Totally fair, appreciate you being straight about it rather than just being polite.
Your game appears the moment it’s approved. After submission I check it for quality (valid info, no offensive material) that kind of thing. Once approved, it goes into the library and the search index, and gets placed based on similarity to other games, moods, categories(free games) and etc so it’s discoverable that way too. Since its a newly added game also, it goes to the top of all games because the newly added first is the default filter in all games. There’s also a dedicated Dev Drops section on the Discover page for visibility. So the fact that it’s not showing up yet is expected. It appears once I’ve reviewed and approved it. Which I already did as we speak btw.
Another example of how discoverability works once it’s live is if you go to Mood → Cozy, your game is there right now it’s near the end of the list since I sort by rating. I noticed your game is free, and there’s also a free filter, so if someone goes to Cozy and filters to free games only, the list narrows down to just your game and one other. I’m still investigating better ways to handle filtering and ordering. It’s fairly simple right now because I wanted the core functionality out there for anyone who wants to use it, but it needs more thought and feedback to get it right. The goal also from gamers perspective is to help players (myself included) to find exactly what they want to play right now, and actually narrow the options down instead of scrolling forever. This way I believe as well helps indie devs for their game to be discovered and find its players.
I’m hoping to get more indie dev uploads so I can figure out how to give them more visibility on the homepage too, still thinking through the best way to do that you know looking at other platforms, taking feedback, iterating. The Dev Drops section, for what it’s worth, actually came from a suggestion by another indie dev, I liked the idea and built it.
Definitely need improvements on how search results are presented, and design more broadly, as you said. I keep a Jira board with tickets for all of this so I can actually track it rather than lose it in my head. I’m approaching this the way I used to approach things professionally and it just takes time and a lot of iteration to shape a platform into something genuinely good, and I’m constantly working on it because I like the development side of it and I like indie games.
Really appreciate what you’re doing here you know, feedback like this is exactly what I need. What I think makes the real difference for a platform like this is users and devs actually taking the time to give feedback, and that’s hard to come by, especially for indie devs. So it means a lot.
Looking forward to hearing what you and your friend notice once you’ve both spent some time with it. And happy to share analytics with you as things develop. I’ll be straightforward about where the numbers stand, good or not.