Devlog #1: Game Demo Release and Retrospective

Hi all! Thanks for tuning it. Its been a great first week (will hit the 7 day mark on Thursday 7/10).
I appreciate all the donations and feedback that came in for my game. Truly amazing for a first release as a solo dev.

The release went a lot better than expected as a first time dev but there were glaring gaps.

The overall cohesion of the project is somewhat lacking in terms of the orthogonal playstyles; which I hope will be resolved as I get better at game design. Tutorials levels where meant to be challenging while still introducing new concepts however the mark may have been missed as early play testers had knowledge coming into the game. In the future, I will work more towards adding smaller and perhaps skippable tutorial lessons.

On the other side, the marketing for this game was a tad lackluster.  Firstly, the thematic consistency of the Title and the rest of the gameplay was a little off. I want to work on developing my artistic eye to bring more cohesion to the imagery. Secondly, I only posted on Youtube and 1 subreddit. The Youtube video gave a decent amount of traffic to the game but again, the thumbnail did not do the best job at conveying the ideas. The Reddit post was a link to the Youtube video, but appeared a little dull (saturation and brightness) on the reddit screen. Moreover, the link requires users to click to play and thus made the activation energy higher. In order to resolve this, future marketing campaigns will use more gifs.

Lastly, I want to discuss the future for this game. Throughout the game dev process I wasn't sure what I was building but enjoyed every second. My intentions where to through together a few mechanics and characters that I like and see what sticks. From there, take audience feedback and really stretch the bounds of what made the game lovable. If there is more support or outspoken feedback I will continue to make progress on Shoplifta'! Regardless, expect a new version of this game sometime next year with everything way revamped.

Thanks for reading!!

P.S.  Teaser for my next game... a fast paced minigame series involving cats!