itch.io

Do not hire coders for custom software in the hopes that you can sell the software. That applies to games as well. Especially to games. This is high risk business. Professional game studios go out of business all the time and those people knew what they were doing. Even if you were to give a game studio a million bucks, they would not be able to guarantee you, that they could make a game that would break even. You can't buy success that easily. Sure, you could poor another million into advertisement. Maybe you even make a million back and only lose the other million. 

Even if you would get a good game for an affordable sum, this would not guarantee that the game would sell. And even if it would have customers, there is no guarantee that it would pay for the investment. I have seen games published here that were also on Steam and had barely a single review. I doubt that they even made the 100 bucks that Steam asks upfront as a barrier fee.

Anyway, it sounds to me, like you have all the ingredients and a lot more than most devs have I  can compose music, model and animate 3D, and direct the art of the game, but that's about it.

Coding is not that hard. It's easier to learn to code, than it is to learn the arts. You need talent for art. Coding is just following rules and rules about rules and writing rules down for a stupid machine to follow those rules. And a lot of redoing what other people already did. The hard part of making a game, apart from making the game, is designing it, so it is fun. Fun for other people to play.

Running around and eating fruits and changing your shell does not sound like fun. But running around and collecting coins and hopping on shells does not really sound like fun either. So your character has a gimmick. Most characters do. And your hero sets out to save the world. That story has been told countless times and in countless ways. You have neither novelty nor nostalgia to help here.

If you aim for a 2d game in the style your prototype was, you basically need only a cookie cutter template of such games. There ought to be tutorials that will end up in such a game. And you have all the important things like assets. I believe you use gamemaker. https://gamemaker.io/en/tutorials/how-to-make-an-rpg

Should coding really not be your thing, the idea with the comic is good. Publishing web comics is rather cheap and therefore low risk. Or you could animate shorts and release videos. Get a feel how to tell the story, so it is interesting. Because as I said, that story has been told so many times. People get bored easily. It should be entertaining in some way. And achieving that is very difficult.

The game is now indexed, btw.

Take the game critique with a grain of salt, knowing these things: I have outgrown old style rpg games. I dislike pixel art. I am not a fan of whatever genre that prototype is. Not sure how to call it. Action rpg or something. And I am not particularily fond of turtles; maybe it's the beady eyes or trauma from playing mario kart. Games I like include Baba Is You, Monster Train, Darkest Dungeon, Thea the Awakening and Backpack Hero, to name a few indie and smaller titles. So your finished game would most likely not be my cup of tea.

Your page is a huge improvement. You can almost get away with having no description because of the screenshots. And unlike the web export, the download version works. It's a bit huge for what it does, but that kind of optimization is another discussion.

All the bells and whistles and polishing is of course missing, but that's a prototype. That kind of game would do as a short jam game.

Perspective is odd. When the game finished, it zoomed out to some more interesting perspective while I was still able to walk around, so the engine could do it. It's a design choice, but I would not be happy with such a zoomed in view (then again, read above how I dislike such old style action rpg).

The shell mechanic was kinda pointless. But I did not experiment a lot with it. Running away as a concept, is far better than bunkering down and waiting for the enemy to give up. Which is the strategy of an actual turtle.

If I were such a fighter turtle, I probably would do things like retracting my head and ramming enemies. Or leap in the air, twist and land backside first on the enemy, bouncing back, flipping back and landing on my feet. I would call it the revenge slam. Revenge for all those turtles that have been jumped on in various games.

As a tech demo to tell your story, ok, but as a standalone game, meh. One can imagine a spectrum between action type games and thinking type games. Maybe even a third axis for story. Yeah, I am sticking with axis, like a 3d diagram. The theory goes, you need to cover a bit of volume to make a game interesting. And this is super hard, if you only put your game's point on one axis. Can be done of course. A book only has story and people buy those. People play racing games and that is mostly mechanics/action. And people like wordle and sudoku, which is only thinking. But imagine a story unfolding while you need to solve puzzles and even do some fighting. Games are a complex medium after all.

You can add things like music and eye candy as another dimension, or view the topic another way, like adding spices to  food. You typically need several of those or a very strong one, to have a tasty dish. (And it's possible to have too many spices. There's actually a name for that in software. Feature creep.)

Your prototype currently focuses on action mechanic and music. There is no thinking or puzzle solving involved. And the story is stop the evildoers. Collect some diamonds. I would need a lot of eye and ear candy and other bells and whistles to play such a game. But as I said, not my cup of tea.