Post by Epsilonik in Locus Tenebrarum comments

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After the first main quest, the gameplay becomes miserable. You have to gift a girl dafoddils, which cost 5 coins each. The only way to get money is to sell mushrooms at 4 coins each. To collect these mushrooms you have to go to one of 3 spots where they grow and basically toss a coin to see if you get one. If you get one, you can immediately try again for another one, if you fail, that spot becomes unavailable for 2 minuts.

The first 10 dafodils were fine. after that I had to gift another 10, at which point I kept failing the coin flips, meaning I spent like 15 minutes being frustrated at the game. After that I finally had another 10 daffodils. I gifted it to the girl for the picture of her holding an actual cat, and got slapped with another 10 daffodils I needed to collect. I shut down the game after that

To get 10 daffodils you need 50 coins, which means you need 13 mushrooms. Since the chance of getting 1 is only lightly over 50%, and the cooldown for failure being 2 minutes, that means you, on average fail every other attempt. Meaning you have to spend 26 minutes on average doing F all to give this girl some gosh darn flowers

Rue2 years ago(+1)

Yes, that's a side effect of a few things.

First, I plan to add more text message conversations, which will provide something to do while waiting for failure cooldowns. Those aren't in the game yet, so this part drags a bit. I'm also adding a side quest right now, so you can try to grab a few toadstools while you're doing other things. I think the cooldowns will be less punishing when there's more stuff to do.

Second, there are only two gameplay rewards for being a patron. One is that you get access to a few extra scenes. I'm trying to be generous with what I give away, so it's just 3 locked scenes right now.

The other patron benefit is that failure cooldowns are faster. How fast they are depends on the Patron tier. The free build is 2 minutes, the $3 tier is 1 minute, the $6 tier is 30 seconds, and the $10 tier is 15 seconds.

I don't love it either. I hate having to put up paywalls and things to stop players from enjoying the game. It feels awful. But I've been working crazy hours to build this game on top of my day job over the last 6 months, and I've made a grand total of $114. When you consider the thousands of downloads I've gotten across several sites over the last few days, and the mostly positive comments, I'm clearly not doing enough to push people towards supporting the game.

I'm considering a number of ideas. Maybe the free version stops getting updates and all new content is just for patrons. That means I could ease up on the cooldowns, and the free version basically becomes a demo. Maybe I could keep updating the free version, but lock all of the lewd scenes. I don't like that idea, because people deserve to have some idea of what they're paying for.

So, I don't know. Finding a balance is hard. I don't like spoiling anyone's fun, but giving 95% of the game away isn't working, and if things don't improve soon then I'm going to have to shut the game down.

Epsilonik2 years ago(+2)

I understand the hardships that comes with trying to get people to support a solo game dev/small team. But I think having people try out your game and having them do nothing for extensive periods of time will only sour their experiences. Which will only make them close the game and forget about it. Having the collection be based on a small minigame would make the collecting a lot more interactive. A tactic I've seen used a lot here on Itch/patreon is a delayed update for the free version. For example having $10 patrons get the newest update immediatly, while $5 patrons only have to wait 2 weeks and the version will only be released for free a month after release. Also giving certain options to patrons only using a code for example is also a neat way of getting support. I've seen things from cheat menus, the option for futa/impregnation, customizing/changing character appearances and xray vision be locked behind a patreon subscription and people are willing to pay for those things

Rue2 years ago (2 edits) (+1)

I'm at kind of a pivotal moment with the game, because I'm honestly quite burned out with the outrageous hours I've been working to make it, combined with the game severely missing my growth expectations for several releases in a row.

Your advice is extremely solid and helpful. I may need to take a brief break to recharge my battery, but I am going to try to take this to heart.

Specifically, I'm going to:

* Consider significantly shortening the failure delay. Maybe more like 1 minute for free players?

* Start doing delayed updates for free players, but continue to give away the vast majority of the content

* Trying some different ideas for Patron content. I've already got a development console in the game that opens when you hit tilde, but I've got most of the useful commands disabled when it's not running in the Unity editor. I use it constantly when testing out new code and content. It would be easy to use build flags to enable some (or maybe even all) of them for patron builds. I could also build a cheat menu if people would prefer the accessibility.

* I was planning to do some additional outfits for patrons, so I think I may already have this on the roadmap, it just hasn't been implemented yet. But hearing you echo something that I've already been considering is encouraging.

* Futa and impregnation are interesting options. I suppose they'd be easy to implement with the outfit system, but getting them into dream fragments would be a little more demanding with art. But it's possible. If it drives some patrons my way then it could be worthwhile.

I think you may have just convinced me to stick with this game for a while longer. I really can't express how much I appreciate the advice.

EDIT: After further consideration, I’m going to try the mini game idea and get rid of the wait times. I’ve got an idea for how to get a lot more lewd content into the game with it.

itch.io

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