Hi, and thank you for coming to this post, as well as for playing Picture of You in case you have.

This is a short postmortem about my experience making a tiny game for a jam (O2A2 2022) and submitting it. I'll try to keep this short, so won't talk much about the creative process, but rather mainly the lessons I learned from it. It has spoilers for the story. 

At first I came up with a much darker idea, as I felt that was the only way to make an impact with such a short game (and maybe that's not far from the truth, looking at the jam's most popular releases), but I don't actually like dark stuff much so that one was scrapped. The next one, "person goes inside a painting and realizes the subject is an idealized version of themselves", was also originally going to end with regret and despair. Thank you Windchimes for guiding me in the direction of something I'd actually enjoy reading, and Pisoos for suggesting MC being unable to speak, which greatly improved the flow and mood. 

While the game did benefit from the jam in terms of exposure, it was considerably less than the number of people who found it while browsing itch for new games, new visual novels, or even free visual novels playable on web. The biggest referral was the itch "My Feed" page, with almost twice as much as the jam submission. I think one of many reasons is I submitted it 5 minutes before the deadline; some early birds were already in the popular ranking when the jam closed, and itch's default sorting is by popularity. Of course, I'm aware of the many other reasons involved, but it's a possibility to keep in mind. 
(Edit 8/10: a few days after writing this, the referrals from the jam page caught up and surpassed the My Feed ones; I'm unsure why, but might be related to a popular youtuber playing other jam games?)

I wish I had the animated thumbnail done from the beginning--I thought that since GIFs are only played on hover, it might not make that much of a difference, but my falling CTR went up over 0.1 and kept rising for a bit after that.

Despite the thumbnail effect, the actual Live2D implementation fell flat; for the first day I had no downloads despite some new browser plays. Of course less people are willing to download a 1000 word game, but perhaps the main reason was I didn't have footage of it in the screenshot portion. I have now added that, let's see how it goes. 

While the Live2D implementation itself was frustrating and unrewarding, I have learned a lot--have the best thumbnail you can, people will often find your game while browsing, try to submit a bit early for jams, and so on. Right now I'm working on Bride of the NEET God, an old project I intend to finally finish. I hope what I've learned from Picture of You will help me get it out to more people, so fingers crossed.

Thank you for reading!