Post by redonihunter in How popular are platformers among itch.io users right now?

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How popular on which scale? Platformers are easily made and many games here are platformer. About 184000. But if you look at top rated, you will see, that games with story are favored.

Without marketing, your game will sink into obscurity. Let's see, how your passive marketing is set up.

You have these tags:

Platformer, Adventure, 2D, Indie, No AI, Pixel Art, Unity

Indie tells nothing, as all games here are indie. No-ai is a meta tag, you do not need to tag it. Unity is a meta tag, you do not need to tag it, you already have made-with-unity.

I have doubts, this is an adventure game. From the looks of it, it is not in the slightest an adventure game. It looks like a pure skill based action type platformer with some puzzles in a level structure.

So. You have a pixel art platformer. As all pixel art games are essentially 2d, that gives not much additional information.

That's 2 tags to give your game distinction. And a misleading tag (Note: if there actually is adventure content, you are good at hiding it). You could have used up to 10 tags on Itch. Plus 1 main genre.

How appealing is your cover?

Not much. Also, you have demo in the title. Why bother with demos, if there are thousands of non demo games. If you want, you can sell on Itch too.

What's a mil. A robot mil. Do I care to find out? No. Your cover looks like coming out of a tutorial. You can use animations in screenshots and covers, in case you did not know.

Your tagline is also not making me want to know about the game. But that ties in to the fact how story games are popular.

I would like to point out, that I do not like platformers in general. Maybe what you present appeals to fans of the genre. The problem is, reaching those fans. What you would need is a hardcore platformer nerd with a streaming channel that would play your game online. Or some other marketing, assuming your game appeals to a distinct target audience.

Itch has freestyle tagging, so you can tag things that are not in the suggested list. But it should be things that people seek out from time to time. Some associations I got, after glancing at your project: difficult, robots, music, puzzle, minimalistic, traps, fast-paced. And the few people that bothered to tag your game on Steam think your game is a runner game.

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Dmytro_Nastenko2 days ago

Thank you for such a detailed explanation. This is my first time posting something on this platform, so I don't know much about it, for example, you mentioned tags, some of which are pointless to add.

Regarding the cover, unfortunately, I can't imagine what I should draw to convey the essence of the game in the cover, and at the same time make it cool, and I also don't have serious drawing skills to draw something super duper detailed. Of course, this is my problem, I don't argue with that, but in my opinion, the current cover immediately makes it clear what awaits in the game.

Thanks again

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redonihunter2 days ago(+1)

the current cover immediately makes it clear what awaits in the game

I disagree. What I see is something that looks like a stock robot head icon and a wrongly spelled mill. A robot saw mill perphaps. There is that thing that looks kinda like a saw blade. (And I read your description and still do not know what a mil is, let alone robot mil. The internet tells me, that a mil is 0.001 inch. Is that the size of your jumpy robot head or what.)

But as I said, I am not a fan of platformer games, so maybe it does make it clear to the target audience.

The biggest issue I see, is this: Platformer games are very popular to make. They really are about the basic thing you will get, wenn using an engine after the tutorials. Move a blob around, dodge environment, get to goal, finish level.

So what you want to convey is, that your game is above that level. And I have no idea how to do that. You can use an animation as a cover. But that will only play when hovered.

You can stuff a few words of text in there. Like the difficulty, or trigger words for the target audience.

Why would people want to play this platformer game, instead of another platformer? I guess, because it is difficult. Because the music is good. Because there is a story. Because the graphics is eye candy. Because there is a highscore. Because people care for the tiny robothead. Because it is fun. Because it has clever puzzles. Because it has a cool mechanic. Because it's a combination between a runner and a platformer game. etc. (Some of those obviously do not apply to your game. Best thing you can do imho, is point out the cool things about the game right in the cover in some way, if at all possible)

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