The original trailer is still up if you want to check it.

If you look close you will notice what elements I drew (platforms, doors, cubes…) because they don’t look as good as the sheep and the background. I thought it was good enough since the main thing about the game was the concept and story, and I was really curious to see if the mobile audience would like something like this.

I decided to publish the game initially in two places: itch.io and Windows Phone.

Itch.io because I never released a game on PC and I wanted to get some experience, also makes it easier to show the game to other devs and get feedback.

Why not release on Android and iOS as well? I was still very unsure about this project, specially on mobile where players are more casual, I thought everyone would hate a game that was trying to tell a more deep and serious story. So this way I would able to test it first.

But I still had a big problem: monetization.

How the hell do you monetize a story driven endless runner? There are no power ups, no coins, no costumes. I only want the player to experience the story with no hurdles. Ideally this would be a $0.99 game, but I was sure that would flop, releaseing a paid mobile game without being known is tough. I bet

So as I was getting to know itch.io better I saw the “suggested donation” thing, and I really liked that, that could work. But how would I do that on mobile? Would App Purchase work?

After a bit of research I found out that you are not allowed to get donations inside an app, if you are selling an IAP you have to give something to the player, otherwise your app will be refused. So I went back to the model I didn’t really want: ads with IAP to remove it, but instead of charging a flat $0.99 I gave the option of paying $0.99, $1.99 and $2.99.

I also tried to make the ads not very intrusive, I did not want banner ads, so I chose to show full screen ads every once in a while, after the player goes through a door and a story bit appears, since the game is paused on that moment. So I published the game and started the usual facebook/twitter/email marketing.

What Went Right

The Story

I really did not expect the mobile audience to be on board for the story, but I was really excited reading the reviews because people were really into it! I also got a lot of 1 star reviews saying the game was depressive or "don't play this game if you're feeling down". I really don't mind that people give it a bad rating, knowing that the story had such a string impact is more important for me, even if it made the person stop playing the game.

Graphics

To my surprise, not only people did not complain about the graphics, but it got a lot of compliments! (Later on we updated the graphics a bit, we’ll get there)

The Name

Touch Arcade later used the headline “Sheep Dreams Are Made of This has a clever pun and a crazy gimmick”. It was the first time I got the attention of a big iOS website, and I think the name played a big part in getting their attention. My previous game had a very generic name that probably did not help at all (Tap Master Mondrian), e the following game I released also had this problem (Snap Quiz Challenge). They were also targeted to more casual players, but I think a better name would have helped them. I lost count of how many people made jokes quoting the Marilyn Mason song, and many people complained on the reviews that they wanted the song to be in the game.

Windows Phone

I tried using the “exclusive to windows phone” tagline when I release Sheep Dreams, since my previous game did much better on windows phone than iOS and Android. And this worked really well with the community, they loved to have a game that could not be found on the other systems, and it also work with the mobile sites focused on windows phone, most of the major ones did a piece on the new weird game exclusive to windows phone. The game also got some small features on the windows phone store. Too bad windows phone did not have a ton of users, and by this point the ad revenue decreased by half if compared to when I launched Tap Master.

What Went Wrong

As I said before, this initial launch (maybe you could call it a soft launch) was more of a test, here’s what went wrong :

Music (lack of)

This one was also a big experiment. I thought I’d make this a “silent game”, since it’s very common to have dreams where you can’t hear anything. There was even a point in the game where the characters points it out in one of the sentences that appear when the character enters a door.

Of course it also made it a lot easier to make the game because I did not have anyone to make the music and sound effects, as I mentioned before, I was making this completely alone at this point.

What happened is I got a lot of 1 star reviews because people thought it was a bug! Later on I added music and sound effects, and of course it made the game much better. Still got some 1 star reviews complaining the music is repetitive. Oh well.

Menu (and very low IAP conversion)

I had this “great” idea of making the menu playable, so the character would have jump on the specific platform if he wanted to rate the game, see credits or buy the IAP.

That’s terrible. You really don’t want to make it hard for people to buy your damn game, or rate it.

So I immediately made a quick update and added a button inside the pause menu that would rate the game, and another one to buy the IAP, except that this one was defaulted to the lowest priced one ($0.99), so it poisoned the stats that I will show later on, at least for windows phone, because I fixed it before launching on android and iOS by adding a separate screen with the 3 prices (which you saw the screenshot earlier when I was talking about monetization)

The Language Barrier

Looking at the average review score after one week or so I realized the game was rated considerably lower in countries where Spanish is the native language, compared to English and Portuguese speaking ones.

The game launched in English and Portuguese, and since the main element of the game is the narrative, it makes sense that people that don’t understand the language won’t like the game. Other places like Germany, Russia and China had also a good rating average, probably because most of the population understands English. On a later update I added Spanish localization, and sure enough the average rating for those countries went from 2.5 - 3 to above 4!

The Time Limit

The 8 hour time limit was not made very clear inside the game, specially when the time ended, it would just go back to the menu and reset the game, so once again people thought it was a bug that was making them lose all their progress, and there came a lot of 1 star ratings.

Sheep Dreams 2.0

After seeing how the game was received, specially how people resonated with the story, the original artist was excited about the game and decided to work on the art elements that were missing (the ones I had do draw) so we could make the game more presentable for release on iOS and Android.

Here's the new art and the new trailer