No Review Games on Steam: Chubby Cats

 

  I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to see how games fail before actually releasing a game.  In that pursuit, I'm reviewing Steam games with no reviews to get an idea of why they failed.  Here is the transcript for Chubby Cats:

Welcome to The Adventure Mechanics, I'm Chandler.  Today, we'll be continuing examining games with zero Steam reviews.  And on today's menu, it's Chubby Cats.  Chubby Cats is a cat satisfaction puzzle game with time as a constraint.  Chubby Cats was released on June 19th, 2025 by Just L Studio.  It's their third game they've released on Steam, with another one slated for release sometime in 2026.  Just L Studio is a one person show, with their itch.io page showing the same games released on Steam.  From what I can tell, many of their games are targeted at the Chinese audience.  It sounds strange to bring up, but it is relevant, I promise.

So, how does Chubby Cat play?  Well, it's pretty straightforward, honestly.  You put islands down on the grid that contain ingredients locked up in trees.  You then use a cat 'chef' to liberate the ingredients from the trees and use them to either directly satisfy a waiting cat's hunger, or use those ingredients to make more complex foods that the waiting cats desire.  You continue liberating ingredients and satisfying cats until the level's time runs out.  There's no real tutorial in this game, but I was able to figure out and describe this game in a handful of sentences.  The cat desires start out with ingredients and then become more and more complex foods as you complete levels.  Progression to more and more complex puzzles is just about right to get an understanding of before the game asks you to go faster.  The artwork is simple and friendly, with all the cats and ingredients being relatively easy to identify at a glance.  The music is a perfect complement to the puzzles, being relaxing to promote you to get into the flow of feeding these cats.  And although they do have an AI disclosure on the Steam page, it is limited to, and I'm quoting here, "In the game trailer, we use music from StockTune, which provides royalty-free music in the public domain. The music can be freely used, shared, and adapted without payment or attribution."  That sounds like the boilerplate from a stock music site to me.  It's not great, but unless you're looking for AI-free music explicitly, you're going to run into this sort of disclosure.

Why does this not have any reviews, then?  Well, it does have nine, but every single one was from someone who received the game for free and are written in Chinese and are positive.  These do technically show up in the reviews list, but from my understanding, they do not impact the review numbers, since they were reviews from someone who got the game for free.  On one hand, that makes sense:  Free copies given out could easily take a game from no reviews past the 10 review threshold for initial visibility.  On the other hand, it's so statistically unlikely to ever reach past the ten review threshold for most studios first game that the conventional wisdom is to have your first game be a learning experience.  And woe be upon you if you don't expand your fanbase enough with that first release as to get out of the no review hole.  That's to say, Steam is the platform, it's up to you to bring your audience and their attention to your game on that platform.  That's not necessarily a bad thing, just a reflection of the reality of releasing on Steam nowadays.  And from what I can find from Just L Studio, they put the game out there and did some marketing, but it obviously wasn't enough.

There is one oddity from Chubby Cats that I want to point out.  The reviews are all in Chinese.  That in and of itself isn't noteworthy, as it is one of the largest markets on Steam, but it brings up a cultural difference that we in the West don't see when we look at Steam: Censorship.  In China, most of the ways to get a hold of the developers through Steam are blocked.  They can only use the review system to get their attention.  If you don't know, one of the reasons Slay The Spire 2 was review bombed was due to the Chinese audience giving no recommendations and then using the review system to give the feedback that normally goes through the Steam community hub.  I found this rather fascinating, so I dug into the censorship and cultural norms of Chinese gamers.  And from what I could find, they don't typically leave positive reviews on games.  They'll leave negative reviews to give feedback to the developer and then almost never update the recommendation.  That makes Chubby Cat more interesting, especially when put into this context.  The main audience for Just L Studio appears to be Chinese, a group of gamers that does not typically leave positive reviews.  And because of that, Chubby Cat may be far more successful than expected.  They may have multiples more sales that a comparably reviewed Western game.  So, instead of being a sub-ten review game, it actually ends up further up the totem pole and into lesser known puzzle games with dozens of reviews.  I struggle to see it being larger than that, however.  The concurrent player count never broke the 5 player count.  I suspect that it isn't that popular and is still in the no reviews category because of that.  If there was a quiet audience, you would expect more than one player on at any given time, not months of no players.  I would also expect to see at least one bad review that wasn't gifted a copy.

What could be done to get more eyeballs on this game, then?  There's a lot of "wisdom" out there that may or may not be helpful in getting your game in front of your potential audience:  Enter into as many festivals as possible to stand out, get a streamer to pick it up and play it for a while, post dev blogs on how you made your game.  All of those are ways to get it in front of as many eyes as possible.  And the advice can work, if you're persistent enough.  I personally follow about a dozen developers who plug their game at least twice a week on their social media.  Whatever path you choose to get your game out there, you need to be doing it almost as soon as you have started working on it.  Barring putting an idea and not a completed game into a festival, of course.  There is a video by Isto, Inc. that takes the conventional wisdom that "experts" like Chris Zukowski use, called the marketing funnel, and flips it on it's head:  In the video, which I'll link in the description, they argue that you should be defining success before you even settle on an idea.  They then take that definition of success, as defined as a sales target upon release, and walk it back all the way to the ideation stage of game design.  Although each step back introduces more uncertainty, it also lowers the definition of success.  And using something like this walkback method can help inform what success will look like for each step of the game design journey.  Why do I bring up this particular methodology when I started with being persistent?  Simple:  This can help you define what progress will look like when you reach certain milestones in your game design.  And it forces you to consider what you will need to achieve in each step to be considered "on track" for your game's release.  And persistence on pushing your game will help you bring your audience to your game when it comes time to release.

That's not to say I entirely agree with all of the "wisdom" in the Isto, Inc. video; I don't.  At the prototyping phase, they define success as getting your playtesters "needing" to play your game, and not just saying it's fun.  That's an almost useless metric driven by vibes as much as others.  And that may end up taking you and your game beyond where you envisioned and offloading the fun parts of game design and decision making onto feedback you're getting from your playtesters.  That's not only fraught with issues, it means you won't be making the game you want to in the first place and almost designing by committee.  And if you've ever been on a design committee, you'll know what I mean and why that's a bad thing.  All the edges will be filed off and you'll end up with another bland as plain oatmeal game.  You'll have a much harder time selling a strange attractor if you've gotten rid of all the interesting bits.  I'm not saying that the video advocates for it, but that's one of the logical conclusions of that thought process I need to call out.  It seems to work for Isto, Inc., though, so what do I know.

