Lately I haven't been feeling very well about my game Normenhill.

I know that I've probably gotten on many people's nerves with it and many will probably stop reading this now, but still, I've spent a lot of time and effort on it, and I have ideas for a continuation, but...

1. I've tried a lot of different ways to promote it on Reddit (where I've been successfully banned several times), on Discord, TikTok, on a couple of gaming sites, but there haven't been any particular results. This game is more or less noticed here, thank you for that, but still, my audience is pretty narrow, which I'm trying to fix.

2. On YouTube, under my various videos about this game, some of my old viewers write comments to me, who know me from other content that I filmed before and on which I gained 650 subscribers. (I decided to hide those videos)

On the one hand, it's cool that I once accumulated so many people around me, but now most of them don't follow this game, they still want that old content, so I had to essentially build an audience for the game from scratch.

And also on YouTube and TikTok I'm fed up with comments like: "Will there be a port to Android?", which are written to me by all sorts of schoolchildren who don't understand that the platformer doesn't play well on phones. Although what surprises me is that many kids now don't play anything else on their phones except casual games like Brawl Stars.

3. I know that even the minority that is currently following the game is clearly hooked by something and that they want this story to continue. I myself have ideas for this, but not all of them are finished properly yet. And considering that I do everything alone, I may miss something.

During the development of Act I, I was torn between drawing, writing the plot, dialogue, music, code, and those trailers and teasers, and I spent 1.5 years on its development. Most likely, I should not have split the first chapter into acts and, although I spent more time in total, I could have finished everything I wanted.

4. Since the first act is mostly just an introduction and acquaintance with the key characters and the main gameplay, I tried to promote it at the level of a game similar to Undertale and Deltarune, but a platformer in which only the battles are made in the RPG style.

I was well aware that I could receive accusations that this is a derivative product, but I somehow did not care. And now that I haven't even received such feedback and haven't done everything I planned yet, I doubt that it's worth continuing at all, considering everything I described above...

And considering all this, I somehow began to look strangely at everything that inspired me... how can I say, I no longer feel that atmosphere, music, and unique gameplay and plot in different games, films, cartoons, and musical groups, perceiving them as the same creators as they are, but less famous, because there are still tens and hundreds of thousands of them.

Although relatively recently they were something from the WOW category for me. But this may be due to the fact that I simply found too many analogues of those works, in an attempt to be inspired by something and come up with something that I did not see there.

In general, I really could use some advice on:

* How and where to promote what I do well and correctly

* How to feel the uniqueness of my sources of inspiration again, while creating something similar, but still quite different from them

* Still, make a good independent project with all this and release it by the end of the year.

In any case, thanks if you read this far and advised something!