2 years! 2 years of creating nearly every single asset featured in this game (minus 2 or 3 image textures), the sound fx, enemy logic, level design, geometry, animations, etc, all created by me.

THINGS I'VE LEARNED OVER 2 YEARS THAT MAYBE YOU CAN LEARN FROM MY MISTAKES:

• OPTIMIZE YOUR HIGH-POLY-GEOMETRY! (My game has a ridiculous load time of nearly 2 minutes due to two factors, one of them being some of my models are unreasonably high poly-count).

• OPTIMIZE SCENES / LEVEL TRANSITIONS! (My game loads the entire "World" scene at the beginning, I wanted the world to be seamless (not sure if there's a way to dynamically load geometry like Half Life 2 or Doom / other games in Godot... perhaps there is?), but keep this in mind, separate your levels up into chunks with transitions before embarking on modeling the entire world in Blender or other software).

• PLAY-TESTERS ARE CRUCIAL! (I had a team of about 12 or so friends and net helpers play through the game and give me such good criticism and found so many bugs I didn't find playing on my own, you have to get other people to test your game.)

• GAMEPLAY FIRST, LORE LATER? (I struggle with this, I want to build worlds, my heart is in the atmosphere and lore, this game works as an exploration game, but doesn't have the depth of interactivity I would have liked (though there are some puzzles / platforming section / stealth section that play-testers and I enjoyed the challenge)).

• USING EXTERNAL ASSETS... MIGHT NOT BE A BAD THING... (A giant reason why this game took me 2 years is because of all the custom assets, using Blender to create everything down to the box design that most won't even pay attention to. I feel I could've been more lenient on using other's assets, but it feels good to be like... I've made every BIT of this game... balance!)

• DON'T TURN AWAY FROM "BAD" CRITICISM (I have a folder where I have all the mean / heart splitting comments on social media (which thankfully there aren't too many), use them as constructive criticism, they can be useful if you put your ego aside, some of the time they're even right!)).

It's been about 18 days since launch, I've made about $111 (even though the game is pay what you want), from 80 downloads! For me, this is a HUGE success! I thought echo_soft_sector_0 would be another echo (see what i did there) in the chamber of downloaded asset, endless tutorial clone games that are posted on this site constantly. This game is from my heart, hidden stories, atmospheric sounds I captured through field recordings, sounds I've spent days manipulating, moments that were dreams in my mind and now here!

I can't thank you all enough for sharing / exploring this world. THANK YOU!