- Apr 4, 2018
- 698
- 947
I feel like the reason your game isn't working out the way you want it to boils down to a couple of factors. The first is that when you take a look at your game, it appears to be dead. It's been that way for a while. You're last subsribstar post was Jan 25th, which is just shooting the red flag of "yeah guys, it's dead". Whether private subscribstar posts don't even appear in the public section unlike patreon I have no idea but it doesn't really matter because like I said from the public's eye it looks dead. Whether your discord is alive or not I don't know, but who is going to join the discord of a game that looks dead. It's overall pretty silent in this thread. Questions get answered but there are no development updates of any kind and communication is pretty scarce most of the time. You take a look at the successful games and the general common point is that developers are engaged with their audience, and frequent updates (news and otherwise). There's a lot of adult games, so if a game looks dead, it's only going to survive for so long without people putting it on the back burner or moving on. My advice then to you guys is to start updating everyone, the public included, frequently. And I'm not saying actually version updates, I'm saying "hey guys we're doing blank". Put out art teasers constantly, everywhere you can, because the art is generally what pulls people in first. I was honestly convinced for a long time that this game was text based with practically no pictures because I only saw the one picture of the slime eating the dragon girl out and the rest was text screenshots. I saw no art for it anywhere.every critique i ever got with the game was built upon. every time theres been a demand for more or complaints involving a system, we rushed and focused on that system and meeting those request while also maintaining the current work load. the only complaint i can think of that we ignored was "we want a male protagonist" when the games development was already heavily strained with a massive work load. the point is, outside of a very few request or demands for specific content, or features, we dont get feedback, at all.
we are isolating and focusing strictly on the games development BECAUSE of the lack of feedback, its almost strictly silence on this end.
The second problem is maybe your scope is too big. Like I said before, scrap the animations if it's taking too much of you or if it's slowing development time. It's doing both, so cut them. They look great, but they are a blood sucker. -->
If you take the time to make 2 cg scenes instead of one animation, I feel as though that is going to be much more pleasantly received. So you're spending lots of time on feature updates and animations when you could be putting in more substantiated content. I literally just typed up like a week ago a giant carefully worded message about why a particular game, WHO HASN'T EVEN RELEASED A SINGLE VERSION, should not be adding a GIGANTIC list of features to their game including but not limited to a weather system and a clothing system. And the people in the comments are eating it up. Let me tell you something, you're not going to be eating it up when the game updates once a year. Could it work out? Sure. Is it likely? Not from what I've seen. Everyone wants a game with 30 intricate long routes, a morality system, booty jiggle physics, 500 animated cgs with voice acting okay, but it can't be done. If you have divine blood in you or you have a large team and you can do it, then hell yeah do it, but the majority of us mortals can't make it work; the scope is too big. Most people just care about sexy scenes and a good story. "every critique i ever got with the game was built upon. every time theres been a demand for more or complaints involving a system, we rushed and focused on that system and meeting those request while also maintaining the current work load", hold on what? Listen I've been browsing a lot of threads for a while, and at least 50% of suggestions are fucking stupid. If you want to make some content suggestions, you know "hey can you add a gallery" or "hey maybe this type of sex scene would be nice to see", but some people come in here with laundry lists of nonsense. Like features that would obviously take years to implement because they apparently have no concept of anything (never do multiple protagonists ever. Do you hear me in the back? Never. Stop asking. It doubles development time at least. Stop asking for it. I don't care if that one game did it very well. For the majority of development teams it's too much.). So starting saying no to ridiculous requests.we put more effort than most projects do, to the point it was taxing my health and despite this, and constantly expanding our tech to make better and better stuff, we garnered no support
As another point with the whole patreon thing, for one thing it's inconceivable to me that this game isn't allowed on patreon when games like Roundscape are. I don't know if this is just patreon being cockroaches or if there is some hidden content I haven't seen yet, but maybe it's time to tone things down a bit. Yeah I'm sure your artistic vision is great, but you obviously care about funding received enough to paywall it (no shame here. you want to make money from your game. that's fine), so make the concession: cut some things.
I have to be honest with you, I don't want to make this post. I don't really care if you wanna go subsribstar only and I don't like coming here criticizing, but you guys have been seeming to be struggling for a while, and I don't really think a game of this high of quality should be struggling this much. And I don't think me coming here and dumping sugar on you is going to help anyone. Your game is really high quality, but maybe it could use a little more prioritizing and marketing adjustments.