I have spent the last two months building a game (Work Life) to submit for the Gameboy Advance 2024 Jam (entries). I released and submit my game two days before the deadline of the jam. I checked the stats page multiple times per day since releasing to see how it was doing. I think every developer wants to know "oh, how successful is my game?" especially if you've spent more than a week on it.
"Work Life" is my first 'real' game. I had bought RPGMaker 2003 sometime last year and built a portion of an RPG game (sprites, dialog, maps) and had come to learn mainly how difficult the art was for a game like that (given that I had no previous art experience). I had used EasyRPG to deploy this game to the web as RPGMaker 2003 does not come with a default way to do this (after all, there are several RPGMaker releases that supersede the 2003 release). I had kept the game private for some time as I wasn't sure if it violated some agreement though I seriously doubt the enforcement of legal agreements against half-baked games using a bespoke toolset from 20+ years ago.
I really didn't put any effort into the "release" of the game as it was mostly an unfinished side project. I took a screenshot of one part of the map and used that for the cover image. I would consider this game mostly "garbage" from the itch Browse tab: no name in the , "test" in the title, lackluster game page besides the controls, only one screenshot. Basically, this represents a game that is easy to ignore.
Why is this game important? when we start to look at the stats for "Work Life", you'll see how for both games (unpolished vs polished) the views in the game are dominated by "recent" activity:
| Time | views | plays |
| First Week | 23 | 6 |
| All time after first week | 21 | 0 |
stat summary:
Near the end of the jam, I could feel my energy and enthusiasm for the project begin to dwindle. I knew I was in the home stretch but I was very aware of the "Return on investment" of fixing various parts of the game (like adding more daily stories or playtesting and fixing more of the dialog). I still tried to put in some effort to make the page look pretty good but I didn't really consider much about how people might find my game. I really just cared about "finishing" it. When the release time came, I added three tags: "dating sim", "gameboy advance", and "visual novel". I also set the Genre as "Visual Novel." I figured this was good enough as it accurately and honestly reflected my game.
I checked the stats for a day and I was extremely excited to see people view and play it. It "clicked" the following day after seeing the "https://itch.io/games/newest/tag-dating-sim" in the referrer analytics section that the majority of my traffic would be from the "New" or the "New and Popular" sections. If I wanted to increase the number of people that would see and play my game, I really should tag it in as many categories as possible. I looked at a few other Visual Novels and dating sims to see which tags they were using. I ended up adding a few more: "Anime", "Cute", "Pixel Art", "Relaxing" "Retro" "Story Rich" "Working Simulator". As you'll see below, not many of these tags made a difference. In particular, that didn't make a difference because I added them A DAY AFTER releasing the game. You'll see later that some tag categories are inundated with games. I suppose this could work both ways: great for consumers as there is a constant stream of your favorite genre. it is tough for game developers as you really need to hook as many as possible before fading farther down the "New" feed.
The second thing I did that Saturday night was re-create the cover image. After taking another look over similar titles, I realized that the cover image was not exciting enough. I know it sounds obvious: "of course you should have the love interests in the cover image of a dating game!!" but it was something I had overlooked as I already had screenshots of them. It is tough to say how much "better" the second version is than the first but I am sure updating the image has helped advertise the content of the game more accurately than the first.
Here are core stats from the Itch.io Analytics page:
Overall, I am quite impressed with these stats. I am surprised that so many people downloaded the ROMs as this seems like quite a bit of work versus just playing the browser. If we consider a Downloads equating to one "Browser Plays" we can see that adding the browser player DOUBLED the number of players. I'm glad I considered looking for various players and found one that met the level of quality I wanted. This was only possible because of this particular reddit post.
The Game Jam concluded that Sunday and all submissions were finally available. The contest organizers chose to hide submissions until the end of the jam so that spam submissions would not get any undue attention. @GValiente (one of the hosts of the jam and creator of Butano, the library for my game) shared this submission page on several Reddit communities:
This could also be from various people browsing recently completed jams: Itch > Jams > anything near the top of the page
By default, the jam submission page is sorted randomly. I think this is quite nice as it attempts to undo a sort of snowball effect some people might have when not deciding to scroll down
Work Life current rating when sorting submission page by "Popular": 16 / 54 = top ~30%
I think this is a reasonable ranking given the game is a visual novel and this type of story isn't all that common for GBA games. However, it begs the question: if the other games are rated as "more popular", just how popular are they? Especially given the "problem" I have with the views from the Visual Novel tag/genre.
I was surprised that the Visual Novel tag never equated to much traffic at all. Instead, there are only about 30 dating sim games per week. I believe this is my game's core genre so I am proud to do pretty well here.
Although ,15% were from "Genre: Visual Novel" (instead of the visual novel tag) , there are so many new visual novels (250 per week) that this class of views has stopped generating traffic. I also thing the combination Gameboy Advance + Genre Visual novel is more from someone browsing back and forth rather than 2 people that insist on searching for those two things.
There are also some weird referrers (like my profile): game > profile > back to game . however, I doubt that anyone is navigating to my profile so it is difficult to trust that those referrers are "organic" or "new" views of my game.
Overall, I am skeptical of this last portion of views and I doubt they will amount to much in the coming month.
That's it! hopefully this data informs you on how a game jam works or what tag you might consider picking for your next jam! Good Luck!
analytics of views/downloads/browser plays
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