I found out that this post has been missplaced in the "Latest Updates" withouth being updated. I alerted the staff and they will look into it. If anyone's interested, I was planing to release the v0.2.48 tomorrow (on Discord) :S
Edit Jan 04: My mistake, the post was never missplaced in the Latest Updates, it's just that the title was not changed.
I also released today the v0.2.48 on Discord. It's mostly bugfixes and a minor improvement in some features. So no need to be hyped.
Also released v0.4.69 for Dark Lord Patreons & v0.3.26 dor Officer Patreons (for whom my be interested).
Is this a word (text-based) game? The changelog only talks about "x thousand words". If there are sex scenes then this is a very bad way of portraying changelog. It seems either there is not enough content or the developer is trying to cover up lack of content with the amount of texts. Either way, it sounds like a grind.
Almost 1k likes for a game with the only content in the intro. I'm done with this until I see a tag added where you can at least catch a handy. Changelog says words added to "main story". And here I thought the main story would be screwing chicks from the Star Wars universe... not listening to officers bitch about shit.
A Somewhat Objective, Comprehensive Analysis of Death Star Trainer
Wow.....I've never seen a thread on this site look like this. I think this is actually my first post, I usually just lurk and get games that look interesting. But I feel I have to say something on all this. I've played through over 50 Games/VN's in the last 6 or so months. I have never seen a game on this site that has high quality art and writing as well as consistent updates have any problem at all making money on Patreon. I've seen games that have pretty basic art, tolerable writing/plot and release maybe once every 2 months still make some serious money. What I'm trying to say is people in this community are extremely forgiving and generous. A game doesn't need to have the highest quality renders possible. It doesn't need to have Pulitzer Prize level writing. What it does need is CONTENT. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people expecting a game after 5 Months to have a respectable amount of content. It is not your customer’s fault that you choose and art style and workflow that is extremely time consuming and difficult for you. Let's be real here, you’re not making Star Citizen. You’re making a slave trainer game, based on a pre-existing template (Something Unlimited) with a Star Wars Theme. The reason most people play these games is to "Train with their Lightsaber" Possibly with a little "Force Choking" involved as well. As long as there is enough content of at least half decent quality to take care of business, people are generally happy. Now if they have to spend hours grinding in a SINGLE PLAYER GAME only to be Blue-Balled, with what amounts to something they could find on the internet, in less time than it takes to say "it’s coming in the next update". They are not going to be a happy camper. Especially when they see your Patreon and that mess of a monetization structure. I have tried to be as detailed as possible about the way I see the current situation with You, Your Game and the Community/Customers. I’ve broken my comments up into different sections just to give this some structure so it’s a bit easier to read and less intimidating. I hope this can help at least a bit. DarthSmut, if you’re actually reading this, I would really appreciate if you read the whole thing. I’m going to be pretty blunt with you in some parts of this but nothing I’m saying do I mean as an insult. This is just the way I see things. Sometimes I think people need someone to be straight up with them. You’re free to disagree, I just ask for you to go into this with an open mind.
The State of Your Public Build:
I’ll start out with the positive stuff, because it’s going to get pretty rough. I can tell that you actually do care about making a quality game. Even though the basic template of the game isn’t really original, the art style that you’ve made for the UI is fantastic. Its honestly one of the best I’ve seen. It fits the theme very well and looks professional. The Main Death Star Map screen could definitely have more info on it but its ok. I also enjoyed most of the dialogue. As long as you don’t try and take it seriously, I find the campiness of it pretty funny. The whole intro scene made me laugh. It probably helps that you’re using the same kind of dynamic with the dialogue between Vader and The Emperor that they used in those Robot Chicken Star Wars sketches. You don’t have to try and make everything goofy though. It seems like you spent more time on everything other than the actual NSFW scenes. You have these long comedic but basically pointless scenes with lots of dialogue but didn’t write a single thing for the stripping scenes. Seriously, I thought people had to be exaggerating when I first looked at the comments on this game. If you removed all the hours of grinding you could go through and see every single NSFW “scene” in the public build in less than 5 minutes. And it’s not even like they are that elaborate. Some don’t even have dialogue. They’re not really scenes at all. It’s a picture of a 3D Model that sort of looks like the character, posing in a slightly provocative way. Goofy conversations are alright sometimes but people aren’t playing this game for its comedic value. At a bare minimum the public build of a game should be able to support AT LEAST 1 good fap session. And that’s like the absolute bare minimum. Even for the few games that actually do paywall content and have public builds, they usually have at least 10X the amount of content that’s in this game. On-top of that you have loading screens between basically every single action. I’ve never seen a game with so many loading screens. Also WE GET YOU HAVE A PATREON, you don’t need to put comments all over the game about it. It’s pretty annoying and makes you look desperate. Work on putting quality content into the game before you worry about asking people for money. Especially not when there is basically nothing else in the game. What are you writing 2000 new words for when there’s no content?!?! That’s like you telling me how nice your TV is for a house that you haven’t even built yet. It seems like using a 2-D Art style like SU would have probably been a better choice. You could make your models look a lot more like the actual person than you can with 3-D Modeling with much less effort. Especially if you don’t have a lot of experience with 3-D modeling. Just tweaking the faces to make them look like the person I imagine is probably an extremely difficult task. Make actual NSFW content. Stop writing dialogue for conversations that don’t really add anything to the game. Even with all of the dialogue you have written, none of it really develops the characters at all. Everything in the public build is either Unfinished, Boring or Pay-Walled. The only thing I would really consider an actual scene is the BJ thing in the intro. And that’s just because there was more than one picture and actual “dialogue” I really hope it was purposely written to be ridiculous because it sounded like what a 12 year old kid would say if he was trying to act out the scene with his action figures. Ok, that was the harshest I’m going to be in this whole thing. I tried to be critical, but honestly I’m still shocked by the overall state of what I played. Sometimes it seems like you really do want to make a successful quality game but other times I’m not so sure. I have no problem giving you the benefit of the doubt though.
