I was pretty happy with my first game Treasure Diver. It is still not indexed on itch.io and I am not sure why. I made a couple of posts on reddit about the game and the feed back was pretty much all positive, I think a large part of that was down to the overall simplicity of the game, the idea the entire time was to do the basics and make the basics fun and it seems I achieved that pretty well.
The Good
There’s a lot of things with the game that I was happy with, the main on though has to be keeping the scope of the game as small as I did. It was a learning exercise so while it would have been easy to keep adding in new features such as attacks and power ups it ultimately would have turned it into an entirely different game.
One of the things I am actually most happy with out of all of it is how good the itch.io page looks. Being able to design good looking pages whether for steam or itch I feel is important as it’s the very first impression anyone gets of the game. A page that shows a lot of care and effort went into it I feel gives the impression that the same would be done with the game.
I managed to get a fair amount of players to try out the game. Most of them were from the reddit posts but looking at the leader board is pretty satisfying since I can see people didn’t simply play it for 30 seconds and then give up but actually played, died and went again in an attempt to get the high score, which does show that people had a level of enjoyment while playing.
The Bad
The game is defiantly not perfect, there was some issues that I am still not sure I had fully resolved.
One of these issues is when mines or chests hit a fish they change the speed of the fish and it decreases over time, I couldn’t find anything in the code that would cause this behavior so I assume it is something to do with the physics system.
Another issue I could not find a solution to was increasing the speed beyond a certain point, I think this is due to the timer that spawns everything, this was something that was brought up by someone that played it, I couldn’t get far enough in the game for this to be an issue so wasn’t something I could test.
Another improvement I would like to have added (and might still when I learn how to do it) is to have the mines drop in patterns rather than just randomly dropping a single mine. Game play wise I am not sure if it would be an improvement or not but I would like to try it out and see how it feels.
The Ugly
There is no two ways about it, the UI needs a lot of work. It is arguably the weakest point of the game. It is functional, and it works as expected but it just looks so bad especially in comparison to the Itch page and the rest of the game. I think this should be easy enough to fix going forward though, in Treasure Diver it was very much an after thought when I realized I didn’t have anywhere to put the score that wouldn’t obstruct the view of items falling or fish entering the screen. I think a little pre-planning on the games screen layout would have lead to a more polished end product.
The actual project. While trying to work out how to link things the actual project file became a bit of a mess, I think towards the end I understood a better way of setting it up, I guess we will find out on the next project.
The Numbers
It took me around a week or so working on it a couple of hours a day to go from an empty project to the finished game uploaded onto itch. Overall a guess at the total amount of hours it took I would say maybe 20 including all the time spent looking up issues and trying to learn how to do things.
Itch Stats
The game got a total of 229 views, with the majority of them coming from reddit and the most in a single day was 131.
The number of browser plays was 33 giving a 14% play rate. As this is my first game I have no idea if this is high, low or average.
Revenue earned from the game is $0.00 which is to be expected as it was a free game with no reason for someone to pay anything. I am only including it for the completeness of the stats.
The game was added to 1 collection and received a total of 8 comments, which includes my replies to comments.