august not-a-postcard in the process of being sent, plus news...!

2021/8/30 update: all emails should be sent by now so please let me know if you didn't get one! 

hello! i'm sending out august postcards a bit early & in batches because gmail only lets me use mail merge on 100 emails every 24 hours... so some of you reading this post will have to wait 24 more hours before the email reaches you, sorry!!!

this month's postcard is not a postcard in the strictest definition of the term because actually, it's a steam code! for A YEAR OF SPRINGS! which i will be releasing on steam!!! << this is news 1

the game will be paid on steam as well but you all get a free code as thanks for your support. i'd love it if you wishlist the game before it's out to help get more people to see the game & leave a review when the game is available to share your thoughts! (i'll share the steam page when it's actually up since it's not up yet)

now, first to explain - i've said before i'm not interested in releasing the game on steam & honestly i'm still not... but i had to because it was the only platform that i could publish on that tokyo game show would allow me to share a demo for & A YEAR OF SPRINGS got accepted to the tokyo game show 2021 online indie exhibit so i needed something to submit for that << this is news 2 

the steam codes (to my knowledge) should be available to use now but it won't unlock the game for download until the game actually comes out at the end of september! i hope you will all enjoy the game again though.

i've had a loooot of trouble putting all of this together for the past months or so & will be glad when this is finally over! this is the sep/oct thing i've been working towards to for the past little while.

below i will talk about the process, but warning: it was really annoying to deal with so a lot of it will sound very complain-y 🙇

(you were warned!)

so first off, i will say that actually the steam registration process was much less annoying than tokyo game show was because i'd already done the most annoying bits when i needed to set up for one night, hot springs (so i already had my tax docs & bank info registered & everything). 

as usual though steam requires waaaaay too many graphics just for registering to the store - itch.io requires no images but recommends you have one - a cover image - as well as screenshots. steam requires over a dozen different images & you are forced to have a trailer as well. 

tgs however is ... honestly i'm not sure this is all worth it at this point because it has been a lot of hassle & i don't feel confident that the online event will actually go well, considering what a mess the submission process was haha.

things i'd like to complain about in no particular order:

• they had a zoom meeting to explain how the process would work, which is fine! but they had over 200 participants & did not have people muted/camera off automatically, which was not. also it was just a bunch of us watching a powerpoint presentation with no other interaction on the viewers' part so there was no real benefit in 200 people watching this thing live instead of just ... letting us view a video (or just READ THE POWERPOINT) on our own time
• the emails are from like three different places and some of the emails aren't even sent from secure servers so gmail keeps telling me replying to the emails is unsafe
• to sign up for their website you had to access it within 24 hours of a temporary password being sent to you or else the password would become invalid and you would have to contact a real person to get your account fixed up
• they asked for a trailer submission with only a day's notice with a bunch of specifications so i had to rush to make a new trailer for them to showcase (actually i would have liked this information in the like two hours long zoom meeting instead of a powerpoint but it is what it is)
• for the website with the temporary password timebomb email after you sign up it gives you access to a 136-page manual to explain how to use the website which is a) way too much text to explain how to use website & b) terrible because the information in it was wrong half the time & it didn't even have resolutions for the images we were supposed to upload to the website
• incidentally they also provided a shorter 128-page manual in english like two weeks after the japanese one but on the website when they have page numbers listed for referring to stuff (because they want you to refer to the manual for more info instead of i don't know putting it on the website...) they only list one page number which matches the japanese manual, so i guess anybody who actually can only use the english manual is out of luck...
• the website also did not specify resolutions for the images (so i don't know how the banner for A YEAR OF SPRINGS will look when the site actually goes up, it might be terrible & stretched out) but it also did not let us check what the images would look like & it also specified on the site that after you uploaded the image there was no changing it afterwards, so well hopefully it isn't terrible
• the submission process was incredibly convoluted using a mixture of google forms, spreadsheets uploaded through emails & websites, all sent to different emails (WHY) 
• when submitting info for my game i actually was physically incapable of submitting my form at first because there was a mandatory tag section but A YEAR OF SPRINGS did not fit under any of them (a year of springs is neither an official tgs program, part of the amazon exhibit, part of the in-person exhibit, part of the online tour*, a vr game, part of the music festival, a business seminar, a gift campaign, esports, voice actors, or for kids/family. i had to email a real person & get them to make the section not mandatory which just makes me think they did absolutely no testing of their website
• another thing that makes me think they did not testing is they allowed me access to sections of the website i really should not have had access to... 
• another fun thing about their website form is that, while normally, you'd think that forms would be written like so:
  
