Hi everyone!
I’ve just pressed the button to sunset the next fest demo for Cozy Game Restoration. Thanks for commenting, reviewing and sending feedback. I’ve been going through lots of planning and poking at my systems with all this feedback in mind.
LETS TALK ABOUT STATS
Cozy Game Restoration was the 24th most played demo during Next Fest
146,000 people downloaded the demo
113,000 people played the demo ( ~77% )
57,000 plays during the Next Fest week
Median time was 36 minutes, which i’m guessing was about 2 games cleaned
280,000 Wishlists which is head explode emoji territory
These are all very big numbers which i am still coming to terms with tbh, so instead of dwelling on them i'm going to talk about my feelings:
CANDID DEMO THOUGHTS
Cozy Game Restoration finished up at around 68% which was like 6-8 reviews away from a mostly positive review rating.
The key stuff i’ve learned has been that I definitely did not prioritise onboarding and controls as much as i should have, and the demo should have shown more around the tool unlocks, and how the shelf system works.
i was far too focused on trying to gate out non core gameplay mechanics stuff and a bit too hand wavy on showing people how things worked. I think i was hoping a bit too hard that people would be happy to just poke around, and i'm not sure that a demo is the right place for that sort of thinking.
Wait why are you taking the demo down?
What i noticed is that whenever i have a demo or playtest active, my productivity just craters.
I think it’s the nature of the constraints being solo dev tbh. There are inevitable issues with builds that make sense to be jumped on and fixed people real people are playing the game and being impacted by it.
So closing out the demo lets me grab my sack of feedback and go back into my little goblin cave to hammer away on features and lets me break stuff without worrying about a live version. Even with feature branches, there’s always the possibility of cascading issues affecting a stable build that might need some quality of life patches.
So this is a move to let me spin a few less plates and focus on the making game part a bit more.
I'm pretty sure the game I'm making is fitting with expectations
A lot of the feedback and asks i've been reviewing are close to what i have on my to do list, or are logical extensions of the stuff i'm making. This is an incredibly good situation to be in, since if I hadn't planned stuff like tools having buffs to make cleaning better, it'd show that i'd be disconnected from what makes the game fit in a genre like this, even if it is still a bit of a mish-mash of genres.
So as guilty as it feels to close the demo, i'm pretty excited about the changes to come. I'll be posting updates as usual on tiktok, youtube and insta in short form, and all the big stuff i'll be posting here too.
Thanks for being part of this journey with me!
-Adam