itch.io

Sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to you >.< Now that October is well under way, I’ve been pretty busy going to as many scare attractions as I can since it’s pretty much what I live for xD Managed to get ill in the process though, so a mix of the two has meant I’ve not even been on my PC since the 12th.

Yeah, I’ve also seen many people say they don’t even bother making Mac and Linux builds because they don’t have the systems to test on and don’t want to get pelted with help requests from players if it doesn’t work or there are bugs cos the devs just have no way of fixing stuff like that >.< I just put Mac and Linux stuff out there and hope to hell it works, haha. But I also have no way of verifying whether those builds work or not, and no way of fixing stuff if it doesn’t. I’ve heard it’s fine to do that on itch, but a bad idea if you’re putting stuff on Steam, which is understandable.

I’ve always thought it must be a bit like a weird version of hell having to be a proper tester for a company, working on one tiny section of something x3 I mean, it’s a good way of getting rid of as many bugs as possible, but it must be quite torturous for the testers! I find trying to test a whole game by myself absolute hell, haha. And it hurts to know there will almost always be bugs of some kind because it’s impossible to catch everything by yourself x3

But yeah, I definitely think a lot of folks don’t realise just how much indie devs are putting in, and it is kinda unfair to hold em to the same standards as proper studios and companies who have entire teams working on projects. I know it gets trickier when money is involved cos if you’re purchasing a product, you want it to work correctly, but proper small time indie devs putting stuff out for free or for under $5 could use some slack and understanding, haha. Most importantly, patience from their players. Cos many do wanna make sure things work as well as they can, but they’re either 1 person struggling to do everything themselves, or 1 very small team where everyone has day jobs and other commitments cos dev stuff doesn’t pay the bills, so it’s gonna take time for them to get stuff sorted.

I’m glad that you realise all that though and bring it up because sometimes it feels like folks don’t necessarily realise or consider these things x3

And yeah, when it comes to comments/feedback/reviews, sharing feelings is fine when it’s positive stuff cos that can cheer a dev up and boost their motivation, but if it’s just sharing of negative feelings with nothing constructive, it’s just hurtful without being any sort of helpful, haha.

It is pretty rocky ground trying to critique poorly handled subjects. I’ve come across that sort of thing in a few games I’ve played and kind of wanted to say something but opted not to just on the off chance I might be making incorrect assumptions >.< Especially after someone commented about insensitivity on one of my projects without knowing the context it was written in! For starters, it was one of my adaptation projects, so the character in question wasn’t even mine >.< but I don’t think the commenter realised that. And the additional original lines and such that I added for the character in relation to the subject the commenter had called insensitive were actually lines spoken to me by a friend who was in the same situation as the character at the time! They were words that really hit me at the time, so they’ve stuck with me ever since. Yet the commenter accused me of something like adding to stigma >.< I wasn’t even able to explain to them that they were words spoken by an actual person I knew myself because they left the comment as a review, and itch doesn’t allow devs to respond to reviews :( 

So yeah, it’s tough, haha. I always have that in mind when I go to comment on stuff myself because even if it seems like someone might not know what they’re talking about, I have no way of actually knowing what their personal experiences are with different subjects >.< For the most part, I’ve just ended up adopting the whole ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all’ approach, haha. It’s a bit different when it comes to jams cos if I encounter technical faults, I’ll try to bring them up in jam-specific comments, and leave game page comments just for praise cos I know if I had a bug I would hope that someone would point it out, even if they don’t know how to fix it, cos if I don’t know it exists, I can’t try to fix it x3

Apartment No.9 is actually the one that someone raged at me for insensitivity >.< haha. But as I mentioned, the base story is an adaptation of 1 episode of an anthology TV series, I just built on top of it and also extended it. I worked with Maneki Mushi to make the original otome version during Otome Jam, and then LPB came and saved the day to help me make the BxG version too post-jam, which is why the sprite art is completely different.

Hope you’re having a merry spooky season so far!