It's been nearly 40 days since the release of my game
🌼 Grand'ma and the flowers 🌼 

I think time has come to share some feedbacks about this project.
Let's begin with some numbers :

From my perspective, compared to my previous game, my game is clearly a success ! 
In only 40 days, it "beat" all my previous games, released ten month ago :

🌟 It's my most viewed game
🌟 It's my most download game
🌟 It's my most rated game
🌟 It's my most present game in collections
🌟 It's my most funded game

Statistically spoken, this game is my number 1 game, and obviously it makes me super happy, because I put a lot of effort on it and I love what it finally looked like 💖

My thoughts on those numbers

• Views : I think it depends a lot on the goodwill of itchio's algorithm, first week it got 100k impressions, which was just unbelievable for me.
It's a vertuous cycle, the more you are seen, the more likely you'll get seen (be careful though, the reverse is also true, the less you are seen, the less likely you'll get seen).

Side note : My CTR wasn't super good, sometimes under 0,5%, I don't know what was the reason behind that.
I tried to change my cover gif but it doesn't do much.
The voice of numbers is sometimes impenetrable.

• Downloads : It's funny, when I started this project, I already knew that I wanted to make a download-only playable game, which started to make me wonder if it was a good idea or not, and if it would not become a constraint to its relative success. In that regard, I tried as much as I can to make a pretty good looking itchio page for my game to try to prevent this inconvenience.

I don't know if it influcenced or not their decisions, but some people still took the time to download my game and test it, which make me super happy.

Side note : Almost 1/3 of people which saw my game page downloaded the game, which seems a very good ratio to me.

• Rating / Collections / Fund : All of these metrics could testify to the "success" of a game on Itchio, since they are hard to get.
1/50 of people who downloaded my game rated it and 1/100 of people actually supported back my work.
From my perspective, those numbers mean that people engaged with my games to the point of giving me written and video feedback, and even for some of them to support financially this work.

💖 This is great, really, it does matter when you are delivering something to the world, to have positive feedbacks and many kind words in return. It's so pleasant. Thanks a LOT ! 💖

My thoughts on my creative process

330 hours working on it, spread over 8 months, sure, this game has been a long creative journey.

It was physically and mentally demanding in the sense that it was my most ambitious completed project. I almost did everything by myself : Animation, Programmation, Game Design, Communication, which was a loooot of work. I also invested more time in the marketing of my game (even if I did it only at the end), on platform such as Itchio, Discord, Reddit, Gdevelop Forum, design of my Itchio page; I even created a twitter account to give it a try.

I made this game selfishly, for myself, trying not to get lost in dreams of greatness and celibrity; just because I enjoyed making game and creative thing. I thing it was the good mindset to have, because at the end, you don't know how people will react with your creation., that's why you have to try to enjoy as much as you can the process of doing it.

More numbers : Thanks to my homemade time-manager (you can find an open source version here), I know that I spend almost 200 hours on Design, 66 hours on Coding, 23 hours on Sound Design and finaly 30 hours on marketing. I'm not really surprised.
My game rely heavily on level design, situation and animations more than gameplay mechanic. My first prototype, which I develop in only two days, already captured the most important gameplay mechanics. After that It wat mainly above finding idea and iterate on my design to get the best out of it.

For that regard, I'm so happy to have kept the ressource of each design iteration, and see how it tranformed as time goes on. I clearly see improvement and the difference between how it started and how it end. Hope it will encourage you to do "bad looking prototype" just to experiment and then to improve it later on.

📚 What I learned 📚

    • Use butler to upload my game, finally !
    • Architecture a viable project to support level extension
    • GDevelop :
            ○ I didn't learn much about new things, but I think  putting my knowlegde to release a new fully polished game did give me a lot of  experience
    • Animation process

💖 What I liked 💖

    • I finished it !
    • I loved what I managed to do with animation.
    • Love the subtle sound design idea I got
    • Love the fact that I succeed to create a more gameplay oriented game
    • I told an emotionnal story
    • I actually enjoyed to play and playtest it
    • The design of my Itchio page
   • My transitions in the game

🛠️ What I could improve on this game 🛠️

I received many improvement advices, I already had some ideas, here is a sample of what I could improve :

    • Make flower hitbox less punitive (less punitive mode maybe?)
    • Add background music
    • Do a web brower playable version
    • Add Color blind mode
    • Add French language (other?)
    • Add juice to levels (for eg: background effect, clouds)

✨ What I want for my next games✨

Hard to tell, maybe smaller game to experiment different things...
Maybe try to explore the SF universe I build, years ago, and finally do something with it...

❤️ Thanks a lot for your support, take care ❤️
🎉 Happy new year, may this year be a creative year 🎉

LumbirBwut