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Waning and Wandering Interest

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago1,870 words

I'm really close now to the point where I can release a playable demo of Atonal Dreams... which should be exciting, but I've had a lot of days recently - today included - where I struggle to get to work due to worries about the waning interest in this blog and - presumably by extension - the game.

I'm not sure which metrics to use to gauge interest in the game or to predict its financial success. This blog is the best thing I have since I feel that people who are really interested might keep checking it, but - as I've pointed out a few times - the views have been gradually dropping with each new post. Shouldn't it be the other way around, if the game was really interesting?

I made a graph of the views on my posts over time:



It graphs up to 5000 views; the two white bars are the only two posts - years ago - which surpassed that. Gold ones exceeded 2000 views, orange exceeded 1000, and the blue ones failed to hit 500 views.

The most recent gold one was the post announcing the Steam release of MARDEK. The gold one before that was talking about the progress with that before it was ready.

Interestingly, there was more activity on the blog when I was ranting about my insanity while I was studying Psychology at university. Maybe some kind of zoo/freakshow allure, or something, or maybe I was talking about things that resonated with people while what I'm talking about now is a very specific project that either interests you or doesn't. Views have been gradually decreasing the more I've focused on games development, and even more as I've started putting more effort into promotion on Twitter etc, which is the opposite of what I expected and hoped for.

I'm always wondering about the causes of this, and there could be many. Maybe the way people engage with the internet is changing and anything that's not social media/discord/whatever is getting less attention. Maybe only older fans check creators' websites, and that audience is naturally dispersing with the passage of time. Maybe it's because I'm posting more frequently now so the posts are replaced more quickly. Maybe some of the site issues a few months ago scared some people away.

The most obvious cause though seems to be that most people who are aware of me played MARDEK during their childhood and wanted a nostalgic fix of that, and once they were able to get it on Steam, that itch was scratched and they lost interest. Everything's gone downhill since that release. I'm not exactly attracting an audience interested in my current stuff since - apart from Sindrel Song, which I never promoted and which was probably too weird to appeal to people anyway - it's not as if I've actually released anything in years.

So hopefully it'll be a different story when I do release something and start building a new audience... though the failure of Sindrel Song and the waning interest in these blog posts is definitely making me worry about whether I'll ever manage that. I hoped releasing MARDEK on Steam would draw in interest to its spiritual successor that I'm currently working on, though the opposite's been the case, unfortunately.

Feels like the advantage I had of an old devoted audience has been completely lost... though maybe in time people will start wondering again and check what I'm doing now. Or maybe after reading the plans for MARDEK that urge to find out what happens next has gone and there'll be no reason for them to. Hmm.

There are all kinds of things I should be doing, like promoting more, or even running a public discord that keeps people around, and I feel that I'll probably have to devote some focused attention to all that soon. I'm unsure though whether to do it before releasing a demo, or after; maybe if I have just a trailer to entice attention in an upcoming demo, that might be more of a hook than advertising a demo that people are able to play if they want to. I don't know. I'll need to look into it.



I have been using Twitter more, and following and engaging more on there (baby steps), but it's difficult to tell how much of a difference it's making. Obviously it's not helping this blog! Annoyingly Twitter's analytics only seem to work for the past ~90 days, for which my graph looks like this:



They're going up, I suppose, and there are some spikes recently that are much higher than anything previously. Being on Twitter is making me aware though of how immensely oversaturated the indie games scene is, and how many people are doing exactly what I'm doing. How hard it is to stand out. So many amazing-looking games out there, so many dreams that are sure to end up crushed in the end, sadly.



I notice my own attention wandering a lot recently. It'd be a different story if attention were building as Atonal Dreams was progressing, but instead I just keep wondering "is this game just not interesting? Should I be doing something else?!", and sticking with it despite that feels delusional or foolish. It's hard to keep focused or find the motivation some days, like today.



