itch.io

First of all, thanks for sharing the accessibility guide! I’m very familiar with accessibility from web development, but this is a fantastic resource and filled in a lot of game-specific knowledge gaps for me.

Even an imperfect optional control scheme could still help players with CTS or other mobility limitations. Accessibility does not have to be all or nothing, and knocking out the easier wins first sounds sensible.

Also, to clarify my hook suggestion: I didn’t mean that sentence was your final, uniquely ownable market hook. You’re right that “build weapons until the screen explodes” broadly describes the Bullet Heaven genre. I meant it as the first sentence on the itch page because it quickly explains what I’m about to play. Right now, the page makes visitors work to understand even that much.

The deeper differentiation still needs to come from what is distinctive about your particular game. To me, the most promising candidate is the weapon-slot mutation system, especially if the combinations create recognizable builds that players can intentionally pursue rather than just receiving incremental stat changes. The Space Invaders direction was another possible path to explore, not a prescription.

And lmao at Plan Waifu. I mean, yes, it can absolutely work. The first battle is getting somebody to click and play the game at all, and putting an appealing character on the cover or in a screenshot would almost certainly earn some extra attention. Even placeholder character art might improve the click-through rate enough to teach you something.

That said, if you’re not personally interested in building around characters and would only be forcing them into the game for clicks, then it may not be the right direction for you. Characters do not necessarily require a massive gameplay pivot, though. A pilot could initially function as framing, branding, ship identity, or progression flavor without becoming the entire design.

My extremely biased opinion is that not enough horny or suggestive games have genuinely good gameplay. There’s a large underserved space between completely clean games and outright NSFW games for something cheeky, attractive, and character-driven that is also mechanically excellent and worth playing on its own.

But again, I may be just a tiny bit biased there. 😅

Either way, testing the itch-page restructure before making any major creative pivot is absolutely the right move. If the page communicates the existing game better and the view-to-play conversion improves, that gives you much cleaner evidence about whether the game itself needs a radical new hook or whether people simply weren’t being shown the hook you already have.