Our current game is failing hard...

I'm not going to waste your time too much here this video is all about our next Fest numbers basically so this is kind of a deck block for game songs of R Jade which is a r cide set in Chinese mythology and we just came from nextfest like almost 2 weeks ago from when this video goes up and it's been brutal to be honest we got a total of 186 wish lists which is nothing and especially for us it hurt even more because last year when we did Forge industry which was in honestly all aspects in my opinion a worst looking game to demo for like our game didn't even start the first two days without crashing we still got almost 10 times that amount of wish list at 1,264 so in this video it's going to be a little bit of a coping session where I'm just going to be crying or trying not to cry is maybe a better thing and trying to rationalize what has gone wrong and try to maybe teach you a little bit about nextfest as well because it was a bit of a reality check for me like I know a lot of developers who've had massive numbers like 700 wish lists in a single day I also know developers who had even worse numbers than us and last time when we made this video I had no real idea how these things really worked it was just a video of hey these are our stats next Fest is good let's just continue doing it now I think there is a bit more Nuance to it I think you should still do next Fest that's obvious like we could have also just not joined the next Fest and gone like 10 wish lists in a week but I think we needed to do a little bit of an adjustment and temper expectations yeah and let's start maybe with the big one which is the difference in genres I think these this is probably the biggest reason why the wishes are so much different because first of all yeah first one was a factory automation game which let's be honest is a lot more Technical and there are just less games in that genre releasing every year compared to the thing we just made Chinese mythology Rog light yeah there's a lot more Rog lights and I think this is the point where I also need to apologize to Chris OSI a little bit because I've been a bit salty at the guy because one of the things he always says like we've done coaching calls with him we've gone to talks from him he's like if you want to make money there are two genres to make adult only no horror games and crafty simulation automation kind of games is what he calls it and I'm sitting there like whenever he says that like seing because I'm like we did that and our game like didn't perform that great like at all like it was still all right now looking back but now it's well above average compared to most Indie releases yeah now we realize that he actually we did really good for having such a bad game I know you guys like to say that it's a bad game so I'm just going to like jump in I agree so I think the genre did an immense amount of stuff because especially with nextfest it's about potential it's about oh this looks like something interesting it's going to come out soon we'll go into the The Window Shopper stat soon as well and I think there's more interest in these kinds of automation games and nextfest has this thing where sure the demo may not be too polished right now but I still like this kind of game let me wish list it whereas who who wants a Rog light honestly I feel like not that many people still want Rog lights or at least there's a lot more competition with it yeah it's a lot harder to stand out because like even if you make a good road light there are so many great Rogue lights out there that yeah good look competing with Hades or whatever you you can't match their style as an indie okay you can but not in a we yeah we can't and definitely not in a small like school yeah I I also had a talk with Chris kukovski about songs of ever Jade specifically and he was just like look I can go over your steam page and whatever give the default feedback that he's like known for but it's not going to sell no matter what you're going to do like marketing this is going to be extremely hard because pixel art as well is something that we kind of mook on pixel art is really hard to Market it needs to be really good pixel art which ours is like it's all right pixel art I think at this point like it used to be way uglier but it's still nowhere near the point to really stand out marketing wise with that pixel art so I think let's dive into a little bit more more of the stats because last time with the previous video we did we just talked about we got this many wish lists te next this is awesome this time I really tried to do more of a breakdown because I really needed to figure out as well like where did we go wrong and I think the first grth to pull up is something that we didn't do last time is looking at Impressions and store Page visits because you can have the most beautiful store page if nobody even lands on your store Page then like what's the point so with Forge industry these are the stats from next Fest last year we had 564 th000 Impressions so that's in that one week 564 th000 people they saw our little dwarf uh main capsule somewhere on the steam page somewhere when they were browsing next Fest and that converted into about 9,000 visits I'm not exactly sure how good that conversion rate is it's like 2% or something I think it's all right I have no clue honestly when I talked to some other developers they had kind of similar numbers in the conversion rate here now we compare that to songs of average eight we've gotten one quarter of the Impressions basically that Forge industry did and this is where for example I think genre comes into play Because at this point it does not matter how good your demo is it does not matter how good your game is it's more about how much competition is there basically if you have the Rog light tab on Steam you had to click like 50,000 times to get to our game so to say whereas with automation games there were only like 12 or whatever so you're just going to get a lot more Impressions because you have a higher chance of being some of the first like presented games and don't all start making Automation and simulation games cuz that's what we are going