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Rebuilt my itch page for a free procedural space game. Does the first screenshot do its job?

A topic by nooxax created 26 days ago Views: 78 Replies: 2
Viewing posts 1 to 2

I spent this week rebuilding the itch.io page for Voidfall, a free space exploration game where every ship, planet, creature, and sound is generated at runtime from a single 32-bit seed. The game itself hasn't changed much—the page just wasn't doing it justice.

Here's what changed:

  • A new banner. I didn't have one before, so the top of the page was literally just the title in the default font.
  • A new cover image, taken from an actual asteroid impact instead of a staged screenshot.
  • Eight screenshots instead of four, reordered so the first one is the only image that's still recognizable as a thumbnail. Most of my favorite "beautiful black space" shots all looked like the same dark rectangle in the gallery, so they had to go.
  • An animated GIF of an asteroid impact at the beginning of the gallery.

There are still two things I know the page doesn't show well, and I'd rather get feedback than guess.

First, there's nothing showing docking, the hangar, or the cargo hold, so the game's progression loop is basically invisible. Second, almost every screenshot has the ship sitting at zero velocity, which makes the game look much more static than it actually is.

Page: https://nooxax.itch.io/voidfall

The question I'd love your opinion on is this:

Without reading the description, does the first screenshot tell you what kind of game this is? If not, which screenshot would you put first instead?

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This is the first screenshot, correct? Seems like some sort of pulsar with neat graphical effects. I haven't read the description, as you requested, and the only thing I'd assume from it is that it's a space-like game, probably with a lot of interacting/simulatory elements. Later screenshots tell me it involves space ship battle management and planning. How far off am I?

In my opinion, the most informative visual piece that drives me to buy a game are screenshots/video of GUIs I'm going to be engaging with, rather than the flashy/pretty action visuals that don't tell me anything about the actual game. E.g. an image of an open world tells you what I'm going to be in, but a capture of an inventory UI tells me what I'm going to be doing, the genre.
(+1)

Yeah, you’re right. For some reason I’m not getting notifications on the site. I’ll replace it.