Post by redonihunter in Harmful Heaven, End of the World Visual Novel

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Two points to think about.

Good art does not sell by itself. Neither does it warrant a higher price. The opposite is also true. There is a certain correlation, but my opinion is, that this has more to do with overal quality. So you will have games that are "ugly" and sell like crazy and others that have "beautiful" art, but collect dust instead of paying customers. It is just not that important for indie games. People know what they are buying and what to expect.

The exception to this is eye candy. If your target audience plays for the nice pictures to look at and the cool music and responsiveness, then it is very important. Many mobile games operate on this basis. Colorful cheery flashy lights and baubles. Ever played Bejeweled?

And taking it a step further, there are text based games. https://itch.io/games/top-sellers/tag-text-based for examples.

So called pixel art and retro games are another matter. It is sometimes hard to tell good pixel art from bad pixel art, if the pixelation is too pixely or the retro is far too retro. Evil people might even say, that some devs just call their games retro pixel art, because it looks bad and they just pixeled it, so no one could tell ;-) (Not talking about your stuff, that's fine. At least it is a style and not just pixels for pixels' sake.)

The second thing is pricing. If someone is willing to pay 1 $ for your game, that someone probably would have payed 2 $ as well. Transaction fees for low prices suck. Also, if you make a sale, you will get next to nothing and some angry customers that cannot pay less than a Dollar anyways.

Of course I might be mistaken, there are many games priced at 1 $. Maybe there is something to it.

Also, if you make the game paid, you should include a demo version or a web playable version. Browser version is preferred, it lowers the hurdle for people to try out your game. That last one also goes for pay what you want.

Finally, this is itch. Do not wait till your game is finished to upload something. You talked about music and sound effects, that alone will probably put your game above many in terms of quality. The sound can make a big impact, if it fits the scene.

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Maidelen214 days ago(+1)

I know but, when people calls your art very low levels of quality, and they constantly say that I have to get standards in terms of art, I consider it a huge point to improve... Until I give up, honestly. I would like to be able to draw pixel-manga art for HH, but, I even have hard times for the basics. So I resort to rpg style sprites, that seems like doesn't look bad, everyone has say that it looks neat. That's the key thing.

There are even visual novels with backgrounds of real life places with filters, and portraits with a few expressions. And even like that they succeed, quality-commercially wise. Just talking of some part of the VN world, not everything. But the point is, the primordial stuff are in the text, and primarily text are like the opposite of stuff like Bejeweled. (Good game, but I prefer Zuma in that regard.)

You get confused, I was talking of the price of my near art commissions, not the game. Harmful Heaven is heavily amateur, and there are solo indie games better than this for free. So it would be like an insult to pay for this in it's current state. There's a way to this to be decent to be payed but, that way is not near. I have to use the most 'cards' possible for I to be able to succeed in this strange work, so putting this as free is crucial. As much at I desperate for money. But I'm gonna take some suggestion with the pricing of my art commissions.

And also, I really wanted to make a demo for this first, but I was heavily insisted that it was doing more harm ~~hahahahahahahaha you get it~~ than good. So is better that the full game, with it's two routes/storylines are there from the first submit, because it's very probable that the people that play the first incomplete version, will not come back when there's the full one. And, I'm gonna put more effort in the audiovisual then.

(I hope it's clear what parts answers to the respective parts)

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redonihunter214 days ago

and there are solo indie games better than this for free.

Pay what you want is popular on itch for a reason. People paying for games do not do it to have a bargain. Well, not for most indie games anyways. "better" is not an attribute that is applicable in my opinion. You just need to find people that would like what you do. Which is an incredibly hard task. And if your target audience is freeloaders to begin with, chances for donations go down.

I might be dead wrong, but my logic for releasing a work in progress, as soon at is somewhat playable, is this: you do near zero marketing. Anyone finding you or your stuff despite the lack of visibility cannot even check out if they would like what you do. They can't really have an eye on your progress. Indie game supporters like that. Evidence is all the successful unfinished games that do have a patreon. What you want to find is players that would like to see your project get finished. You will have a very hard time finding those, if you go public after it is done.

If you release a finished product, you do compete against all the finished free games. Also, you operate in a bubble. While there is danger of trolls and an even higher chance of getting no feedback at all, you also miss out on testing your game for a wider audience. And you can train and experimenting how to release a game, how to update it and so on.

Money wise, it might help if you do not think of payments for most indie games here as payments and buying a product. It is support for the developer. Itch could to a better job here and take the cake away from patreon, but pay what you want for a "free" game is essentially this concept. Bargain hunting is for Steam and more professional devs that sell minimum priced items.

Of course all that does not matter much for a hobby project and talk is cheap. The important thing is you should have fun making the game. Not even professionals can reliably go indie. I am talking about developers that have years of professinal training and worked in the business. Same for art students with a degree. Doing indipendent commissions for a living is a rarity.

If you do commissions and actually find customers for that, very well done.

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