Thanks!
Yes you're right there wasn't as much marketing. One of the problems of being a solo dev with 0 budget, I guess! It had about 1k wishlists.
The steam Halloween sale had just ended a couple of days prior to release actually - I did make sure to check that one!
Making a release just after a discount makes it a high risk of players already spending their money + winter sales are coming soon too.
As for the money that is not critical, if you have time you can still do a lot of marketing with a 0 budget. Having a marketing campaign on Twitter, email marketing, Discord guerilla marketing, Facebook target audience group marketing campaign, and so on, a lot of possibilities even with 0 budget.
Also, another free MK strategy you can make is having a Demo(free short version) released on itch.io/gamejolt 2 weeks before the full Steam release.
Or even if you don't have either money or time, in that situation you can always look for an indie publisher(although I think this option should only be for the worst-case scenario, personal opinion)
Truly I feel sad because your game actually looks full of potential and you wasted so much hard work on it just to skip the marketing stage.
Good luck in your Journey Tusky, you are a talented game developer, just don't skip Marketing