  name: __
  title: ___
  platforms: ___
  &c.
  
  with text next to the form entry space so that you know what each cell is for, right? but tgs does not do this. instead they did:
  
  1-a name
  1-b title
  1-c platforms
  &c.
  
  _____ 1-a
  _____ 1-b
  _____ 1-c
  
  where for some reason i have absolutely no idea of they thought it would be a great idea to have all the form text explanations at the very top of the page & then just have numbers next to the form cells, so that you have to scroll up & down every time to check what each cell is for before actually inputting into the cell
• also yeah so tgs is doing online tours of the exhibit through a travel agency or something & i just want to complain about this because if they're using money on this really weird thing they could have hired somebody to at least specify image resolutions on their website instead & be better at writing forms
• back to complaining about the forms, as an example of the wrong information they had in their 136-page manual, it said i had 500 characters for the game summary in japanese, but when i pasted in the summary on the website, my under-500-character summary was said to be way over. after some testing i figured out that the website was for some reason counting every japanese character (double-byte character) as 2 characters instead so i had to cut down my summary by half - but actually even while the site said i had 4 characters of space left in my summary, when i tried to submit it STILL said i was over, so in the end my summary is only like 200 characters long out of the supposed 500 characters i was allowed
• the form also said that if you clicked a button to save your progress you would be able to come back to the form later, but this didn't work so i had my progress completely wiped once, which was incredibly frustrating
• the form on the website had a very long terms of service thing that appeared at the top of the screen with a confirm button at the bottom of it, with the form after, & while to any regular user you might think that the 'confirm' button referred to confirming that you agreed to the terms of the service of the form, what it actually meant was that you were going to submit the form, at which point the window would refresh & show an error message since you didn't fill out the mandatory cells (obviously, because you can't even see the form on screen since it's filled with the terms of service...) but you also can't see the error message because you can only see up to the 'confirm' button on the screen and have to scroll down to see the error... i pressed confirm a couple of times before i realised what the button was actually doing
• this is such a small, small, small complaint but there is also a meeting service for tgs & for some reason when the email was sent to me from it to sign up (from a different service provider again) i was addressed as N/A N/A & i was like... who is this is this spam? but no, it wasn't! it seems that everyone was signed up to the website by default as N/A N/A first because for the user signup first/last names are necessary & i think tgs couldn't think of any other idea to deal with the name slots when signing people up so everyone was just named N/A N/A...
• another thing is when i contacted them by email (because you can't get anything done through the site without actually contacting a real person apparently) about some weird display issues for the official site, i was told that these were intentional & would not be fixed, so if there's some weird looking stuff on my exhibitor's page, please know that i have nothing to do with it & it's all tgs...
• they also shared a zip file with tgs logos so you could use the logos to promote tgs but the logos are all saved in one pdf file so you can't actually extract any of the images - i had been thinking about including the logo on a banner when announcing that a year of springs would be in tgs but this was too much effort so i gave up

this is all i can think of at the time of writing this post but i think i had a lot more to complain about... just thinking about it is making me more annoyed again so i'm going to stop here haha. (i warned you! i have a lot of complaints!)

that said i am still happy to be able to participate in an event since it's the first time i'm showing a game at an event (even though it's online) so i hope it'll help the game reach more people.

i will be glad when all of this is settled but in the meantime i hope you all enjoy your steam codes!