Post-Launch Thoughts on Marketing, Analytics, and Game Design

26 Oct, 2023

I'm going to be talking about marketing reach, the conversion rate (analytics), and what I would recommend (but chose not to do this time) when making a game.

But first, here are some A M A Z I N G reviews I've received:

• "I would rate this game 5/5 but I don't have an itch.io account." 0/5 stars 👁️👄👁️
• "Maddie, you're not getting me to leave a review cause you'll know my itch.io porn account and judge my fetishes." 0/5 stars ✊🍆
• My partner: "Are you sure you want me to review it? I use my account for porn games--oh, it's fine? Okay!" 5/5 stars 💦

All in all, I think the game is doing well. I expected the download rate to die off immediately (within a day) but it's got a surprisingly long tail. Heck, it's still going! The conversion rate for views to downloads have hovered at almost exactly 10% and I'm currently at a 1% review rate. I.E. if 100 people click on my page, 10 people will download it, and 1 person will leave a 5/5 review.

It is far, far easier to get a follow from users than to get a review or a comment from them. 😞 Please leave a comment and a review on your favourite itch.io devs, it really helps.

Okay, so...things I would recommend other people do but I chose not to do.

Colour (and our unfortunate lack of it)

I approached The Good Weapon attempting to be as conservative in the budget as possible. Two reasons:

1. It's my first game, why am I spending a huge budget on it lmao
2. No, seriously, it's my first game. Why do anything else.

I know it was possible to do it without much art, but I felt a certain amount was required for immersion. I am incredibly lucky to have friends who were willing to go a little bit further. Regarding the level of detail, we settled on rough line drafts for the sprites and concept art thumbnails as the background.

Meaning, it was an intentional decision to use black and white and draw EYES only. (Please check out the sprite artist Rebecca; she's my good friend and rabbit careworker. She does commissions btw!

I'm very proud of what we did. It absolutely worked with the writing tone, and the stylistic choice I made early on in the planning phase really carried it well.

Did we realize early on that we had slapped ourselves into a difficult corner without full body coloured sprites and bright pastel backgrounds (for marketing)? Yeah, sure. But that would require a rework and, well--

Ask yourself? What's your end goal? Is it constant red notification bells in your itch.io dashboard? Are you doing this for praise?

Because as @hthrflwrs so succintly put it, external motivation cannot sustain you.

You have to make what you want to make. That's it. Yes, we want people to see it. We want some amount of feedback, but I would not sacrifice our vision for a few more clicks.

HOWEVER, if you are making something to earn money, then that's okay! Just be honest with yourself and know that you're activating Commercial Brain™. Heck, I do that a lot in my novel writing. I'm absolutely aware that I'm inserting certain tropes for my specific audience, but I'm not letting it take over. I'm still working in as much drama as possible, I'm still killing my darlings, and I'm not sacrificing the tone and mood of a scene just to squeeze in a dumb joke. (Joss Whedon's damage to Hollywood is immeasurable) (if I ever get famous I'm coming back and deleting this line before I get death threats)

On backgrounds, it was mood, mood, MOOD above all. I told Thaw--my background artist, good friend, and Anno 1800 fanatic--that I didn't care how he did it. I sent him all the reference pictures, sure, but I told him above all, you could draw stick figures for all I cared, as long as the dire tone of the story comes through. The sense of doom. The horrors and struggles the main character had to go through.

I think he did an amazing job. But I'm far more proud of these ones he did:

These ones really allowed me to push the general tone of a scene further. There's a constant fear with visual novel writing that I do -not- get when I write a novel. In a regular novel, I know the rhythmn of the reader. I know they're going to stay with me just a little bit longer so I can linger on a scene and really hammer in the mood. I can indulge just a little bit more.

With a visual novel, I am trimming all the excess fat since:

1. people can alt-tab out of my game
2. worse, people can just close my game
3. most people who are playing itch.io games have really short attention spans and I don't have full body sprites with EXPRESSION CHANGES

Now, I haven't played many visual novels. I've played like...Umineko once. (I don't even remember if I finished it. Maybe?) And I guess, I watched Doki Doki Literature Club on Youtube? Oh, and Necrobarista (written by my friend Damon).

