I like to do some analysis after I release a game, and the first 24 hours of Waystation Deimos have been pretty solid so far.
It's by far our most successful game if you're just going for the initial release; it's not quite up to the same scale as velotha's flock, but it's gotten a lot of very positive feedback.
I want to go over some things that have helped it do well where previous games haven't.
We hit 52 downloads on DriveThruRPG in 24 hours. That's a new record for us. It's not phenomenal all things considered, but it's about what velotha's flock made in a month.
We also surpassed what the Hammercalled Quick-Start did in the equivalent amount of time, though not by as much. The Hammercalled Quick-Start is purdy, and Waystation Deimos is not exactly ugly, but is definitely lower production value.
Since going up on DriveThruRPG, it has received one four-star rating (and no others). Obviously we aim for five star quality, but as a side-project that's very niche and a 48-hour project I'm willing to accept that. It's better than no ratings, given DriveThruRPG's system for showing content. Also, velotha's flock is sitting at 3 and 1/2 star reviews on average, so it's bumping our average which is nice.
We'll see how it develops going forward, especially once we release Segira in a week.
Honestly, I feel like the majority of the issues here come from being on a 48-hour schedule. The shift in focus from a very clear and concise design to something that was a little less direct showed.
While the core game's good, I was planning to do some word art to put into the things and add more interludes. Scribus makes that very easy to do, but adds the complication of having to fiddle with it and I wasn't certain if I'd have time.
In the past I've used both LibreOffice and Inkscape to do stuff like that, but LibreOffice doesn't export it well to non-PDF formats (and Scribus reads .odt but only main body text if I'm understanding right), and Inkscape's setup doesn't necessarily flow naturally.
The store page was an issue; someone said that it was really nondescript and didn't help a whole lot with decision making. I've made some standard boiler-plate to put there.
So the switch to Scribus from LibreOffice let us do a couple new things, but it came with some downsides. The cover looks fantastic, but the text isn't selectable because it's stylized and I didn't want to make invisible text in Scribus.
The hyperlinks on the first real page that link to Facade and the Resistance toolbox were left out. And by that I mean that not only were they removed, but the actual text for them was too, which led to Nora Blake sending me a Discord message telling me that there was an issue (fortunately, it was fixed before much time passed).
The image in the cover is one of the alchemical symbols for iron ore. Going from a unicode symbol, I contracted the shape down to give the rough outline that I was going for, then I cut the arrow into slices to create an illusion of motion (using a boolean to knock-out some lines I had drawn over it. The entire cover is one .svg, made in Inkscape.
The Theseus Implant is an augmentation based on the notion of the Ship of Theseus, but also is just pure mind horror, since it resets the user's mind to an earlier state without having any way to acclimate them to their surroundings. I'm not sure how balanced it is, but it's an interesting thing that I'm not sure has been done anywhere else (the concept has, but the augmentation itself hasn't).