What seems to separate the studios that live from the one release and then dead is persistence.  And both Just L Studio and Isto, Inc. have released multiple games.  And if there's one thing being so enthusiastic about games and game design has taught me, it's that getting a game to done is the first and most important step.  I can't count how many games I've played that never made it past prototype and out to the larger audience they so desperately deserved.  No matter how you choose to market your game, be persistent and keep plugging it like the devs I follow.  You will find a way that works for you if you keep on putting it out there.

Well, that's about all that I have for this examination.  If you have any comments, suggestions for other games with no reviews, or anything else, leave a comment below.  I always enjoy talking about games and want to hear your thoughts on them, too.  If you prefer to use social media, you can find me under @jcsirron.  This has been another side quest on games with no reviews on steam for the adventure mechanics.  I'll talk to you next time.

No Review Games on Steam: Vertical Descent

  I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game.  In that pursuit, I'm reviewing Steam games with no reviews to get an idea of why they failed.  Here is the transcript for Vertical Descent:

  Welcome to the Adventure Mechanics, I'm Chandler, and this is another Side Quest. Today we're going to continue our No Review Games Examination with Vertical Descent.  Vertical Descent was made in Unity and released in March of 2025 by RuHix.  They appear to be a Canadian developer and Vertical Descent appears to be their only game released, on Steam or otherwise. I can't really find any other information for them on the internet at all. So their presence is minimal at best. Cannot find a valid website, itch.io page, Twitter handle, BlueSky handle or anything like that. So all the information that I can get on RuHix is from this one game.

Vertical Descent is a first person puzzle game consisting of roughly ten puzzles spread across seven floors in a mini tower.  Each puzzle usually contains a letter or some context for clues.  Once you figure out all the puzzles, you'll exit the lobby of the tower.  Sounds pretty straightforward, doesn't it?  Well, it's complicated.  Let's talk about the build I played.

The current build on steam is broken, there's no sugar coating this.  The lighting, one of the most important things shown on the Steam page, isn't included in the latest build.  And depending on how you set up the game, there may or may not be more or less broken textures throughout the level.  When I compared playthroughs with my co-host Devon, I ended up having a lot more broken textures than they did.  Your mileage may vary, but the broken textures will never be zero.  And since you don't start on the top level of this Vertical Descent game, you can actually just open the screen door on the elevator and fall out of the game.  And once you've broken containment, you can do wacky things like walking off the map, channeling your inner Jesus and walk across water, or even just say fuck it and run to the end trigger.  The possibilites are limited, but none of those are intended.  And this is all before we actually engage with the intended puzzles in the game, too.  Both Devon and I were able to "beat" the game in under a minute.  Before we used the elevator.  Not a great first playthrough.

Because of how broken this game is, Vertical dissents smells like this developers first commercial game.  Judging by how little footprint they have online, I'm pretty sure that's the case. That's not to say this game is completely unredeemable, but rather this game needs to be reworked with the player in mind.  And that's why I find it so fascinating.  This game has potential.  It's just so marred by heads-down developer-itis.  Like they needed to step back, get some external perspectives on their game and regroup.  I'll hold off on further thoughts on this as we get to them, though.

Let's assume that you want to play the game as intended and you're able to make your way to the roof, the seventh floor.  You'll see your objective pop up on screen then.  This makes me suspect that there's a build of this game that starts here, but I digress.  There's a clue on the mattress that relies on meta knowledge (i.e. your U.S. layout keyboard) to give you the code that you'll need to enter into the keypad in the elevator.  That's the level of puzzle the designer put into the game.  Now, I'm not saying it's bad to use meta knowledge, per se, but relying solely on meta knowledge will frustrate players that don't have the same keyboard you do.  And that shows in the Steam community hub for this game, too.  When you enter in the correct code, it will unlock a button for the next floor in the elevator.  The game continues on to each lower floor where the player must solve a variety of puzzles, many tied together, to reach the tower lobby.  I'm not going to go through each puzzle, but I will say that if this game is getting reworked, more clues will need to be sprinkled throughout the environment for each puzzle.  Some solutions straight up felt like they were trolling me.  I'm sure that wasn't the developer's intent.  It was the lack of parallel clues for the puzzles to figure out what to do.  For example, the fourth floor has four candles that need to be lit in order to go to the next floor.  There are no clues for that puzzle anywhere.  And I searched for the clues on how to solve it.  I ended up brute forcing it, assuming that the developer wanted me to run from room to room.  You know what?  That was the solution.  If I wasn't intrigued by the absolute state of this game, I would have gotten frustrated and walked away from the game at this point.  You start on the fourth floor.  Take that in.

Vertical Descent is easily broken and the puzzles can be somewhat obtuse.  Why is it interesting, then?  Well, despite not having lighting, I feel like the story has promise.  It mostly avoids jump scares and has at least one touching moment where you see the deceased person the letter writer tried to bring back.  Trying to bring back the dead by any means necessary is a solid plot point to base a game off of.  And RuHix touched lightly upon the grief of loss.  The puzzles that weren't obtuse were interesting as well.  That's a pretty solid base to build from.  Like most horror games, the game lives or dies on a story execution.  There are hardly any mechanics in the game, so it only leaves ambiance and story-telling to make the game engaging.  And I feel like this game can be changed to make it work.  It's not going to be easy, or quick, but if the dev wanted to build upon this, maybe make a sequel or something, they wouldn't be starting from zero.  And there's a lot to be said about that.  As it stands right now, though, this game deserves to be in the no reviews pile.

Let's no leave it there and say we're revamping this game, though.  Where would we start?  Step one would be to VASTLY increase the internet presence of RuHix as a studio.  It appears that their website has lapsed, and that's unfortunate, but not insurmountable.  Getting a new domain isn't that hard.  I don't expect them to pay the almost six grand that a domain squatter is currently trying to extort.  The dev will also have to get more into a social media they can handle.  That means sitting on handles where the dev is comfortable having them, like Bluesky, Twitter, Twitch, whatever.  Put out a few dev logs, or something to indicate you're alive as a studio.  If you're not leaving a trail, you're making it so much harder for people interested in your game to learn about you, either as a studio or as a developer.  You need those bread crumbs.  Being an indie dev, that's the one way we can get an edge on the AAA space:  We're small, reachable, and approachable.  Use that advantage.  Don't make hard for your customers to reach out to you if they are interested in what you made.  Put yourself out there in some capacity!  If you make a fanbase, they will be able to latch on to your presence online and, hopefully, evangelize you and your studio.  Don't waste that opportunity.