Last year, I worked on a game called Belief, which eventually had many of its features gradually absorbed into Atonal/Divine Dreams. I can't remember why I decided to change course with that after doing quite a bit of work on it, but I think it was because it wasn't getting as much attention or feedback as I'd hoped, so I was led to believe that it wasn't interesting enough and I should change course to avoid another Sindrel Song flop.

But ∞ the post here showcasing a demo video of Belief ∞ currently has 3,209 views, and the video itself on Youtube has 862 views.

By comparison, ∞ this weekend's post about Atonal Dreams ∞ currently has 274 views, and the linked Youtube video has just 228.

It's not exactly a fair comparison since the latest post is only around 3 days old, while the other's been up for almost a year, and was pinned to the main blog page for most of that time and linked to from the Games page that apparently exists on this site, but most things get most of their views within a couple of days of posting. I seem to remember the Belief video getting maybe around 600 views back when it was new, and I thought that's far too few for me to stick with the game so I should do something else.

I actually really like Belief still, and there's an urge to just return to that instead, or at least a similar derivative. I find the purely social battles more amusing, the thought of making just human models less taxing, and I like the thought of a game where you can gather a whole crowd of followers eventually by winning them over in these social 'battles'. But I went with the straightforward violence angle I have in Atonal Dreams because it seemed like that was what people wanted.

Also though, ∞ the post about the Steam release of Memody: Sindrel Song ∞ currently has 2,840 views, but the game only has just over 100 sales. So it's not as if there's an obvious correlation between a post's popularity on this blog and how well it's able to sell. ∞ The post about the MARDEK Steam release ∞ has 3,785 views currently, and the game's sold 1,484 copies (and the number keeps growing, slowly but surely; it's getting around as many sales each month as Sindrel Song got in total).



I've also been thinking a lot about the difference between games you can 'just play', where you can just explore a world for a few minutes at a time whenever the mood takes you, and linear, narrative experiences with set characters. Atonal Dreams is obviously the latter, though from seeing how many other indie devs are making procedural, non-narrative 'just-playable' games, I've had an urge to make my own.

Something where instead of following the story of a prewritten character, you make your own custom character and just go on an adventure in the world that's been made for you. Something that could be gradually updated with more content without breaking any storytelling.

I have a couple of ideas for specific games like that set in the Alora Fane world that I've been gradually writing notes about over the past few weeks whenever an idea comes to me.

It seems like getting big youtubers to play your games is a big factor in how much they sell, and more of them would likely be interested in something where they could make a character of their own and just mess around. I've written about all this before.

So currently I'm having to fight the urge to abandon what I'm doing and pursue one of those ideas instead...


I'm not going to, though. I'm going to stick with Atonal Dreams until the end, since it's not designed to be very long anyway. Completion is months off rather than years off; I've mostly finished the most time-consuming parts.

I wonder how much of a correlation there is between the number of people actively following a game during its development, and the number of people that buy it in the end. I suspect that most people who find any game do so after it's been released, or immediately before, rather than months in advance. And they presumably find it either via word of mouth or through some press promotion or something. Probably youtubers, streamers, etc.

I've talked about all of this a bunch of times before, so I know much of what I'm saying in this post is nothing new. As always, it's mostly just vomiting out words to process them, stop them spinning distractingly around in my mind, and get accustomed to what I need to do next and to motivate myself to do what I need to do now. It's not as if I have colleagues to do this sort of discussing with, or an employer to make all the decisions for me!

I need to spend the rest of this week polishing what I have, then I'll need to spend a week just looking exclusively into what the next best step would be: do I release a demo then try to promote that demo, or just a trailer and then try to use that to hint at an upcoming demo? Do I even do a demo at all? A closed beta test first? Lots to think about that I really should have been thinking more about sooner, but I've been so busy focusing on actual development! It's hard juggling everything at once.

For now, I need to find the motivation to address a whole bunch of irritating little issues I've been putting off since they're the main things left to do!