Thanks again for the response. Realized I wrote the quote wrong. 5 updates later not 5 days. Was just quickly jotting down from a recording. The words kinda sound similar.
Glad to hear all the work you've done and plan to do to polish up the game. Definitely will pledge when I get a chance. Most important quality in a dev to me is one that's receptive towards feedback (constructive feedback anyways..).
I'll be sure to update my review here and on the other website whenever the updates come out and hopefully when some of the issues I noticed get fixed. Certainly makes me excited to hear you have plans to touch up these things.
Edit: pledged
Thank you for your support!
I try to keep my ego in check when making Superheroes Suck. I am very new to all of this: I had no experience in a relevant field when I started creating the game, with the exception of creative writing. Coding, Rendering, even basic game design were all new to me. So, I make an effort to keep an open-mind when I receive feedback, even if I don't understand it at first glance. For example, I had no idea how bad the original grind of the game was, and was shocked to hear that the majority of early complaints were against it! Of course, the
reason I had no idea how bad the original grind was, was because I made save-game compatibility a priority early on. I never needed to play the game from scratch - I could just fast forward through all of the old content to get to the new bits to make sure nothing broke. After receiving all of that feedback, I started up a new save and did everything like a new player would: reading everything without skipping any text. It was
awful. I was so embarrassed.
Ironically, the length of the original grind is how long it is supposed to take for those relationships to develop from flirting to something more. By cutting down the grind, now that sequence moves much faster than I intended, but I'd rather receive feedback saying that "the early game is fast" instead of "I spent two weeks training and there are no new events, what gives?" The best solution would be to go back and add new events to those early sections, and then hopefully re-render those old events to the higher quality I have now.
Many people on my Patreon page and on this forum have very good ideas on how to improve the game, and there are so many things I want to add: more thorough training sequences with the protagonist, better interactions during the lectures, branching story choices, and so on. The major limit I have on development is time - the vast majority of it taken up by my real job. The first Patrol, for example, took about a week and a half to develop. Since I work in six-seven week cycles, that's a massive chunk of time when people want each one of their favorite girls to get updates, new animations, and so on. If I branched it into multiple endings, I would have needed two weeks easily. This is something I could flesh out more thoroughly with a longer development between releases, but then again, I personally would have issues giving money to an unknown developer with little experience and no credibility (like myself) for three months without seeing the product!
All that said, working on Superheroes Suck is great fun and a great stress relief. The game improves every week: better animations, higher quality renders, and better character designs. I use all of the feedback that I can implement: even if the feedback is, "the game has no visual vagina sex." After that, I went through all of my animations and - Damnit, they were
right! Now there will be an animation like that in Version 0.45. Or feedback that I can at least try to implement; I had no idea how to even do a hint system until I sat down at two in the morning and just rolled my face across the keyboard until it worked out. It's a great experience, even if it sometimes doesn't love you as much as you love it.