Next, do some market research and play some similarly short horror and puzzle games that are well received.  It doesn't have to be on Steam, either.  If there is a popular horror game in the same vein on itch, try it out.  Take notes on what works for you and what doesn't.  Write down the memorable moments, scares and set pieces.  Really dig into the artistry on display.  Get inspiration for level layouts, puzzles or scary moments that would fit into Vertical Descent.  Examine puzzle games and see how they layout hints, clues and puzzles.  Mock up the puzzles from Vertical Descent to match that style and see if it makes the puzzles easier to engage with.  Just because you're an indie developer doesn't mean you shouldn't try out what your peers are making.  I know some devs prefer to avoid similar games while making theirs, but from what's on display in the current build, external inspiration is needed.  And it's inspiration, not copying.  Take the inspiration and make it yours if you plan on putting it into your game.  Your game will turn out better if you have a base that you enjoy to work from.  I promise you that.

That's all fine and good, but that doesn't rehab this game.  How do we do that?  First, and foremost, it needs to have the expected player path described.  That includes the potential scares, the visual set pieces, and where they can look for clues, and most importantly, the story being told in this environment.  Each floor should ideally have a visual set piece that feels at home in world.  Not having a morgue on the second floor of an office building or a random pair of school rooms on the fourth floor sort of thing.  Make the whole building cohesive.  Once that's figured out, we need to make the characters: The letter writer needs to have clues of his or her presence described and fleshed out.  The player is following them, metaphorically.  We should know more about them than we currently do.  The elevator, yes, the elevator, needs to be better fleshed out and made to fit in the world.  That means making it more like an elevator and not a box that takes you to a series of screen doors.  The dead lady needs to be given more context with the letter writer.  And what came back instead of her needs to be hinted at, too.  Only once we have all of that defined can we then look at remaking the map.  And yes, this map needs to be remade.  There are far too many dead spaces with nothing in them and unintentional red herrings spread throughout.  Each floor should have a clear theme and goal instead of using the elevator to move the player to each floor.  Make this feel tower feel lived in!  It's the home of the letter writer, the dead lady, and presumably, the player.  It shouldn't feel like a broken-ass Unity asset.  Give each character space to tell their story.  Hell, if it's appropriate, use them directly and give them a voice, too.  You can make text boxes for speech and not necessarily need a voice actor to do that part, either.  If there's time, voice acting would be a beautiful addition, though.  It may be out of scope for this remake, and that's fine.  Using grunts and other human sounds will work just fine with what I'm envisioning.

If you're putting up a hundred dollars on a steam page, you need to be sure you're going to at least make that hundred dollars back.  Maybe even make enough to reclaim the studio domain, who knows.  And that means the game needs to be polished.  I find myself saying that a lot each time I make one of the games with no reviews:  You need to polish your game.  And it keeps being relevant because it's the last step in production.  Each and every part of the game should be taken to a base level of polish, and it should be consistent throughout.  No random blood spots that will throw off players from a puzzle.  Each blood spot should have a distinct purpose, to say nothing of everything else put into the game.  Ambiance is good, but the goals and motivations should be clear at all times, especially in a horror game.  You don't have mechanics to lean on, you need to make your environment clear.  Always, always, always.  You want to make sure, even when unsettled or scared, the player will be able to make it to the next area of your game.  Nothing pulls the player out of the world faster than strange or rough edges not intentionally put there.  Except maybe having to do the same "scary chase" scene again.  That's a different topic, though.  It needs to feel like every part of the game is ready for someone to skulk, hide, or get chased down.  And when it's there, the playtesting cycle can finally begin.

Once that's all been executed, playtest.  And I'm not talking about using the dev or their friends or family, either.  People unassociated with the game at all need to play it blind and comment on it.  That's why all of these puzzles feel obtuse.  It never got cross-checked with other people.  All games need to be playtested before release.  It's abundantly clear that Vertical Descent was not.  Not in any real sense, anyway.  Even a short smoke playtest would have revealed not starting on the roof and the shading not appearing as expected.  Before bringing in outside playtesters, the game needs to be as far along as possible.  If needed, break up the testing to puzzle testers and blind playtesters.  You can lean on the puzzle playtesters to get the vast majority of the puzzles into a good state, swapping out the puzzles they are testing each time and adjusting those in isolation.  If possible, don't even put the puzzle into the world.  Make a dedicated build that only shows the intended puzzle without the ambiance.  If it's possible in the best situation, it should work in world.  Save your blind playtesters for when you have everything nailed down to your satisfaction.  Sure, there will be minor issues around, there always are, but you should not be putting a build with obvious issues in front of those willing to test your game.  It's not going to get you the same level of feedback as if you were giving them a nearly complete game.  Blind playtesters are a valuable resource, so squandering them on broken builds is a waste of everyone's time.  They will give you the end-to-end overview you need to push your game up to the next level.  Use them as such.

And once you get your first playthrough feedback, you have more work to do.  Ideally, you'll get a screen recording of them playing and you'll see where the rough spots were and what the player was thinking when they were working out your puzzles.  You need to iterate on each puzzle and make it so your playtesters don't get stuck for longer than you intend.  Some red herrings are fine, and good ways to introduce story bits, puzzle clues, or scares, but they shouldn't be so convincing that you see players fixating on those areas.  And remember, it's always lock before key.  Introduce the locking puzzle before giving clues on how to solve it.  You will see players appreciate that design flow and it will pay off as you go through the feedback process.  Go through this process as many times as you're able to, and hopefully the game that comes out the other end lives up to the horror genre you love so much.

When I started playing Vertical Descent, I was not expecting it to blow up into such a fascinating game to examine.  It absolutely deserves to be in no review town, but it does not need to stay there.  If RuHix plans on taking another chance on this game and is willing to overhaul it, I believe it would be able to stand proudly in the short form horror game genre.  And I'm not really a horror game player, either.  Something in this beautiful and campy mess inspired and intrigued me enough to spend far too much time looking at ways to make it what the developer RuHix originally intended it to be.  And that means something, especially in the environment the video game industry is in right now.

