Chanterune by Kerdelos 2024-10-24T14:29:22Z
Hello! I saw that you guys are looking for feedback on whether this game has commercial potential or not, so I'll give my thoughts based upon that premise! For context, I've been a AAA dev for 7 years now, but before I was indie for a few years. It's been a while since I've been in the indie space though so consider that while reading my opinion.
The two factors that I consider when gauging the commercial viability of a product are the potential for marketability (acquisition) and retention.
I feel like your game concept has strong potential for retention. The core mechanic is interesting and immediately intuitive, but obviously packs a lot of depth and potential for future variations and combinations of songs. The tricky thing is how you would scale the numbers of songs, since already learning 2 or 3 was a bit of a challenge to remember and establish muscle memory for the inputs. You will need to think very systemically! The general style of the experience where knowledge is the only progression mechanic is super cool and I think there's a niche that you're hitting.
Your biggest challenge for this game is marketability. As you probably know already, 2D platformers are by far the most common game released, so the market for these games is extremely saturated. This makes acquisition of users difficult since your game needs to REALLY stand out, and stand out within the first few seconds of a user seeing gameplay. Luckily, your mechanics are easily explained in a gif, so the mechanical hook for your game shouldn't be that hard to convey!
However, I do feel like the overall visual presentation is lacking that same level of hook to match the mechanic. As I said, I think the visual bar is just set incredibly high these days in the 2D platformer genre to break through all of the noise. You'll need to be in the upper 1/2% of games visually to attract attention. Look at games like Spiritfarer or The Last Night to get an idea of the quality bar you'll need to hit. Outliers like Animal Well are not good reference unless you also have a youtube partner with millions of subscribers to market your game for you.
Before you commit to a commercial future for this project I would try to do a visual "keyhole", which is just a polished proof-of-concept for shippable quality visuals and see if you can do some marketing tests to see if your games visual style is enough to gain traction on social media or other marketing channels.
It's a great concept and you guys seem very talented as a team! I believe you can do it but make sure you're testing the marketability first! Good luck :)