I agree with this. You guys have been pretty darn great throughout all of this. One way or another, I think you've created something quite nice here.... the "HOLY CRAP ITS DIABLO ZOMG" sales drop kinda sucks, but I bet you can get to where you wanna be with this one. I think that pretty much sums it up for me, art-related complaints aside. And even my complaints about new art arent TOO negative..... not from me, anyway. If I'm NOT complaining about something, I'm likely asleep. And even then, that's not a certainty.
I really appreciate it very much. And you really never seem like you're complaining to me. Yes, you raise a lot of issues, but the way in which you do it is always constructive and well thought-out and thought-provoking. It's never to my recollection been antagonistic or any of those other negative things that feedback can be, and that's been really awesome of you.
And I apologize if I rambled too much or seemed lecture-y at all; I tend to randomly rant like that. Wether or not I'm making SENSE or accomplishing anything, that's random too 
I really wasn't trying to call anyone out on lecturing me, I just get weary when the discussion in general turns to "you guys picked the wrong market" or "games like this don't do well in general" or "X would have sold when this didn't." And there was starting to be an undertone of that from a number of people, so I thought I'd just comment that those thoughts are not generally productive. I actually have quite a bit more data about these particular markets than most of the people offering the suggestions, and each specific game in general is unique anyhow. "Games like Minecraft" generally are niche and free and/or don't sell well. That's pretty well always been the way, to the point that most people had never even heard of Infiniminer or similar to my knowledge. But Minecraft itself obviously put things together right and went nuts on sales.
As an indie, it's specifically our goal to look for underserved markets that we think we can do an awesome job with. The fact that there are few Metroidvania games on the PC at the moment is the best thing in the world for us, because that means that if you want that kind of game you have a more limited pool of games to look at, and our game comes up fast. Generally speaking my experience has been that PC gamers are a really fragmentary group that will play basically any kind of game you can think of, but some genres are more popular than others and both platformers and adventure games are really popular.
Now I'm lecturing. Sorry about that.
Well...for one thing, I haven't seen A Valley Without Wind on any of Steam's main store pages in weeks. That's probably one issue with it. If people don't see it on there, they don't know it exists and don't buy it.
That's something we can't control, and is inevitable for every game. There's only so much front-page space. But what makes up for that is gaming news coverage, word of mouth on forums, and steam discount sales (daily deals or otherwise). Our baseline sales are of relatively little concern because they have never paid our bills, ever. But the fact that our latest steam discount sale failed to produce more than 1/6th the minimum numbers we were expecting was a drastic blow. Good thing we had some cash stored up for a rainy day like that, plus some projects on the back-burner.
The market of selling games to consumers through a portal like steam is actually extremely counter-intuitive, and there's a limit to what developers can tell you because of NDA agreements. There is a logic there, and it all makes sense, but the discount sale is basically our marketing budget is one way to look at it.
And the second problem is the art itself. It really turns a lot of people away from the game. If they looked past that, I'm sure they'd love it, but they aren't gonna look past it.
I agree. Hence this thread. I think that this is actually the sole problem, not one of two, though. We were just on discount sale (and still are, actually) and are failing to produce adequate sales numbers on the largest gaming portal in the world. Whereas just three months ago we were making serious money on the same game. Either the really divided reviews killed the momentum during the lull instigated by Diablo 3 (look at our metascore, it's abysmal but not representative of the extremely positive things said by giant places like Polygon and Kotaku, or smaller indie-focused places), or else the art style of the game is seriously hampering the ability of the game to sell itself when it's mixed in with a lot of other games on crazy discount and often better graphics.
Anyhow, to put it another way, I think that the art is basically acting as a bottleneck that prevents the game from reaching whatever potential it otherwise would have. I could be wrong on that -- I could be drastically wrong. But based on what we've seen thus far, I don't think I'm that far off. Out of the people who have gotten to the stage of trying the demo, we've got such excellent conversion into customers and that is a pretty strong message. It's also a strong message that when loads of people see it on discount and don't try the demo or buy it, the art is probably to blame; the concept is something that has had press and players at places like PAX East really kind of gaga, and if anything our problem was way too high of expectations rather than "meh I don't like that concept."
So, yeah. That's why I agree so strongly that it all comes down to the art at this particular point in time.
Random suggestion you've probably already come up with: maybe it'd be good to have the chosen studio redo the big steam splash (that thing that comes up when, I assume, you pay Valve a bunch of money for it to appear there, cycling through the different ads). That way people can be like, wow, what is this elegant game that I've never seen before? and click it even though they saw the old one already. The current one is actually really pretty but it might help.
I can't comment on Valve's splash stuff (just as a reminder to any staff who might make a comment one way or another on this). But any promotional materials that we do with Steam or otherwise would certainly be redone using the new art assets I imagine. A lot of times they'll have concept art that can be produced into larger pieces, etc. And Studio H produces all their work at 4x scale and then scales it down and gives us both the smaller and the original, they say. So that's quite a lot to work with, especially if we have their artists do the composition of the specific splash or whatever.
I also wanted to comment on a turn of phrase in the steam blurb. I don't know how easily you can change it, but I liked most of it except for "The game adapts to how you play: as you demonstrate your proficiency, monsters and missions upgrade accordingly. Killed 100 bats? Okay, time for... bats on fire!" That seems to sell it short to me, probably largely because of the specific number of bats provided there. Something airier (like the first sentence, really) might be better.
We can change it somewhat straightforwardly, and actually did change some things there just two weeks ago. However, the line you reference really has been something that went over really well with press and players. We talked to 300+ people about the game at PAX East, and we really got a chance to see what made people light up and what did not when we were explaining things to them. That phrase in particular was one that was almost 100% effective with everyone on piquing their interest. The idea of an adaptive game world is kind of radical.
I also really want to make a thread on bubble-popping because bubble-popping is awesome.
By all means; we're going to be putting many fewer hours per week into the non-art side of AVWW for a while, but there's still plenty of room for discussion and thought and making the game better in ways like that. In some respects, having a more measured approach and thinking things through more is actually a good thing. I'll still be doing an average of hopefully one new spell or similar per week (this week it's two spells and one enemy, coming out tomorrow), and my wife is still going to be working on new mysteries to integrate, and we'll be doing whatever else that we collectively all can think of that is cool and fits in our time budget during this particular time period.
I hope you feel better soon, Chris.
I'm feeling substantially better today. A lot of things just hit me at once yesterday, including a virus, fairly heavy dehydration (my own fault), and a lot of stress. But I've been guzzling water and some gatorade and the virus was just one of those 24 hour things apparently, so that's all good. I'm also going to be taking a week of vacation next week to recharge and be with my family, so that's going to help immensely as well.