Pricing and Sunk Cost Bias:
When it comes to pricing. Humility goes a long way. World of Warcraft has more content than you could ever hope of making. Not an insult, just a fact. It costs $15 a month. Stardew Valley was made by a single person. It's a single payment of $15. Your game does not exist in a vacuum. You want people to pay up to $45 a month when all they are seeing is an unfinished NSFW game that has almost no real NSFW content and is full of bugs. Pay-Walling content in a market full of games that are higher quality, have more content and most importantly are FREE, not only makes you look greedy but it also makes it look like you think your game is far better than it actually is. After this section I'm not going to say anything else regarding pricing because I think I've gotten my point across and anything I haven't touched on has already been said in this thread. Just put the full game out for free. If it's good and you continue to release content regularly, people will pay. It doesn’t matter how hard you work on a game. You can spend a whole bunch of time and accomplish nothing. Just because it took you a long time to do something doesn’t make it more valuable to anyone except yourself. All customers care about is the end product. Food that tastes absolutely awful doesn’t magically taste good because it took the person who served it an extremely long time to make it. It may taste good to the person who made it, but that’s because they invested a lot of time and effort into creating it. What’s really happening is they don’t want to admit to themselves that all of that time and effort was wasted. If you honestly believe your game is worth that amount of money that’s fine. But you can’t be surprised or mad when others don’t think it’s worth the same amount. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how much you think your work is worth. It’s worth whatever people are actually willing to pay for it. If you really believed your work was that good, then why not let it speak for itself instead of putting it behind a pay-wall, obfuscating the details about your content and arguing with people who try to give you legitimate criticism. It’s not a good look. I’m not even going to start on the whole multicolored responses.
The Way I See F95:
You have to understand what F95 is as an institution. If you release the full game to everyone, there will be people who just download it and don’t contribute at all. That’s just how it goes. But there are also a lot of people on this site who appreciate and understand the work that goes into the creation of these games and will want to support you. Not because they have to, but because they WANT to. The people who contribute money without being forced to by the developer are usually far better customers and also tend to contribute more money. You can’t think of someone getting your game for free as a lost sale. The people who aren’t going to contribute money most likely wouldn’t have given you a dime either way. Some of those people aren’t even in a position to give money if they wanted to. But the more people who play your game, the more people will hear about it and try the game out. Even if only one out of every 20 people who tries the game actually donates you can still make quite a bit of money. Most of the people who actually give money don’t just want to immediately jump into paying for games like this. They try it out first and if they enjoy it and think it’s worth it they will. When you release an outdated unfinished buggy build as the only free content for people to try out, you’re just making a much worse first impression on them than you could have by giving them the full game. If anything, releasing an inferior product as you’re first impression on a customer probably does more damage and costs you more sales than the percentage you would lose by releasing the actual Full game for people to play. The vast majority of developers understand this as well as the value of F95. For example Something Unlimited (you may have heard of them) has the full version of their game (which is excellent btw) on F95. Do you know what it says on the Something Unlimited F95 page, right above the <Downloads> section?
It says; “Developer Note: We don't condone the sharing of our Patron exclusive content, the links which are added by F95 Uploaders. However, we respect F95zone for what it is and have chosen to be active in the community despite the content shared.”
This is how you respond to a community full of prospective customers. Not to mention they are extremely detailed when explaining the content in their full game as well as what is actually in each new update. When something important happens or changes in their development, they make sure that everyone knows and is on the same page. When you’re thinking of spending money on something MONTHLY. You have to understand that what matters is not just the content that you already have out. People want to make sure that there will continue to be quality content coming to the game on a somewhat regular basis. Or at least that they are made fully aware of when the content will be coming and what it is. I don’t think it’s strange for someone who’s giving you money on a regular basis to expect to be kept in the loop on what and when things are happening.
Wrapping Up:
Look, I know I've been pretty blunt throughout this whole thing. I think people in this thread for the most part have been pretty nice to you. The level of discourse on this site is far better than the average comment section. They seem to genuinely want to help you succeed. Which makes sense. We lose when you do. You’re sitting on an idea with a lot of potential and an IP that almost sells itself. I think almost everyone on this site would love to play a really good Star Wars Slave Trainer. Which is probably part of the reason that you have gotten so many comments. It's not difficult to imagine what this game COULD be. But at this point, it's not that. It comes across as game made by someone who wants to make a good game, because they want to make a bunch of money. I’m not saying that’s what you’re actually like. The only person who truly knows your motivation for making this game is you. But I also think it’s important to understand how other people perceive both you and your game. I’m sure if you actually are just very passionate about this game and just really want to make it. Then you wouldn’t want people to think you’re another Scam Artist who just thought it would be easy money after seeing some of the popular creators Patreon pages and figured that they could just figure out how to do it as they went. What I’ve been trying to communicate through this 3039 word post is that: One, You need to work on how you take criticism and understand that someone criticizing your work is not trying to insult you. Even if you worked very hard on something, there is always room to improve. Sure some people are just assholes but you can ignore that. Most of the people on here who are really involved in the community are more than willing to help you as long as you actually respect and implement at least some of the things that they took the time out of their day to help you with. You should be happy people will actually take the time to tell you what they think could be improved. If they really didn’t care they wouldn’t say anything at all. But if you show you’re unwilling to actually take suggestions, that’s eventually what’s going to happen. Two; The money you make from your current monetization structure is coming at the cost of many more potential customers and seriously damaging your reputation on this site. I’ve explained this a bunch already but seriously man. It’s not worth it in the long run.
