It was quite a busy month, with a lot of progress being made. Unfortunately, none of it ready to release yet. Well, not quite none. I did manage to sneak in the time for a few small fixes and improvements that struck me, but nothing major. Not even minor, really. Just some oversights corrected.

But mostly I worked on the new contacts feature. I had a vague idea of how it should work, but nothing actually written down, so I fleshed it out into a full concept in a couple of evenings after the last release. This took a couple of surprising turns, as these things often do. I ended up with a concept that will truly be the first major progression system of the game, the birth of a secondary loop, if you will. I took a week to test the concept, and it was the most fun I ever had playing the game.

If you’re paying any attention, you might be wondering how on earth I tested the concept before writing even the first line of code. Well, that’s where making your game a diceroller really shows its perks. I played the game on my computer, while running the new mechanics in a notebook with a pencil and, of course, some dice. A notebook and some dice are where this whole game concept was originally born after all, while playing the orbiter spaceflight simulator.

What to expect

Since there’s not much to talk about in the release this month, let’s instead have a short look at what the new mechanics will entail. The job hunting challenge that is in the game right now will be gone. You won’t be able to get jobs using your dice anymore. Instead, you can use your dice to find business contacts. They belong to a faction, with which they hold influence, they have a profession, and they’re working off a certain station, and they come with their own dicepool, and you use their dice to find jobs.

Contacts get penalties based on their location, their factions influence in that location, and their profession. You’re asking a cargo broker for a maintenance job? Yeah, he probably doesn’t have anything for you. You’re asking a contact for a job from a location their faction has no presence at? Probably not going to result in much either. Looking for a shipping job from a location that has practically no export? Gonna be tough unless you know a contact with quite some influence.

This mostly results in a hunt for an extensive contact network early on in the game, with the goal to make money later. In the initial game, it will be hard enough to break even with the few lousy contacts you have giving you lousy jobs.

This part is almost done. Contact acquisition is not yet implemented, but that won’t require any new systems. The heavy lifting for getting jobs through contacts is mostly done, though some UI work and refinements are still missing. There will possibly be a release with the whole thing in this state, or maybe I’ll blow right through to the full system.

Because that’s not all I’ve got planned. I’ve said it was going to be a progression system, right? So, the plan is that you can “level up” your relation with contacts, and for each of those level ups you get to choose a benefit from something that has a lot of similarity with a perk tree in other RPGs. Except you don’t get them from leveling up your character, you get them basically from leveling up your characters connection to and integration in the game world. I think that’s a concept that’s criminally underused in RPGs, and I am interested in where it’ll take the game.

In any case, this perks system currently only exists on paper. No implementation work has been done on it yet, and it will require a couple new systems, so I’m not sure when exactly I’ll get the whole bunch done.

Until then, there’s also other concerns, which have less to do with code, and more to do with things I have far less experience with…

The epic rage of furious crickets

You know crickets, of course, at least if you live in any rural area on the northern-but-not-too-far-northern hemisphere. They make an awful lot of noise at night, and by that noise you can tell that nobody’s there. If there would be a lot of activity, the crickets would shut up.

I’ve got to hear a lot of crickets since the last release. Now, I should probably preface this by saying that this is not intended as a rant. More of a summary of thoughts and musings. The thing is, I could’ve gotten to what I’m implementing right now a lot sooner if I hadn’t taken the detour of making the game prettier. But I had decided to invest that effort in the belief that It would get more people to try it out, to get more feedback, to develop less in a vacuum. This belief… turned out to be wrong. The better screenshots and the promise of music and sound have not led to more people taking a look at the game. And it’s not because nobody would’ve known about the game.

Let’s crunch some (very light) numbers and look at the funnel here. For those who don’t know, “the funnel” is marketing technobabble for the process between the points where somebody first hears about a product, until somebody actually buys a product. Just that I don’t ask people for money doesn’t change the concept. I’m still asking them to “buy into the game”, give it a go, write some feedback. The process is essentially the same, though you would assume that the hump is much smaller when no money is involved. An assumption that may not actually be correct, as it slowly dawns on me.

Down the rabbit funnel

Anyways, I promised numbers, so here we go. The first hurdle in the funnel is awareness: People need to know that what you have to offer exists, so you need to make them aware of it. I can say that I succeeded quite well in this regard, so awareness does not seem to be my problem. In the month since last release, the announcements I’ve spread around the net have been seen a rather surprising 1500 times by new people (as this excludes places where I already regularly informed about progress on the game). That’s plenty and then some for my purposes. If I’d have gotten a feedback from just 1% of them, I’d be writing a new ode to joy here instead of picking numbers apart. Even if it would have been half that, I’d have been happy.

But, 1% of them… didn’t. In fact, zero percent of them did. That’s what the funnel is. An effective funnel will see a reliable percentage of people that have been made aware of the product buying into the product. Not reaching 0.5% when I’m not even asking for money suggests that there’s something fundamentally broken in my funnel, or with my product. Looking at the funnel further down might give me an idea for which one it is.

So, what’s the next stage in the funnel? It’s people actually taking a look at the landing page of the game. A landing page which I had also gone through the trouble of redesigning a bit, knowing this might very well have an impact on my feedback gathering attempts. It turns out I might have spared myself the effort. The game had a total of 40 views on its landing page during the last month. Here it is much more difficult to filter out new views, which I kind of need to do to judge the funnel. Luckily, itch’s analytics provide a little help here by telling me which domains views came from, i.e. I can tell how many people followed a certain link directly from a certain place (In case you’re wondering, no, I cannot tell who. You’re save. Now take off that tinfoil hat, it looks silly!).

