PostMortem : Time for love [Release open source]

It's been nearly 40 days since the release of my game Time for Love.
I think time has come to share some feedbacks about this project.

Let's begin with some numbers :

It's not much, but to me that's super cool ! It's slowly became my most viewed/played game, considering it was my most polish solo project it's satisfying.  It also get more views than the jam version of this game (only 156 views and 48 browser play),  which to me is a good point.

I think the polish I put into the game did paid, both in terms of visual and gameplay, it has indeed attract more people to my game page and obviously to play the game.

For the launch of my game (the first week), I tried to communicate as much as I can on Itchio community, and it did pay, as I got more than half of my views during this period. I also tried to get invest in, testing other new games.

I think being invested in the community of Itchio, in addition having fun chatting and trying game of other people, is a really good way to generate reciprocal traffic on developer's page, and slowly being noticed. If you don't give something to the community yourself, you can't expect other people to be invest in your project.

That's interesting that Browser plays correspond to approximatly a third of the views of the game page. 

Another fun fact is that, the launch of this game actually drew attention on my other released game, which is always satisying to see.

Concerning the developpment, it took me 43 hours (one month) to transform the jam version of the game into a fully playable one.  Even if it wasn't much, it still took me some effort to go there. Hopefully, having a journal to keep track of what was left to do, and tackling each functionnality bit by bit, help me a lot, to get through this.

What I learned

• Basics of Gdevelop (Visual programming with blocks)
  • I didn't learn much about new things, but I think  putting my knowlegde to release a fully polished game did give me a lot of experience
  • Code refactorisation especially through : Externals events, functions/behaviours
• How to add some juicy polish to a game (through visual, sound and screen shake)

What I liked 

• I finished it !
• It matched what I envision and what I wanted to improve from the jam version of the project
• It's complete/coherent from A to Z.
• Visual of the dialogs, kind of persona style effect, which I'm proud of
• The juicy interaction with the different menu
• Visual of the Homepage
• Gameplay which is coherent...

What I could improve on this game

• ... but not infintley fun

What I want for my next games

• Trying a more gameplay oriented game

I already began a new project, using the confidence and knowledge I developped on this one.
I'm pretty excited to reveal informations and gameplay about it ! Only thing I can tell for now, is that it will be a platformer about blooming flowers :D

In the meantime, here is my full project, if you want to test it out on Gdevelop Engine.  My project follow the GPLv3 for code :

"The GPLv3 allows others to copy, distribute and modify the software as long as they state what has been changed when, and ensure that any modifications are also licensed under the GPL. Software incorporating (via compiler) GPL-licensed code must also be made also available under the GPLv3 along with build & install instructions."

and the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial for the asset I made :

"This license allows adaptations of your work to be shared in any way, as long as it's attributed to you, but it forbids commercial uses of your work. This is not a Free Culture License."

! Beware ! Some assets I used are from other people, check on the source file, to get more details about it.

Enjoy :D