to do and then you basically just give the problem back to us no you can go and make an automation game I want to see you try you're going to cry just like we did because making them good turns out it's kind of hard so this was the first point where I realized like look we kind of messed up with the Rog light genre I think the our capsu also like I like our capu the dwarf was better that's like one thing but still the capsu is more for the conversion rate Impressions to visits but if we don't even get the Impressions to begin with it's like okay maybe steam was like Hey people don't really vibee with this game as much so we're going to show it less I have no clue how the steam algorithm works but that's also part of what I would guess because our conversion to visit rate is actually higher for songs of average eight than is for Forge industry now there's a bit of a bias there because like the higher the number of Impressions the like lower generally that your clickr rate is going to be we see that with our YouTube videos as well like our top performing YouTube videos have lower clickr rates even though they get more views than like one that gets 5,000 views which makes sense if you think about it and then I maybe want to quickly dive into the like visits as well because there's something really like different as well that happened between for industry and songs of jate and it is that these are I have two graphs here of the sales page visits so what sales page means is it's people who saw our game on the nextfest themed event basically and then click through and as you can see here with Forge industry like day one was like all right this was the Boost that we expected then it dropped down and then we got like an extra big boost even though this didn't convert really into wish lists as much but like we we kept being shown basically the three last days of nextfest you're not really going to get any wish list it's like a very much a curve the first three days is like a balloon and then it just flattens out pretty much that is something that stay the same we don't have that with songs of8 songs of8 just like day one basically we got of visits and then it nearly flatlined again yeah it's probably because not a lot of people were either wishlisting it or whatever not sure how the steam algorithm works exactly but this is probably my guess because like it it g it gave it a shot it underperformed it was like yeah you're not going to give me a lot of money in the long run so get out of here so looking at wish lists once again as a reminder for Forge industry like the first day because like it steam nextfest the first day doesn't take a full day for steam's reporting we had 210 wish list which which was awesome for us because we had like 1,100 I think when nextfest started and then it just kept going up then we got like what is this 305 we got 324 and then it started to go down because like I said the last three days nothing really happens as much whist list wise when we go and we then look at songs of ever jate it's like okay we had a really good Boost from two wish list today I think that was like an exception to 36 like this gra looks great but it's one0 the scale basically of the forge industry graph where yeah 36 and 37 and then it just because I knew on day one basically of like we're doomed because if our best day like our first day was 36 it's only going to go downhill and it did we went to like 20 wish list today so it's not great and I think once again sha is really important here when I spoke to other developers as well who had other kinds of games like Rog light games or 2D games or whatever most of them had similar stats to this whereas if you had some of the more unique shs like for for example an arpg or an um also developer of Lauren had a really good one he makes an open world Zelda like game people love that like they had really good wish lists but I think if you don't make something that like really out there that is really something that there isn't much of like honestly who asked for another Rog light at this point then you do have a lot more issues in getting those conversions one thing that I still want to talk about as well is demo place because we had that ratio of okay Forge industry got four times as many visits and it got 10 times as many wish lists but percent songs of ever8 actually had a higher ratio of people visiting the game page and wish listing it I think we got about 120 people who played the demo and that gave us like 140 wish lists whereas with Forge industry we had like these stats are harder to find because I can't like go back in time but as far as I remember we got about 20 genuine demo players and that gave us 1,000 plus wish lists so that that gives me also more of the idea of hey people just wish list for the idea for the vision you have for your game like hey this looks like it could be a good automation game down the line whereas with Rog lights it's like look this is another Rog light why should I play this instead of like warm snow or some other kind of game and I think yeah I think we kind of messed up there so agreed it keeps going back to genre could just be that we're also incompetent I don't know probably a mix of both and these stats also basically show what we've been seeing for quite a while is that it's very important to pick what game you want to make but also what the market needs we also mentioned that for genery was a very good first game for us then we said we just wanted to make songs of average eight and then the third game is where we actually think about what would fit and what we want to make together we really lucked out with Forge industry I think as well we just like dumb luck stumbled into a genre that is like really popular I don't think I ever looked just because it fits us yeah it fits us I don't think I ever watched the Chris zukovsky talk until like one month before launch so it really helps there we've basically just looked at a lot of stats we know we are doomed what the hell are we going to do about it yeah I think first of all you probably have commented at this point of like I saw this coming from miles away like s ever jate is an ugly ass game