As you know if you follow me on twitter, after Loren RPG release I decided to take a break for a week. Break from coding, but not really a total break from work 🙂 During this week both good and bad things happened:
Good things
In the first week of release, Loren is the best selling game I’ve ever made. However I must not forget that it is also the most expensive and the one that took most time, so I haven’t even recovered costs yet, and sales are starting to decrease already (that’s normal).
Of course, just a week means nothing, will have to wait at least one month or perhaps 2-3 to judge better, but so far the early results are somewhat reassuring and I don’t exclude the possibility of making more deep RPGs like this one in future.
We’ve started working already on the expansion that should be out sometimes in the next 2-3 months, depending how much content we decide to put in it 🙂
Also, the press release outcome wasn’t bad as I thought: I said last week that my PR was mostly ignored. Luckily, I spoke with a veteran indie, Chris of Arcengames, who enlightened me about how PR actually works. It’s uncommon, if not very rare, to get press coverage for a game after just one PR. You need to chase journalists, send follows up, and so on. He stated it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
So I followed his advice and sent some review codes to some journalists, and while I cannot be sure when they’ll do it, they said will review the game. This include two of the biggest review sites online, so if a review appears in those sites that would be pretty good 🙂
I made good progresses also in the other games. I got new texts for Queen Of Thieves, Roommates, Nicole. I got new art for Nicole and Planet Stronghold: Warzone. Below you can admire the Marada Knight, one of the new enemies:
And this is Kurt from Nicole game, one of the 3 dateable boys:
One last thing, curiously Bionic Heart is my best selling game on Android. I would have never thought about that, and while Android sales in general are very poor due to the rampant piracy, it’s interesting, since on desktops that game definitely doesn’t outsell Heileen or Spirited Heart.
Combined with the many ports of Flash games I’ve seen, I’m thinking that Android is a mostly male-dominated market, while iOS is more neutral or even more female oriented.
Bad things
Of course, also some bad things happened. First of all, I realized how wrong I was to commission a J-pop song for a RPG. Basically, lots of people don’t like Loren theme song, and even those who like it say that is out of place. I’ve now removed it from the main game menu (you can listen it in the credits screen) and I’m thinking to replace the trailer in the game page as well, since I’m quite sure it was hurting sales.
Even if I have already commissioned Heileen 3 song, I’m thinking won’t make theme songs anymore in future, since that money could be better spent in making the game bigger with more art or texts.
Another bad thing was the reaction of some people to the game art. I realized that as a straight male, I simply cannot understand if a female outfit is too skimpy/sexy, so from now on for the games that need to appeal both genders, or only female players, will ask the feedback of female friends.
Right now, the artist is redoing most sprites of Amber, the main character of Amber’s Magic Shop, because as my writer Aleema suggested, her outfit was completely wrong for an otome game! And beside Amber is supposed to be an alchemist and I haven’t seen one with such outfit in any game yet 😀
Of course I plan also to have games with more adult themes, like Bionic Heart 2 will be. Lots of fanservice and sexy outfits, horror/mystery, betrayal and blood. Well, like most tv series airing on TV lately, no? 😉
