An experiment (Patreon)

Up until this point, I've made very little effort to "market" (shill) the game beyond a couple of reddit posts and a thread on F95. Brazen marketing makes me queasy and I hope to maintain a reputation as a pretty chill dude and not a money-hungry monster. I'd like to expand the feature set a bit more before I start trying to chase down players as well.

That being said, there is one thing that I thought needed improving: the game's itch.io cover image. Currently, a significant majority of traffic to the game comes through itch internally (people browsing through the listings on the site), and up until now the image that has ostensibly beckoned those people to click on the game has just been the game's title on a plain background, giving no indication as to what the game actually is.

This is obviously terrible. I had assumed when I first uploaded the game that there would be some restriction on what could be depicted in a cover image, but it seems that if your game is already listed as being 18+, you can basically do whatever you want. There's full on cocks on some of them.

And so, an experiment. I have changed the game's cover image to the one above, which, were I not already the developer of the game, I reckon would cause me to click through to see more with a roughly 100% effectiveness. My current click-through rate (the percentage of people who actually follow a link to the game page after seeing it somewhere on the site) is 2.81%. After some light reading on the itch forums it would seem that this is actually a pretty good CTR, although I think this is partially because adult games presumably get far fewer overall impressions. We shall see, however, if this can be improved with some more titillating bait.

---------------

In other news, I've been working on adding a freecam. The basic functionality is working, so I just need to decide how best to allow players to interact with it, UX-wise.