Hey Spatenklopper,
We're venturing outside of our traditional writing style to try to find what works for people and what doesn't. While we're extremely proud of Avalon, it didn't meet our expectations in terms of popularity. We want to write something that people want to read. We're trying hard to take into consideration the complaints and criticisms our player base has with A Petal Among Thorns and address them as best we can. If you feel like we've overused certain words or phrases, we're happy to go back through and make alterations if this is a common complaint.
This has been an extremely difficult market to break into. Much more difficult than we ever could have anticipated. We've already had to abandon a game due to severe critical disapproval which is something we were devastated by. It was a hard lesson but a valuable one. With A Petal Among Thorns, we're exploring a more sex-oriented story catering to a male audience. Men tend to prefer youth as younger women often had a better-than-average chance of birthing healthy offspring. It was an evolutionary preference developed through natural selection. Reminding the audience that the girl in the story is young engages heightened arousal. At least, in theory.
We'll make adjustments before we finalize A Petal Among Thorns and we're confident the end result will be great. We have made peace with the fact that we won't, and can't, please everyone though. We hope you continue to enjoy our style of writing even as it does change and grow.
Thank you for your interest.
Hi
Myrabelle
I loved 'Avalon', and while I would have liked to see some more of Dallas (I tried the Octavia route, but I prefer Dallas) and the three of them together in the end (lewd and story!-wise), it was still a great story and a very enjoyable experience (like for others, the large eyes were somewhat unexpected at first, but made for a very cute looking style in combination with their other looks).
The sister-plot felt a little tacked on, though.
Penny was fun, especially after the initial rework, and I enjoyed her parts immensely. Although I myself wouldn't have made her that prominent in this kind of story.
I'm not really active on either Patreon or Discord, so while I knew there would be a new game, beside some news from threads on here, I got to 'A Penny for your thoughts' mostly without any knowledge of what to expect exactly.
I remembered then that I had read somewhere some time ago that Penny would be the game's protagonist, and I wasn't sure I'd like that game, but was giving it a try because of 'Avalon'. And in the end, I think she actually was much better suited as a protagonist of her own game, than a sidekick in an emotional/'dark' game like 'Avalon'. On the other hand, it brought a lightness to it that I may have missed otherwise, so it's all good, it didn't sour my experience as it seems to have done for others.
While I felt the sister plot to not really fit as well as the rest of the story in Avalon, I really liked her.
But transferring a LI (and she kind of was presented as one) into another story as a LI again is 'problematic' for me. Even though I play the MC in both games, I built an emotional connection to her already and having her in a 'completely new environment' again, somehow damages the wholesomeness of the first one in retrospective. No logic here, just a feeling.
Just adding her as part of the story but no potential LI, even a possible one that never comes to fruition (and not adding that additional last scene with her in Avalon) would have worked much better for me personally.
While the beginning was a little 'different', I just went with the flow and trusted in you doing your magic again.
I found the story intriguing and only then read about people's fears regarding protagonists/LIs/...
I also read about what you had planned from those more active on discord, and was still very much looking forward to future updates. In retrospect, it might have been beneficial to state stuff like that beforehand, but I myself wouldn't have thought of doing so too, most likely.
Sad to see it 'Onhold' and now read you won't continue its story!
As for 'A Petal among Thorns', it's a great game, again!
The mentioned by others repetitive use of her age and relation to the MC is something I noticed too, though.
It's a difficult thing - how people address others in conversation at all is so different. From my own family experience, beside welcoming/saying goodbye to someone or addressing someone that might not be aware a conversation was started, or in a group with changing recipients, we hardly ever use our names at all - we and those we speak to know that we do so and what our names are.^^
With my friends/colleagues it is different, while I only seldom use names, they mostly use them much more often in conversation.
Even ignoring different kinds of (family) interactions, in a presented medium like a VN it is often potentially less clear who is talking to whom and while different name colors do help, relying on them for understanding the story might not be the best idea.
So naturally, VN dialogue might (have to) be different from RL dialogue.
Especially in stories with incest content, it seems to be part of the kink, though? I myself could live with some initial mentioning and then never coming up again unless it was really relevant, just because it feels somewhat forced to me (even in lewd scenes where it is added because of the kink).
That the girl is younger is already portrayed by the visuals (I would hope), the relation hopefully obvious from the rest of the story and their interactions. So my vote would go to a restrained usage of these bits.
If I feel like 30% (this is random!, while I stumbled over this, it mostly led to me more often browsing over the dialogue to get to the real content - which is a shame) of a conversation is stating the age and relation of the conversationalists, there is definitely not enough story in there. And yes, while I enjoy lewd scenes as much as the next guy, I'm mostly interested in the story. Fitting lewd scenes are the spice in it, while those added just because someone needs to have a scene with one's favorite girl just damage the whole thing. I'm not supporting games update to update, but in the hopes to have a finished product some day, that as a whole is balanced, fun to experience again and a good advertisement to the dev for new players.
All in all, I'm looking forward to what the next updates and the next parts of this planned trilogy might entail.
Thanks a lot for your great games!
