All the TIGS old guard seems to be in love with it, AdamAtomic in particular is bringing it up constantly in every social space I share with him lol. You’ve made something really cool and special!!!
6 Likes
yeah i’m a huge hit with other platformer devs it seems. i think designers love me because i’m extremely mechanics focused and detail-oriented and i tend to make decisions that have higher friction than your average game. i really want to respect the player and give them space to get dirty, but my earlier games often just overwhelmed players.
i’m starting to get that balance better. i want them to be challenged, not overwhelmed. but a lot of it is just vibes and winging it. it’s extremely hard to get this right; it’s basically on a razor’s edge. i’m sure i still made mistakes, but i’m not as stubborn as i used to be and i’ll compromise when it’s necessary.
i think the other aspect people have been harping about is how cohesive it feels. this is honestly just a consequence of taking my time and really letting it marinate. the reason everything feels like it belongs is because it’s the culmination of a year’s worth of ruminating on it. give it time and you can find all these cool little connections between disparate pieces of your art that you can then emphasize. you have to let it breathe.
the thing i’ve been surprised by is people are so down with my programmer art. like i think of myself as a visual artist maybe third or fourth. i’m much better at programming and more recently music, so i was really kind of hesitant about the graphics but something about it makes it resonate with people. i don’t really understand that one yet. i think it has symbolic appeal, maybe. paired with the immersive sound, it conjures up something beyond what’s on the screen and your imagination fills in the blanks.
12 Likes
it’s probably that it looks sick as hell and also owns
10 Likes
could be unfortunately due to my inability to take compliments we may never know
3 Likes
it’s 90% the spotlight effect imo. it really elevates the art and mood
2 Likes
i spent a lot of time making sure the dithering on the spotlight changed nicely when you moved subpixel amounts. the shimmer is very important.
7 Likes
The graphics while simple do have a lot of small touches that many games that look like this don’t bother with, just on the couple of gifs in the first post you have the spotlight effect, the flicker on the candles, some background bits have some movement to them, etc. It all adds up! Add in that it sort of expanded beyond its Pico-8 roots while keeping the general aesthetic and it can hence generally go a bit further than those actually on it and it comes off as better than one would initially expect when looking at say a single static screenshot.
Got two more batteries today (including the one I mentioned last night), it turns out being able to warp between various checkpoints to practice various stretches before trying to do them all in a row can be very helpful! Next time I think I’ll have to go back to exploring as I hit the major bits that first caught my attention so time to find some new ones.
3 Likes
ok i asked for reviews on bluesky yesterday cause i always heard getting to 10 reviews on steam matters a lot and got them pretty quickly
turns out uhhh yeah it does. i went from 1000 page views on steam yesterday to 16000 today after i hit the threshold
11 Likes
im speaking from no experience but could maybe be beneficial to put out short trailer or update steam page with reviews/bsky dev pull quotes? I def kno thaat kind of self-promotion can be uncomfortable but since it seems Steam discovery algo going into overdrive rn the response might be of value to ppl not on bsky and help convey appeal?
5 Likes
yeah, added the pull quotes. good call!
5 Likes
i think these must be curated by someone who likes me? my itch page for this game doesn’t have a ton of views, even compared to my other games. harder to sell a paid game on itch than a free one.
4 Likes
Yeah. The Featured Game tab is absolutely curated manually, though I can only guess what their process is.
I had one of my ZZT games there for a couple days, and the only reasonable explanation was that one of the site’s leads is (reportedly) an ASCII-phile and liked my spread of screenshots.
2 Likes
wow the itch front page is powerful, but not in terms of click-through rate lol.
i must get an “impression” every time someone visits the itch homepage, but when i’m logged in the “featured” section is below the fold so i don’t even see it unless i scroll down.
6 Likes
yeah those numbers seem about right lol
1 Like
This game really feels like VVVVVV or other “early” indie games in a way that makes me nostalgic.
3 Likes
when can we start calling 2000s indie silver age indie
8 Likes
if anyone is playing on steam and got far enough where they want to give me a positive review i’d really appreciate it! trying to hit that second review benchmark at 50 reviews where steam pushes it even more.
6 Likes
i tried and failed to figure out how to leave a steam review this morning lol, gonna try again later tonight
2 Likes
Should be on the store page, probably around the spot where it confirms that the game is in your library. (Just above the section where you can buy additional copies as gifts.)
4 Likes