Hello everyone, I have read through all of the reviews and your comments on the game so far and I want to thank everyone for their feedback I appreciate it. I will try and get to everyone's points here. Sorry for the wall of text, but I have tons to say LOL.
It's great to hear that most people like the game, I'll break it down into the 3 main areas of the game that people care about; Art, Writing, and QoL.
A fair number of you pointed out the many issues you had with the art, all completely valid and I will address that below.
In regards to the art, I always knew that there would be issues with AI art, as I'm very new at this and by no means an expert. As I was learning about using Stable Diffusion, and combining that with Inpaint to fix the issues that were mentioned, I realized that it was a hell of a lot of work to get everything that people care about done just right. To be clear, everyone's complains about the art are absolutely correct and valid, and I will strive to fix it. But I only genuinly ask for your patience and understanding as I slowly work to fix the issues. I always thought that as long as the characters looked great, other issues like inconsistent environment, fingers, etc. were secondary and that it was fine. I now see that was incorrect and will try my best to fix those mistakes. For now, I plan to leave the existing content in and fix them over time. For any content moving forward, I will keep a closer eye on the things that people mentioned that would break their immersion, such as weird backgrounds, weird posing, inconsistent body shape/size, fingers, etc.
Luckily, I think people actually like the writing so far? I won't make any major changes to this aspect, unless someone wants to bring up issues they had with the writing. Please let me know.
I totally understand the complaints about the length of the game so far. To be completely honest, because I spent so much time on it, I felt that it was much longer than it actually was. I've spent many hours putting in the scenes, rewriting, playing it to see if it flows right, if it matches the picture on the screen, I guess I just felt it was way longer than it actually was for first time players. I poured over the prologue so many times to try and get the feel of the MC down just right, and how he interacted with the people around him. To be frank, I didn't think people would like the game at all, I thought the overall NTR space was over saturated with games like this, but I was just hoping people would enjoy my take on it. I was fully prepared for people to chock it up to just another AI slop game that would get forgotten/abandoned. The best way I can describe it is that I spent a lot of time describing what happens, that it ended up being that not much actually happened. I will strive to make my next updates more substantial in content.
I am working on the next update, but I have a full time job, and a life outside of this game. I don't want to burn myself out before I even got very far on this, so I will do what I can to release better, more meaty updates for you guys to enjoy, thank you for supporting me!
There was one comment about versioning, and I will tighten that up to more allign with the community's expectations. Next version will be 0.21 to "catch" up the content with the update.
I'll get into specific story elements here.
In regards to the roleplay and the pictures imagining it before it actually happens. I saw some complaints about this and I understand, but I have to clarify that this type of scene writing was only to give players a glimpse into MC's mind as he fantasizes about his fetish. I wanted players to get a taste of what the later game would be like, before setting up the story for the beginning steps exploring this fantasy. Once the female MC accepts MC's fantasies and really starts to partake in them, the imagination scenes will gradually decrease. I still want to include them here and there, as I think it is quite realistic for the MC to either see it with his own eyes, or hear about it from others, and still have his imagination run wild with what oculd have happened, or what else could happen. I'll see how people like it and if everyone hates it, I'll pivot.
The story moving forward.
My overall goal was always to explore multiple different paths for this story. I wanted to provide options for the player to choose what type of fetish they wanted to explore, whether that was NTR, NTS, Swapping, Cheating, etc. This is crazy ambitious and I definitely cannot satisfy everyone's perferences anytime soon. Eventually I will get there, but my Patreon is set up with a monthly poll to help me decide which path to focus on for the next update, to actually incetivize people to help pay for my now ridiculous energy bill. Currently, NTS has won every time.
(Small aside, someone asked about futa content. Probably not? Not really my cup of tea, but hey vote for it on the Patreon and maybe it will win one day.)
About paywalling. I want to be clear and confirm that I will never paywall extra content / features. That's not really my vibe, so I promise that all content will be released for free, including all versions that I make the game for. (Android port is coming, I tried with this update and I had no idea what I was doing and ran out of time lol)
Because I have no idea about programming or anything like that, adding new features has been a struggle and half, lol. That's why it took awhile to add an opacity slider, why there isn't an android version yet, or a scene replay system. Basically I google how to add this feature, I read some stuff, I try myself, it doesn't work. I copy the code from soemwhere else, doesn't work. I get sad and then I go back to writing more stuff and generating more art. I can only say that I promise I am working on it.
Okay, I think that covers most of it, if there is anything I missed, please message me and I'll definitely respond ASAP.
Obligatory patreon plug, patreon.com/c/Maplebird . There is also a free tier where I post updates so people know that this game did not commit die.
Thank you everyone for playing, it means a lot that people are actually enjoying the game. I've never been much of a creative type throuhgout my life, so to get absolutely slammed in the comments/reviews is a huge W for me.
Next update sometime this month.
MapleBird.
