itch.io

Unfortunately it is against Steam's TOS to sell a game on another platform cheaper. Besides the VN costs barely anything, so no, I can't.

Ooh! These are great! Thank you for sharing

Hello everyone!

It's a little weird, but one of the highlights of game development for me is making the game page for itch.io, even when 99%+ of my sales are on other platforms, it is the customizeability of itch.io pages really hits my inner designer and it is the only part of marketing I enjoy. I think, my strength is in making my pages visually pleasing by tying the look of the page to the look/themes of my games. 

But what about the actual content on the page? So far all my (commercial) games have been visual novels, so my pages always heavily focus on the story aspect. But what else is important to you? I think screenshots are a given. I would not buy a game if I couldn't see a single screenshot of it first. But I think the game page should probably have sections for:

• Quick tagline to sell your game in one sentence
• List of features
• Gameplay hook
• Story hook and characters (If your game is story focused)
• Appropriate credits and links
• Maybe controls/start up instructions?

Anything you can come up with that I missed? Also what do you think is a good length for a page? Is it bad to make your page too long? Am I thinking about this way too much? :D

If you have thought about this too much as well let's share what we have learned. Here is my "wisdom":

• I sometimes go through the game pages of featured games to learn about marketing and maybe trying to work out what kind of page cathes the eye of an itch.io staff member. A lot of the time the featured games don't actually have all that fancy game pages. Just a few screenshots and and plain text, especially if they are browser games. 
• From what I've gathered having gifs helps a lot because movement catches your eye and communicates gameplay ideas effectively.
• This is more thumbnail/cover point, but  faces are really good at attracting attention when you have very little real estate. This is why all the mobile game icons are just character heads. It's a little sad, but I do notice I'm clicking games more often if the thumbnail features characters and I rarely click thumbnails that only have a logo/game name.
• Borders of the page are not visible on mobile (But do people often browse itch.io on mobile?)

P.S. Please share the best game pages you've seen, because I wanna see cool ones

Hello! Thank you for playing! I'm so glad you like our work :) 

The music for Vengeful Heart was sourced from various sources, most of them royalty free music from opengameart.org or several other royalty free music sites. As such We don't have the lisence to sell them as they are. 

All the composers are listed in Vengeful heart's store page here in itch. If you beat the game you should have access to the jukebox feature in-game. There you can listen to the songs and they also contain credits for each track separately, so you should be able to find them online for your own purposes ^^

Hope this helps! Thank you for the praise, and have a good day :)

Thank you! Your kind words make our day :)

So happy you liked it <3 Thank you for this comment

Glad that everything worked out! <3 Thank you for buying it, and hopefully you have good time with it!

Hi! The game is stillk on steam as far as I know and I can see that 16 people have bought it even today, so there shouldn't be a problem. Sadly the itch.io version doesn't come with a steam key. I'm able to request a batch of keys from steam, but that might take some time.

That's our weakness too <3

Thank you for your kind comment!

Thank you for your comment (and purchase!) We're glad you liked it! And all your criticisms are very valid points we have thought about ourselves after the game was released. We'll be doing better work with our next game <3

Hi everyone!

LINK TO THE GAME

At long last Vengeful Heart is out! It's been almost 2 years, since Elmo and I began crafting this visual novel and we are very proud! It's 00:00 am here in Finland, so I'm very tired, but I wanted to get this announcement in time when the game releases. I even took a day off from work to be able to focus ton press releases today. Sincere THANK YOU to everyone, who has been a part of this project during the last 2 years!

Vengeful Heart is a retro futuristic cyberpunk visual novel. The story is set long after humanity has polluted this planet, groundwater is undrinkable and seeing a living plant is considered a luxury. Most people live in mega cities that rely on the labor of poor masses to sustain a modern standard of living for the few at the top. With most of the earth scorched, water is regarded as liquid gold and the control of it is the truest form of power. Forced to cope with a permanent water shortage, ordinary people persist and toil on the hope that if they work hard enough, they too can someday swim every morning in the refreshing pools of the Gardens.

We follow the story of Josephine Lace, a young hydraulic engineer eager to climb the corporate ladder and claim a spot at the top. Until the day when that promising future is ripped away from her, leaving her half-dead and homeless, she becomes hellbent on taking down the system that ruined her and left her without a heart. Along the way she meets a diverse group of people sympathetic to her cause, every one with secrets of their own. With their help, she seeks redemption, love and most of all vengeance.

Features of Vengeful Heart:

• Story rich in social commentary with both grim and humoristic undertones

• Synthwave soundtrack that makes you nostalgic for the time that never was

• Art reminiscent of PC-98 with a personal touch

• Two possible branches with wildly different outcomes

Experience the retro futuristic world of Vengeful Heart and unleash your revenge with style in this tale of capitalism, companionship and cyberpunk!

Consider buying our game if you are interested and please leave a comment on the store page. It brightens our day when we receive any comments (positive or negative) since so few people leave comments in the first place. I sincerely hope you will enjoy Vengeful Heart.