I'll leave my rant here.  As always, if you have any questions or comments on this episode, leave a comment below or reach out to me on various social media.  My handle is @jcsirron.  If you have a game with zero reviews that you want me to review, let me know!  I've been inspired by this series and want to keep making these sort of episodes.  This has been another Adventure Mechanics Side Quest and I'm Chandler.  I'll talk to you next time.

No Review Games on Steam: Cryptic Escape

 I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game.  In that pursuit, I'm reviewing Steam games with no reviews to get an idea of why they failed.  Here is the transcript for Cryptic Escape:

 Welcome to the Adventure Mechanics, I'm Chandler. It's that time again for another side quest. Today, we're going to continue our no review games examination with a title called Cryptic Escape.  Cryptic Escape was released in June of 2024 by LionEY Games.  According to their itch.io page, their first game was released in 2022. They have seven other games on their itch page as well. After releasing Cryptic Escape, they released another game in 2025.  So, they still appear to be an active developer at least at time of recording. 

What is cryptic escape I hear you ask?  Cryptic Escape is a top down real time dungeon crawler without combat. It sounds like a conflicting premise, but it works surprisingly well. In cryptic escape, you will run around each dungeon level collecting coins and opening chests. The denizens of the dungeon will chase you an attempt to stop you from collecting coins. As you tell deeper into each dungeon, you will run into stronger and faster enemies. You will also run into traps and switches that block off areas of the dungeon. You can use these to your advantage, but if you're not careful you may run over a spike trap and and your run there. You can also use potions to become invisible, run faster, that sort of thing. The game claims to be a rogue like, but I don't necessarily get the feeling that it has a fully baked progression in the game itself. That being said, you can save some progression by purchasing upgrades to your abilities in the shop after each run, making future runs easier.

It sounds like a great premise, doesn't it? Well, it is. But the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. The camera movement feels off somehow. It moves the way I expect it to, but it seems to move way to aggressively to get the player into the back third of the screen.  In a more polished game, it would ease the player into that 1/3 so they can see ahead, but not so fast as to cause potential motion sickness. In cryptic escape, there's no lurping or easing, the camera just speeds there. It's a novel experience, but that camera needs to be fixed.  And bad feeling isn't something that's obvious when you look at the trailer for this game, either.  The sound effects are serviceable, but they feel amateurish. The same applies to the music, as well. After one level you will want to turn off the music because it's just that repetitive. 

On my first playthrough, I was able to get awarded achievements for getting through the fifth level of the dungeon just by playing the tutorial. That's a pretty big oversight, and it looks really bad when that's your first experience of a game. Paradoxically, after my first run, I was able to get the welcome achievement. It feels like the achievement system they included is actually worse than not having any achievements at all. And you have a very short window to impress your players, I want to make sure you're achievements fire off as expected. 

That being said, what is good or interesting about this game? The premise is very good in terms of idea. The randomized dungeons feel well constructed and although they are procedurally generated, there's still enough wiggle room to get by enemies without having to cut down long hallways.  The variety of enemies are introduced on a level by level basis, easing the player into harder and harder situations. This is a good game design. And although the artwork is basic, it serves its purpose well in context. Especially if the developer is trying to call back to rogue and it's offshoots.  It just feels like a game jam level of effort and polish, though. 

Let's talk about a couple elephants in the room for this game. First and foremost, despite not having AI anywhere else in their game as far as I can tell, the capsule art for this game is AI generated. And I can almost guarantee that many gamers that would be interested in this game didn't give it a chance because of that. I know it's a shocker, but AI generative art is not popular with players. And if your first contact with them, the capsule art, is AI generated, you are going to turn off a lot of players. And I think that's exactly what happened here. I feel like LionEY games understood that players don't want generative AI since they didn't include that in their subsequent game.

The second metaphorical elephant is the zero review moniker. I didn't do my due diligence and actually check if there were any reviews for this game. Turns out there's 11 of them. So technically that disqualifies cryptic escape from being a zero review game. Looking at the reviews, however, I suspect that all of them were comped. And comped reviews don't show up in your review queue. And looking at the reviews left, it appears that most of them are one to two sentences saying the game is good.  To me, this looks like the developer trying to get over the 10 review threshold to have his game show up. That's not a bad thing, per se, but as shown by it appearing in my zero review list, I don't think the way the designer did it worked.  So, a little bit of a lesson for everyone, I guess.

So, with all that being said, how can cryptic escape be made better? The first low-hanging fruit I would pursue would be to rework the music and sound effects to better reflect what they're trying to make. And by that I mean crunchier sound effects, more variety of music, that sort of thing. If the point of the game is to be in the dungeon, make it feel good to be in there.  That's the centerpiece of your game, after all. Make it sound like that's where you put most of your effort. 

There are some small visual effects on screen when you get too close to an enemy. I think this is a good first step in making the dungeons feel better. As another piece of low hanging fruit, the designer could add torches and dark spots to make it feel darker and less like a game jam. A greater variety of props in the dungeon, and maybe dedicated rooms to add a hand curated touch, would go a long way to making each dungeon level feel unique. And like the audio portion, you want to make sure that the player feels like this is where you spent most of your effort. The level of effort that's in here now is fine for a short game. But I get the feeling that this game wanted to be more than what is actually there. And because of that it feels hollow. As more monsters populate the dungeon levels, it's somewhat alleviated, but it's never completely gone.

Now, I haven't been very deep in the dungeons, but there are opportunities to introduce more variety in layouts. It's important to make sure each run of the dungeon feels unique. And it doesn't right now.  Other rogue lite games, such as Spelunky, there are ideas such as moods for a level. I feel like cryptic escape would benefit greatly if there were some sub varieties of dungeons, especially in the earlier levels. The ultimate goal of this is to make sure that your players don't see the seams of your game so quickly.  As it stands, I could see the seams of the first dungeon very quickly. And I hadn't even put an hour into this game before seeing those seams. Especially in run-based games, you want to make sure that although you're doing the same thing each time, it doesn't feel repetitive. 

