What's troublesome to me is the attitude they have.
I can get behind the frustration of not being told things directly, but then again they basically owned up and admitted they check F95 for feedback, too. Why is this feedback suddenly so bad because it's not written on the Discord but in F95 instead?
Especially when their attitude is loaded with gunpowder and people with legitimate concerns feel discouraged from bringing it up directly to him because they might get banned or ridiculed?
This isn't the kind of attitude that a game developer should have.
My personal take on this update, as biased as it's gonna sound:
It's mediocre.
I've enjoyed this game way early into its first versions and I genuinely enjoyed the idea and the narrative surrounding it - but recently, it feels like progress is stagnating and a lot of stuff is happening all across the board without a proper direction. Now hear me out on this first, because it might seem like I'm joining the hate train here, but what people have written isn't wrong. Some of it may be more heartfelt and rude, but there is good, constructive criticism hidden in there:
1. The game has more areas put on hold than it has completed areas.
I can't stress how important this is both for developers AND players... get structure into your game. Start developing one area, finish developing that area and THEN move on to the next area.
We have multiple towns now that feel dead and devoid of purpose both for their Inn Quests (which are empty, there's zero content, not even a filler Quest for money like hunting wolves) and for the Events within town. There's no reason right now to check out the Port once you finished the Main Story surrounding it - while there are reasons to go back to the Royal Kingdom to re-explore content or find new content.
We also have multiple places such as the Royal Kingdom Jail that were available way early into the game and then never got any content added to them again despite being one of the biggest excitement factors for this type of game.
2. Yarizo has taken way too much attention up recently
I know that he's a big part of the NTR portion of this game, but as an optional character you're not forced to take with you, he's greatly taking up development time of this game and winds up giving zero content to people who simply don't like having him around.
It would be great if Yarizo content could be slowed down in favor for general content.
3. Immersion is constantly broken by multiple factors surrounding game development
This one has to be one of the biggest problems for me right now by far - to give you a glaring example, Iris' entire section is bugged to the brim:
- Half the walls don't have collision
- There is an absurdly gamebreaking bug that'll rob you of your entire inventory if you're on 0.41a
- The Strip bar at night is accessible and there are no people in it. It's a graveyard with zero immersion attached to it, making me wonder why it wasn't closed up first before adding content to it
4. The game feels all over the place
I like this game, I really do - but I can't help but feel that this game massively lacks a direction it wants to go into.
There are multiple characters that Techno commissioned for this game and at least 70-80% of them show up in one cutscene and then proceed to unexist. When characters start to feel devoid of purpose, their existence in the game damages the immersion. The player will start to care less and less about new characters because they'll perceive these characters with a negative bias: "Oh, it's a new character I won't be able to care about because they won't show up ever again after this."
Off the tip of my tongue, characters like this are:
1. The cat girl that robs you in Port Down
2. The sage girl at the end of the Adventurer Trial
3. All of the prostitutes in Royal Kingdom
4. The temptress in the Hot Baths
5. The tough girl at the bar that challenges you for money
6. The strange knight that tried to murder you during your Adventurer Trial
I get that a lot of these characters don't have a reason to show up right now, particularly the strange knight, but I want to make a point here:
Adding personality to white sheets of paper before you know what you want to do with them oversaturates the overall image you're trying to create. People will have false expectations when they see that 10/100 NPCs have unique character art but don't behave differently from characters that don't have it.
Feedback?
Honestly the only thing I can recommend right now before this game gets [Abandoned] or prematurely finished is.... revisit how you handled the game in its early phase, Techno.
You've introduced things you never really addressed anymore afterwards and I wish you would stop adding new features for now to either clean up these features and remove them from the game or finish development on them.
Just to name a few examples here:
- You implemented a Sanity bar and an Insanity scenario to the Sewer scene, yet no real way to increase / decrease Sanity. Neither does it matter because past the Sewer scene Sanity is never brought up again. Do you plan to work with it or would it be better to scrap this?
- You added a Hero, Iris, Leon section with the latest update: Are you absolutely SURE that you want to develop 3 characters ON TOP of a True / Bad End Route that will split your game into 2 different models and add possibly twice the work load?
Again, and that's really the best feedback I can come up with right now:
Revisit how your handle your game, because right now? It's all over the place with 500 roadblocks that you consciously put in your own path instead of giving yourself a realistic goal to work towards.
Iris should not have priority right now as a playable character. You coded her in as a Level 50 character while in a normal case scenario the playable characters at this point in the game are around Level 10, maybe 20 if you grinded like a lunatic. It's okay to create content around Iris, she's a cute character loaded with personality, but adding a draft where one of your playable characters is low level and the other is high level means you're creating even more branching paths in the game's development because these characters will realistically never be in the same team or the same wavelength - in other words, they'll always walk separate paths in the story unless you want Hero & Priestess to be worthless and getting carried by Leon & Iris.
I much preferred when you used Team Iris & Leon as cutscene characters who instantly kill enemies with focus on telling their story while Team Hero & Priestess focuses primarily on the Gameplay and erotic aspect.
