Itch.io Release Stats and Chapter 3 Update

Dev blog is also posted on my website, which can be found here.

It’s been a bit since I released a dev blog so here’s a bit of an update on the game’s development and some stats on the itch.io release.

 I’ve gotten a decent amount of attention after releasing Tales from the Road on itch.io and posting about it on FA. I’m getting about 15 downloads a day and 65 views a day, and the number of downloads and views I’m getting is increasing every day. The first day on itch.io I received only 2 downloads and 20 or so views, the day after that I had 4 downloads and 30 views. The third day, which I believe is when I posted it on FA, the downloads and views went up quite a bit and I ended up with 50 views and 15 downloads. And today, on 7/15/2019, I’ve gotten 65 views and 15 downloads. I also have a CTR of 2.67%, not sure if that's good or not. I’m very happy with these results, the game has done a lot better than I thought it would. Odds are the views and downloads won’t keep increasing, but if the downloads were to level out at around 5 or 10 downloads a day, I’d be pretty content. I forgot to mention that those numbers are itch.io only. I’m getting an additional 10 or so views on my GitHub as well. Don’t know how many people have downloaded it on there since GitHub doesn’t track that.

My main source of traffic on both GitHub and itch.io has been Furries, of course. I’ve gotten a decent amount of views and downloads from FA, and tons of people have found the game by searching the “Furry” tag on itch.io. If I ever get any feedback, I might look into posting the game on other furry forums and site. Just don’t have enough confidence in the game to be posting it everywhere yet.

More on the feedback, which is the only thing I haven’t been overly happy about. And that’s not because the feedback has been bad, it’s because I haven’t got any feedback at all. Around 40 people have downloaded the game and no one has left feedback or a comment on itch.io. I don’t know if it’s because no one’s played through the whole game yet or if it’s because the game is so trash that no one can be bothered to leave feedback. I’m hoping it’s more of the former, but like I said, I don’t really have much confidence in the game myself.

I am quite happy with how the development of the game has gone recently. At this point I’ve pretty much finished the first half of chapter 3; I just want to test out a few things before completely proclaiming it complete. Chap 3 is shaping up to be pretty damn good in my opinion. I really like how I’ve implemented choices in this chapter. For a lot of the scenes and dialogue, you’ll have 2 or more choices in how you approach them. Except for the dialogue with Sasha and Jacob, but that’s because there wasn’t really a big need to implement choices there. For an example of the choices you have, one could skip the entirety of the neighborhood walk if they wanted too. It might lead to them missing out on future dialogue or scenes, but it’s possible. There’s also a host of options when it comes to texting Holly, including just completely ghosting her, to the detriment of your friendship. Chap 3 is also looking to be the longest of chapters released so far, with just the first half being about as long as chapter 1 was. I’m not sure if I’m going to properly release this first half of chapter 3 or not. There isn’t a ton of new content when compared to 0.1.3, but I have fixed a ton of bugs while developing chapter 3. Which has me leaning towards just putting out a 0.1.4 version.

The content in the second half of chapter 3 will vary pretty heavily depending on the player’s choices up to that point. I know for certain that the player is going on a date Holly if they went down that path. I’m thinking of also adding a Valery date, but only if the player met him on the walk and weren’t hooking up with Holly. I’m also thinking of explaining how money will work on the road trip, I already have a perfect scene in mind for introducing it. Most of the other stuff I’m thinking of for the second half isn’t really close to final so I’m not going into it much. Better safe than sorry.

Well, I think that covers most of what I wanted to write about. If you have any questions about the game that I didn’t cover just let me know on Itch.io or on Twitter and I’ll do my best to answer them.