In the end, I feel like this game unfortunately is where it should be in terms of reviews. It's not as bad as some of the other zero review games I've played, but like pixel knight, the extra level of polish needed to get it out of low review territory just isn't there. And I feel like that's a shame. The premise is interesting. The moment to moment action can be compelling. But it doesn't have the longevity needed to actually make a full game out of it as it stands right now. If there was another polishing pass and the AI capsule art were removed, I feel like this game would stand up on a similar level as Pixel Dungeon.  And that's what comes to mind as a comparable game for cryptic escape. It feels like this game reached the point in development where content mountain comes into view and the developer said, "nah, I think it's good where it is."  That's a shame, because I feel like if they put in that extra effort, did some market comparisons, and polished their game up to their competitors' standards, this game would have found a larger audience than it did.  Without that work, it's doomed to the sub-one thousand review pool with so many other games.

Well, that's about all that I have for Cryptic Escape. As always, if you are the designer or developer of this game, reach out to me. I would love to talk about your game design process and how you made Cryptic Escape. And if you aren't and have comments and or questions, leave them in the comments below or reach out to me on various social media.  My handle is @jcsirron. This has been the Adventure Mechanics side quest and I will talk to you next time. 

No Review Games on Steam: Pixel Knight

I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game.  In that pursuit, I'm reviewing Steam games with no reviews to get an idea of why they failed.  Here is the transcript for Pixel Knight: 

Welcome to another Adventure Mechanics Side Quest. I'm Chandler. Today we're going to continue the zero review games series on Steam with Pixel Knight.  Pixel Knight was released in 2023 under Eross Video Games.  It's not their first game, either on Steam or on Itch. They have since released the beginning of another game on Itch a month after releasing Pixel Knight in 2023. So, we aren't talking about developers first game here.  Although the developer may be inexperienced, they have released several games before Pixel Knight. It does appear they have gone dormant after their last game in 2023, with no notable updates or new releases since then, however.

But let's talk about the game in question.  Pixel Knight is a platforming beat 'em up. In it, you will face platforming challenges on top of fighting various flavors of goomba style monsters. The artwork is very good, although it is missing a lot of transition frames, such as jumping and getting hit. I'm not particulalry surprised, since I was able to find the asset pack used for the skeleton enemy on Itch.io.  As such, I'm not going to comment further on the art, since it's likely composed almost entirely from asset packs.  The choice of packs do work well together, which is is a point to the designer.  I will, however, note that even when you purchase assets, unless the license forbids modification, change them to fit your game, like making jump animations for the main player. I talked about assets more in a previous side quest if you're interested in more of my thoughts on asset packs.

The musical choices in the game are surprisingly upbeat and definitely make the vibe of the game more engaging. I suspect that the music follows art, in that it's likely a "best fit" instead of music composed for the game directly.  Like art, that means I'll only be critiquing on how it fits the game.  Some of the pairings, such as the level select screen, don't really match the rest of the theming.  If the designer chose music more holistically and went for a specific style, then the audio scape may have been a bit better. 

There are a lot of additional mechanics in this game that you can engage with, or you can ignore. There is a dash, for example that I never touched while I was testing this game. It shows in the steam trailer, but I never ended up feeling like I had to use it. Overall, this game is a decent representation of an action platformer, but there are a lot of things missing and that is holding the game back.

Let's talk about movement. In an action platformer, you typically have a ramp up to max speed ramp down situation. It makes the game feel like it has weight. This game is all or nothing in terms of speed. And that doesn't feel great. Jumping has no pre or post jump animations, and this makes it feel stilted while jumping. There's no animation of the player in air, either up or down, which only adds to the stilted feel of the movement. I didn't notice jumping itself feeling particularly bad, per se, but it didn't feel great, either.  And may the jump gods have mercy on your soul if you want to attack in mid-air.  That WILL kill all horizontal momentum and send you to the briny depths. I know it sounds like I am harping on this game's movement, and I am, but it is competing with the likes of Shovel Knight, Hollow Knight, Abathor, to say nothing of pure platformers like any entry in the Super Mario series. And missing the most fundamental mechanic of the game is going to turn off players at the very start. If the developers spent more time working on how movement felt, I feel like this game would have reached a larger audience alone. Level design needs to be changed as well. 

For some reason, the designer has a fetish for blind jumps and jumps just at the edge of the players capability. I know that creates tension, but from level 1 to when I stopped playing, every jump felt like it was going to be my end. And, don't get me started on how the blind jumps we're not telegraphed very well. It even shows one in the steam trailer for this game. If you watch the video and that blind jump doesn't bother you, great, you might enjoy this game. But I don't know very many people that enjoy blind jumps. They weren't fun in platformers in the '90s and they're not fun now.

The one note jumps make all the levels feel absolutely basic. There is just enough detail in the background to not call it a test level. It's not much beyond that, though. If the designer wanted to continue working on this game, he needs to go back and think of the challenges that each level is going to have. The leaps of faith and blind jumps each level gets tiresome very quickly and there's not much beyond running from the left to the right with some borderline unfair jumping challenges in between. If certain levels were dedicated to more interesting challenges, or interactions with the enemies, then I feel like this game would have a lot more to it. I'll save most of my thoughts on the enemies for later, though.

The second part of the game is the combat. It is basic, but it has just enough feedback to the player that it is functional. It's not great, much like the movement was, but it is good enough. The player can strike from head to toe with one click and take out the vast majority of enemies quickly. Most of the enemies will flash when hit and emit a sound along with usually a pain state. This is the very minimum I expect from a game that involves combat. It does not do anything beyond this, though. Yes, there is a dash, but as I said earlier you don't really need it. There is also magic, but again, you don't really need it. There are a lot of stats in this game that you won't ever really care about. There's a lot of mechanics that you won't ever use. Do you get where I'm going with this? The designer put more mechanics in before they fully fleshed out any of the mechanics.  They're all functional, but none of them feel great.  Even fighting enemies feels bad in the trailer on the same page. It seems like the designer was trying to make it feel like a slower game than it is, especially when you can speed click enemies to death.  If I can speed click an enemy to death, why would I want to use dashing or magic? The main solution I can think of is to make the enemies more interesting. But that isn't in the game. 

As I said in the beginning, enemies will move left to right on a platform. Once they either hit the edge or the end of their patrol route they will turn around and go to their other edge.  This isn't bad for a starting enemy, but as far as I've gotten into the game, every enemy has this behavior. There are no static enemies that provide a combat challenge. There are no real flying enemies, aside from one that is placed slightly above your attack range. On that note, there are no range enemies for that matter. If they are found later in the game, like in the infinite dungeon, they are introduced too late to be relevant.  Combat ends up being one note and flat.  If there were more variance, it would make the game more engaging.  But as it stands, enemies don't add much to the game.

