Barony & The IGF

Last night I submitted my game, Barony, to the IGF to be judged alongside all the other up and coming indie games in the 2015 competition and frankly, I am now scared as fuck.

Over the past few weeks my team and I have been working on producing a new demo and I think we've managed to accomplish some really good things, but the game is still in alpha and I just don't know how I feel about the game at all anymore.

So for the sake of my sanity: would somebody please just tell me straight whether or not I've just wasted $100 on a submission fee for something I am way out of my league in? I mean, honestly, I can name more than one game from you guys that I would be embarrassed to even try competing against right now. In fact, if I can be even more honest: I don't even feel comfortable having had my game in open alpha for six months. I feel like people have gotten a bad taste of something I never wanted tasted in the first place.

Somebody tell me I'm not crazy.

I liked the Barony Version i played some times ago. I'll check it again as soon as i can find some time...
But yeah, i liked the game!

For real? Because when I look at it, my biggest worries are that other people ultimately think the game is just too derivative.

And I don't want to give the impression that I'm just begging for attention either, because I'm not. It's just, I dropped out of university a few days ago because I was working on this project so much that my grades were suffering badly, so I've got a lot hinging on this thing now personally, and I don't want it to just end up being a shitty mess that everyone just remembers as a shitty mess in the future. I want it to be good enough that the game can actually appeal to a majority of people on its own merits.

So on the one hand, it's super cool if you play the game and legitimately enjoy it, but if I'm asking for anything, it's just firsthand impressions. Like for example, anytime I demo the game to any sizable audience, there are inevitable comments that the game just looks like Minecraft, and that really bothers me because it makes me feel like it'll be passed over on account of that a lot. Even though it wasn't a concern for me at the beginning because I just wanted an art style that was functional for the kind of game I was making, I worry now that I made a fundamental error in not choosing a style to distinguish the game early on, and I just don't know what to think anymore.

I don't know - maybe I'm just overthinking all of this and I should just concentrate on making the best thing I can right now. But it's really hard for me to just throw a switch and dissipate all of these doubts immediately like that.

I thought alot of people like pixel-art design in general. Or was this maybe a hype a few years ago?

Anyway, I checked your game on indiedb and the initial reactions seem quite positive. I am personally biased cause I don't like pixel design in general so I can't give an usefull opnion on this.