Howdy everybody

Howdy everybody.

We’d prefer to introduce the sport we’re engaged on and in addition get your ideas.

This sport is a visible novel / interactive story a couple of younger lady looking for her personal identification and sense of self. The story offers along with her interior conflicts, pivotal moments in her life, and psychological depth. The participant confronts her previous and selections, shaping the story’s route by way of their choices. It has a darkish and melancholic environment, but it surely’s additionally very thought-provoking and emotional. Our principal purpose is to create an expertise that encourages gamers to empathize with the character and replicate on comparable questions in their very own lives.

As you’ll be able to see within the 1-2nd picture, our sport contains scenes set in a post-apocalyptic world. The environment options ruined constructions, deserted areas, and a robust sense of loneliness.

The picture itself exhibits what you’ll be able to consider as a sort of interlude mini-game. Right here, our little lady imagines herself as a princess from a fairy story she heard from her previous historical past instructor. She envisions herself occurring sure adventures on this section. Gamers can select to play this half or skip it—it affords about 10–quarter-hour of non-compulsory gameplay.

One other picture exhibits a tough draft of an underground bunker she encounters throughout her principal journey. The bunker continues to be in improvement; doorways, interactive objects, decorations, and atmospheric parts shall be added later.

We need to be very clear about this:

Results, NPCs, animations, and interactable areas will not be but full. They’re in a tough, placeholder state that we’ll proceed to refine.

Lighting and fog results shall be added, and the backgrounds shall be modified to replicate a extra reasonable, dwelling world.

The elements you see within the screenshots are literally simply small sections of very massive maps.

Our sport continues to be in improvement and there’s much more we plan so as to add. Maps and animations shall be way more polished and visually interesting. We’re aiming for a mean of two–3 hours of story that may be completed in a single sitting however will really feel wealthy and substantial. We’re additionally engaged on about 20 new maps. We would like gamers to consistently discover new areas with out having to see the identical location time and again.

However right here’s the place we’re struggling: Our sport is definitely designed for cellular platforms. Nonetheless, nearly all of cellular gamers are likely to desire these kind of video games:

Easy and fast-paced informal video games Aggressive and socially interactive video games Idle/auto-play mechanics with reward-heavy programs Battle Royale, MOBA, or different action-heavy, short-session video games

Our sport is the exact opposite: story-driven, atmospheric, and designed to immerse the participant within the expertise. This robotically guidelines out a lot of the cellular participant base and limits our potential downloads.

Promoting-based monetization can be problematic for us as a result of we don’t need to destroy the story expertise. In narrative-heavy video games, in-app buy charges additionally are usually very low (often round 1–3%, that means just one–3 out of 100 gamers purchase one thing). We’re contemplating an non-compulsory donation system on the finish of the sport, however that often has a fair decrease conversion fee (round 0.5% or much less). So even the gamers we do attain are more likely to generate restricted income.

Additionally, visibility within the Play Retailer is fairly restricted organically. It doesn’t matter what we do with key phrases, we anticipate the natural obtain numbers to remain low.

That is the place we’re torn.

Making this sport is extraordinarily demanding. Animations, maps, dialogue, results—all of it takes critical effort. However the income is nearly nonexistent.

On one hand, we actually need to make video games that provide significant, immersive experiences like this. However, there are less complicated, faster-to-make “informal” cellular sport concepts that might attain much more folks and earn considerably extra.

We’re curious what you assume. Do you assume it is sensible to complete this undertaking with a lot effort? Or would it not be higher to shift towards less complicated however extra profitable sport concepts?

Thanks upfront to everybody who takes the time to learn and share their ideas. ❤️