and nobody asked for it I think I still want to defend ourselves a little bit I think songs of ever Jade was like commercially not the biggest brightest idea we had but it was something that was good for us because we needed to learn Unity that was our goal having a short scoped game just to learn how does unity work more like you know the technical stuff but we always knew it was going to be really Limited in scope because now our team has actually expanded and we have some 3D artists we'll dive into that in a second as well so songs of ever jate was never supposed to be like a game that we put in like three years to polish to Perfection and things like that so we always had some limitations really neither did we actually expect it to like become a big success our goal was basically to match Forge industry okay that goal now seems optimistic but if you set your goal basically to just match what you did last time and last time was okay but not that great I think that's pretty realistic thing yeah remember Forge industry is still earning money so like if we can just stack it up like you guys like I think we also mentioned there's like the talk of like 11 years of game development and you just make a whole bunch of games and it like Stacks up yeah the guy that makes like the the the click games yeah the GDC talk he will link it I will put it on screen right now so look we knew songs ever J like okay wasn't going to be a massive success some of you guys like the concept some of you guys like gave us very long pieces of feedback that were really solid as well of like hey there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done and now that I've gotten that steam nextfest reality check I'm put a big question what the am I going to do with this game kill it before it lays any eggs because we're in a complicated stage right now so up until like last weekish William was still working on songs ofj together with me and the then we had our artist that we just send stuff over to for the style Maps mostly and I like a real Captain abandoned the ship very long ago yeah because we also started working on a next game which is back more in that like management game style it's a genre that fits us a lot better yeah but that means that okay we now have two artists and two programmers and then like a little bit of me working on our next project already so that means that there's like 75% of me that's available still to continue working on sounds overate and I looked at it and I'm like I'm so because sure we can reduce the scope but at this point we have some really critical issues such as honestly combat it doesn't feel great and changing combat is something that you can't just do in a day yeah we basically have two weapons one is too floaty which is a sort and the other one people say it's like takes too long to attack it has too much field basically which is like great yeah we nailed ner so that's problem one problem two is okay we now have one stage somewhat done the gardens but we need another two stages okay that one we can still live with of like hey that's like a few hundred bucks in TI maps and we have our three stages that was something hey we can just bump out the three stages and release the game but then I realized our enemies are garbage like one of the main points of feedback we got as well is our boss fight which is the the turtle thing to be fair it's it's valid criticism it's very valid criticism but getting art made for that like Sprite sheets for bosses that's what we really kind of mistook upon the is pixelart takes a lot more time and a lot more skill than we thought we're like oh pixel art is like oh you just click some things and voila you have some some nice art I guess not but hey we're programmers first as you may be able to tell at this point so now we're reaching the point where I personally am not even certain how far like we can keep releasing this also we have a really uphill battle marketing wise even if we get more enemies even if we get more bosses it's a Rog light and if that genre Trend continues of hey we we simply get one quarter of the Impressions that Forge industry did is it worth doing that additional investment because if we do that investment and we do reach the same number as Forge industry we would have lost money like Forge industry if we don't count our time was a really cheap game to make like I think we bought like a few assets and that's it like no real big pieces of art that were commissioned whereas all of the art now because we realized we suck at pixel art has to be commissioned and characters can easily cost1 50 to $200 per character we want to have like at least like five to 10 different enemies still and I know asset packs are a thing but asset packs don't really fit no that's the problem because we have that very specific style that we want to go for we don't want to make a generic fantasy RPG kind of game we want to have that more Chinese Eastern style which means that our enemies for example can't just be generic Soldier number two or whatever or some random slime and then getting like the pixel aspect ratios they're often not fully matching so now I'm like what the do I do so if you want an answer to that luckily for you we don't have an answer to that is in this video we will probably come back to it at later point if you have any ideas you can always share we are we have some options in mind yeah let's go maybe you can go to our options yeah first one is because we still have like somewhat differing opinions so honestly we're like you're a relation therapist like we are like fighting of like I kind of just want to sunk cost songs of ever jate I don't know what I would do exactly but like kick it out of the door as fast as possible but it's not going to be a good game I think and you want to put in some more effort so I was like look we're going to leave this on the table for now and we're going to ask our army of professional game developers what their opinion is as well so what's your plan my plan is to take songs of ever Jades do a little bit more work not a lot what do you call a little uh for example just some bug fixing and maybe look like at actually maybe just