Three: You need to focus much much more on making actual NSFW content, less jokes and talking. More Lewding. The Slave Cellblock Scenes are I think some of the most important ones to get right in the whole game. You can do a lot of character development for each of the slaves during that whole ark. If you’re going to write dialogue, make sure it serves some actual purpose and isn’t just mundane conversation. The more believable your characters are the better the NSFW scenes can be. It’s no fun if they just begrudgingly do what you want immediately. The whole point is to develop them as strong willed unique characters and then break them slowly with lots of graphic punishments, degradation, embarrassment and torture. The amount you work for it is directly proportional to the amount of satisfaction you feel when you finally do break them. Working for it is what gives it value when you finally achieve it. But this doesn’t mean make the process artificially long and tedious by making people grind through boring tasks. The whole process should be fun. People don’t play games to be bored and grind for hours just for like 5 minutes of entertainment (unless they play Fallout 76). I know this is one hell of a first post but I hope that everyone who read it was able to get something from it. And if not, hopefully you at least understand where I’m coming from. DarthSmut, I hope I didn’t offend you too much. I think you can tell I genuinely want your game to live up to its potential. And I will continue following the progress of the game and I hope that you take some of what I’ve said to heart. To anyone who actually read this entire thing, I really appreciate it. And finally to any MODS that are reading this, I don’t think I said anything that’s not allowed but let me know if I screwed up at all. OK I’m done.
Uhhhhh……………my friend wants you to add some pee scenes. It’s totally not because I have a pee fetish or anything. No way. It’s just for my friend…….Steve…….yeah…..
P.P.S
Steve came back and told me that he specifically wants one with Leia where she’s either tortured in some way until she pees, is locked in a room with no bathroom and eventually has no choice or the classic egg vibrator forced orgasm until she pees and passes out
A Somewhat Objective, Comprehensive Analysis of Death Star Trainer
Wow.....I've never seen a thread on this site look like this. I think this is actually my first post, I usually just lurk and get games that look interesting. But I feel I have to say something on all this. I've played through over 50 Games/VN's in the last 6 or so months. I have never seen a game on this site that has high quality art and writing as well as consistent updates have any problem at all making money on Patreon. I've seen games that have pretty basic art, tolerable writing/plot and release maybe once every 2 months still make some serious money. What I'm trying to say is people in this community are extremely forgiving and generous. A game doesn't need to have the highest quality renders possible. It doesn't need to have Pulitzer Prize level writing. What it does need is CONTENT. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people expecting a game after 5 Months to have a respectable amount of content. It is not your customer’s fault that you choose and art style and workflow that is extremely time consuming and difficult for you. Let's be real here, you’re not making Star Citizen. You’re making a slave trainer game, based on a pre-existing template (Something Unlimited) with a Star Wars Theme. The reason most people play these games is to "Train with their Lightsaber" Possibly with a little "Force Choking" involved as well. As long as there is enough content of at least half decent quality to take care of business, people are generally happy. Now if they have to spend hours grinding in a SINGLE PLAYER GAME only to be Blue-Balled, with what amounts to something they could find on the internet, in less time than it takes to say "it’s coming in the next update". They are not going to be a happy camper. Especially when they see your Patreon and that mess of a monetization structure. I have tried to be as detailed as possible about the way I see the current situation with You, Your Game and the Community/Customers. I’ve broken my comments up into different sections just to give this some structure so it’s a bit easier to read and less intimidating. I hope this can help at least a bit. DarthSmut, if you’re actually reading this, I would really appreciate if you read the whole thing. I’m going to be pretty blunt with you in some parts of this but nothing I’m saying do I mean as an insult. This is just the way I see things. Sometimes I think people need someone to be straight up with them. You’re free to disagree, I just ask for you to go into this with an open mind.
The State of Your Public Build:
I’ll start out with the positive stuff, because it’s going to get pretty rough. I can tell that you actually do care about making a quality game. Even though the basic template of the game isn’t really original, the art style that you’ve made for the UI is fantastic. Its honestly one of the best I’ve seen. It fits the theme very well and looks professional. The Main Death Star Map screen could definitely have more info on it but its ok. I also enjoyed most of the dialogue. As long as you don’t try and take it seriously, I find the campiness of it pretty funny. The whole intro scene made me laugh. It probably helps that you’re using the same kind of dynamic with the dialogue between Vader and The Emperor that they used in those Robot Chicken Star Wars sketches. You don’t have to try and make everything goofy though. It seems like you spent more time on everything other than the actual NSFW scenes. You have these long comedic but basically pointless scenes with lots of dialogue but didn’t write a single thing for the stripping scenes. Seriously, I thought people had to be exaggerating when I first looked at the comments on this game. If you removed all the hours of grinding you could go through and see every single NSFW “scene” in the public build in less than 5 minutes. And it’s not even like they are that elaborate. Some don’t even have dialogue. They’re not really scenes at all. It’s a picture of a 3D Model that sort of looks like the character, posing in a slightly provocative way. Goofy conversations are alright sometimes but people aren’t playing this game for its comedic value. At a bare minimum the public build of a game should be able to support AT LEAST 1 good fap session. And that’s like the absolute bare minimum. Even for the few games that actually do paywall content and have public builds, they usually have at least 10X the amount of content that’s in this game. On-top of that you have loading screens between basically every single action. I’ve never seen a game with so many loading screens. Also WE GET YOU HAVE A PATREON, you don’t need to put comments all over the game about it. It’s pretty annoying and makes you look desperate. Work on putting quality content into the game before you worry about asking people for money. Especially not when there is basically nothing else in the game. What are you writing 2000 new words for when there’s no content?!?! That’s like you telling me how nice your TV is for a house that you haven’t even built yet. It seems like using a 2-D Art style like SU would have probably been a better choice. You could make your models look a lot more like the actual person than you can with 3-D Modeling with much less effort. Especially if you don’t have a lot of experience with 3-D modeling. Just tweaking the faces to make them look like the person I imagine is probably an extremely difficult task. Make actual NSFW content. Stop writing dialogue for conversations that don’t really add anything to the game. Even with all of the dialogue you have written, none of it really develops the characters at all. Everything in the public build is either Unfinished, Boring or Pay-Walled. The only thing I would really consider an actual scene is the BJ thing in the intro. And that’s just because there was more than one picture and actual “dialogue” I really hope it was purposely written to be ridiculous because it sounded like what a 12 year old kid would say if he was trying to act out the scene with his action figures. Ok, that was the harshest I’m going to be in this whole thing. I tried to be critical, but honestly I’m still shocked by the overall state of what I played. Sometimes it seems like you really do want to make a successful quality game but other times I’m not so sure. I have no problem giving you the benefit of the doubt though.
