Deep Sea Claustrophobia goes free (a late postmortem?)

Late news, but I've decided to drop the price for the game and let it go for free (link to file). It's been a long time coming to drop the EA price from $9.99 to zero because it made zero cents and was just sitting there anyway collecting dust. Haven't worked on the title almost a year now, as priorities took over and tried to get started with another project (trying to save my career with a slightly better value proposition, codenamed Falterstone) because I couldn't save this one (no publisher wanted to help with it).

What was surprising to see that the project suddenly got a lot of attention, despite barely doing anything about it. I just made a blog post on IndieDB and Itch.io and that was about it (at first). The project immediately went to top 20 which was to be expected (to go higher than 12k or of 73k) as blog posts are FIFO listed on the main page, however I only managed to do that last time with vigorous, several day long marketing campaign (probably due to it not being free, so less people were keen to put up with the aesthetics and the price tag); guess announcing something for free flocks people in. So out of morbid curiosity pushed the game a bit more, and in an indie sub on Reddit, which bumped the game to number one for over a day or two on IndieDB, and still is receiving way more traffic than is should be, as now it slowly fades out into nothingness once again. Picture below for proof!

Obviously, I can't do anything with this data (or the view counts, comments, new followers and a few dozen of new downloads because that doesn't count as traction), which would be nice though as the game while looking not so hot, has an audience and could be made into something better (if I had the time and hardware to do so). So partially my thinking was that if the game makes enough noise, maybe someone would notice it (say on LinkedIn). But of course that didn't happen, and after chasing so many publishers, I knew better that even this is nothing in the grand scheme of things, unless I show them receipts of actual sales numbers and wishlists, so didn't bother reaching out to anyone this time. Because if they didn't like it in the past, and kept ghosting me as a result, it wouldn't make much difference now either.

Still proud of making this, after deciding to commit to an 8 months brute fest (everything was made from scratch BTW), designing all the interconnected things (the system is surprisingly complex under the hood as everything affects another to some extent, as all individual valves has their own function within the system). Could've finished it by now, as only 2-3 months were left behind (connecting everything up and creating the game loop finally, to be playable), as I was busy working on the backend (a lot of systems are in place just unusable because there's no interface for them in game to communicate with); so only a few minigames and some basic movement is usable (as that was the last thing I was working on, making the sub move with fake physics).

You can find the IndieDB page here.

Link in case video is broken: https://youtu.be/KTSGTIqoO3o