I paint Malta for a living. The election posters on the lamp posts, the casino signs in St Julian's, the billboards on the A1, the neon that bleeds into the puddles when the storm comes in. When we decided it was time to give LAWLESS a page on Steam, I thought: one weekend. We already have the island, we already have the trailer. Pick a few nice frames, put the logo on top, done.
That was almost a week ago. I'm still not done, and some days it honestly feels like getting the game into the store takes longer than making the game.
Thirteen rectangles
A Steam page isn't one picture. It's a stack of rectangles, and every one of them has its own size, its own rules and its own place where people will see it:
- Header capsule, 920 × 430: the top of the store page.
- Small capsule, 462 × 174: search results, lists, wishlists. Tiny, and probably the one most people see.
- Main capsule, 1232 × 706: the big carousel on the front page.
- Vertical capsule, 748 × 896: seasonal sales and spotlights.
- Page background, 1438 × 810.
- Library capsule (600 × 900), library header (920 × 430), library hero (3840 × 1240, no text allowed) and the library logo (1280 wide, transparent), for when the game is already yours.
- The shortcut icon, the app icon at 184 × 184, and two images for every news post and event.
You can't just scale one image down. A wide shot of Sliema's towers that looks epic at 920 pixels turns into a grey smear at 462. Each crop is its own composition: where the car sits, where the horizon sits, where the logo can go without covering the one interesting thing in the frame.
The small capsule hurt the most. At 462 × 174 the "MALTA 2050" line under the logo is unreadable, so it had to go. What's left is the wordmark, a few neon towers and the colours. That is the whole pitch, in a space smaller than a bus ticket.
The rules
Then come the rules, and they're good rules, but they take away all my usual tricks. The capsules may carry the game's name and nothing else: no quotes, no awards, no release date, no "wishlist now". The library hero may carry no text at all, because Steam puts the logo on top of it later, and the important part of the picture has to sit in the safe area in the middle, because every screen crops it differently. I re-cut the hero again and again until the skyline sat inside that yellow box and the logo had a quiet corner to live in.
No paint-over
We made one promise to ourselves: every image on the page comes out of the game's own renderer. No illustration, no paint-over, no upscaling. If it's on the store page, you'll see it when you play.
That sounds noble. In practice it means I can't fix a frame in an image editor. If a car is in the wrong place, the frame has to be rendered again. My laptop screen is only 2560 × 1600, so Annabele built a switch that makes the game render offscreen at true 4K, and a full pass over every candidate shot takes about 45 minutes. Then you look at the results, change the hour or the weather, and go again.
Some of my favourite moments in the game simply don't work as stills. A night storm flyover looks incredible in motion; frozen, it's murky, and one lightning strike turns the whole sea white. What sells is street level: neon in the rain, golden hour on limestone, a bright morning in Sliema.
In the end we picked 21 screenshots. And here's the next lesson: the first four show up when you hover over the game on Steam's front page, so they have to be suitable for all ages. All the shootouts, the rocket launcher on the pier, the club: to the back of the line. Our opening shot is a car chase in the rain with nobody getting hurt.
Five GIFs, 2.5 MB each
The store description can have animated images, and five short clips say more than five paragraphs. Each should stay under 2.5 MB, and the whole description should stay under 15 MB. Fitting a rainy night chase into 2.4 MB means choosing which raindrops survive. Ours add up to 11.4 MB, and every one of them has been re-encoded more often than I want to admit.
And then the words
The short description has 300 characters. Ours has 276, and every one of them has been argued over. Then 20 tags, in order of importance. A content survey that asks very precise questions about violence (in a crime game, the honest answers take a while). System requirements, which Phileas has to confirm on real minimum and recommended machines before we can put them online. And a release date, which for now is simply: Early 2027.
So, why does it feel longer than making the game?
Because making the game is the part we know. Swen can add a whole new district between breakfast and lunch. I spent a whole day on one rectangle of 462 × 174 pixels.
But I've learned something. These rectangles are the first thing most people will ever see of LAWLESS: a thumbnail in a list, between hundreds of others, for maybe half a second. Malta took us a long time to build. It deserves more than half a second.
When the page goes live, the link will be right here on the blog. Until then: thank you for reading, and if you want to tell us which screenshot should be number one, write to us at headcrash-games@pm.me.
Jasmin