Pricing and Sunk Cost Bias:
When it comes to pricing. Humility goes a long way. World of Warcraft has more content than you could ever hope of making. Not an insult, just a fact. It costs $15 a month. Stardew Valley was made by a single person. It's a single payment of $15. Your game does not exist in a vacuum. You want people to pay up to $45 a month when all they are seeing is an unfinished NSFW game that has almost no real NSFW content and is full of bugs. Pay-Walling content in a market full of games that are higher quality, have more content and most importantly are FREE, not only makes you look greedy but it also makes it look like you think your game is far better than it actually is. After this section I'm not going to say anything else regarding pricing because I think I've gotten my point across and anything I haven't touched on has already been said in this thread. Just put the full game out for free. If it's good and you continue to release content regularly, people will pay. It doesn’t matter how hard you work on a game. You can spend a whole bunch of time and accomplish nothing. Just because it took you a long time to do something doesn’t make it more valuable to anyone except yourself. All customers care about is the end product. Food that tastes absolutely awful doesn’t magically taste good because it took the person who served it took an extremely long time to make it. It may taste good to the person who made it, but that’s because they invested a lot of time and effort into creating it. What’s really happening is they don’t want to admit to themselves that all of that time and effort was wasted. If you honestly believe your game is worth that amount of money that’s fine. But you can’t be surprised or mad when others don’t think it’s worth the same amount. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how much you think your work is worth. It’s worth whatever people are actually willing to pay for it. If you really believed your work was that good, then why not let it speak for itself instead of putting it behind a pay-wall, obfuscating the details about your content and arguing with people who try to give you legitimate criticism. It’s not a good look. I’m not even going to start on the whole multicolored responses.
The Way I See F95:
You have to understand what F95 is as an institution. If you release the full game to everyone, there will be people who just download it and don’t contribute at all. That’s just how it goes. But there are also a lot of people on this site who appreciate and understand the work that goes into the creation of these games and will want to support you. Not because they have to, but because they WANT to. The people who contribute money without being forced to by the developer are usually far better customers and also tend to contribute more money. You can’t think of someone getting your game for free as a lost sale. The people who aren’t going to contribute money most likely wouldn’t have given you a dime either way. Some of those people aren’t even in a position to give money if they wanted to. But the more people who play your game, the more people will hear about it and try the game out. Even if only one out of every 20 people who tries the game actually donates you can still make quite a bit of money. Most of the people who actually give money don’t just want to immediately jump into paying for games like this. They try it out first and if they enjoy it and think it’s worth it they will. When you release an outdated unfinished buggy build as the only free content for people to try out, you’re just making a much worse first impression on them than you could have by giving them the full game. If anything, releasing an inferior product as you’re first impression on a customer probably does more damage and costs you more sales than the percentage you would lose by releasing the actual Full game for people to play. The vast majority of developers understand this as well as the value of F95. For example Something Unlimited (you may have heard of them) has the full version of their game (which is excellent btw) on F95. Do you know what it says on the Something Unlimited F95 page, right above the <Downloads> section?
It says; “Developer Note: We don't condone the sharing of our Patron exclusive content, the links which are added by F95 Uploaders. However, we respect F95zone for what it is and have chosen to be active in the community despite the content shared.”
This is how you respond to a community full of prospective customers. Not to mention they are extremely detailed when explaining the content in their full game as well as what is actually in each new update. When something important happens or changes in their development, they make sure that everyone knows and is on the same page. When you’re thinking of spending money on something MONTHLY. You have to understand that what matters is not just the content that you already have out. People want to make sure that there will continue to be quality content coming to the game on a somewhat regular basis. Or at least that they are made fully aware of when the content will be coming and what it is. I don’t think it’s strange for someone who’s giving you money on a regular basis to expect to be kept in the loop on what and when things are happening.
Wrapping Up:
Look, I know I've been pretty blunt throughout this whole thing. I think people in this thread for the most part have been pretty nice to you. The level of discourse on this site is far better than the average comment section. They seem to genuinely want to help you succeed. Which makes sense. We lose when you do. You’re sitting on an idea with a lot of potential and an IP that almost sells itself. I think almost everyone on this site would love to play a really good Star Wars Slave Trainer. Which is probably part of the reason that you have gotten so many comments. It's not difficult to imagine what this game COULD be. But at this point, it's not that. It comes across as game made by someone who wants to make a good game, because they want to make a bunch of money. I’m not saying that’s what you’re actually like. The only person who truly knows your motivation for making this game is you. But I also think it’s important to understand how other people perceive both you and your game. I’m sure if you actually are just very passionate about this game and just really want to make it. Then you wouldn’t want people to think you’re another Scam Artist who just thought it would be easy money after seeing some of the popular creators Patreon pages and figured that they could just figure out how to do it as they went. What I’ve been trying to communicate through this 3039 word post is that: One, You need to work on how you take criticism and understand that someone criticizing your work is not trying to insult you. Even if you worked very hard on something, there is always room to improve. Sure some people are just assholes but you can ignore that. Most of the people on here who are really involved in the community are more than willing to help you as long as you actually respect and implement at least some of the things that they took the time out of their day to help you with. You should be happy people will actually take the time to tell you what they think could be improved. If they really didn’t care they wouldn’t say anything at all. But if you show you’re unwilling to actually take suggestions, that’s eventually what’s going to happen. Two; The money you make from your current monetization structure is coming at the cost of many more potential customers and seriously damaging your reputation on this site. I’ve explained this a bunch already but seriously man. It’s not worth it in the long run.
