Hello there !

Here come the latest news ! Last month I essentially spent my time on 3 subjects:

I – Marketing

And yes, you know it now, I force myself to spend more time on marketing… and boy is it difficult. I tried to optimize my reddit ads, but I was disappointed in the results. It seems the longer the ads run, the lower the conversion rates. So I tried to go back to organic posts. One did quite well on r/pcgaming:
https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/1byxmvv/hi_ive_been_working_solo_on_zefyr_a_thiefs_melody/

I also took the time to apply to 4 festivals for this summer. Sadly, I received negative answers from the last ones I applied too. A bit harsh for the moral.

On the Steam side, I built and fixed my full game and the prologue version too to have them validated by Steam, and they were accepted ! I have officially passed the Steam quality test. From now on, I shouldn’t be annoyed with the process anymore. I also reworked the tags for the Steam pages. It seems to perform OK for the prologue but not that much for the full game. People don’t discover it on Steam. But the prologue is free, so I guess this can influence things.

Finally, I kept mailing streamers, but no luck this time.
However, one streamer from my previous contacts tried my game and interviewed me! He was super nice and it was a pleasure to answer his questions. You can check out the interview (in French) if you want to know more about how I work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFKFDEz1bLs

So in the end, a bit of a depressing month for the marketing except for the reddit post & the interview.

II – Mini Game

Last month, we had holidays here in France, and with the kids at home, it’s always a bit difficult for me to work fully on the game. So I worked on a small project that I called Lantern Island. It’s a small wholesome game where you play as Maya, a young girl trying to save the lantern festival on a nice cosy island. It’s supposed to be somewhere between “A short hike” & “alba”. This is one of these “small games” I occasionally try to create to test myself. I think I’ll release this one when it’ll be more polished. Here are a few screens:

I had to work on many NPCs and animals too. I’ll add these back into Zefyr, so that I kill two birds with one stone.
And I took the time to code the famous “pet the dog” interaction. Speaking of which…

III – Zefyr

Yes, I also worked a bit on the game itself. Here are a few improvements:

• I reused the “pet the dog” code from Lantern Island. You can now pet the dog in Zefyr too. Even if it’s more of a fennec fox actually.
• Descriptions for all inventory objects
• New footstep sound visual FX, hopefully less annoying
• Shadow under the character when jumping to help for precise landing

And that’s it for this month. As usual, thanks a lot for your support & patience !
Take care!