1 month update: 5 reviews, 47 sales, USD$179. Gained exactly 100 wishlists since launch. I think it’s fair to call this a failure most abject indeed.

A hypothesis as to why is that Omnigon has been described by myself as a metroidvania, which is sort of technically true. but metroidvania enjoyers tend to want sick upgrades and tight combat and sweet platforming. gameplay stuff, y’know. but Omnigon is not that, the appeal of this game is in poking your head into a room and seeing what funny thing is within. in that way it shares more in common with the earthboundesque RPGs than with the metroidesque platformers.
obviously I couldn’t have called it an RPG because that’s flatly false. but somehow targeting the quirky RPG guys as the audience rather than metroidvania guys would have been wise. How exactly that’s supposed to be done though is rather beyond me.
instead of changing up the communication I could have foreseen this problem and changed the game. what if it did also feature competent combat and such? the metroidvania guys would have enjoyed it far more, and no doubt that would have looked good in trailers and perhaps also screenshots.

That’s the chronic problem, and its more acute manifestation is that when release time came there was no pre-existing community around this game at all. A sign of a guaranteed incoming failure. A mistake made months ago was to continue working on Omnigon even as the discussion around it was characterised by silence and crickets. While the game was very fun to make I should probably have abandoned much earlier on so as to avoid wasting so much time.

So, what I might aim to do in future is to only invest large chunks of time into games that have already gathered a chunk of audience from the outset. and to spend more time on identifying the target communities and trojan-horsing my game into their discussions with earnest participation in these groups, and high quality self-promotion.

Right, well that’s probably all for Omnigon,  thank you for reading my walls of text