- Sep 3, 2020
- 1,885
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Beyond what you say, which are technical aspects that dented the production and therefore the final quality, on a personal level as a story and as a game itself, why do you find SL worse than Melody and DMD?well - we don't give a fuck about number of stars at all in general.....
BUT:
Even we (Dots creator team) agree that SL is the worst of all 3 games. I don't say that SL is bad at all, but still to be fair the other 2 games are definitively better. So it's more than fair that SL has lower ratings then Melody or DMD.
I already said in a previous post that a 1 star rating isn't right, same as a 5 star rating wouldn't be fair.
I could elaborate why SL is worse than the other 2, and tell the reason for that, but that's internal and even though no excuse - so i refrain from doing that.
Just say because we restructured the workflow and changed the way we develop the story and scenes, we are pretty sure, the next game will be much better again - and if people do ratings based on the new experience and NOT being biased early just because of SL or anything from the past, i am sure the ratings will show that. The first changes can already be seen in SL (the scenes with shortcake near end of the story) which were already build by the new "style". But visuals are just one of the points we gonna change - that's a promise.
EDIT:
Maybe i can tell one of the main changes related to workflow though:
For the past 7 years, we always aimed for a monthly update and set a deadline very early. We managed to hold nearly every deadline and only missed 3 within the whole 7 years - 1 of them due to technical issues - 1 of them (the last one of SL) we delayed to move to x-mas as one of the reason - and 1 of them we had to delay because we wanted to add one scene and didn't manage to get it done in time. All other releases were on point.
No other developer team has been that reliable - and we know, people honor our reliability.
But things have changed. Animations are expected to be much more detailed, longer and look more realistic. The render quality improved because of new engines and assets, but they need more render time. There are more girls demanded which ends in more pathing (SL had more datable girls than Melody and DMD together) - and much more.
This deadlines and grown dev time and all lead to more "rushed" updates, also sometimes we had to take scenes out just to be done in time for deadline.
But we decided that can't be the way to go anymore - we need to focus back on quality - so we get rid of deadlines like we used to set. The future updates will be out when done, and most likely that will not be on monthly base anymore because of the bigger workload. We still try to get updates out as soon as possible, but we feel the urge to do the updates again exactly like we want them to be instead of "rushed" versions for the deadline.
In short: expect the new game in a 2 monthly update cycle (maybe few less or even more).
I always find it important to highlight intellectual honesty, for me it is a rare attribute and I wanted to congratulate you for it.