phanes
patreon
Poll Aug 6 2023: Whither Web?
🕑 Added 2023-09-06 19:36:48 +0000 UTCHello, special perverts! Thank you to everyone who weighed in on the previous poll. It looks like only a couple of you use multiple saves with different characters, and no one reports restarting just for the hell of it. That makes me feel like I don't have to worry too much about varying my writing in story scenes and expeditions, except to enable player choice. If a bunch of people were playing the intro repeatedly, that might be a place to add more variability, but it looks like that's not called for right now.
I was pleased to see that several of you say you like to do repeatable stuff in-game; sometimes I've wondered if it was worth it to make play scenes with variations and stuff like that, so it's useful to see that folks return to that sort of thing even when caught up on the story.
The next poll is on the web version of Ruin Me! If you missed it, I put out a test of Ren'Py's newly-returned web publishing system; you can link it to your Patreon account and play the game in the web! I can see from the stats on my server's side that a few people have tried it out! I'd love to hear what you think, if you do so.
You'll probably notice that it has some basic issues, starting with some of the buttons on the main menu. While I'd eagerly publish a web version if it worked perfectly out-of-the-box, it will take at least some development effort to get it to a state where I'm comfortable calling it an official release. It also adds an extra step or two to my release process, since I have to build and upload an additional version.
So I want to know: what should I do with the web version? I think that having a version that's playable right on the itch.io page would help encourage randos to check it out and get hooked by the game, but I'm interested to know if y'all think it's worth it.
For reference, I currently have 3-10 views of the itch page for every download, which is a really good click-through rate but could definitely be higher. Let me know in the comments if you have more nuanced thoughts than the poll allows, or if you tried the web version and have opinions on it!
The poll will be open for a week, but you can weigh in any time in the comments. As a note, I'm putting this poll up as just part of my decision process; even if it's unanimous, I might end up doing something different based on other factors.
Comments
Harris Sirrah
My thinking is that it depends on (1) whether you enjoy figuring out that process and (2) if it drives some interest on itch.io. I'm likely to keep playing on my local machine, but I have no problem seeing some of my subscription going to support cool projects that help the game overall.