Three: You need to focus much much more on making actual NSFW content, less jokes and talking. More Lewding. The Slave Cellblock Scenes are I think some of the most important ones to get right in the whole game. You can do a lot of character development for each of the slaves during that whole ark. If you’re going to write dialogue, make sure it serves some actual purpose and isn’t just mundane conversation. The more believable your characters are the better the NSFW scenes can be. It’s no fun if they just begrudgingly do what you want immediately. The whole point is to develop them as strong willed unique characters and then break them slowly with lots of graphic punishments, degradation, embarrassment and torture. The amount you work for it is directly proportional to the amount of satisfaction you feel when you finally do break them. Working for it is what gives it value when you finally achieve it. But this doesn’t mean make the process artificially long and tedious by making people grind through boring tasks. The whole process should be fun. People don’t play games to be bored and grind for hours just for like 5 minutes of entertainment (unless they play Fallout 76). I know this is one hell of a first post but I hope that everyone who read it was able to get something from it. And if not, hopefully you at least understand where I’m coming from. DarthSmut, I hope I didn’t offend you too much. I think you can tell I genuinely want your game to live up to its potential. And I will continue following the progress of the game and I hope that you take some of what I’ve said to heart. To anyone who actually read this entire thing, I really appreciate it. And finally to any MODS that are reading this, I don’t think I said anything that’s not allowed but let me know if I screwed up at all. OK I’m done.
P.S.
Uhhhhh……………my friend wants you to add some pee scenes. It’s totally not because I have a pee fetish or anything. No way. It’s just for my friend…….Steve…….yeah…..
P.P.S
Steve came back and told me that he specifically wants one with Leia where she’s either tortured in some way until she pees, is locked in a room with no bathroom and eventually has no choice or the classic egg vibrator forced orgasm until she pees and passes out
Yeah that was a seriously awesome first post. I second the thing about white text on a grey background. The styling of this site is great in terms of being easy on the eye until it comes to reading blocks of texts. I drink a heap of caffiene which causes some mild light sensitivity. Alot of websites use a white background which if you look at for an extended period of time is basically staring into a light bulb.
Some coders out there noticed the prevalence of this problem so created an add-on for chrome browser called negative. Negative has 5 different colour inversion settings for whatever page your browsing which works great on fixing the problem for any other website I've encountered it but because of the colours used here it only makes it worse so I'm kinda stuck with short spans of reading here until I can find another work around.
Not right now, but some people have suggested me to add more sources of income, and once I develop them, you'll have more ways of making money. In any case, this will take time.
A Somewhat Objective, Comprehensive Analysis of Death Star Trainer
Wow.....I've never seen a thread on this site look like this. I think this is actually my first post, I usually just lurk and get games that look interesting. But I feel I have to say something on all this. I've played through over 50 Games/VN's in the last 6 or so months. I have never seen a game on this site that has high quality art and writing as well as consistent updates have any problem at all making money on Patreon. I've seen games that have pretty basic art, tolerable writing/plot and release maybe once every 2 months still make some serious money. What I'm trying to say is people in this community are extremely forgiving and generous. A game doesn't need to have the highest quality renders possible. It doesn't need to have Pulitzer Prize level writing. What it does need is CONTENT. There is absolutely nothing wrong with people expecting a game after 5 Months to have a respectable amount of content. It is not your customer’s fault that you choose and art style and workflow that is extremely time consuming and difficult for you. Let's be real here, you’re not making Star Citizen. You’re making a slave trainer game, based on a pre-existing template (Something Unlimited) with a Star Wars Theme. The reason most people play these games is to "Train with their Lightsaber" Possibly with a little "Force Choking" involved as well. As long as there is enough content of at least half decent quality to take care of business, people are generally happy. Now if they have to spend hours grinding in a SINGLE PLAYER GAME only to be Blue-Balled, with what amounts to something they could find on the internet, in less time than it takes to say "it’s coming in the next update". They are not going to be a happy camper. Especially when they see your Patreon and that mess of a monetization structure. I have tried to be as detailed as possible about the way I see the current situation with You, Your Game and the Community/Customers. I’ve broken my comments up into different sections just to give this some structure so it’s a bit easier to read and less intimidating. I hope this can help at least a bit. DarthSmut, if you’re actually reading this, I would really appreciate if you read the whole thing. I’m going to be pretty blunt with you in some parts of this but nothing I’m saying do I mean as an insult. This is just the way I see things. Sometimes I think people need someone to be straight up with them. You’re free to disagree, I just ask for you to go into this with an open mind.
