An example screenshot from the current in-development version. The bottom choice avoids going back to Russell's house and yields a different scene entirely. There are also choices within the scenes at Russell's house which avoid the sexual encounter.
Huh... Thanks for replying - despite the situation, it's nice to see a developer being active and patient with the community. With how angry I was, I was half-expecting to come back to a report or a ban.
But still, you can see where I'm coming from with this, right? It's just... I just got invested and then... Boom, suck a dick, player. And it's literally with the least attractive person in the entire game to me - both physically and personally, some bara fish dudebro who can't speak like an adult. I get it's a fetish, but it's not my fetish and I didn't enjoy being forced into it.
After I wrote that comment I kept pacing the room, seething, wondering if you did this just to insult the players who chose Dom or Axel - punish them for not choosing any of the bara men in your VN with mostly bara men. Not going to point fingers, but I've seen VN authors do this sort of thing before. I see now that's not the case here, but that's the mind space your VN put me in - I was seriously suspecting malicious intent, and I'm sure it's not how you want to make your players feel.
Why would you even first implement the route of doing something, instead of starting with the route of not doing it? No, I get it, you wanted to put out sex content before sfw content, because that's what many vocal players like, but In a game where player's choice is supposed to matter, where the player gets invested in the story, you basically locked players who decided against pursuing any of the huge men into a sex scene with one of them.
Yes, it's WIP, and it's going to be different in the final version, or even in the very next update. But many, MANY players are playing the VN as it's being developed and this is going to be their experience. Sorry, but you should have anticipated this! For many players, myself included, this is forever going to be a bad memory.
Yes, I know, it's a free VN, and you owe me nothing. and you put a lot of effort into it, and it's great that I could just download and play it! But! Could you please show some consideration in the future when choosing which routes to release first? Because this was Bad with capital B. And I'm sure you can do better.
This is one of the most delusional and entitled things I've ever read, please get some help, I'm saddened any of the great people who work on this game had to read this...
Sorry to break it to you, but the target of your delusional para-social "relationship" does not need your protection - never did, never will.
The way you feel isn't invalid at all. At the time I wrote it, I was pulling my hair out over a major scene in Tai's Route that just wasn't coming together how I'd hoped, and I was experiencing considerable burnout. The plan for the scene with Russell had only recently been locked in and at the time, it was something I was excited to write. I took a short break from Tai's Route to focus on something I felt more passionately about in the hope it'd allow me to return to Tai's Route feeling refreshed, which thankfully is exactly what happened. I'm also constantly inundated with requests for sex scenes with a myriad of different characters, of which Russell was a frequent request. Tai's Route had already had its final sex scene and it was likely going to be quite some time before we'd otherwise be doing another. All of these reasons are what led to those chapters being made ahead of time. It was the right thing to do at the time and largely a necessity, and my feelings on that haven't changed.
The total wordcount for Sileo is about on par with Lord of the Rings as things currently stand, and it's only about half done. That's all been written by just one person, and that's only one of my jobs. I also do all the programming and interface design, all the PR, the audio, so on and so forth. Progress in story content can't always be made as quickly as I'd like, and admittedly I'd hoped finishing Tai's Route would have happened much sooner so I could return to this route and expand it beyond the small vertical slice it has been up until this point.
I apologize for the negative experience you've had, but I can't apologize for doing what I needed to do to ensure progress continued being made and to avoid burnout. On a route like the one in question, there are numerous possible paths and outcomes, and those things take time to build out. An unfortunate reality of work in progress games, particularly those with branching storylines, is that the content you want isn't always going to be ready, and what is ready isn't always going to be what you want. We try to keep our releases as regular as possible, and that means we end up releasing material that isn't representative of the final product. In general, we've found this to be a better approach than holding content back for more infrequent releases, especially with our business model of being a free game supported by monthly subscriptions on Patreon - frequency is critical for our financial security and to retain interest in our project. You can please all of the people some of the time, or some of the people all of the time. But you can never please all of the people all of the time. That doesn't stop us from trying to, but cases like this are an unfortunate inevitability, and I know it never feels good when you're the one affected.
All I can suggest at this stage is that if the content in that route still interests you, come back when it's done. It's a big route with branching paths and multiple endings, but it's going to take us some time to create and implement all of that and until that time, it might not be everything you want it to be.
Oh hell, I know the struggles of being a jack of all trades on your own project only too well, so I get it, I really do. You did what was right for you and the project at the time and I'm not going to argue with that - you certainly have a clearer picture of which scenes for which routes need releasing first. I should not have tried to advise you on that. Not only was it not my place to do so, it was a wrong approach to the problem.
And thank you for apologizing. I regret initially being so harsh now, there was no need for that attitude, I 'm sorry.
And I want to be helpful here, not just nagging. So here's a thought - why not add menus for the choices that aren't implemented yet? Sure, one or more buttons would say "(NOT IMPLEMENTED YET)", but that would still warn the player where they are going and give them some semblance of choice - "either leave and wait till your desired route releases, or check out this route that's already here, you might like it". Seems like that approach would keep everyone happy, or at least safe from becoming unhappy the way I did, wouldn't it?
Either way, thank you for your time, I took enough of it already. I'm sure we both already got what we could from this particular discussion anyway. I'll be back to check on your progress sometime in the future(I might even be lucky to have some control over whom the MC gets intimate with this time around, ha)
The best reason I have for something like that not being in there is that the content surrounding this scene and the specific choices you'd be able to make hadn't been fully decided yet. There was a lot of hesitation on my part as I've had a habit of committing to too much only to wind up regretting that later when the workload feels borderline insurmountable. We've only locked our plans in quite recently, deciding to go whole hog with the choices and branches but sacrificing length and secondary/background stories to focus on a concise yet branching primary plot with little else happening around it. Of course, that's not really much of an excuse. Clearly it would have been better having something there, even if plans change and we end up removing it in favor of something else later on. I'll learn from that, and be sure to more carefully consider how unfinished content might be perceived in the state in which it's released.
Thank you again for your replies - I wish more developers were this active and open with the community.
