Making a game is hard, or so I’ve been told by those brave enough to give it a go. Mistakes happen, and sometimes your game just doesn’t work. That’s what happened to the developer behind Red Flag, a social deduction game about convincing your friends you’re fit to survive the apocalypse in a bunker with limited resources.
In a Reddit post last week (spotted by Automaton), the small, first-time team explains that it had unknowingly submitted a broken build of the game to Steam on the day of the deadline to get into June’s Next Fest. The review and approval process typically takes five to seven days, the developer explains, so it really was cutting it close.
“It was the weekend. [Steam] Partner Support doesn’t work weekends. We sent a desperate email to regular Steam Support, honestly just screaming into the void.”
Steam replied saying the build was sent for urgent review to, hopefully, get it into Next Fest in time. And a few hours later, viola, the Red Flag’s demo build had been approved.
“But there was a note: the reviewer couldn’t launch the game. We’d messed up the C++ redistributable setup (forgot to use the Steam common redist system, shipped local DLLs instead).”
Instead of rejecting the game and sending it back to the developers to fix (which almost certainly would’ve caused it to miss the deadline), Steam’s reviewer fixed the issue themselves.
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“Steam Support actually edited our configuration, sorted the dependencies, and approved the build so we wouldn’t miss the fest. We’ve now passed our first day of Next Fest, wishlists nearly doubled, and we’re actually meeting players in our own lobby. All because Steam Support went way above and beyond.”
Turns out, this is quite a common issue, with several other indie developers sharing similar experiences in the comments. “They did this for me on my first upload, too. Thought it was very cool.”, one commenter wrote. It’s apparently just a few clicks on Valve’s behalf to fix such an issue, but it no doubt saved a last-minute panic from the game’s creators.
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