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Xmas theme has been good for my jam (SANTAPUNK New Year's mini postmortem)

A topic by Gymcrash created Jan 01, 2021 Views: 132 Replies: 8
Viewing posts 1 to 6
Submitted

For a very niche gamejam, and as a Dev with no real social media presence (I have like sub 20 twitter followers lolz), I'm surprised at those stats. Tbh I didn't expect more than 20 views/plays!  ( I also did some reddit, but didn't get any click throughs - my reddit-fu is bad).

Most of my hits come from itch.io directly - through the front page/popular & new and for people looking at some of the tags I have (including Xmas, cyberpunk, interactive fiction). Some come from people playing my other more popular game (Mazeborn). And a few from ifdb.com.

I think the Xmas theme and the cyberpunk theme timing have contributed to the overperfomance, although I don't really know if it's an overperfomance unless other jam submitters share their stats (and how much social media they've pushed this on!).

I think overall though, given some of the questions I've had, more people are discovering Adventuron (and text adventures) through this, and that can't be a bad thing.

Submitted(+1)

Oh yeah, Happy New Year all!

Submitted

Happy New Year!

Host

Really glad to hear your game is outperforming your expectations. 

Happy New Year.

Chris

Submitted

FWIW, I've had 119 views, 7 downloads, 63 browser plays and it's been very quiet over the last week or so. Your game is far outperforming mine in teams of analytics. I haven't done any promotion yet, because I haven't uploaded the final version.

Host

Based on votes it seems that the thumbnail art style has a lot to do with plays. The more vibrant and retro the thumbnail, the more plays. 

I also have experience of this with the 10 self published games on itch so I think that's why your game is lagging in plays Garry. Your pixel art is very good but it's not reflected in the thumbnail so players don't know to expect it without clicking first.

Submitted

You might be right, but how would you know for sure? Maybe two identical games, one with crude bit-mapped cover art and one with polished cover art and see which one gets the most hits.

Submitted

That's a really good idea - I think thumbnail is a huge part. It's honestly, really honestly, why I put the pixel image of the main character on it, instead of just the title. Anime-style girls catch the eye for a lot of folk, even with a very low pixel count!


But this is why I do jams - to learn!

Submitted

I am also surprised by the number of hits on my game from itch.io itself. It's double the next source (which is facebook)!