you back about 5 days.
Make sure you’ve thought about marketing materials, steam store pages require numerous images to have the pages up and running.
Consider the description of your game and how you want your steam page to look to users.
Do some research on other steam pages, especially if you’re looking into early access to see the kind of things people answer the steam questionnaires with.
You can easily transfer your app to another steamworks account, just bare in mind that you will have to pay for a second credit on the account you’re transferring to before you can accept a transfer (if it’s a new account).
Once you’re past the initial review process and your page is uploaded, updates to your page are instant. Just edit and publish.
Most of all, give yourself plenty of time to work out the details, there’s a lot of information to fill in and think about, and this process will take time.
Small thing but make sure your game assets are encrypted! It’ll make it more challenging and difficult for people to just up and steal your assets and code! I wrote a small guide on how to easily do that.
There are a few tools out there which can easily open PCK files and get your entire project out of it. All your code, assets, sprites, images, models, fonts, audio files etc…
Encrypting your assets won’t make it impossible to get these back, but will make it a LOT more difficult, difficult enough where most people will not even bother trying.
Thanks for the heads-up! I’ve got a few ethical hacker friends who love digging into this kind of stuff. If I come across anything useful, I’ll be sure to share it with you.
This has nothing to do with ethical hacking though. If you make it easy for shady people to steal your entire game, they might just do that, and getting it taken down is a lot more difficult than one might think. I highly recommend reading into the post I linked above.
I think this happened to “That’s Not My Neighbor”, when I looked up the game I got a bunch of websites hosting a browser version of the game. It’s a paid game made in Godot that doesn’t have an official browser export, so I assume the those websites are just designed for ad revenue from children who can’t buy the game.
The point I was trying to make is that ANY game, regardless of what engine it was made in, can be the target of people / companies like that. If you don’t pay at least some attention to your assets being encrypted, as I mentioned above, you make the job of these scammers a lot easier, as it’s a lot less effort for them to take your whole game, code, assets etc… and just re-publish it under a different name and on a different storefront. It’s not a problem unique to Godot.
My guide explained it, that’s exactly what you need to use, but you cannot use that feature without compiling your own release template with your own custom encryption key. Godot does not provide that by default.
