Soul Dream: Reality Shift - Post Mortem Retrospective

Hi all,

First of all, I just want to say thank you to the people who played Soul Dream: Reality Shift. It's honestly such a surprise to me that it performed so well the last 4 days. The fact that it even got into New & Popular, sitting among other more visually stunning games is surprising, even when SDRS only has like 3 enemy types, one being an annoying common-enemy and only 4 abilities unlocked for the first 5-10min.

That aside, I wanted to write this as a retrospective - what happened, what went right, what went wrong, my current feelings and the path forward, so here it goes:

What Happened?
Since 13th Nov, the numbers are as follows:

 - 385 views
- 74 Downloads 
- 176 Browser Plays
 - 1 Rating (it was 4 stars)
 - 6 Collections
 - 32k Impressions
 - 0.56% CTR
 - 4 new followers
 - $0 received :(

To provide a perspective, my previous release (Soul Dream: Mini Shift) had these numbers since its release in Mid-August

 - 78 views
 - 1 Download
 - 45 Browser Plays
 - 3 Collections

What went right?
I don't know. The initial feedback I got after releasing SDRS was from r/DestroyMyGame, which suggested that the gameplay ideas were flawed, among other things, but after SDRS suddenly popped off on itch, I didn't get any further feedback other than the one 4-star rating (and that same person then also followed me).

Like, the only thing I can gleam is something did go right, and I can only guess what went right based off feedback from my friends, and my own opinion, which of course these opinions are going to be biased.

So here's what I think went right:
 - Simply engaging in reddit. The initial chunk of traffic came from reddit, presumably my post on r/DestroyMyGame. However, my post got removed and so you'd think that reddit traffic would stop, but it didn't. While my post was removed from r/DestroyMyGame, it was still on my reddit profile, so I can only assume that because I went around posting on reddit, people looked into my profile and clicked in from there
 - (Almost) intuitive gameplay. Initially there were issues with the game's lack of tutorial, so I addressed that by putting a right-click drawing on the ground, and at some point after I implemented this update, feedback stopped being about how to play the game. In fact after that update, no feedback was about how to play, as it was mostly about why it's played the way that it's played. (like why is the first enemy is so damn annoying)
 - Seemingly bug-free gameplay; I haven't seen any bugs with SDRS, and it seems to never come up in feedback either. It's almost suspicious
 - The artwork (imo) is passable, but unique. I mean, just the itch banner (imo) stands out from the games it sits around, even if the characters *"have the charm of an anime character scrawled into a high-schooler's notebook"*. The game itself isn't exactly offensive to look at either while being distinct from other games 
- Despite there being a horrible lack of visual variety and only 3 enemy types (1 being a boss that is only available after 20-30min of gameplay), there is enough variety in the encounters, loot, builds, and challenge fights that somehow people liked it enough to make it *New and Popular*
 - The little things. I mean basic stuff like moving interfaces, rule of thirds for the UI, sounds for the UI, tooltips. Hell even just the fact that the main menu is only very slightly shaded personally felt good to have
 - Being free on itch probably helps a ton

Feel free to disagree, because honestly, I'd rather take that feedback than constantly play the guessing game here

What went wrong?
Hard to say, as lot of what went wrong imo is towards the social media side of things and how to comments/feedback from players. There are definitely things in SDRS that make me say *this could be better*, but nothing feels like a mistake with the game (besides the lack of a tutorial).

 What I didn't mention in the numbers is where the incoming traffic came from. Obviously, a good chunk came from itch itself due to SDRS hitting *New and Popular*, but before that it was 90% from reddit. Why do I bring this up? That's because I feel I stuffed up my twitter posting.

My twitter is pretty unknown, with only 20 followers and an average 12-15 likes on #screenshotSaturday. The best clip on that account has 80ish views. I can guess these numbers are due to unimpressive art.

I made a post on the weekend of SDRS's release, comparing new screenshots with the old. Easy 16 likes on the day of posting, but I only got 6 visits from twitter as of today

https://twitter.com/deddonotto/status/1459429653425242113?s=20

In part, I think the stuff up was because I forgot to link the game directly in the tweet. The tweet that does have the link to SDRS in fact only has 1 like. It's bothersome to think that I got more traffic from reddit where people had to click into my reddit profile to get to my game, after seeing one of my comments buried in some random thread, whereas that didn't seem to happen that way for that twitter post. It's possible that due to the nature of twitter, people just quickly glance by, feel good, and then continue scrolling, whereas on reddit, people going into comments are just looking rabbit holes to jump into

Rant aside, I'd like to hear what your thoughts are on that

My Current Feelings
On the day that SDRS popped off, I was as excited as a husky on cocaine. Today, I'm kind of mellow.

This is due to where SDRS is; 95% of the gameplay features are already implemented. The last 5% is just functionality for shops, dialogue classes, and abilities, so the work moving forward is like 90% doing more enemies, tiles, props, music, and writing.

It's because of that fact that Soul Dream feels finished, even when there's a lot more go to with it.

Since we're on topic of feelings, I'm not going to lie, more than half the time that I've been working on this game, I didn't believe in it and I didn't want to work on it, and so the thing that kept me working this is friends checking up on me, sunken costs, a very organised kanban board, and a fortunate amount of discipline

Anyways I think this is a good segue way into the last section

The Path Forward
Well, there's a number of deadlines I want to meet. I won't talk about those. Instead I want to focus on what a SDRS with 100% gameplay features will look like

 - A proper intro; currently you are thrust straight into the game with no contextualising or reason to care about what's happening

 - An easier, more varied start

 - An actual boss fight; Boss in SDRS atm is a reskin

 - More music variety

 - More tiles

 - At least 3 more enemies

 - Shops

 - Some amount of dialogue scenes

 - Various other improvements based on feedback

Fingers crossed, I'm aiming to get these out by the end of the month.

TL;DR
SDRS popped off on itch. Thank you Reddit, fuck you Twitter. Work doesn't care about my feelings. I'm going to add more content by the end of the month hopefully

Link to SDRS

https://vuanotto.itch.io/soul-dream-reality-shift