I have the time, might as well.
To make it clear, I'm only talking about the quality of communication here, not release cycles. It's also not meant as a personal attack. So please don't take offense by it. I disagree with your methods, but I do understand your reasoning behind it, so other than some prickling, I truly don't have anything against you.
"When you are talking about bad marketing in truth you are comparing a project that was distributing for more than a year around the internet on many websites and a single paywalled version of a new game without any demo that got only one post in several subreddits. I mean all versions of Midforest and 0.1 version of Luna that tripled donations in three weeks."
No, I am not. I'm talking about the way you handled communication on other platforms during it. Even with searching around you barely made a few posts here and there when a version dropped. The way this works is that until people know about the game you have to spread the word more actively, meaning more time investment. You clearly didn't invest more time into advertising Midforest than Luna. Now with Luna you don't even have to since the word already got out. Either way, I don't blame you for not doing it better during Midforest, it's certainly not easy to do.
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First, your post. You are counting every single post as equally valuable, which heavily skews the numbers.
Let's establish that double posting releases or the same image sequence separately doesn't make them a new update post. I'm less harsh with polls since they increase engagement, but they still basically count as one thing. One-two liner posts are also not exactly comperable to 90% of the posts you wrote during Luna.
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This is fine once or twice with more informative ones surrounding them, but not 4-5 in a row.
I hope you agree that this doesn't hold a candle to your current format.
Timeline from the first release of Midforest
January: 3
February: 3
March: 4
April: 4
Up until release you had the well done longer posts, but most of it is just art/screenshots/memes without much text if any at all.
May: 4 (Not counting the double post of the patreon/public game release)
June: 5 (3 of those are polls/result posts)
July: 6 (11 if we count the different versions of the art. 3 versions of undressing for Lyralei, 4 for Luna, basically 2 posts spread out.)
Other than those there's 2 posts that have some substance.
August: 1
The report.
September: 6
Only 1 having more than 1-2 lines of text, that's the monthly progress report.
October: 1
The progress report.
November: 4 (Not counting the double post of the game release)
It sure seems like you had the creative passion in the first couple of months, but you lost it somewhere along the way. Money troubles or just getting disouraged, I don't know.
Here's the huge divide though. I guess you became unsatisfied with how things were standing and started to take more time to write posts or maybe your passion reignited for the game
Dec: 4
These are fine, they're not just a few lines. Progress towards your current way of writing them.
January: 2
Looking even better, started with the dual language posts as well. More informative. Plus points all around.
February: 5 (3 of those are polls, not counting double post once again.)
You're keeping up the trend of being more informative.
March: 3
They're good as well.
After March you basically went MIA from giving information, only posting releases, one or two art and 2 polls. This kept up until Luna announcement. I assume you felt like it was too late for Midforest and it would be better to just start fresh. So basically Luna preproduction.
April: 3 (2 of those are polls. Not counting the triple post for the release. Also not counting the public release post on May.)
May: 2
June: 0
July: 1
August: 2
You triple posted releases again, there's the walkthrough which is kind of different, but it's still the release
September: 0
The only thing you posted was the 1$ release and the public so basically nothing new.
In total with polls only counting as 1 per month:
58 With polls counting full:
63 in a period from Jan to next year September. So 1 year and 9 months.
Bear in mind that I counted the 1-2 liner posts as well, which makes up more than 1/3 of the posts.
In other words a third of these posts don't even compare to about 90% of the Luna posts.
There were also 2 very inactive periods, one after the launch passion died down and one at the end. So the activity is not even.
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In October Luna starts.
October: 4
They're long and informative.
November: 4 (3 is art, but they are not duplicates like with the undressing, so they count.)
December: 9 (You basically started using the tier releases as progress reports as well, so these get counted.)
January: 9 (5 of which are polls.)
February: 4 (Not going to count the 1 liner public release.)
March: 2
April: 4
May: 6 (3 of which are polls.)
June: 2
July: 4
August: 5
September: 4
October: 3
November: 2
December: 4
January: 2
February: 6 (3 of which are polls.)
March: 6 (2 of which are polls.)
That's a total of (with polls counting only 1 per month):
71 With polls counting full:
80 in a period from October till March of the year after the next one. Which is 1 year and 6 months.
That's considerably more compared to Midforest even without accounting for the quality improvement of those posts. Also I counted 3 more months to Midforest's lifespan which you left hanging in the air, but even if you only count until June, you only lose 3 posts. So 55 to 71 in 1 year and 6 months.
Some observations.
-Being informative and giving needed feedback is true for almost all of your Luna posts. Contrary to how a lot of the Midforest posts looked like.
-The result/progress report posts are punctual following the same release interval for Luna, unlike Midforest, which were sporadic at best.
-You were active with Midforest at first even if a lot of those posts say nothing with an image or a few lines, the reports notwithstanding, you put effort into those.
-It shows that you experimented with weekly report posts as in December, but I assume the lukewarm reception discouraged you from continuing with them.
-After that you started to use the Luna format posts, that were not just single lines and actually had something to say. You were on the right track.
-You also started posting more frequently, I assume you got excited about the game again and wanted it to be a success.
-You kept that up for 3 months, then poof basically nothing at worst and the bare minimum at best for 5 months. Most of this is Luna preproduction most likely.
-This of course took a complete 180 once you started off Luna, and you clearly took the time to write those posts and try to interact.
Point is, your communication has improved a lot and trying to prove that you did a good job during Midforest so vehemently does a disservice to your own growth. We all make mistakes.
Anyway you did make the game more lax with the feedback you got so that's a positive in my book. Good luck, just stay away from marketing with negative backlash. It doesn't always work.