The State of Your Public Build:
I’ll start out with the positive stuff, because it’s going to get pretty rough. I can tell that you actually do care about making a quality game. Even though the basic template of the game isn’t really original, the art style that you’ve made for the UI is fantastic. Its honestly one of the best I’ve seen. It fits the theme very well and looks professional. The Main Death Star Map screen could definitely have more info on it but its ok. I also enjoyed most of the dialogue. As long as you don’t try and take it seriously, I find the campiness of it pretty funny. The whole intro scene made me laugh. It probably helps that you’re using the same kind of dynamic with the dialogue between Vader and The Emperor that they used in those Robot Chicken Star Wars sketches. You don’t have to try and make everything goofy though. It seems like you spent more time on everything other than the actual NSFW scenes. You have these long comedic but basically pointless scenes with lots of dialogue but didn’t write a single thing for the stripping scenes. Seriously, I thought people had to be exaggerating when I first looked at the comments on this game. If you removed all the hours of grinding you could go through and see every single NSFW “scene” in the public build in less than 5 minutes. And it’s not even like they are that elaborate. Some don’t even have dialogue. They’re not really scenes at all. It’s a picture of a 3D Model that sort of looks like the character, posing in a slightly provocative way. Goofy conversations are alright sometimes but people aren’t playing this game for its comedic value. At a bare minimum the public build of a game should be able to support AT LEAST 1 good fap session. And that’s like the absolute bare minimum. Even for the few games that actually do paywall content and have public builds, they usually have at least 10X the amount of content that’s in this game. On-top of that you have loading screens between basically every single action. I’ve never seen a game with so many loading screens. Also WE GET YOU HAVE A PATREON, you don’t need to put comments all over the game about it. It’s pretty annoying and makes you look desperate. Work on putting quality content into the game before you worry about asking people for money. Especially not when there is basically nothing else in the game. What are you writing 2000 new words for when there’s no content?!?! That’s like you telling me how nice your TV is for a house that you haven’t even built yet. It seems like using a 2-D Art style like SU would have probably been a better choice. You could make your models look a lot more like the actual person than you can with 3-D Modeling with much less effort. Especially if you don’t have a lot of experience with 3-D modeling. Just tweaking the faces to make them look like the person I imagine is probably an extremely difficult task. Make actual NSFW content. Stop writing dialogue for conversations that don’t really add anything to the game. Even with all of the dialogue you have written, none of it really develops the characters at all. Everything in the public build is either Unfinished, Boring or Pay-Walled. The only thing I would really consider an actual scene is the BJ thing in the intro. And that’s just because there was more than one picture and actual “dialogue” I really hope it was purposely written to be ridiculous because it sounded like what a 12 year old kid would say if he was trying to act out the scene with his action figures. Ok, that was the harshest I’m going to be in this whole thing. I tried to be critical, but honestly I’m still shocked by the overall state of what I played. Sometimes it seems like you really do want to make a successful quality game but other times I’m not so sure. I have no problem giving you the benefit of the doubt though.
Pricing and Sunk Cost Bias:
When it comes to pricing. Humility goes a long way. World of Warcraft has more content than you could ever hope of making. Not an insult, just a fact. It costs $15 a month. Stardew Valley was made by a single person. It's a single payment of $15. Your game does not exist in a vacuum. You want people to pay up to $45 a month when all they are seeing is an unfinished NSFW game that has almost no real NSFW content and is full of bugs. Pay-Walling content in a market full of games that are higher quality, have more content and most importantly are FREE, not only makes you look greedy but it also makes it look like you think your game is far better than it actually is. After this section I'm not going to say anything else regarding pricing because I think I've gotten my point across and anything I haven't touched on has already been said in this thread. Just put the full game out for free. If it's good and you continue to release content regularly, people will pay. It doesn’t matter how hard you work on a game. You can spend a whole bunch of time and accomplish nothing. Just because it took you a long time to do something doesn’t make it more valuable to anyone except yourself. All customers care about is the end product. Food that tastes absolutely awful doesn’t magically taste good because it took the person who served it an extremely long time to make it. It may taste good to the person who made it, but that’s because they invested a lot of time and effort into creating it. What’s really happening is they don’t want to admit to themselves that all of that time and effort was wasted. If you honestly believe your game is worth that amount of money that’s fine. But you can’t be surprised or mad when others don’t think it’s worth the same amount. At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter how much you think your work is worth. It’s worth whatever people are actually willing to pay for it. If you really believed your work was that good, then why not let it speak for itself instead of putting it behind a pay-wall, obfuscating the details about your content and arguing with people who try to give you legitimate criticism. It’s not a good look. I’m not even going to start on the whole multicolored responses.
The Way I See F95:
You have to understand what F95 is as an institution. If you release the full game to everyone, there will be people who just download it and don’t contribute at all. That’s just how it goes. But there are also a lot of people on this site who appreciate and understand the work that goes into the creation of these games and will want to support you. Not because they have to, but because they WANT to. The people who contribute money without being forced to by the developer are usually far better customers and also tend to contribute more money. You can’t think of someone getting your game for free as a lost sale. The people who aren’t going to contribute money most likely wouldn’t have given you a dime either way. Some of those people aren’t even in a position to give money if they wanted to. But the more people who play your game, the more people will hear about it and try the game out. Even if only one out of every 20 people who tries the game actually donates you can still make quite a bit of money. Most of the people who actually give money don’t just want to immediately jump into paying for games like this. They try it out first and if they enjoy it and think it’s worth it they will. When you release an outdated unfinished buggy build as the only free content for people to try out, you’re just making a much worse first impression on them than you could have by giving them the full game. If anything, releasing an inferior product as you’re first impression on a customer probably does more damage and costs you more sales than the percentage you would lose by releasing the actual Full game for people to play. The vast majority of developers understand this as well as the value of F95. For example Something Unlimited (you may have heard of them) has the full version of their game (which is excellent btw) on F95. Do you know what it says on the Something Unlimited F95 page, right above the <Downloads> section?
It says; “Developer Note: We don't condone the sharing of our Patron exclusive content, the links which are added by F95 Uploaders. However, we respect F95zone for what it is and have chosen to be active in the community despite the content shared.”
This is how you respond to a community full of prospective customers. Not to mention they are extremely detailed when explaining the content in their full game as well as what is actually in each new update. When something important happens or changes in their development, they make sure that everyone knows and is on the same page. When you’re thinking of spending money on something MONTHLY. You have to understand that what matters is not just the content that you already have out. People want to make sure that there will continue to be quality content coming to the game on a somewhat regular basis. Or at least that they are made fully aware of when the content will be coming and what it is. I don’t think it’s strange for someone who’s giving you money on a regular basis to expect to be kept in the loop on what and when things are happening.
