Even as we were releasing it, we knew there were some things that we weren't entirely happy about, and I suspect that had we had time to address those issues, it would have been a much more successful game. I also suspect that cutting arcade mode out of the demo (which we thought would entice people to buy it so they could unlock it) was a huge mistake, since this meant that people only got to experience one tactical pod - the Nuke pod. The "hook" of the game is the different pods, and we gimped the demo by not allowing players the chance to play with them.
One of the complaints we got in video reviews was that the game never changed levels. We had planned different levels for each capital ship, but we eventually gave that up because our artists never found the time to make more sky-boxes. Another was that the stages were too long, and dog-fighting wave after wave of ships before reaching the capital ship got tedious. Our decision to make the stages increase in time with each new level was clearly a bad choice, though hardly anyone that plays the demo can even get to the second level.
Which leads to LPF's third downfall: the game is too hard. Despite the fact that we pop up little hints about how to beat each capital ship (as well as instructions for each type of pod, ship maneuvers, dodging etc.), nobody seems to read them, which makes the game extremely difficult to play. For example, in the very first capital ship battle we pop up a hint about how lasers hardly do any damage to the ship, so you have to find some way to deliver a bigger punch. Right around that time, the fighter ships start dropping Nuke pods, which will defeat the capital ship in three or four shots. Time and again though, I've seen videos of people playing the demo, skipping past the hints, and trying to fight off the first capital ship with lasers. They also seem to ignore all the fighter ships around them (ships that will drop the Nuke pods necessary to defeat the boss) and just focus on the capital ship. We thought that if we made the fighter ships annoying enough that people would want to get rid of them, plus it's a classic boss-battle tactic - fight the boss until he spawns some minions, kill them all, then go back to the boss. Sadly, nobody really seems to catch on to the pattern, and though I still don't know what we could have done to change that, it is entirely our fault for making it that way.
Finally, our biggest mistake was that we made the game too "arcade like" in that when you die, you completely start over. I've often thought that we should have just had them start at the beginning of the current stage because if you get all the way to the space station and die, it SUCKS to have to start all over again. We did it thinking that it would make people want to play it over and over again so that they could beat it, but we seriously misjudged our target audience. People who buy and play XBox Live Indie games don't necessarily want to grind at those games, especially if they only spent a buck on it. They want something they can play for maybe an hour or so and be done with it. They want more casual games, games they can pick up and play when they're bored but don't require very much effort, and LPF requires a serious amount of effort in order to get good enough at it to beat it.
I'm sad about our game's lack of success, but a person learns more from his failures than he does his successes, and I'm grateful for the lessons learned. In future endeavors, I'll make sure that people have as much fun playing the game as I did making it. :)