Cheers,

-Hanuli from Salmon Snake

A very aesthetic and entertaining little game. Definitely up there with the jam games I didn't get tired with under 5 minutes.

Only got past the first level since the white wall never left in the second? I'm not sure if I did something wrong. I think the enemies were unfairly unforgiving. Would like to see a polished version with mechanics introduced slowly one by one.

The tutorial is pretty unclear and I think this is impossible if you (like me) don't have numpad on your keyboard. Interesting idea with a little less stellar execution.

I have the sma complaits as the other commenter. It was really hard to make out what's going on and the screen was really small. I like the idea though and would like to play this again with clearer art.

So I won without the ghost taking over me :D I think this was a really good idea, however the jumping felt really awkward because there was no momentum compared to the distance the player could jump. I would like to see this polished. The ghost was really scary

By now I've played at least 5 other asteroid-likes here but this one was audio-visually stunning! Your game made me feel like I was in a dimly lit arcade and I loved that! At first I thought that the out of control meant I lost but then I realized it was a powerful tool against the flood of enemies. Can't give much points for originality but everything else: mwah!

I really like the clean visual style, however in the end I found the slowness of the shooting frustrating. I feel like this would've been more fun if the pace you shoot in had also varied, or you could've controlled that yourself.  I did like how enemy and player health were visually communicated really minimalistically. Thanks for making this!

A neat idea! The controls were not explained anywhere so I had some trouble understanding how whistling works. Eventually figured it out. I feel like this could've worked better in 2d since the 3d models got stuck sometimes. Overall was surprisingly fun!

I respect that this had a leaderboard and really lightweight. I was reminded of snake games but instead with an out of control ship. I liked the music very much. I feel like this could easily become a kind of aesthetic vaporwave/outrun style of game. The out of control aspect of the game made the frustration of losing disappear for me, since losing "wasn't my fault." Overall I really liked this, though I feel like the visual style could've been more interesting.

This was like REALLY great! I think the combination of bullet hell and tower defence was implemented really gracefully. I think this has real potential to be a full game. The visuals were consistent and clean. You even made little animations for everything! As a detail I loved that you could also push the enemies around. Stunning job, team!

The presentation was really cute! Sadly couldn't get very far since the (first?) level was monstrously hard! I would've personally started with a simple level, but I guess now the "out of control" theme manifested in two ways: Not getting to choose if you get a tower or a harvester and the absolute chaos of the level since it's so hard :D

Thank you very much <3

Thank you for supporting us! :)

A wonderful bite-sized game. (Maybe "wonderful" is a tonally unfitting word) The style, twists and world building were superb. I especially love the design of Ms. Appleton. Her movements are comical yet when you reach the end you realize why she is like she is, your view will completely change.

The art style is kinda rough and it fits the tone perfectly. The game is grim but also very humorous. It's a mix of tones that tastes really good!

Puzzles were good apart from the plump arm puzzle that had me run around the small setting over and over until I caved in and checked the answer from one of the playthroughs in this comment section.

I'll be looking forward to your next game!

I love to hear that you loved it! :) I hope you like the full game as well when it releases!

Hey! Sorry if I haven't been clear: The game has not released yet. You don't need to pay any more. I will deliver you  once Vengeful Heart releases. The development is just taking longer than expected due to us having to concentrate to our day jobs. I apologize for the delay!

It's Rani's old parade uniform. She lost all of her own clothes after the events of the demo, so Rani had to loan her some of her own.

This was amazing! I wanna play more of this! :D The humor was spot on! I'm so sad it's over

So this is r/mildlyinfuriating - the game. I think it was really clever take but will sadly maybe age badly in a few years :^) Especially the steam greenlight joke

In the end I locked myself from progressing because I didnt take the note in the archive and when I try to go back a hostile robot kills me. Too frustrated to continue now but maybe I'll give it a shot later. ;___;

Hi! I really love this game so far! This is exactly something i've been wishing existed and I will be playing this to the end :) The only thing is I had to reset and lose some progress because I got stuck on the following scenario:

I have examined the body and am about to leave the doctor's quarters. On my way down cleaning robots come to block my way and instead of going to the left to let them pass me I go back to the doctor. Now I'm stuck because every time I try to exit the robots block my path.

That said very interesting game with super interesting story and mechanics! Good work and I will be following you in the future too <3

This is really cool! I really like this kind of "double dimension" mechanic! The shadow music is also cool! The blue color made me think more of water than shadow though :D How long did this take to make?

Thank you! Comments like these make our day <3

I love this! I'm gonna back this when my paycheck comes in a week!

Is that so? Thank you for telling me. I guess I shouldn't trust that renpy works on the platforms it says it works. I was sadly unable to test with linux anf mac, but I will find someone with those systems to try the full release when it comes out. I hope you enjoyed the game and thank you for the comment! :)

I backed this on Kickstarter. For many years I was sure You weren't gonna make it. Good job finishing Exogenesis after everything life threw at you!