How to figure out why (a few) people bought my game and how to make more of it?

This post was originally posted on reddit (Link)

My brother and I have an indie game on Steam in a small-ish niche (typing games). The backstory is that my brother had been making simple educational games to supplement his day-job as a language teacher (in powerpoint believe it or not) and actually managed to create engaging experiences. He even had parents call the school asking if they could somehow get these games he made to play at home because the kids really wanted more. So he would send them the PPT and a guide on how to run it and everyone was happy. He never considered himself as a game developer and was just doing this because he thought it was fun and it helped with teaching.

He showed me some of the game prototypes he made and I was absolutely blown away with how fun they were. They were simple, buggy and janky ... but really fun. And his students felt so too. I've been a professional game developer for almost 20 years and have worked on a many games (even a few AAA ones) so when I saw what he was doing I wanted to see if I could steer him towards something more enabling than Powerpoint (its crazy what you can do with powerpoint tbh).

So I encouraged him to check out Unity to see if that's could elevate some of the games he was making and lo and behold it did.

To make a long story short(er). We released a game on steam based on one of the prototypes. (The Way Home - A Typing Adventure). Its a game that takes the player through a short campaign where you must correctly type in a sequence of letters in order to accomplish your goal.

We released on steam, collected a bit of analytics and updated it a few times which resulted in us getting a few paying customers. We are off course ecstatic that someone thought the game looked interested enough to buy and that they had enough fun to not refund it.

We are planning a small game jam over the holidays (we are both home for Christmas) and we would really like to add something to the game that builds upon what people already like about the game. We have a long list of features that we want to add, and I'm sure many of these features would result in making the game better.

But I would love to hear some thoughts on how to actually gather data so that we add / improve the features of the game that are already working. We have been playing around with:

- Do we add a link to a questioner to the game and ask the people who are already playing why they bought it and what they would like to see improved?

- Do we try some sort of A/B testing through google ads, see if we put one feature in focus instead of another one to get the answer?

- Do we reach out to gamer communities that like similar games and ask them why/why not they would buy this game?

Would love to hear how other indiedevs tackle this!