Post by redonihunter in Game and Post not appearing anywhere after publishing

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For your tags, I just looked at the screenshots and the tags and it felt like something is missing. Maybe a sub genre of what you are doing. Or people call it differently. Based on the screenshots, I would not expect an adventure tag. And I would not expect a strategy game to be rogue-like. Acting stragegical with your ressources kinda goes without saying for certain games, but I would not call them strategy games for that. Strategy games to me are more like 4x games. Strategy implies a grander scale. But some people disagree, see below.

This is only 170 games. https://itch.io/games/genre-adventure/genre-strategy/tag-roguelike It is an unlikely combination. That's not bad in itself, but might indicate that some of those games would not be labeled by these tags in that combination by many players.

Your game is inspired by Blue Prince. That below is the Steam tags for that game, in descending order, chosen by players. Steam has a limited pool of tags, and tags like Indie are superflous on Itch, while a tag like singleplayer is important on Steam. But as you can see, even that game is labeled strategy by some. Players are not known for distinguishing tags accurately. For instance, a game actually cannot be rogue-like and rogue-lite at the same time. One implies very hard difficulty, the other does not. Yet most of such games have both tags. Even Slay the Spire has rogue-lite in the tag list on Steam for crying out lout.

Anyway, you only have 10 tags and one main genre to chose on Itch. Better not waste them on tags like no-ai or godot.

Puzzle

Exploration

Mystery

Investigation

Singleplayer

Roguelite

Story Rich

First-Person

Indie

Adventure

Atmospheric

Roguelike

Escape Room

Simulation

Nonlinear

Strategy

Level Editor

Stylized

Replay Value

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GoodGuyGames49 days ago

Thanks again for your great post buddy :)

Well tags are very important and sadly I'm not using them correctly. But your explanation makes the problem (and the solution) easier to understand.

I place both rogue-like/lite tags because as you said, most people don't differentiate between the two and often search one instead for the other.

Main tags don't offer that much variety to choose from (and that's reasonable), but I thought Strategy was the best fitting. I think checking Blue Prince's tags is a good idea if I want that game's player base to follow my game too.

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redonihunter49 days ago

Yes, there is two aspects. What a tag means and what people think it means ;-)

Both on Steam and Itch, the people chosing the tags are not reliable on the meaning of words. You would need curators for that. So ~~tags~~ genres mentioned on professional articles about a game might be more accurate.

Skimming such articles, Blue Prince seems to be a mystery puzzle rogue-lite. Bordering on deck-building, without being one. Of course the 3d immersion is missing from your game.

For strategy one might read the wiki article about it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_game

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_video_game#Subgenres

Having strategical thinking involved is not enough. It would be like calling a game point & click, because you can point at things and click them. Or calling a game a visual novel, because there is things to see and things to read.

But I have not played your game. Nor the inspiration for your game. Chess is a strategy game. The strategy game. You command units. Strategy is the skill used by a commander. A game with a single acting entity feels wrong to be named a strategy game. Yet I even found an article mentioning "strategy" to describe Blue Prince. I disagree ;-)

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GoodGuyGames48 days ago

I read some of the articles you mentioned, and although I'm not an expert, I don't like that restricted definition of a Strategy game. Its not like FPS or Sports category which are self explanatory, but rather can be applied to almost any game, so defining it is difficult.

Anyway, from now on, I have to think twice before choosing my games' tags!

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redonihunter48 days ago(+1)

Meaning of words can change. A roguelike game today is practically nothing like the game Rogue. What it now means is doing a "run" that is random in the way you can improve your character and generally that the game is very difficult and there is no save scumming. But that does not mean every difficult game or every game wihtout save games or every game that has things like game sessions fits the definition.

The strategy genre is a bit different what it describes. The kernel of it for me is commanding units. In every game where you have to manage resources, you need to plan how to effectively use those resources. But that does not make them strategy games. Strategy games give the player the feeling of being a strategist. Rpg games, adventures and rogue-likes do not do that. If resource management is a key element, I would tag such as management, not as strategy. Even if you would come up with "strategies" how to use the resources.

https://itch.io/games/tag-management

Management

Games where you have to manage resources in order to complete objectives.

Yet still people tagged that Prince game with strategy. Who knows what the word means in 10 years for games. But then again, the term strategy is used for games maybe as long as there is the game of chess.

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