Hello everyone!
Today I have sad news. The next update will be the last one adding new content for Dipets: I have lost motivation after several reviews (not steam ones) of people not enjoying the game at all and who have claimed that even fixing the small problems the game has, it wouldn't be fun. I will, of course, try to address those problems and I will continue to do so in the future (I want Dipets to be the best possible game even if it's not a good one). Sneak peek of the biome:
To follow this decision, I have also decided to lower the price of the game in Steam and to make it optional on Itch.io: https://kiriboo.itch.io/dipets so feel free to return the game on steam and play it there if you want.
To end this stage, I would like to do a small post mortem about the things I learned and those I think went wrong with the game:
What I learned (the hard way)
Solo development is incredibly lonely. You have no one to ask for advice or discuss what features to add to your game. And while a lot of the dev community is awesome and will try to help, they are also working on their own projects so they will likely not have much interest into yours.
There is no perfection in videogames. You will find yourself trying to improve every aspect of the game, losing a lot of time on small things and forgetting the most important one, making a fun experience. That's also why you will likely not feel ready to release the game ever.
No one will care about your project. That's the truth, you start from 0 and need to try to get people attention with time. But be careful because attention also comes with small doses of hate and scams and you will have to deal with that too.
What I did wrong
Late playtest. I have been developing the game for quite a long time and while some close friends have tried it while I developed it, I didn't manage to get people to try it. This has led to elements that are not understood or are not attractive at all.
Late and wrong marketing. Read 4th point of previous part and now read this one. It leads to a complete disaster in terms of exposure for the game. Instead of the 4 month marketing before launch I probably should have done it from the time I started on the project. To add a bit more on this topic, I wanted to not show too much from the game so the player can have a good feeling of discovering in the game and that is clearly a mistake too. If people don't see the best of your game in the marketing content, they are not going to even give it a try.
Steam page unatractive. I followed what most people were saying and launched a Steam page with almost no gifs, trailers or unattractive screenshots and that has been a bad decision. People are going to see your game once (or not even once) to take a look at it and may ignore it if it's not something they find interesting which leads to a potential loss. Moreover, pixel art capsules are not favoured on Steam, and the capsule is one of the most important parts of advertising in Steam (a good one can attract a lot of people!) so that's something to keep in mind too (try to get someone who can make a good looking one).
Connecting with your audience/content creators. I did not dedicate a lot of time to this: I took some time to send content creators a personalised email, try to engage with some on social media, etc. but that's not enough. You have to actually engage with them through their community, because they are working too!
And that's all. I think it summs up what I learned from the development of Dipets.
Finally I want to give you a couple advices for all of you who want to star your own development:
- Release your Steam page in all the languajes you can! (It widens the target audience tremendously).
- Start connecting with content creators now so you can stablish a partnership and not just a one time thing. Also be nice to them because they are working too and are giving your game attention when they could be doing any other thing.
- Show your game, even the most interesting parts of it. People are not likely to "steal" your idea, and can show the people what you want to make. It also allows to get criticism and allows you to know what you have to change.
I want to thank everyone of you who gave the game a chance and as I said, I will work fixing all those problems that the game has right now so it can be the best possible version of the game I imagined.