When you visit town, you will experience the trouble with UI.  You can open up inventory, magic, or whatever with a single button press.  That's not the issue.  The issue is when you want to do anything on the windows.  I was able to brute force myself into figuring out how to stash things, sell loot, and purchase potions.  I never could figure out how to upgrade equipment, however.  Sure, you can put your greaves in the upgrade window with components, but how do you actually do the upgrade?  The menu doesn't say, nor does it show anything helpful in the controls.  This game seems to revel in being obnoxiously obtuse.  For instance, you can not only open up the inventory, but you can open up the pets, magic, and trade windows all at once, too!  Not the type of thing you want to see in your UI.  At all.  Having more control explanation, possibly being optional to turn off in each menu, would go a long way towards making them more user friendly and understandable.

Does this game deserve to be put on the no-review list?  Maybe.  There is an interesting idea here, but it's either not fleshed out enough or not implemented well.  Pixel Knight feels like a game that was made by one person that did not get any notable feedback from playtesters before being released.  If it did get playtest time, it certainly wasn't blind playtesting.  And it made the game so much worse for that.  Yes, the game has a low price and yes, it's a relatively short play, but if the developer wanted it to actually find an audience, there needs to be a lot more work done, mechanically, artistically, layout-wise.  Considering I'm reviewing it years after the fact, I doubt it will ever reach an audience beyond the morbidly curious.  I certainly understand why it has no reviews after examining it, though.

I don't want to bash on this game any more than needed to understand why it's on the no review list, though, so I'll stop here.  If you are the developer and want to talk about Pixel Knight, please reach out!  I would love to hear what you went through designing this game and what process you had.  If you're just a listener and have thoughts on this game or this series, reach out below or on various social media.  My handle is @jcsirron.  This has been another Adventure Mechanics Side Quest.  I'll talk to you next time.

No Review Games on Steam: SpaceWorm

I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game.  In that pursuit, I'm reviewing Steam games with no reviews to get an idea of why they failed.  Here is the transcript for Space Worm: 

Welcome to the Adventure Mechanics, I'm Chandler. Today I wanted to try out something a little different from what I'm normally doing for these Side Quests. I've been looking at a number of games on Steam that don't have any reviews, and I was curious why they didn't.  Instead of just doing this for my own edification and keeping it all to myself, I've decided to turn it into something we can all learn from. And to start it off I found a small game that feels like Alien Invaders and Snake, with a dash of Vampire Survivors. So let's talk about it.

The game is Space Worm. Space Worm was developed and created by Brazilian programmer Filipe Izalon. He has a rather amusing website that is based off of what appears to be a Linux command line.  Although Space Worm is his only published game on Steam, he has produced a number of other games as shown on his GitHub page. And a quick look at that page shows that he's still developing games and tools. Most of his commits have been in the last year or so on a variety of different projects.  That's a promising sign. It means that he's not so disheartened by poor performance of Space Worm on Steam that he gave up on the discipline entirely. Although it does appear that he's been focusing more on tools rather than games as of late.

So what is Space Worm? It's actually a series of games made in PICO-8, one of which is similar to Snake mixed with Vampire Survivors, and the other which is similar to an old arcade game where you're just storing stuff for points. There's also technically a third game included, but it appears to be a cutscene only as far as I can tell. Let's start with our exploration of what the main game is, Space Worm.

In Space Worm you are unsurprisingly a worm that navigates the cosmos, eating stars and planets. There are other galactic-sized enemies with unknown motivations trying to stop you. You have the ability to shoot, upgrade, and use different special abilities in your pursuit of eating that cosmos.  It plays very much like Snake. You go around collecting stars and planets to upgrade your snake, and when you collect enough to level up you get a choice of three different icons, very much like Vampire Survivors. None of these icons are explained in-game, although they are on the Steam page. The game ends when you run out of life by getting overwhelmed by your opponents. What is great about this game? I actually love that this game is a marriage of Snake and Vampire Survivors. That's not something I was expecting to see, especially with a PICO-8 game.  The presentation is easy to get into and hard to master, much like Snake. That's a pretty powerful motivator to keep playing the game. Unfortunately, it's not exactly perfect.

To start off with the obvious, the Snake play area is finite. The theming of the game isn't, at least not really. If you go too far in one direction, you'll hit a wall with little or no feedback to where you are.  And although the sizzle reel in Steam shows that there is a white bar when you hit the edge, I didn't see that when I was playing the game. This can and will get you killed. The second is what I mentioned in the description of the game.  The upgrades have no description or glossary in-game to reference. This may have been okay with the arcades, where you could put all of that information on the cabinet itself, but not so much when you don't have access to a cabinet. Modifying the edge behavior and adding a glossary in the pause menu would go a long way to making this game feel a lot better.  It also does not have any noticeable music of any sort. I think that is another place that it could possibly improve.

The second game we have is called Consequence.  It is a simple abduction and destruction game. It has appealing graphics and a tight little gameplay loop. With the additional graphics it has, it actually feels more like a game than the headliner, Space Worm.  The only thing that's really missing from it is a soundtrack and a little bit of wonkiness with the controls I'll go into later. I'm somewhat surprised that Consequence wasn't the headlining game, to be honest. That's not to say it's a perfect game.  It doesn't have diagonal movement, which you'll surely feel when trying to avoid enemy projectiles. There's also no sound effect for  abducting people, which I think is a major missed opportunity to make the  game feel better. And one of the most cardinal sins I feel there is in a game  there isn't a way to go to the top menu without having to mash your keyboard. This applies to all games in the collection.

And the last game, if you can  call it that, is called Another Side. This seems to be the story trying to tie  the two games together.  Although I don't really get what is trying to be conveyed in the cutscene, I do appreciate that they put the effort in to at least have a cutscene. There's no hint that this is a non-interactive cutscene, at least from a player perspective though.
So why do I think this game doesn't have any reviews? The answer is rather simple. Polish. This game lacks a lot of polish. It does have a decent minute-to-minute game loop for each game that you can play, but it doesn't surface what's expected of the player. And for its price point, it's competing with things like its inspiration, Vampire Survivors. And that means the polish level needs to be close, if not on par, with its inspiration. Now don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that it needs to be the exact same quality level, just that it needs to have the same level of effort put into it, especially if you're taking inspiration from a game with such a high level of polish. I actually think that if this game had more juice, it would be more competitive. That means adding more sound effects and music, making it so you can navigate the menus in an obvious way, and quit the game without having to use Alt-F4, and exposing how mechanics work more transparently to the player. I think it would have found a wider audience if the level of polish was that high. It has a solid core in both games, but they just aren't quite tied together even with the extra story, at least not yet. And if we're spitballing here, I would actually take the level up system in Space Worms and apply it to Consequence as well. That would make both games feel like they're minigames inspired by Vampire Survivors.  And that would tie both of them together mechanically, not just thematically. I think this needs to be iterated over a couple more times with playtesters, at a minimum.  It's apparent that the game didn't really see much playtesting before it was released.  Otherwise the issues I brought up would have been at the very least surfaced to the developer, if not addressed.