The answer is, 14 of those views came from those posts that were looked at 1500 times. So, that’s about my 1%. A teeny wheeny bit less, but close enough for government work. If this would be buy-in, that would be great. But this is just the first hurdle, it essentially costs a person a minute and a click to get to this point. So the bar of entry here is very low, and yet I’ve already lost 99% of them. The problem is, to tell how bad it really is, I’d need reference points. For which I’d need experience in marketing, which I don’t have, and quite honestly rather wouldn’t want to acquire, but I guess it just comes with the turf when you want to make a game. Surprisingly enough, an almost equal amount of views of the landing page are coming from various corners of itch itself. Apparently somebody does find the game at random every now and then.

Let’s look at the penultimate stage of the funnel. How many times did the game get downloaded during the last month? Here itch is less helpful, not telling me which visits resulted in a download, but then providing that information would require session tracking, and nobody, including me, wants that, so it’ll have to do. In any case, there’s been 5 downloads last month. That may sound like crushingly little, and in relation to the 1500 new people that have heard about the game, it is. But considering there was a total of 40 views on the landing page… that’s not actually bad! that’s 12.5% of the visits to the landing page downloading the game. I know enough about these things that I can tell that that rate is not bad at all. In other words, if I can get people to have a loot at the landing page, the chances of them downloading the game are not too bad. The landing page is definitely doing its job. It’s the announcements that don’t. So my design touches to the landing page might have had some impact after all.

But that’s not the “buy in” that I’m looking for. In the end, I want feedback. But realistically, I would never expect more than 10% of people who downloaded the game to take the time and write feedback. In fact, I would expect it to be significantly less. 10% of 5 downloads, that would be… errr… counts fingers …some poor bastard that got cut in half, apparently. Yeah, I’m not surprised they had more urgent problems than giving me feedback at the time.

What’s it all mean?

Here’s the rundown:

• Is my game a pile of poop? - Those numbers tell me that there’s not enough data to answer that question.
• Should I implement a feedback mechanism directly into the game to make giving feedback easier? - The numbers tell me that right now, that would be wasted effort. That would be priority number one if I’d have seen a hundred downloads and no feedback, though.
• Should I make the game prettier to try to increase the conversion from announcement views to landing page views? - These numbers are the result of a major investment in prettyfication. It didn’t work as I had hoped, so Nope. Not worth it at this point.
• Are my announcements a pile of poop? - The numbers say potentially yes, but there’s no way for me to really tell. If you want to extend a helping hand, have a look at this reddit post and tell me what you think.
• Am I announcing the game to the right crowd? - The numbers strongly indicate no. The problem is, fixing this means figuring out the right crowd, finding out where they hang out, and then kind of do the equivalent of sneaking into the place and plastering it with wallpapers overnight. It all sounds a bit too predatory for me to be perfectly comfortable with, but at some point I guess I might have to start working in that direction. So far I have stuck to places that I had some connection with, where I still had some excuse to be or some past credit to burn, but I have no doubt that they aren’t the places with the people potentially most interested in this particular game.
• Do I suck at marketing/PR? - Yes, definitely, but I didn’t need those numbers to tell me that. I knew this was going to be a major hurdle, much more so than just coding the game. I’m trying to get over that hurdle the way I’ve gotten over most hurdles in my life: Analytics, study, honesty, experimentation and a lot of whining and self-pity. Hey, nobody’s perfect…

There is, however, one particular number in all the data available that we haven’t looked at yet. An anomaly, if you will. A potential glimmer of hope, but also a source of some confusion…

Why are you reading this, exactly?

It’s not that I mind. I wouldn’t be writing all of this if I didn’t want people to read it. I am however puzzled by just how many seem to be reading this devlog. Since the first state vector in November last year, each of these rather wordy posts has been viewed at least 70 times… within a month. The older ones have by now accumulated well over 200 views. In fact, the initial state vector by now has as many views alone as there are total views on the landing page of the game. The state vector I posted together with last months major update has by today been viewed 80 times. Take note that this is twice as much as the landing page of the game itself has been viewed in the same time.

Sooo… what exactly is the deal here? Unfortunately, itch does not tell me where the views are coming from, just that they are there. While my brain started speculating on the reasons for this weird discrepancy, I had the brilliant idea of just asking you. Yes, you! You’re obviously reading this. Going by the discrepancy between how much these blogs are viewed, chances are you have not tried the game (if you have, thanks a lot!! What did you think of it?), but chances are also that you have read more than one of these. Would you mind telling me why? Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to guilt-trip you or anything. I’m not telling you to download the game or stop reading the blog, that would be horribly stupid, and so far I’m still holding on to the slight hope that that descriptor does not apply to me. I’m just curious about why you are apparently reading this while not trying out the game. I mean, this blog can’t be so good that somebody would keep reading it without any interest in the game. So, I would like to kindly ask you to leave me a short comment here, or wherever you might have found the link to the game if you don’t have an account here. Might help me make sense of things.

Meanwhile, I’ll keep listening to those crickets, and implement those new mechanics. I’m not saying this isn’t ever fun for me.