A Huge Thank You and Future Projects!

Hello everyone!

   Just want to give a huge thank you to all of you who have played my game, or even just took time out for your day to look at it! This was my first ever video game so everything is very basic and it’s all together really short. The game was a class assignment, where I had to have 3 scenes, each with 2 options, one of the options had to be a dead/bad end while the other continues. I focused on the art and tackled through some programming bugs, but eventually arrived at a good stopping point and waited to post it until I had graduated.

   I certainly did not expect to see all of this attention for a class assignment! I really love the concept of sleep paralysis and have heard your feedback on expanding this idea. I hope to revisit this in the future and maybe re-make this!

Major Feedback:

  I have watched many of your let’s plays, and heard your feedback, let’s discuss!

1) The game is too short/basic/straight forward.

• I agree this game needs more. I feel that it could benefit from a wider breadth of sounds, more animations and more options. In hindsight I probably should have released this as an alpha instead of a full released game.

2) The bad endings (You wake up. You are paralyzed.) need a try again.

• I saw a lot of people struggling with these endings and only a few people understanding my reason for not putting a retry button, so the endings need to be clearer and more obvious as right now they are too vague and are set up so players expect more interaction. The idea was that the player wakes up in sleep paralysis if you choose wrong, and results in you, being paralyzed from doing anything. You can’t move, you can’t exit the game, you can’t touch anything, you can only look. I wonder if adding an animation after a few seconds showing the player falling back asleep and automatically starting the game over would fix this?

3) What are the symbols above the gate and on the tree?

• These were intended as clues to which key is the correct one, as they all have 3 prongs. Seeing the lets plays, I feel that they were too vague or not similar enough of a shape to infer that, (one of you noticed the key in the title had 3 prongs, nice!). So the hints need to be more obvious, and also not in options that people are least likely to click on. Many people went straight through the correct options not getting a chance to see the clues.

   These were the main comments I gathered from everyone, if I missed something or would like me to address a specific aspect of the game please ask me!

For transparency I would like to share my Analytics with you all:

Analytics:

The game was released on May 13^th 2019 and as I am writing this has been out for 3 weeks.

   Views: 6,484

   Plays: 2,126

   Downloads: 168

   Impressions: 82.3k in the last week

   CTR (click through rate): 1.08% in the last week

   Let’s Plays: 12

   Rating: 4/5 stars

   Revenue: $0

(I’ve attached the graphs for all of this to the devlog)

                Thank you all so much, these numbers are astounding to me, I didn’t even think 10 people would see my game and the amount of views and plays just overwhelms me and motivates me to make even better games.

Views vs Plays:

     - The amount of plays is absolutely crazy to me, including the pp downloads I have a total of 2,294 plays. This is absolutely crazy. Comparing it to the views a little under 1/3 of people who viewed my game’s page played it.

Impressions & CTR:

   - This number is HUGE for just the last week of analytics, and considering this past week was the low of the graph and not the peak these numbers aren’t true to the overall data. I had a very low CTR rate for the last week and I wish I could see what this stat was during the first week.

Let’s Plays:

   - Thank you so much, all 12 of you, for playing and reviewing my game on your channels. It is such an honor to watch and also SUPER helpful because without you realizing, just your reactions, and watching where you click first is critical feedback for gamedevs to use.

Rating:

   - 4/15 stars. Accurate. I agree with this per my answer to the first bit of feedback.

Revenue:

- I made 0 buckaroonies off of this, it was a class assignment and definitely not enough content to ask money for. I still feel weird about pricing for games since my primary art form is animation and I imagine the pricing for the two mediums are very different. In the future though, especially with my bigger projects expect a pay what you want or prices to start popping up. Although I love free games myself so I imagine I will make more.

Marketing:

 - I only advertised this here on itch.io by releasing it and on my twitter (https://twitter.com/jenny_twigs), and I am so in awe at what that did for me. I imagine in the future I will also advertise on my Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/jenny_twigs/) and my twitch (https://www.twitch.tv/jennytwigs).

Final Notes

    Thank you so so much to everyone who viewed the page, played the game and left feedback. This is my first game developing experience and I’ve learned so much and you have all been so amazing with your feedback and helped me grow.

Ideas of the Future:

     I have two more games in the works. One is currently in pre-alpha and is my current project and another is an idea for down the road.

What is my current project you ask?

                It’s bigger, way bigger than Paralysis. More complex. It is also a point and click 2D game, the art style is something I pushed and there is a narrative as well. You will be placed in the Victorian era, in a female ward of a certain kind of hospital. It’s dark, historical, educational, and twisty. Stay tuned~

 - Twigs