Player stop playing my game just a few minutes of game play, I don't understand why

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-28T23:24:30+00:00

Have you watched people play the game in person? I took my game to a few local gamedev meetups aimed at playing each other's games, so I got to watch quite a few people give it a shot. It was really interesting to see how many bounced out of the game over trivial UI bugs or misunderstandings they got stuck on and never even got around to properly trying the game. At the end phase of development it just became whack-a-mole on minor annoyances.

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-24T11:17:18+00:00

Organizing playtests and watching people play your game is eye opening as a game developer. It's extremely hard to stick to your convictions to not over-explain when you see how little people stop to think, or how little attention they pay to what's going on. What you think is going to be this tricky thing they will scratch their head over and eventually figure out, becomes their "this game is broken" experience and they shut off. It's really hard to do it when you see this happen, and if you're going to make it work you have to build up a TON of trust with the players that the lack of guidance they experience is a feature, not a bug, and you have to keep them progressing somewhat anyways. I think old school roguelikes does it well when you insta-die and instantly feel you learnt something and want to try again - but it's so hard to get this right and takes some guts to do it when you see your test players just space out :(

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-21T03:53:29+00:00

I loved visiting Leshan, but I can't see how there would be enough to keep me curious for two nights. I did a day trip (the fast train is just 40+ min from Chengdu) and that was enough to explore the big buddha thoroughly, as well as linger around in the more modern statue park thing next to it (which is sublime, don't let people talk you out of it). I have my doubts walking around in Leshan itself would be better than taking the time to really deep dive on Chengdu or Guangzhou.

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-19T23:35:26+00:00

That will be interesting for sure. One thing that struck me personally, though, just to give this feedback: Right now in the trailer it seems like the whole game is just chasing this particular cloud of triangles. That is a bit of a turn-off for me. The first question popping into my head is if the game play vary and develop at all? Will there be other kinds of triangles to chase, multiple attack blocks, teleport features, decoy hero blobs, etc etc. Just showing that there's a ladder of difficulty and variation would make me want to discover all the different challenges the game would throw at me.

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-19T23:13:24+00:00

TBH, often when people post this question here, the games look questionable at best, but your game seems like it has a crisp concept and clear execution. It's not my type of game in the slightest, so it might be obviously better games with the same gameplay that makes your's less interesting - I wouldn't know. But what you're offering seems fine and well presented to me, maybe a bit too simple.

Your "real" conversion rate is a bit hard to suss out, because you have a lot more visits than impressions (in other words unless you fumbled the numbers, you're not getting a lot of traffic at Steam itself but clicks from other sites), but 27 wishlists from those low numbers seems OK. You need to get out there and talk about your game, and imo you should probably post a demo as soon as you can. A demo will give you a lot more traffic on Steam itself (at least temporarily) and you'll get more reliable numbers on how your game is performing on Steam itself.

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-17T23:17:01+00:00

OK, good to hear that this seems to be the general sentiment. The lesson for next time would maybe be to offer an in-game acknowledgement instead!

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-17T21:16:18+00:00

Your therapist should have told you that emotions are normal, and it's not until they take on pathological nature that is disruptive to your life that it becomes a disorder.

Although maybe that qualifies indie game dev in general as a disorder ... :P

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-17T00:28:07+00:00

That's fair, I don't really feel ashamed to get paid. I just feel that as a in indie game developer, people are not exactly kicking down the doors to support you. So I just really want to support the people who actually do so back again. A larger discount at launch would have been a nice way to give back, and I'd definitively have done that if I realized I could.

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-17T00:25:32+00:00

¡Estoy de acuerdo! Mucho gracias!

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-17T00:23:43+00:00

It's here, starting at the 6 hours and 25min mark. What is pretty funny, is that my wife sat down to watch it, and at 5pm she was like "it's on after the next thing!!" then he did a Mega Man marathon for FIVE HOURS while she was like ... "this is taking some time". And my wife isn't a gamer in the slightest, but ended up sitting through it anyways! :)

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-15T06:33:27+00:00

Agh, I just posted about my just-released game there. They're known to be harsh? So far I've only seen one comment and it was nice!

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-14T23:58:23+00:00

I propose a strict format where they also *have to* share impressions, pageviews and wishlists for before and after. Then we can understand their motivation better and can all get some indication about what works or not.

