I put on my robe and wizard hat [you could be in this blog post]

Yesterday was the release day for Tales of Akash 10. It is essentially my first fully commercial game so needless to say I'm very excited and at the same time confused.

Excited because I'm looking forward to honest feedback from the game, and wishing the players good times playing it. I am also at the same time somewhat confused.. this is all so new to me. It's not like it's going to make it to Steam or Play Store or anything, and I'm not looking to compete with something like Heroes of Might and Magic 3, Diablo 2, Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment or Dungeon Master etc.

I must admit there were times I wanted to quit developing the game. Then there were times I couldn't stop programming it, while having a 16 hour coding session behind.

Here's what the website traffic looks like for September after launching the Premium subscription again. As you can see there's a notable spike in the graph, I have actually no idea where the traffic came from but the report told me the traffic came from Google (Organic) searches.. whatever that means.

Between Sept 4th and Sept 19th I think I did some singles for the store to drive traffic.. I think it did pretty well considering I'm not that popular in social media, but I did post Instagram Stories, on forums, Reddit, Facebook and all that.

On Oct 1st I did a modest Facebook Ad campaign using the Advantage+. It turned out really well, there isn't much left to it really on the 3rd. It drove some traffic and gathered a nice amount of likes, which makes the game link seem more appealing to potential players. In total I think it had around 1-2k views.

But, I've been up basically all nights this weekend, trying to promote and market the game. Maybe I get the sought-after title of "night hawk". I also did a short music livestream and it went ok, other than that I was working on implementing a new feature in the game, and now it has a Zodiac system. How that works is upon entering the realm the game generates an astrological sign for the player. These then affect certain aspects of gameplay. On top of that I found some fatal errors in the code which completely prevented the game from starting, so they have been fixed.

What are your thoughts this fine Sunday? Let me know in the comments section!

For Endor!

-ef