Valve's Tom Giardino was at DevGAMM Seattle Summit 2017 to deliver a talk about Steam, as well as provide helpful insights and advice for developers who are distributing their games through the platform, or planning to do so in the future. The talk covered the replacement of Steam Greenlight, Steam Direct, a new system to publish games on Steam, trading card and gifting changes, Steam Curators update, and new upcoming features.

Here is a compilation of tweets from the conference.

DevGAMM - July 31, 2017 - 10:19 AM

Tom Giardino from Valve is opening a DevGAMM Summit with a keynote on Steam's Business Update.



italicpig - July 31, 2017 - 11:04 AM

Insight into localisation impact trends from Tom Giardino, Valve...



Exey - July 31, 2017 - 10:56 AM

Very cozy place and great speakers!



tiedtiger - July 31, 2017 - 10:15 AM

Steam has 67m MAU, 28m new customers since 2015, customers of both types buying more games.
Directly linked to diversity of content.

aNichiporchik - July 31, 2017 - 00:16 AM

Russia went down from 9% to 5% on Steam, but the overall numbers have grown.



aNichiporchik - July 31, 2017 - 10:16 AM

Regional localization is super important on Steam.

In Half-Life, everything is seen through the player's eyes, in first person view. But this wasn't always the case. The game was originally designed with third person cutscenes in mind.

During the development of the game, Valve was torn between using or removing cutscenes. In some cases, they couldn't figure out how to advance the story without them. They didn't have time and resources to do a good job with third person cinematics. These constraints forced them to make everything in first person. This gave the game its own unique identity.

For today's article, we remade one of the cutscenes using the leftover animations from the game. According to Marc Laidlaw, this sequence was to show Gordon Freeman being captured by the military from the view of a security camera. In the next scene, Gordon was to be seen being dragged to a trash compactor by soldiers.

Scenes

#1

Gordon Freeman gets captured by soldiers. Unfortunately, the last 33 frames of his animations are missing. Every other character's animations are 254 frames long.



#2

Gordon Freeman is seen being dragged to a trash compactor by soldiers. The same animation was included in Half-Life: Blue Shift but was left unused.



Facts

#1

Half-Life has a fully functional complex camera system that was created for the cutscenes. It was only used twice in the entire game. First, when Gordon is being dragged to a trash compactor by soldiers. Second, in the finale of the game, when the player accepts the G-Man's offer and steps into a teleporter.

#2

For cutscenes, they used a variant of monster_generic named monster_player, a generic character entity that uses Gordon Freeman model.

#3

The company wanted to use cutscenes for the tram ride, the disaster sequence and the finale.

Special thanks to Marc Laidlaw for answering my questions and Josh "Slartibarty" Dowell for recording the video.

In today's article, we're going to talk about Half-Life's lost feature, glowing textures. In Half-Life version 0.52, a pre-release build dated September 8, 1997, there are special types of textures that glow in the dark. These textures do not require another form of light to be lit up.

This is actually a more complex version of a technology that was present in id Software's Quake, the engine that Half-Life is based on. Unfortunately, this feature is only available in the software mode, which works if you set your computer's color depth to 16 bit from its display settings.

Half-Life uses 256 color images as textures. The last 32 colors, minus the last one, can be used as the glowing parts of the textures. In addition to this, the filenames must have the prefix used for either animated (+0~filename) or switchable textures (+a~filename). While this feature is not available in the final release of the game, the textures still carry the color data used for the glowing parts.

Example #1



Example #2



Special thanks to Tom Schumann for the help.

For today's article, we created a list of locations revisited in the Half-Life series.

...

Valve's Alden Kroll was at Indigo 2017 to talk about Steam and the changes they're working on. The talk covered the business side of Steam as well as some specific features available for game makers. The company wanted to meet developers face to face, answer questions, and hear feedback and suggestions as well.

Update #1

Here are the slides from the conference.











Original post

Here is a compilation of tweets from the conference.

dutchgamegarden - June 30, 2017 - 01:35 AM

We kick off Indigo 2017 with a Steam Business Update from Valve!



ElineMuijres - June 30, 2017 - 01:39 AM

Localization, especially in Asian languages, will up your sales on Steam.



ElineMuijres - June 30, 2017 - 01:52 AM

Great news: Steam is gonna make it easier for developers to verify Curators.



MaliceDaFirenze - June 30, 2017 - 01:52 AM

Steam will soon have a built in system to verify influencers are who they say they are & send keys.

TheRedStareVR - June 30, 2017 - 03:12 AM

This talk on updates to Steam is very promising! For developers, players and curators alike.