Nothing helped month to month so I did get a bit fed up and burnt out on Aerial Antics
It only takes 1 week link in the chain and the whole thing snaps.
If you add all the elements up that lead to an indie game getting an online sale, unlike other mediums, lots of 90% effectives dont add up to 90%. They add up to 90% of 90% of 90% of 90% and so on, so very rapidly you end up with no sales.
A game being a turkey can lead to no sales as you would expect, but a great game can do equally as badly too. If just one part of the marketting / demo / purchasing system is not up to scratch then the whole project fails.
The critical thing is to understand and learn where your weeknesses are. If you havn't identified the mistakes you made with AA you'll be prone to making the same mistakes again.
That might sound harsh phrased like it's your fault, but if you consider the game to have failed then you must also accept that the failing was on your part because if you want to blame it on other factors you'll never get anywhere... the buck stops with yourself, it has too, as it's your project. If other people have sucessful projects then clearly they are doing something differently, and it isn't just because Lunar Lander games are out of fashion this week...
Having established that the only person to blame when our projects flop is ourselves, the next thing to do is work out why it flopped and what we can do about it.
A focus group / market research can be very beneficial in this respect. Around the Blitz community or perhaps another programming board you have the opportunity to exploit a very useful and knowledgeable focus group - but the market research you must do elsewhere, as all anybody here cares about is making or selling their own games and not buying yours.
In the spirit of that 'focus group' the first thing I would say to you is that it wasn't until the third level, after watching the demo play for a moment and after reading the website that I even knew what the Aerial Antics game was about.
I just couldn't categorise it and even after starting to play I still didn't know what sort of game I was playing. I feel this was probably a mistake. I came to realise I was playing Lunar Lander, but whilst that isn't the most glamorous of marketting concepts I would still have mentioned somewhere that the goal of each level was to land on the target pad as close to the middle as possible.
This was a mistake on the web site, not with the game itself.
I was told there where 50 levels, I played 5 and they all had the same scenery. This gave me the impression I wasn't going to get much diversity by buying the game. Mistake two A.
Mistake two B: The demo provided no real gameplay challenges. A demo should not be very difficult because if a player cannot complete it they wont buy the game - but on the other hand if there is no challenge then i'm going to get the impression the game wont challenge me either.
Mistake two was the composition of the demo.
None of these mistakes so far have anything to do with your ability to program or the tool you used.
I hope you find those thoughts beneficial Jeremy and that you take them in the spirit that they where intended. They are of course just my opinions and i'm a cranky witch so dont take them too close to heart ;)