So, closing thoughts. Does this game deserve to have been buried without a review? As it stands right now, maybe.  The reality is Steam has tens of thousands of games competing for your eyeballs. And this isn't one that's forward enough to demand your attention. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean that it will be overshadowed by everything else that is.  And that's what we see with it. It's been out for just under a year and a half, at least at time of writing, with no user reviews to speak of. I think there's a good game in here, but it needs much more development time. And by that, I mean it needs to be polished. It needs a lot more polish. And if you happen to be the developer and are listening to this, I'd love to interview you and get your story on the game.

That's about all I had for this game, Space Worm. As always, if you have any comments or questions, reach out to me on either various social media as @jcsirron, or leave me a comment below. This has been The Adventure Mechanics, and I'll talk to you next time. 

Mechanics Make The Point

  I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game. To that end, I'm going to go through the development process to release a game. Here is the transcript from the twenty-sixth episode on building the player profile for your game:

  Welcome to another adventure mechanics side quest.  I'm Chandler.  Good games aren't easy to make, per se, but they can stumble on how everything interacts and still be good.  Great games take all things and make them work in concert.  A story that works with the actions of the player to not only make the game more immersive, but also get the intended emotion across.  Today, let's talk about using mechanics in your game to make the point.

If you've ever played a game where it intentionally pushed you to a specific playstyle, such as the desperate decisions in Papers Please or being a true hero in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, you'll notice that the mere act of playing gets you into the game more than, say, an abstract puzzle or bit of expository lore does.  As the old idiom goes, actions speak louder than words.  When a player is doing something diagetic in your world, you're demanding that they buy into what you've created.  You're asking them to be an active participant, not just an observer.  This buy-in is very powerful.  It's forcing them to actively think about the action they're doing and can push them to do things they otherwise would object to.  And if your game is about getting a message across, that is valuable.  Let's talk about that.

Do you have a specific emotion that you want to get across to the player?  Do you want them to feel desperate or overwhelmed or like they're contributing to something good, bad, or ugly?  Make them do something.  Sure, you can preface it with lore and audio dumps, but those are the appetizers to the main thing you want to get across.  When a player realizes that they're not the good guy and are committing heinous acts, they're more likely to think about what they're doing.  When the player has to balance their home life requirements with their duty to check all the paperwork at a checkpoint, they're going to feel that pang of desperation.  And as long as you don't get too heavy handed with the message, you'll get the player to consider what you're getting across, at the very least.  For a less extreme example of this, let's look at a contentious mechanic in Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and it's sequel: Weapon durability.  In previous installments, your weapons were linear improvements and indestructible.  You could rely on them being there when you needed them, unless they were consumables like arrows or bombs.  In the latest installment, however, you can lose your weapon mid-fight.  You'd then have to either scrounge a new weapon, retreat, or stockpile weapons for that eventuality.  This encouraged more planning, reacting, and the feeling that you're just scraping by.  It made the collapsed world of Breath of the Wild feel, well, wild and dangerous.  Sure, you have a stockpile of weapons, but the red moon is just around the corner and you're a long way from safety.  It made the world feel challenging, not just being told that the world is now a dangerous place.  All of that is in service to the story that the game is telling, too.  This isn't the comfy Hyrule you've played through in other games, it's different.  And when you pair weapons breaking and being a finite resource with the respawning enemies, it's hard to not feel that the game is actively trying to kill you.  And that makes the world so much richer and more engaging, as opposed to just telling the player it's a dangerous place, but letting them clear out areas to be safe.

If you do this poorly, however, you can have mechanics that actively conflict with what you're trying to convey.  Take, for instance, the return to office situation that Adam Jensen has in Deus Ex: Human Revolution.  It's the first social hub in the game.  And like any social hub, it's encouraging you to stop, talk with everyone and explore.  Especially after the intro, where Adam is thrown around and grievously maimed, it feels like narratively we should be doing the "welcome back from sick leave" with our old co-workers.  But the game is actively fighting this by having a radio buddy incessantly nagging us to get to the helipad for our first mission.  This builds tension, but it's also demanding the player to ignore all of this interesting stuff they've just been introduced to and chase the main plotline.  There's something to be said for putting that tension on the player, especially towards the climax of the game, but this isn't really near a climax.  It's at the very beginning of the game.  Barely introduced to our character, barely familiar with the controls, a new area to explore, and being demanded to ignore it all and chase the story.  Now, I'm not a particularly good writer, but this, at a high level, seems to be a good place to change plot points around, to better align the story to the mechanical progression.  What mechanics are we looking at here, though?  It's a social hub, so we want the player to get used to the controls and learn that actively talking to people yields rewards.  Sure, there needs to be something to push the player along to the first combat mission, but the timer introduced here mechanically is actively pressuring the player to go in half ready.  Now, if that was the point of putting this exploration social hub before the action, fair enough.  But it doesn't feel that way to me.  Instead, it feels like the game is trying to get a message across, but the message is clashing with the mechanics.  And while I'd love to critique Deus Ex further, let's get back to the reason I brought this up:  The mechanics are actively fighting against the message here.  If you want to keep the player actively engaging with your story and world, you need to be mindful of what the current mechanics and story are telling them.  They should be working together to get the overall message across.  And in the case of Human Revolution, that's just not happening at the beginning of the game.  The only mechanic that is conveyed with this area is that if you dawdle and explore the area, you're going to be punished by the game later.  And that's not necessarily the point of a social hub, especially in a Deus Ex game.  Be extremely careful about what actual message you're sending to the player with your mechanics and story at any given time.  If you're having issues identifying either, playtest the area in detail.

