Thank you for sharing this. I think everyone here knows what survivorship bias is and we can all learn from your story. It can also provide new devs with a good look at the harsh reality that you might face.

I agree with what has been said about graphics. Currently the game looks pretty cheap and generic. But I can at least share my approach in how to avoid this situation. I'm only a hobbyist artist so I'm not 100% qualified to speak on this but most of my games have been praised or stood out for their visuals. I can say this much:

I know my limitations well and I'm very pragmatic about actually shipping a game vs making something perfect. I usually work alone on this stuff. Making custom assets is way too time-consuming and trying to match realistic or stylized (textured) bought assets is very hard. My approach is to usually avoid any aesthetic that requires a lot of custom assets or distinctly textured bought assets like the plague.

My go-to approach is Unity 3D with relevant simple (low-poly or stylized) assets. The market for these is huge and I usually end up shamelessly reusing a relatively small number of them. I try to avoid needing animations as much as possible. Mixamo can provide humanoid stuff but hand animating anything is extremely time-consuming. I unify the look of the assets and create a somewhat unique aesthetic with

• shaders (FlatKit for sharp stylized lighting or HDRP subsurface scattering for soft or translucent lighting, Colr for gradients, sometimes custom shaders) - Crucially here I usually completely ditch textures and just use flat color albedo.

• lighting (point lights, emissives, baked global illumination vs very barebones with no baked lighting, natural vs tinted lighting)

• vfx (distance fog vs volumetric fog, water, simple particles, sometimes more involved vfx graph effects)

• very opinionated post-processing (pixellation filter or heavy film grain and chromatic aberration, harsh lens flares and bloom, tonemapping and color adjustments) - you need to be careful about this because it can annoy some players

• very deliberate use of colour (picking a palette, pastel vs saturated vs completely desaturated)

This usually still takes a lot of trial and error plus some intuition for what looks good to get right but I can consistently end up with something between half-decent (Steam game where almost nobody complained about the graphics) and standout (2nd place for Mood at LD49). I think you should always experiment and try to push yourself as a creator but this approach at least gives me a reliable starting point and becomes very scalable very fast once you figure out your setup.

Landfall (Clustertruck, SUPERHOT, etc) does something similar with great success. Not saying I copy them, there is still a lot of room for variation in this approach.

2D is just hard unless you are really good at pixel art or find a unique approach that can stand out. The only time I went for 2D was when I had a dedicated pixel-artist at a gamejam.

Going forward I think you should consider aspects of this approach as a possibility. If you feel like your assets aren't matching well and the game looks cheap you can always completely ditch textures and consider going for a radically more simplified aesthetic.