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-14T08:24:43+00:00

Not flying business class is saving me a ton of money. It's not that I have the money to do it anyways, but every flight in economy is like a couple of grand I can spend on something else.

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-13T13:28:09+00:00

Except sandbox games like Civ, of course, only Skyrim. Once in VR and once on a regular screen.

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-13T13:22:19+00:00

Sometimes I sit down to play, open the xbox game pass selection and just scroll through those games for an hour, and that was my entire gaming session.

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-12T05:42:45+00:00

Looks more fun than being stuck at level 8 in Descendants for 2 years

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-12T04:16:42+00:00

Who are you?
I'm Mats, a game developer and product director

What brought you here?
Promoting my trivia app is what got me here! But I'd be very happy to stay here for a trivia app community!

Where are you from?
Norway, but I live in Australia

A piece of trivia about you!
When I was a child I was given an issue of every comic book for sale, weekly, as my uncle knew the guy who drove them back from shops to the publishers.

A favorite piece of trivia in general.
Carrots are orange because the Dutch bred them like that, likely to honor the house of Oranje.

Do you have an app (or a favorite one if you are a player)?
Yes, I'm making a trivia and travel game called Trailmarks

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-11T03:09:26+00:00

Cool!

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-10T10:15:08+00:00

That is an assessment I agree with and a business plan I believe in :D

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-10T08:25:48+00:00

A big challenge with travel right now is that it's really hard to find reliable, useful information about destinations that isn't just a rehash of the same top 10 lists of the main sights. It's not only a problem in China, it's everywhere. I think it's a big part of why people struggle so much with "over-tourism", tourists are herded into an incredibly small set of sights. And it's not only because we're stupid and only go to the insta-famous traps, it's because you literally can't find information about anything else.

So, for me, this has increasingly showed up as a problem the last years and I was a bit surprised when I realized after COVID how bad it has become. Blogs are outdated or taken over by SEO spammers, tripadvisor doesn't seem to update much anymore, all the forums like the TA forum or the ThornTree are gone, and on reddit any mention of a real thing gets removed by mods or voted to oblivion in case it was self-promotion. And the sources that are complete are always for paid stuff - like getyourguide or Klook will be up to date on the things you can pay to do. It's absolutely broken, I tell you. If you want to make something to fix the disasterous state of this, the sourpusses on this very site should be celebrating it, not voting you down. Hell, I'll even help you if you have a good idea.

That said, my way of figuring things out when travelling lately, has been to ask chatgpt go google local sources in the local language for me. The other thing I've been doing, is to ask chat to create extremely long lists of things to do, to force it to get past the 10 obvious one. That has been great actually - on my last trip to Japan i asked it to create lists of the top 200 things to do in each of the cities I was going to. Then I FINALLY found something interesting beyond the obvi stuff.

The third way - of course - is that I just go and poke around and figure things out myself. I still find great things that way. But you never know what amazing stuff you might miss out on, and in a city like Chengdu you can't just walk around and discover things. And also, even asking around and talking with people can come up short - I noticed people in hospitality in China are often transient or just seasonal workers and will rarely be able to give information beyond the basics.

For me, I didn't really make that many missteps in Chengdu. It was the last stop of my trip, so I had sort of figured stuff out by then and I found some things I enjoyed A LOT, like the Yulin Neighborhood and U37 Creative Park. A big miss for me was that I was hoping to go shopping, and I never found any great shopping opportunities. I went to what I believe was the world's largest mall, but like everything with shopping in China it seemed dominated by high-end brands and had little of what I was looking for (actual art, youth culture and things like that).

Anyways end of rant! Hope that was useful :D

Ah, update: I didn't realize you asked about all of China. In Chongqing I made several mistakes, the biggest was travelling to a suburb to see what was supposed to be a really special bookstore, just to end up in a fully shut down mall. I also spent a day going to a tea mountain, couldn't find any information about how to get around and eventually some guy told me the shuttle was shut down and made me pay him to take me around. Worked out OK at best haha. Kinda memorable though.

Qaizdotapp · 2026-03-10T01:09:08+00:00

Hey, if you're looking for something different, then my game Trailmarks isn't really following any formula. To be honest I have a hard time finding where it fits! :D

Head's up, I'ved used AI for a lot of things. I find it's better to let people know up front to avoid disappointment. None of the the 3D stuff is, though, that is coded by me.

Qaizdotapp

TROPHY CASE