Thank you, That actually means a lot to me. Are you enjoying the way I am moving the story forward? Does it feel like a natural continuation? I guess maybe I shouldn't be asking those questions until we get further into the territory of my own writing since you have only played 1 chapter of my own writing huh? Well hopefully you play again when chapter 7 comes out and give me your feedback on it. I am still hard at work on chapter 8 but it is going to take longer to come out as chapter 8 will finally have audio so that is a whole new thing I am trying to teach myself.
It seems like the original author was trying to turn the boyfriend into an ahole, while redeeming the group leader and maybe pushing a relationship between the leader and mc, typical of ntr.
Your writing has steered away from that. And although I'm a fan of poly, I don't think you're trying to get the best friend to join the relationship but instead have the boyfriend choose the mc over her, to make it seem like the boyfriend is the right choice.
But to me, I've realized that you and the original author have both written the mc to be someone who will be more and more sexually free and independent. This means the mc could be with someone who respects her sexual freedom, OR she could say f*** it and just not be in a relationship at all.
I think the best thing to do is make this a bit more cyoa. Date X or date no one, or date everyone. Be a housewife, broodmother, or ceo. Her future is open ended, and regardless of how you characterize everyone else, the story is still hers.
Well the chapter 8 I am quite literally writing the script for right now lays the groundwork for the ending. There have been 2 endings for this story in my mind from day 1. I am going to try not to spoil too much. But 1 ending would be Misaki and Ryou leaving the circle together and having a family. While Akari joins full time. ending 2 would be Misaki leaving Ryou. Then depending on more player choices destroying the circle from the inside/leading a new circle. I know its kinda late into the story for branching routes but I do feel like player choice is a big deal in a game like this so that the game can end the way you want it to. I am not sure how many endings there will be due to the branching paths to the end, Though in my mind the "good" end will be where both mc and ryou leave and start a family together. If I were to take a guess I would say it will be somewhere between 3-5 endings minimum. As chapters 9 and 10 are the planned endgame but they will be released in parts as I will be doing smaller more frequent updates for those as they will be a couple steps towards all possible routes at a time. I have changed my chapter style already into a scene format, for example the titles for chapter 8s scenes that I have planned so far are (Though I only have finished scripting the dialogue for the first 3 scenes so far....)
Scene 1 - Misaki's Apartment
Scene 2 - At the swingers club
Scene 3 - VIP Room
Scene 4 - Chat at the Bar
Scene 5 - Kishimotos Test
Scene 6 - Return to the Club
Scene 7 - Ragnarok
So during chapters 9 and 10 I plan to make these smaller releases scene by scene instead of chapter by chapter since there will be so much to script and code on my end making all the possible branches for each one of the players choices. I mean its either do that or release chapters at a much slower pace than I currently am. Which I am not a fan of as the idea behind this game is to start a community to have a starting platform when going into the second game. I feel like if I take too much time between releases players will forget about this game and ignore future chapter releases thereby shrinking the audience. Right now it has around 1000 players that are downloading each chapter as they come out. Though no where near that many players on itch.io I am unsure why its much less popular here than it is on f95
You know, them just being a married couple with a family... and still being swingers is also fine.
The popularity issue is just that you're not being favored by itch's algorithm enough yet. Tags, downloads, and consistency of updates are key, and you're doing okay with those, but f95 is a classic forum system afaik so posts are probably helping you a lot there. Itch is very different, but then even super popular games like Third Crisis have been getting buried lately, so I wouldn't worry about it.