flexiblemedia
patreon
Public Dev Update: About the Future...
🕑 Added 2021-11-18 00:43:08 +0000 UTCThe image has nothing to do w/this post. But I thought Andrea would get your attention.
Was writing a reply to someone on Discord earlier, and then realized it was worth sharing with a wider audience.
I wanted to talk a bit about our focus in the next few months.
This started with someone saying that they were happy that we were continuing constant development on the game and not abandoning it. And that's cool. Thanks. We appreciate being appreciated. :) We're loving making this game, and learning so much while we do it. And we have plans for continued development, new content, etc. for at least 6 months out - likely longer. So... Yay everyone!
That being said, we're refocusing our development a little bit. TBH - our ability to make more content is primarily about the audience, and the support we get. We can only make a game as long as people pay to play it - either through Patreon or Steam... This isn't a hobby project for us - we're 100% fulltime game devs. And so... Yeah. If we don't sell games, we can't just go back to our day jobs for $. This IS our "day jobs" - and for a lot of us, it's our night and weekend jobs, too. :)
Right now, we're doing OK. But we've hit a bit of a plateau in the sales of the game... And TBH that has us worried. Not worried about RIGHT NOW, but about our long term future. And we're looking for ways to improve now to ensure we can keep building this game for quite a while - years, if possible. And the key to that is ensuring three things:
- People who find our game for the first time are sharing w/friends and others, and spreading the word, so our user base increases.
- People leaving reviews on Steam that compel others to come play our game, and increase our user base.
- People seeing MEANINGFUL improvement w/each update, so they stick around and continue to support us here on Patreon.
Obviously, you can help that - not only by continuing to support us on Patreon - but by sharing this game to your friends, writing reviews on steam, sharing our tweets, etc. And thank you in advance for doing that.
But we have to do more. Specifically for the next 2 months, we need to focus down on making the "new user experience" even better - based on all of the feedback we have gotten from all of you. This is because the big Steam sales are coming - and that means that people who have wishlisted us will (hopefully) be buying. And we want THEM to leave reviews, share with their friends, etc. It's a chance to get our game in front of a BUNCH of new eyes.
We're still in Early Access - and we think that means something. It means that we SHOULD be making meaningful changes, adjusting, and improving the core game, so that not only are we adding "more content" we're making the content we have now better. Theres millions of potential gamers out there who might like our game, and Early Access is about making our game better, so that when those folks find us, we're better than we were last month.
So, we're going a bit "off plan" from the roadmap for a while. This means pushing a bit of the main story development back a few months, and spending serious time improving what we have. Don't worry! We're still adding new content! - with new story and sexy scenes in both the Nov and Dec updates - but we're also doing a bunch of other stuff based on improving the game we have now, including:
- Major improvements to the FISHING subgame, which really wants some love.
- Adding in another very cool new "sketch" subgame that you can play almost from the beginning of the game. This is coming along very nicely.
- Improving our CURRENT sexy scenes. We've built some new tools for moving the camera around in our dialog and animations, and we'll be going back and improving the animations of the sexy scenes to use this more, and make our animations more fun and cinematic.
- Adding in a few more new cartoons and illustrations at key moments of the game we think could be a bit more fun/sexy.
And we're looking for other ways we can make the current game look/feel/play better. This will be a big part of our focus from now through February. (again: WHILE we still make new content! Don't worry!) The goal is to make this game a lot more polished, shiny, and make the best possible impression on our new users, so they join in and support us, and we can use that to keep pushing out more/better content.
The hope is, this time will grow our user base some, and help us ensure that we can keep making really great content for long time to come.
If you have more ideas/thoughts on how things can be improved, please let us know! You can reply here, or come chat w/us on Discord.
Thanks!
Comments
Flexible Media
Please don't misunderstand. We're set to develop at least another 6 months. We have the funds and the plans to last at least that long - maybe longer. This isn't "the sky is falling" - it's "We need to ensure the sky stays the hell up there!" We're more or less breaking even now. To be honest, if we were living only on our Patreon, we'd be broke... You can do the math, we have like 8 people working more or less full time on this game... Hard to feed 8 people on $1500 a month! But we have Steam income as well. Combined... We're surviving. But just barely, Luckily most of us are in pretty low-cost Asian locations, so its a bit better. If we were all in the states or Europe, this level of quality and this volume of content at this level of income would be impossible. The point is not "We're broke" - the point is "What we need to focus on right now is making sure that what we HAVE is really compelling, so we can grow our user base" - and accomplishing that will make continuing a lot more viable in the long run.
Buckey
that doesn't sound encouraging. Whats the minumum monthly turnover for viability?
