Wish there was a better way to answer reviews. That last one was particularly just false information. But oh well.. that’s what the internet has become. Just mad people posting false information everywhere. ^^
I get that all the different branches are hidden behind certain interactions, but that‘s not exactly the problem… it’s just the development schedule. I’m focusing on all side content and the base systems first instead of the main story because it‘ll make it easier to balance how many days the game needs to have, and therefor how long the main story needs to be. It would limit me tremendously on what side content I can add, if the main story is already written. I‘d rather not limit myself on that.
But also, the cage/piercing really only has a few events behind them. Submission is not a stat that has any impact on the other content.
Getting disqualified is not the goal of the game and that dialog line saying it is is not in the current version anymore. The qte‘s being boring is the most subjective line of the review but therefor also the most agreeable one. I see that come out every now and then, but I also got a lot of positive comments on them, especially the new arrows, so no… I’m not going to entirely remove the core game mechanic because one dude wrote the word „bad design“ a hundred times.
Erica is not attackable yet because getting her will require you and the other contestants to work together, meaning it requires the other quests, and implementing anything now would just get removed in a few months.
The different transformation items on the contestants do work correctly, if you give them longer hair that‘s what they are getting, but yes, there are a few scenes that are not correctly reading that information for dialogs YET because that new system was only implemented a few months ago and there are a lot of dialogs. The different player transformations also do have very different effects on a lot of the events.
So basically, the reviewer is mad that the game is not finished or that I‘m not focusing on the things that make the game feel finished immediately for them, which I understand, but it just doesn‘t make sense to start with that. In fact, I just did a poll on Patreon last month to see if people wanted me to abandon that development schedule for new players like that reviewer, but the end result was like 93% against it because they understood that that main story content will be better for it in the long run.
But yeah, I can see how it can provoke those angry 1 star Andy’s, because they just don’t understand how the game works. I just don‘t know yet if people actually read these things and now everybody thinks they actually have to get the cage/piercing in order to see any content.
My main game design Mantra is to always be as clear as possible. But I feel like with this game the exploration of what transformation lies behind what quest is part of what makes it interesting and just saying „you need to get the piercing if you want to get submissive“ is not clarity, it‘s hand-holding and anti-immersive. I do understand this player‘s frustration… it‘s just… chill man, this game is not finished. Getting angry and giving 1 star reviews to early access games because they are not finished is just making it harder for that early access game to get finished because people read that before they decide to help that early access game. I don‘t think I’ll have a problem with that because I‘m very fortunate to have gotten a lot of support already but there might be a newer game one day that gets cancelled because of comments like yours. Think before you get entitled to spit at hard working people because the 0.5 version of a single developer has some imperfections. Keep that for the AAA studios with thousands of people that release those things as finished products. But also, that‘s not how you get people to listen to you.