About a month ago I released my first real game, called Til The End Of Time, on Itch. I spent months working on the game and released it. I didn't check up on it for about a month, but when I did I found that the game had flopped big time. I didn't expect it get super popular or anything, but only 8 downloads over the course of a month was very bad. This was my fault, as I had done almost no promotion at all. Today, I decided to go poking around, and try and get my game analytics to look slightly more impressive. I remembered this website, where people can ask questions and share their games. I've had an account on this website for almost 2 years at this point, but since I want to keep all my stupid questions apart from my game releases, I decided to make a new account. Big thanks to anybody who decides to try my game, as I really appreciate it.

Til The End Of Time is a game about training a monkey to write a player-decided goal text on typewriter. You must strategically buy upgrades, feed the monkey, and accept or ignore offers to get your monkey to write your goal text. There are 16 achievements of varied difficulties and a decent amount of easter eggs to find in the game. There is also some fairly deep lore to find, but no so deep and convoluted that its annoying.

link to Itch page: https://poetic-manchild.itch.io/til-the-end-of-time

    I see that it's Windows-only, and requires downloading an .exe.

    Maybe that's why it's not popular.

    I use Linux, and would be hesitant to download an executable file even it were for Linux.

    Poetic_Manchild 8 downloads over the course of a month

    That's not unusual for itch.io, which has a huge quantity of published games.

        DaveTheCoder I had thought about that, but I don't own or have access to any apple or linux computers. I had a desktop that ran Linux Mint at one point, but it was very unreliable and it's broken now. I can compile Linux and MacOS builds at any time, but I would have no way of testing if they run properly, and I don't want to publish builds that don't work.

          • xyz

          • Post #6

          Poetic_Manchild but only 8 downloads over the course of a month was very bad

          Start with improving the visual appeal.

              xyz How so? Of the game itself or the Itch page? And what elements exactly need improving? I'm no graphic designer or artist, so I'm just not very good at identifying these sort of things.

                DaveTheCoder I Just compiled a build of the game for Linux. I have no idea if it will work, but you are welcome to test it, as it available for download on the Itch page now.

                  +1 for web export. This is what I will do to get people to play test my game as well. If you think about it your target audience (for .exe) is already a desktop user with internet so why not just have it on the web so they can just click and play.

                    Gowydot It's not that I'm against having a web export, but the game was programming and compiled in a .NET compatible version of Godot, which means it won't let me export to web. While the game doesn't use any C#, so I could technically just download the same version of Godot without .NET compatibility and compile the build from there, that feels like a lot of trouble for a game that I had already finished and released a month ago. I've moved on to my next project, and I don't have the will to continue fleshing out this game. I just saw the bad download count and wanted to do some easy late promotion. Also, the game does save information to drive (for achievements) and I'm not sure that functionality would carry over to web without me needing to do more work. I find it hard to continue working on projects that I've already deemed finished. The bad download count was a result of my poor and limited promotion, which is entirely my fault. This game shall be a lesson for myself in the future.

                    Man, I did not expect to write this much in a single reply.

                      @Poetic_Manchild Yea I was just sharing my opinion, no big deal if you moved on 🙂 . I am working on a game with focus on mobile android export but changed to web export because of that reason. You can get people to critique your game early on and adjust as you progress.

                        Gowydot Thank you for the feedback. My next game I will not make the same mistake