Become the Moon Postmortem

I just spent maybe 90 minutes writing a BTM postmortem only to accidentally press the back button on my mouse, losing everything instantly because itch doesn't auto-save drafts. Figures, honestly! I didn't have that much to say, and frankly, I'm more interested in talking about the future than the past. 

Here's the spark notes of what I wrote:

• The game hasn't sold well. ~4,000 copies thus far.
• The game was too hard relative to its complexity at launch, resulting in somewhat mixed response from content creators and players alike at launch. This was alleviated with a post-launch update which buffed a lot of cards and changed some systems to be more in the player's favor, which was well received but the damage was already done.
• Localizing to China at launch was a mistake due to the aforementioned difficulty. To this day, almost every Chinese review is negative, which heavily harmed the game's initial review score (although its mostly recovered now that more English reviews have come in).
• Putting aside the reception to the game, I'm still happy with how it came out and am glad I didn't cave to making a less interesting game in the hopes that it would sell better (I don't think it would have without making a different game).

I could probably write a lot more about how the game's design was always cursed from the beginning, but eh, I don't feel like it lol. I've been thinking about the game's design for years now and have iterated on it so many times that it's just become exhausting to talk about at this point.

Reflection

The thing I've been thinking about the most post-launch is whether I want to continue trying to sell my games or not. Since starting to sell my games, I've been spending much more time working on each game, and it takes me much longer to figure out what each game is. I'm much more critical of my work and worry much more about how it will be perceived by others than I was 10 years ago. I feel like this change has been hurtful overall to my enjoyment of something that once was a hobby but maybe no longer is. 

It's been 8 years since I released Super Skelemania (my first commercial release) and I haven't had anything close to a hit between then and now. If it hasn't happened yet, will it ever happen? Should I keep bashing my head against it or is it time to stop treating indiedev like lottery tickets and start treating it like a hobby or an artistic practice again.

So I think I might give commercial indiedev a break for now, which I hope will be freeing but I worry that I'll struggle to really "let loose." I just want to be able to jam stuff out in a month or two without obsessing over details or quality as much. I also would like to try to return to non-turn based games again. I used to love making platformers, but haven't done it in years at this point. I think I'm missing it!

Lastly, some may have noticed that Become the Moon's old demo has been taken down from itch, and the page is gone altogether. This is because a Steam player found it and tried it out of curiosity (flattering) only to find that their save was wiped upon returning to the finished game! I don't have a way to fix that, so I just took the page down. It wasn't representative of the finished game anyway and my publisher doesn't want to release on itch, so that's that. Sorry :(