Post by redonihunter in I have a problem with promote my game

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Yes, my game is good, you can have fun

I did not have fun. It made a bad impression, and that got worse. I tried for like two minutes, but there was no fun emerging.

It started with the ultra high pixelated "story" that has no information value, so the character could have just been a jumping square. Controls are made for two hands, but could have been for one hand. Why return and wasd? Why not space?

The collision detection is quite bad. You die. A lot. We do not have 1985. And even then those games had something like lives or health bars. Insane difficulty does not equal fun. You swing your stick or whatever and if you are anywhere near the enemy pixels, you die. Unless you swung it before at the right moment.

There is no check point and you start again and again from the start.

Did you let anyone try the game? What did they say? And were they pixel platformer enthusiasts with a preference for unforgiving hard difficulty? Because only those type of players might think your game is good or fun.

You should try to market your game to those. But there are just so many games in that genre, 30000 on itch. Maybe get inspiration from your favorites for things you could improve.

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KittyCreamPuff1 year ago

But does my game have any chance or is it just a pure waste, I migrated from Unity to Gdevelop to facilitate development, sorry if my game is a pure waste of your time

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redonihunter1 year ago

Any chance for what? I dislike platformers, I dislike (extreme) pixel graphics, I might be quite far from your intended target audience.

But after looking at your gamejolt page, I can tell, you should definitivly work on the first few minutes of the game. People might give up, before seeing all the cool stuff. Imagine someone playing this for the first time. They do not know what is to come. People need to get invested, before you can punish them. And do not count on people watching any videos linked on different platforms. If it ain't an animated gif onpage, people like me will not see it.

There are near a million games on itch. People trying out games will give you a quick glance, maybe a minute of playtime if it is web and then move on if they disliked it.

What put me off at the beginning was the controls and especially the collision detection. That seems to be too sensitive. I am dead and on the condescending screen, even before I touch the enemy. Oh and on second try, it would have been nice to know that there is triple jump. Or that the space key also is jump. But attack on return is still awkard for my hands.

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KittyCreamPuff1 year ago

Okay, thanks for the feedback, just because of that, my game is mediocre?

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KittyCreamPuff1 year ago

I understand the gitchs, but I always say: my game is in Non-FullMODE, that is, version under development

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redonihunter1 year ago

Mediocre on what scale? For your game to be in the middle or elsewhere on that scale, you would have to establish what is an excellent game and what is supposed to be a horrible game.

What is your competition?

You can find an arbitrary set of criteria to select the games and rank them.

https://itch.io/games/genre-platformer/platform-web/tag-arcade/tag-cute/tag-pixe...

Bam. 120+ games in that one. And your game is on page 1 / 4. It must be quite good then.

On that list below you are even on place #1.

https://itch.io/games/genre-platformer/last-30-days/platform-web/tag-arcade/tag-...

Unfortuantely, those lists only told what itch thinks is "popular" and recently so, not what players thought about those games. One can deduce that, after the games were around for a while and enough people rated them, but as you can tell from experience, that part is hard. Actually it is the topic of the thread here.

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KittyCreamPuff1 year ago

Thanks for your help, but it's a bad idea to start a conversation saying that my game is mediocre just because you didn't like the genre, anyway, I didn't really understand the point of the conversation or what you were getting at with this dialogue, but that's okay, I know my game needs to improve by the end. thank you very much for the feed

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redonihunter1 year ago

Maybe this is a language thing, but I do not remember claiming your game was mediocre.

If I were to rate your game, it would be 1/5. But I do not rate games I would not play. And I believe I made clear, that I dislike platformers and extreme pixel graphics.

For all I know your game is 5/5, but it has to be viewed in comparison to similar titles.

It started with you claiming this: "Yes, my game is good, you can have fun".

To which I replied: "I did not have fun"

If you blanket advertise your game, you should consider to whom you advertise. If you advertise to the general public, you might encounter people like me, that do not have fun playing such platformer games like your's.

And according to my little research on itch, you will have it extra hard, because if you narrow it down to the tag list I linked, so it is only a few hundred games, most of those games have less than 10 ratings. That part of the genre is not very popular. Half of them have 0 ratings. And if you use less tags, most games drown in obscurity among the 130000 platformer games on itch. Only 30000 of them seem to have more than 0 ratings.

So if you want qualified opinions about your game, you should ask pixel graphic platformer enthusiasts. They will tell you if they think your game is good or mediocre. Those are also the people you should advertise to, if you can.

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16bitnights1 year ago(+1)

FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!

Long story short, platformers sell hard, even amazing platformers sell hard(check out MoonScars).

The Indie Game Dev industry sounds romantic but it's cold and hard most of times.

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redonihunter1 year ago

Well, many games here are more fun to make for the creator than they are fun for players to play. It is nice to have a creative hobby, but the competition is vast and player budget is limited. Indie games excel at genres and topics seldom used in AAA games. A reason why horror is so popular (on itch). The early professional games were often platformers, so there is a plethora of polished and established platformers. New platformers are measured in view of them. And technologically, if a game is basically simpler than early Mario, it is not gonna impress people all that much. You could try story, or appeal to some retro enthusiasts, but that is a small market.

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