When you're looking at the message and story, make sure you're not judging the player for their choices.  There can be consequences, sure, but the game shouldn't moralize those consequences.  In the Deus Ex example, the first mission is a hostage rescue.  And if you're too slow to get to the chopper in the social hub, you're put in an actively worse situation when you finally get to that first mission.  It works to get the message across.  But then the game has your radio buddy yelling at you for being too slow, moralizing the consequences.  And then the message becomes you're working for a terrible boss who wants to micromanage you and not actually resolve anything.  That's a different message, isn't it?  If that's what the team was going for, then that message comes across clearly.  But if not, then the moralizing done by your radio buddy has single-handedly pulled the message off the tracks.  That's why I say to be very careful when you want to moralize or criticize the player's actions in your game.  You may have made a fun mechanic, but if the message is that your fun mechanic is bad, actually, then you're going to have the mechanics and message conflicting with each other.  And you don't want to have that in your game.  You want them both to be working together.  A moralizing message is much easier to disregard when you're having too much fun with the mechanics.  Don't ask your players to make the choice.  You may not like what they're going to do.

Well, that should be enough for this side quest.  As always, if you have any comments, suggestions, or feedback, reach out under this episode or to me directly on various social media.  My handle is jcsirron.  This has been an Adventure Mechanics Side Quest.  I'll talk to you next time.

Building your player profile

              I am doing a podcast with my friends about games (check out The Adventure Mechanics here) and I decided that I need to try for accountability on actually releasing a game. To that end, I'm going to go through the development process to release a game. Here is the transcript from the twenty-fifth episode on building the player profile for your game: 

 Welcome to The Adventure Mechanics and I'm Chandler. Today I want to talk about player profiles. I've seen a number of early game devs try to sell their games to other game developers. And I want to address that.

It seems to be a common thing that happens with new developers. They have their copy of a game they really like, and then they shop it to other game developers. This isn't exactly a good way to get your player base started. Sure, other developers will be able to give you feedback, and often it's very useful feedback, but there's not going to be enough developers in the world to support your game unless you're building it in a week. If you're not building for other developers, who should you be building your game for? This is where the idea of a player profile comes in.

A player profile is who you expect to be interested in your game, specifically. There's a number of different ways to make a profile, but the one I like the most is the player motivation model made by Quantic Foundry. I'll link to their model in the show notes, but the short version of it is that players are motivated by twelve factors, clumped into three main groups: The action-social, the mastery-achievement, and the immersion-creativity motivation clusters. Each cluster represents broad motivations players have, be it immediate gratification, deep interaction with mechanics or broad interaction with narratives. I'd highly recommend that you take their gamer motivation profile to see where you're at as a player and get a feel for how their model works. I'm not sponsored by them in any way, I just think that their model works well to create a player profile for your game. Let's play with this model a bit.

If you're building a real time strategy game, your target audience better be strategy focused players. You don't want to make a RTS for the cozy farming sim crowd. Or maybe you do. If you're making it for yourself, the player profile is you. Assuming you want to make a commercial game, however, you're going to need a larger audience. Similar to advertising your game only to other developers, having too small a pool of potential players will fundamentally limit the potential success of your game. On the other hand, the wider net you cast for your target audience, the harder it's going to be to actually attract them. If your game is made for everyone, it's going to have to be everything for everyone. And like in relationships, that's just not feasible. You'll exhaust yourself before getting anywhere close to achieving that goal. You need to find that sweet spot if you want to have a hope of success for your game.

So, how are you going to build your player profile? Look at comparable games, and take a look at the people that are interested in them. For the RTS example, your game is going to attract an older audience that maybe grew up on RTS's from the late '90s. Or it's going to attract people who played multiplayer online battle arenas like DOTA. Either way, you have a very specific audience in mind in this case.

With the former audience, twitch reactions and a frenetic pace aren't necessarily going to be attractors for that type of audience, at least not anymore. In all reality, many of those people are going to have a slower reaction time, more disposable income and a desire for deeper tech trees. Having a good base game with a varied tech tree and a slower game pace, but missing some mechanics that could be saved for a DLC is probably a sound strategy.

With the latter audience, you're looking at people who really thrive on the competitive aspect of RTS, yet still want strong characters and a more personal feel with the units they command. You'll want to emphasize the smaller scale strategy layer and stronger character design. More ways to customize each character in the army and really pushing the character aspect and what makes each unique would be a better approach for that audience. Not all player profiles are going to be this easy, though.

Let's say you are actually making that RTS for the cozy farming sim crowd. That's going to be a hard audience to find. At first blush, I would think this crowd wouldn't be interested in that sort of thing, as a cozy game doesn't lend itself to mechanics mastery and competing with other players, like Stardew valley or similar titles. Let's say that's your dream project and you want to fuse the cozy with the real-time strategy, though. Who are you targeting with this game? If it's the farming simulator crowd, you are looking at people who like to take things slowly and build relationships with other characters in the game. You will likely want to emphasize an overarching story and minimize the competitive aspects of typical RTS games. Knowing this, you may change the direction you want to take your game.

If you want to make a "cozy" RTS, on the other hand, you're likely looking at people who want to have a similarly slower pace, but will still want to have the challenge and push from other players, either real or AI, to keep it from a managerial sim. In this case, you may be looking at games like Majesty or Offworld Trading Company and their audiences. The challenge is still there, but it's changed to either be more espionage, in the case of Offworld Trading Company, or character driven, as in Majesty. Or it could be something akin to Factorio, where automation is the key. Each of these games garners a different audience and knowing what they are and are not interested in will be key to your game's success.

If you have a comparable game, look through their forum posts, discord channels or whatever other thing the community has formed around and see what they are like. Instead of looking for what they like and dislike about the game, look at who the people are. Build your player profile from an aggregation of the community. That's now who you're building your game for. That means every decision you make in your game will have something to test against. The joy of manual labor in a farming sim isn't going to really appeal to an automation player, whereas having a list of recipes they can use to get to their goal definitely will. As you build and market your game, you will then have a much better idea of who you need to reach out to and get interested in your game. And that means you'll be one step closer to actually reaching the audience your game needs to succeed.

I'll stop here, but this is just a start to the player profile topic. It's a much deeper topic, one you could build an entire career around if you're interested enough. As always, if you have any questions or comments, leave them below or find me on various social media as jcsirron. I'm still Chandler and this is the end of this Adventure Mechanics Side Quest. I'll talk to you next time.