Regardless, I know that being a first-time writer on itch.io--a platform notorious for being saturated with 'bad' games--I come into this scene with no authority at all. Not one bit. As such, people will drop my game in a heart beat.

So I had to use the most useful tool under my belt for visual novels: motion.

I would define motion as almost anything that changes on screen. If you slap on a regular page of text, that's a death sentence for your game. Where's the drama and the intrigue? You probably have 20~30 seconds worth of time before your reader closes your game. That's why people engage with sprites first or mood or music.

If you're going to take a single thing away from this article for making visual novels, just remember:

Make. Things. Move.

(I am assuming, of course, that you have GOOD WRITING as a foundation.)

Motion, then, is movement out of the ordinary. Or rather, it's anything that reminds your player that they're not reading a book--they're playing a game! So, a sprite jumping in excitement that accompanies the excited statement? Good. An expression change on the sprite? Even better. A background change? Whoa, now you're cooking, but be careful about your budget.

Thaw gave me multiple mockups of the same background and asked me, "Hey, which one do you think is best?"

I said, "ALL OF THEM."

Thaw: "Which flower version do you like?"

Me: "BOTH. GIVE ME BOTH."

And I literally just transitioned between the flowers during the scene, using it as a way to convey the mood of something beautiful/hopeful twisted and revealed as darker and sinister.

That's change. That's motion. It's the same way how JJ Abrams and Michael Bay just doesn't use static cameras. The characters are talking? Holy shit, let me spin this camera round because while we're dumping exposition, at least something dynamic is happening visually.

All of this is, of course, UTTER PAIN on the programming side. (I could not have done it without Ruqiyah's help @ub4q, so please check out her work. I've written some very nice notes on Amarantus before and it's very worthy of your time. The amount of love and care put into that game is insane.)

I hate programming. I don't even tolerate it--I have to actively force myself through it because programming is how you get all the cool shit without extra budget. You don't need more art! Just have the sprites dissolve in a cool and cinematic way. Tune every sentence to its maximum effect by checking the timing and position of its entry. There were quite a few sentences in which I manually lowered the display speed to give a slower, typewriter effect, and that was when I really wanted to emphasize the weight of the dialogue.

Other than having cool cut-ins and animated backgrounds for the art, setting the text at certain points to give a cinematic effect was my bread and butter. It drew the reader's eyes around the screen and highlighted certain transitions that were way better than just having the text run down the page.

Examples:

It shows better ingame, but that's the 'motion' I'm talking about. You're just tricking the reader into thinking they've got a high budget visual novel on their hands when all you're doing is smoke and mirrors with the same assets over and over again.

I know that it's hard to get our game discovered because our art isn't pretty like the other popular ones on itch.io. (Note our unfortunate lack of husbandos and waifus) But I'm extremely proud of the end result. I've been told my follow rate is incredibly high on itch.io. So long as they made it to the download page, that's hook, line, and sinker for me.

Marketing Blurb

So the writing on the itch.io page. Uhhhh...

I feel like I did something wrong. I don't know how to market here. I basically wrote it like a novel blurb?

But...like...oooh. People tell me it's a bit too long and some even mentioned it's not really representative of the game? That there's far more climactic power that I could've written about and that I didn't get in the whole philosophical argument--

I knew it had to be short. But I didn't know how short. I didn't know what my single "high-concept" premise was. I wrote it as, "Would you nuke the world to save it?" because I thought that was the punchiest I could reduce the premise down to, and while that DOES happen ingame, the main core of the visual novel is centered more around, "How do you use an evil weapon that turns you into a good person?"

Hence the title.

I don't really know what to do here. I have no other thoughts other than a general feeling of "I could've probably marketed the itch.io page better and gotten a higher conversion rate of views to downloads" but I literally don't know what I'd do differently.

So, yeah.

That's it! That's all my post-launch thoughts and everything that went into the design.

I hope you enjoyed the game, and I feel very privileged to have so much help and love!

The game is FREE and available here!

(On a final note, I wrote about the game, GUTLESS, that inspired me. This game would not have existed without that beautiful masterpiece made by haraiva and isyourguy. You can check out the post here.)

#gamedev