keep it at the demo even and just ship it I either as a free-to-play game or a very very cheap game and just at least ship it because if we just stop it's not worth it in my opinion because then we just lose anyway the least that I want to do is release it in what state I'm not sure yet yeah I want to release it as well my idea is more of liid just kick it out of the door as a freeo play game but it needs to be like a little bit better still even then like the demo we have right now I have like a giant I have multiple giant documents of like all the feedback points everything we still need to improve upon it and I think it's still going to be a bit of work and we also have that other project that is like I kind of want to jump in on that as well but I shouldn't you and William are jumping in on that already for a lot yeah William is like now for a week or so fully into it I'm like gu guys I'm going for like one and a half months already yeah so he hasn't touched songs of ever Jade for that long already basically so there are some issues there like I I'm not a really a great programmer I can't rework the combat system and even stuff like okay adding more V effects and things like that is going to be a little bit of a struggle I can get more stle maps and that's like one thing that I think I can do like more levels and things like that more rooms no worries but things like the enemies it's going to cost us money and especially like if we're going to release it as a free topl it's like really hard to justify yeah but if you want to make enemies for example first you have to commission it then either William or me has to make the AI for it so and then you need to like coat like the attacks as well like the hit boxes make it feel actually kind of decent because the Archer went to a couple of iterations where you guys said it was horrible which I kind of agreed on so I think yeah honestly I don't know what this video devolved into uh next Fest should you do it yes just do it and just keep in mind that even if you participate you can you can still get royally in the ass I mean it's not royally it's just we had set bad expectations I think that's on us I think what we did wrong with the previous video is like look at what we got everyone else needs to get at least what we got if like we are so incompetent and that turns out it isn't really the case so yeah as as you might have noticed this is a bit of a weird video we didn't really script it we just wanted to talk to you guys like our honest opinions what we think we did wrong and how we are thinking about tackling this Beast that we still have ahead of it because it is harsh for us yeah it is very much like I think this is a problem that a lot of game developers have as well is well we just put our head in the sand like sure we didn't get the wish list we want but let's just keep working on our game even though we have like 50 or like 100 wish lists sometimes you have to make hard decisions and I think we are now just on the precipice of having to make a hard decision I think also something to keep in mind because a lot of you guys you don't do this as a full-time job you don't need to eat like or like you need to eat but you have some other kind of income and we don't have that right now and it means that okay SS not really launching I kind of still like to at some point be able to earn money so we'll have to see what we do there but at that point it is also like hey do we just move on to something that we feel like is going to be more profitable and that feels like hey there's more of a potential that is more in that right genre so to say of a game keep that in mind as well like if you're doing this just as a hobby project like it doesn't matter if you launch with 500 wish list or 1,000 wish list or 10,000 because you just wanted to make a game we wanted to make a game sure but we also would have liked if we earned some money out of it and right now I don't really see that happening so go and wish list songs ofj down below woo I don't know really like what happened last time we made a video like this for for series all of you guys went and play the demo and then wrote like giant essays if you want to do that like you're welcome but I don't know like how much we're actually going to still be changing be implementing because there's no real magic quick fix for songs whatever J that's the problem it's not like we can just tweak one setting or update one Sprite and everything matches like everything basically is kind of off isn't really perfect and that's just yeah yeah everything is like 70% there but the lost 30% is very hard to do and also very hard to even identify what is missing anyways that's all I think we really had to say usually for sure we usually make a lot more like happy videos sometimes at least yeah um it's just been a bit of a a rough time you may have seen it as well in like the kind of topics I talked about in the past few videos I'm sorry for that it's just it's been not ideal we're going to keep doing this we're going to keep making games for now we're going to keep making videos so if you want to just learn more genuine about the real world of game development and not just I made my first game and it made5 gazillion dollars we show you all the struggles we have along the way yeah we are very open about it so if that's something that interests you be sure to head down below and subscribe as it really helps us out also like I'm just going to plug this right now we have a patreon if you do want me to like earn money at some point and be able to eat like more than just dry bread we give extra content there more insights into game development more behind the scenes of the games we're making so if that's something you're interested it's linked down below as well that's all we have to say thanks so much for watching and we'll see you guys in the next one bye

Channel: BiteMe Games

Views: 50,697

Keywords: gamedev, indie, indie developer, game development, unity, c#, blender, game design, game studio, devlog, development, startup, forge industry, flega, steam

Id: otpICzbhtbw

Length: 22min 1sec (1321 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 20 2024