Wrapping Up:
Look, I know I've been pretty blunt throughout this whole thing. I think people in this thread for the most part have been pretty nice to you. The level of discourse on this site is far better than the average comment section. They seem to genuinely want to help you succeed. Which makes sense. We lose when you do. You’re sitting on an idea with a lot of potential and an IP that almost sells itself. I think almost everyone on this site would love to play a really good Star Wars Slave Trainer. Which is probably part of the reason that you have gotten so many comments. It's not difficult to imagine what this game COULD be. But at this point, it's not that. It comes across as game made by someone who wants to make a good game, because they want to make a bunch of money. I’m not saying that’s what you’re actually like. The only person who truly knows your motivation for making this game is you. But I also think it’s important to understand how other people perceive both you and your game. I’m sure if you actually are just very passionate about this game and just really want to make it. Then you wouldn’t want people to think you’re another Scam Artist who just thought it would be easy money after seeing some of the popular creators Patreon pages and figured that they could just figure out how to do it as they went. What I’ve been trying to communicate through this 3039 word post is that: One, You need to work on how you take criticism and understand that someone criticizing your work is not trying to insult you. Even if you worked very hard on something, there is always room to improve. Sure some people are just assholes but you can ignore that. Most of the people on here who are really involved in the community are more than willing to help you as long as you actually respect and implement at least some of the things that they took the time out of their day to help you with. You should be happy people will actually take the time to tell you what they think could be improved. If they really didn’t care they wouldn’t say anything at all. But if you show you’re unwilling to actually take suggestions, that’s eventually what’s going to happen. Two; The money you make from your current monetization structure is coming at the cost of many more potential customers and seriously damaging your reputation on this site. I’ve explained this a bunch already but seriously man. It’s not worth it in the long run.
Three: You need to focus much much more on making actual NSFW content, less jokes and talking. More Lewding. The Slave Cellblock Scenes are I think some of the most important ones to get right in the whole game. You can do a lot of character development for each of the slaves during that whole ark. If you’re going to write dialogue, make sure it serves some actual purpose and isn’t just mundane conversation. The more believable your characters are the better the NSFW scenes can be. It’s no fun if they just begrudgingly do what you want immediately. The whole point is to develop them as strong willed unique characters and then break them slowly with lots of graphic punishments, degradation, embarrassment and torture. The amount you work for it is directly proportional to the amount of satisfaction you feel when you finally do break them. Working for it is what gives it value when you finally achieve it. But this doesn’t mean make the process artificially long and tedious by making people grind through boring tasks. The whole process should be fun. People don’t play games to be bored and grind for hours just for like 5 minutes of entertainment (unless they play Fallout 76). I know this is one hell of a first post but I hope that everyone who read it was able to get something from it. And if not, hopefully you at least understand where I’m coming from. DarthSmut, I hope I didn’t offend you too much. I think you can tell I genuinely want your game to live up to its potential. And I will continue following the progress of the game and I hope that you take some of what I’ve said to heart. To anyone who actually read this entire thing, I really appreciate it. And finally to any MODS that are reading this, I don’t think I said anything that’s not allowed but let me know if I screwed up at all. OK I’m done.
P.S.
Uhhhhh……………my friend wants you to add some pee scenes. It’s totally not because I have a pee fetish or anything. No way. It’s just for my friend…….Steve…….yeah…..
P.P.S
Steve came back and told me that he specifically wants one with Leia where she’s either tortured in some way until she pees, is locked in a room with no bathroom and eventually has no choice or the classic egg vibrator forced orgasm until she pees and passes out
So many, many, many, many topics to answer.
I am not offended by anything you've said. Maybe a little worried because it seems I am being very missunderstood in some stuff you mention.
I want to briefly comment some of the most relevant stuff you have said, but if you want to keep talking about it, please, meet me on this
You must be registered to see the links
and if you want we can have a chat about all your doubts. Again, I am no english native but maybe I can give you answer without having to spend like 4 hours (because I think that's what probably take me to properly answer all your post).
There is nothing wrong either with a developer that takes more time than other developers to create content. Neither it's his fault that people create false expectations.
It is not your customer’s fault that you choose and art style and workflow that is extremely time consuming and difficult for you. Let's be real here, you’re not making Star Citizen.
First, playing this game does not make you a customer, but a consumer/player. This game has no customers because you can't purchase it. Patreon is just a platform to support the artist.
And second, Can I say then that it's not developer's fault that some consumers (not customers) are not patient and they may miss some, if not most, of the complexities of developing an adult videogame?
I don't want anyone giving me $45 if they don't believe in me and this project, do not understand what is Patreon, or do not want to give me $45. (This is why you can play Public Versions for FREE)
The game is not "fully" developed yet. Right now all I have are Public Versions, and I am putting it out for Free, as you say. Also, when it's done, I will keep putting it for Free too.
However, If you are asking me to release what today are Exclusive Patreon versions as a Public Versions, I must ask you again ot be patient and wait. I am planing to do some changes on Patreon this 2019, explain better the Version Release to avoid confusion and so.
This is indeed a very complex issue which I would really like to speak with you. But it will be a long conversation, so again, it's better if we have a Discord chat. I am sure you'll have a lot to say and I want to hear it.
Do you know what it says on the Something Unlimited F95 page, right above the <Downloads> section? It says; “Developer Note: We don't condone the sharing of our Patron exclusive content, the links which are added by F95 Uploaders. However, we respect F95zone for what it is and have chosen to be active in the community despite the content shared.”
This is how you respond to a community full of prospective customers.
Do you know what I had few weeks ago right above the <Download> section:
"You will receive updates and support on F95zone."
And I was not even "not condoning" this community. Must have been deleted in the OP update, but I maybe I can convince the mods to put it again
One, You need to work on how you take criticism and understand that someone criticizing your work is not trying to insult you. Even if you worked very hard on something, there is always room to improve.
Believe me when I say that I am not on that point anymore.
Or if you don't believe me, you watch my PM inbox and see that I am trying to get more feedback from people and understand them:
There is nothing wrong either with a developer that takes more time than other developers to create content. Neither it's his fault that people create false expectations.
First, playing this game does not make you a customer, but a consumer/player. This game has no customers because you can't purchase it. Patreon is just a platform to support the artist.
And second, Can I say then that it's not developer's fault that some consumers (not customers) are not patient and they may miss some, if not most, of the complexities of developing an adult videogame?
