TLDR:
I trust Alcahest’s vision, I would prefer he keep his own motivation and creativity up by: Focusing on a shorter game with aking few branches (like now), using toggles sparingly and trusting his own narrative instincts. It is likely that he will displease some people with some of his content as content accumulates. But the majority of the story will be very appealing anyway. It’s a wonder no major negative feedback was posted on the forum so far for a maturing game!
The longer take...
on pregnancy, storylines and my willingness to trust in Alcahest’s vision:
I missed the poll on pregnancy and related conversation, but was delighted about impregnation coming in. I have noticed another post that is not appreciate about pregnancy. Some nuances on that first.
While some specifically like to see (as in visually admire) visibly pregnant characters, many may not have such a need. Unfortunately, there is no “impregnation” tag in F95, so the “pregnancy” tag sometimes serves as a proxy. I am definitely a much bigger fan of “impreg” as compared to “pregnancy”. Not showing pregnancy also is not only perhaps potentially less offensive, it broadens availability of “source material” for this specific genre. There are also levels of authenticity to “impreg” source material too, but some things can be limited to narrative anyways. I know narrative-only can be a letdown, but not everything can be perfect for everyone. (And not eveyone needs to impregnated anyways) In any case, visibly pregnant religious characters - with progressive visual storylines!- are definitely hard to come by.
On another note, there is a lot of merit to the thought “let the author do what it wants to do” (as opposed to "consult the fans freauently"). Here are my reasons:
1) The authors have creative visions. My kinks so far have aligned very well with Alcahest. This may be the reason I love this game. However, I believe that the primary reason is the quality of his research and the depth of the narrative of the transgressive. Nuns aren’t my primary kink, but the religious transgressiveness is so well researched that the whole story is admirable. On the other hand, I tend to not appreciate BDSM, and distaste watersports and anal. But if I push the author to do X and avoid Y, I would be ruining the authors fantasy, the primary narrative motivation. Speed and quality of the work would suffer. (Alcahest puts in a lot of work, and speed/productivity is correlated to quality when you have to research a lot!)
2) In my view the creation of the better / more popular games on F95 is taking too long. I highly doubt that this is mainly due to patreon milking. It may also be due to creative / motivational / real life blocks, but I think it is more likely because a lot of mechanics sap creative energy and result in procastination: Branching storylines need to be taken care of, many toggles such as of “no-NTR”, “no-watersports” require re-narration. This can make the project pretty big and cumborsome down the road, not at all fun to write. “Free world” and “lots of narrative choices” come with a huge cost in planning effort. It may require a team instead of a single author. This burden of itself. All this saps energy.
So I personally will try not to push Alcahest on content, or its omission by toggles/branching. I believe it might be better to focus on shorter projects less branches. Even the best games will sap both reader and creator enthusiasm after a few years and projects have a much higher likelihood of sudden abandonment. I would aim for a shorter project, preferably under a year, 18 months max. (I don’t know whether this would satisfy financially) This means implementing the absolutely necessary number of toggles and keeping storylines linear. From what I observed in F95 forums, the most divisive option that almost always requires a toggle in projects is NTR. I do not like NTR, but many in the community cannot stand it at all, so I guess it is a must if any major (male, human) non-protag character will eventally be involved in things. (looks unlikely so far)
3) From what I can see, this game has a small but very appreciative group. I suspect we in general would trust Alcahest’s judgment since he is narrating a storyline with specialized elements anyway: Nuns, religious, history and paranormal. This limits the potential for future storyline focuses considerably (e.g. female protag, NTR, incest, gay unlikely). More vanilla transgressive elements such as virgin and pregnancy more common in this context.
Alcahest is narratively detailing psychologically transgressive elements which presents the corruption a much more realistic sliding scale. I don’t belive that he will suddenly go 10X and suddenly present multiple visibly pregnant nuns. So far he has been even more detail-oriented in scene set-up than I would have expected him to: Notice that he has taken care to pick scenes hiding the male face, so that you don’t have jarring jumps of different personas for the protagonist. This definitely reduces available alternatives.
Big thanks Alcahest!
