I appreciate Majalis response. I agree with them even, given that I'm one of those who want ToA content to keep coming, and that it makes complete sense to add the content that your Patreons want to see.
But I don't think there's anything wrong with people stating they'd like some other expansion instead of the one we got, or with wanting a somehow defined plan for the coming updates every once in a while. As long as the cricicism is voiced with respect, that is. So yeah, I think there's room for criticism as long as it's done right.
I'm usually not in the business of telling people how to better get what they want out of me, but posting "I love Cait!" or "I want the goblin to sit on my face" or "I like playing as a pure mage and finding ways to debilitate specific opponents" has a non-zero chance of influencing how we work on the game. Waiting for an update, seeing that it's the Minotauress and not Cait, and then saying "more minotauress content? Devs are so lazy/patrons have such shit taste" has zero chance of doing that and just gets you put on ignore. I know you said "with respect", but mostly when people are doing this respect isn't even on their list of priorities.
I wish balls of devs did something with newbies asking literally the same questions all over again each year because the game doesn't give them the real directions to what they should do with this whirlpool of new encounters choices every months.
I understand a tiny team can't make such a game all by themselves in a span of even 4-6 years, but honestly I have to say it's in some cases becoming even harder to play it. It feels like drowning in the amount of “content” that is generic new sex-scene stuff without any solid ground that could help you snap out and grasp what the hell is happening.
I mean:
four locations, — but all of the shops are on the first map. Both existing towns on the first map. And all the companions are here. For years now.
When you move further, you can get in ambiguous quests. You have to find characters, than backtrack to the places that are VERY VAGUELY hinted. There's no way to tell for sure who you have to encounter. When you do, you get a short often strange/boring scene (with Trudy and Kylira, Alma had a bit more fun quest scenes).
Also you get in fights, which are very similar. Your strategy is basically the same, you just manage your health and use same skills. Learning something complicated doesn't really help you. You just need adequate stats and gear, then do all the same things. And again, it was like that for years with small additions like armor weight and upgrades, that again affect the battle as whole, instead of giving you variety in tenths of different fights.
After the aforementioned you only experience encounters. Encounters, encounters, checks in same stuff, the same choice in letting them lay you or fighting and losing/winning. Overall they're written good. But there's so many of them with the same fabula that it can make you sick. The only proper analogy I could find is the butter you use to make your food tastier, and of course it does, but when you only add butter everywhere you feel sick of how fat it was (by the way, EVERY character has the same fat butt and tiny waist).
Majalis do have balls. But they don't have what it takes to continue ToA. Maybe they know what has to be corrected. Maybe somebody in here could make them. Maybe it wasn't possible in the first place. Flaming in the thread or not, wasting their time or not, we certainly need dialogue right now, “let them do what they want with their game” proved itself not quite problem solver.
I think we should take our conversation to DMs because you clearly care about ToA and put a lot of time into trying to help it, but I'll address some of this here:
To some degree, we have plans to fix this stuff when it comes to unevenness - more towns spread throughout the game, more quests, etc. Unevenness in the writing are pretty much the result of the content mill - I timebox the creation of a quest for a given week, maybe the writing in it on another, and once I run out of time, it goes in whether it's really as edited as I'd like it to be. But I would just pull it and finish it the following week if I didn't have to worry about people complaining about the updates on here! Instead, I just plan to go back over and improve the writing (the pacing and the quality) when I have a chance to - now that I have an encounter viewer/editor I can easily trace the flow of encounters and improve them with an understanding of how they fit together without creating continuity errors or pacing issues.
The pieces for making combat more varied and interesting are all there, but improving the combat system is on pause until I work with my engineer to improve the code for it so that it's easier to work on and less volatile. We'll also probably build out a little combat simulator so that I can create both manual and automated tests to keep combat outcomes happening as expected even as I tweak things. The main issue with improving the combat system is that, in making it so that you "use more varied strategies", I am inherently making it more difficult, since most players won't use more varied strategies on different enemies instead of a one-size-fits-all approach if it's possible to do so. And making the combat
more difficult is going to make it, well, more difficult for people to get into the game, and people will argue that a porn game doesn't need
difficult combat (which is a legitimate concern). It will happen, eventually, but I do want for the game to offer as much help as possible or ways to opt out for people who either will have a hard time dealing with difficult combat or simply don't want to.
To the last bullet point: that's an artifact of not having an editor tool until now. Making more interesting ways for an encounter to flow was just difficult to do through pure code, so I prioritized getting the scenes in at all. While there does need to be some rewrites to fit the existing scenes into an encounter flow that's more varied, the bulk of the work was in getting those large-scale scenes written - so again, the pieces are there. On the other hand, keeping them with a similar formula does allow new players to have a basic idea of how most encounters are structured - familiarity can be helpful.
Also, not
every character has the same fat butt and tiny waist at all; we
just added the sperm bank nurse, for instance, and there's also the Mermaid, the Brigand, the Ogre, the Innkeep, Lupa and the Werewolf, the Fire Elemental, and the Catgirl. Admittedly, a lot of the characters do have a cinched waist and similarly flared hips, but I'm fine with that for ToA. A lot of games have characters with all the same athletic build or the same busty build, so having large waists or butts is a differentiator in the artstyle. We do want to make sure it doesn't get samey, and try to do something different with new characters, but I think part of the reason so many people like ToA but don't want to play it is because they like the fat butts and not the big dicks, or gay stuff, or whatever. I'm definitely not backing down from making plump, chubby, or fat characters, either, so people can give up on that, too.
People have been saying we don't have what it takes since we first dropped ToA's initial build. I'll be the first to agree that ToA has a lot of untapped potential, because
we put it there to begin with intentionally. And we have our prioritization. If I could take six months to just work on systems and UI/UX and all the unsexy little improvements, I would, but I don't have that luxury - it has to happen in parallel with content creation. And since we have a team now, that means waiting for the right time to do things. Our engineer started at the end of last year, and they got to work on the stuff I was never going to have time to - localization/translation support and an encounter viewer/editor tool, but now that those are done and they're familiar with the codebase, they're going to be helping with the core stuff. Similarly, our animator started earlier this year, and just became full-time recently, so Alis is having more time to work on the art, including things like the backgrounds, which could definitely use more variance.
tl;dr there's a lot of work to do to make ToA even better, but the game is where we expected it to be right now, and we have plans to get it where we want it. Unless I get hit by a bus or lose my to-do list, I think it'll be just fine.