What this game also need is patience. ^^'
This is FALSE. I am building this game from scratch. There is no template. If there is a template of SU videogame anywhere, please, send us the link.
As I keep getting notifications of this thread, I might as well come in with some suggestions:
Seems to me like you may have hopped on the patreon train a bit too fast, you generally need to be pretty experienced in what you do to make fair deliveries on there.
If it takes longer time to make your game than other creators, realistically you should put your patron tiers at much lower levels because its not the pledges fault that you may be slow. That is on you and you should think more for the supporter than yourself. You could say: hey guys, i'm still learning all of this, I know I am slower so please bear with me but I really want to make this game so I will do my best. That would justify a lower pledge tears, and help yourself to working at half speed or one 5th or less. As you pick up pace maybe you can up the tiers as you, bit of a tricky subject, but you are nowhere there at the moment.
I am also curious to hear what it is in this game that is done from "Scratch" , because from what I have seen from your patreon you download and mishmash 3d models, and from your code you use pre-developed assets ,like leantween, fungus, moonsharp (which i understand cause why make your own lua interpreter) and same with csv parsers but still, what is it that you make from scratch?
It's not the 3d models, its not the code, is it the poses? probably not from scratch either or are they modified?
Scratch and modified are not the same thing...
Also just a question, are you putting your renders straight into the project in unity, it kinda looks like they are loaded as resources, doesn't that eat up a lot more disk space? I am curious about that for own sake.
I have dst 0.1.56 here 72.8mb
and a dst 0.2.48 which is 81.24mb, like 2 months inbetween these downloads on my disk.
Ps. I think maybe a lot of people might be having too high hopes for the game to deliver good and fast, probably because the IP, Star Wars. but the developer is not helping, you ought to not oversell the game so much with the grindy games and p2w elements. It's really up to the developer to lower the expectations of the supporters, be more modest, take the initial hit of loss of supporters and then build a legit fan base over time, and grow together with the game.
Seems to me like you may have hopped on the patreon train a bit too fast, you generally need to be pretty experienced in what you do to make fair deliveries on there.
I am not aware that Patreon requires artists to meet certain requirements to start promoting their projects, but I may be wrong, so I hope you can provide me a link to their guidelines explaining that precise information that you're pointing out. Thank you. (As far as I know, it shouldn't be no problem telling people what I am doing, no matter what stage of the development, and neither it should be a problem if they want to support me.)
If it takes longer time to make your game than other creators, realistically you should put your patron tiers at much lower levels because its not the pledges fault that you may be slow. That is on you and you should think more for the supporter than yourself. You could say: hey guys, i'm still learning all of this, I know I am slower so please bear with me but I really want to make this game so I will do my best. That would justify a lower pledge tears, and help yourself to working at half speed or one 5th or less. As you pick up pace maybe you can up the tiers as you, bit of a tricky subject, but you are nowhere there at the moment.
I am also curious to hear what it is in this game that is done from "Scratch" , because from what I have seen from your patreon you download and mishmash 3d models, and from your code you use pre-developed assets ,like leantween, fungus, moonsharp (which i understand cause why make your own lua interpreter) and same with csv parsers but still, what is it that you make from scratch?
It's not the 3d models, its not the code, is it the poses? probably not from scratch either or are they modified?
There was a specific context that you decide to ignore. He was saying I am using a template. I am not using a template to create the scenes of the game. Obviously, I am not doing everything in Bynary. (I already stated multiple times that english is not my native language, and you should not try to take me in a literal way).
The developer is not helping, you ought to not oversell the game so much with the grindy games and p2w elements. It's really up to the developer to lower the expectations of the supporters, be more modest, take the initial hit of loss of supporters and then build a legit fan base over time, and grow together with the game.
The developer (me) is already being honest and he just said (precisely, in your previous post), that people must have patience.
However seems that, no matter how many times a I say something, no matterhow much color I put in my texts., if you do not read me, at this point, it is on you to believe something that I haven't said.
For example, I am not having any loss of supporters. It is just the opposite. Everyday Death Star Trainer have more and more supporters.
Regardless of the game's issues, the constant drama in this thread does not exactly help with the impression people get. If I was your PR manager, I would strongly advise you to stop posting so much, and limit future posts, if any, to change logs only.
You know what, I spent time to write to you here to give some pointers to why maybe the community is approaching you the way you are, using your own information, but you are incapable of taking any ownership of your own disasters. You are so afraid of losing the little support you have, and blame that on the community. I'm sick of the bullshit you have been spewing here for months.
Some of the things you mention really does fall into an antisocial personality disorder. You are trying to make everyone feel guilty except yourself because you just don't care.
You have freedom of speech but that doesn't mean people have to eat your words or like what you say.
Stop blaming the community, maybe you are incapable of realizing what it is you are doing to your own project but don't come and blame others for your shit show. Don't blame bad reviews on a "brigade" that just wants to stain your game. Don't blame posters on their constructive criticism. People write here cause they care. People are not stupid, if you try to get that big payout its literally called a scam. Asking way too much for something of much lesser value. There you go.
Not enough people are calling you out, someone that also knows what it takes to make a game, and I will tell you that you have gotten yourself into something you are not capable of managing now, and you have realized it but you are trying to sugarcoat your disaster. You should have gone back to the drawing board a long time ago but instead you can't deny that regular payment from patreon feels good and you rather keep up the charades and blame game rather than taking ownership. You have been selling lies to people and now the time has gone on long enough that they see it for what it is, just a bunch of lies.
Well this is what happens, making games is not easy, own your fucking project and maybe show some more care to your own
community.
I rather take a warning for calling you out here because it might be OT, but damn man.
If you want to prove the people wrong start delivering properly instead of coming with more excuses.
ps. Just because you told me I can reach you in DM it doesn't mean I have to, I had legit concerns on the topic that was discussed in this thread, and I replied to it. This is not something to put in DM so that you can control whatever pops up here.
Why don't you just take the feedback and make something good out of it instead.
