trinian
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Lifelong learning
🕑 Added 2024-01-24 17:52:49 +0000 UTCHi everyone, and welcome to this week's public post! The progress report is pretty straightforward - Chapter Six is currently at the writing and structuring stage, the earliest stage of the development cycle. Next comes the mapmaking and coding stage.
Last week I asked you what you thought of Chapter Five. I've had some really good qualitative feedback from people about this chapter, but it's also important to gauge sheer numbers. So let's look at what those numbers are saying.
19 respondents had no notes. Thank you!
This is a bit of a drop from Avenging Angel, but as we'll see below, there are reasons for that.
The consensus opinion is that the chapter was over too quickly. This is a fair criticism. This was always going to be a danger with splitting the story in two, and as I have something of an aversion to padding the game with any sort of grind, it proved hard to create the length of gameplay that I needed. My hope was that having a big new city to explore would ameliorate this, but yeah, if you just go straight to each objective, it's not that long.
One point that was made is that other quests are mixed in with the school day, which is fun to play in itself, and this artificially spreads them out. It's a problem I'm going to have to think about for future quests that take place outside of school (including the one currently under development.)
The last chapter to take place outside school was Chapter 3. It's a similar length, so what's changed? Are expectations just higher now, or did the sandbox of being able to "play" with the slaves in the base help I wonder?
Either way, I expect this will actually change in the future, as Fivaviana continues to develop, you'll find there's more to do on arrival than just play through Chapter 5. A big chunk of time developing this expansion went into map making and those maps are now made and ready to be filled with even more stuff.
A rerun of the result we've had for this part of the poll the last few times. And that's fine. I'm not planning to make the game any darker than the fourth chapter was, as the humiliation and slavery elements are necessarily offset by the humour.
This would appear to vindicate my creative decisions at least. Obviously taking control of a new protagonist and leaving the city we've been in since the beginning is a change of pace for the game, but it was well received. It's even been suggested that sticking with Missy as she was tormented would have been enjoyable, but I fail to see how I could even have made any meaningful gameplay out of that.
This is the part I really wanted to talk about. By a large margin, players expect choices, even when the story itself is proceeding towards a predestined conclusion. It's going to require me to go back to the drawing board a bit on a quest later on in the game, since Act 2 finishes on another large multi-chapter arc, similar in scope to Reign of Jess.
This is another problem that arises from my decision not to use the more traditional combat-focused RPG elements of the software. When you think about it, some of the best RPG games out there have no choices, but the skill element stops you from noticing. Missy is more like an AVN, and lives and dies by its writing. Since I compared it with Chapter 3 earlier, it's fair to say that there were some fairly significant choices in that story.
I'm grateful to everyone who has submitted feedback on the newest quest, whether it be filling in this survey or through some of the excellent and thoughtful contributions I've read on forums. It's a reminder that Yuri game enjoyers are a more refined breed and your contributions genuinely help me to understand my audience and hopefully make my game better.
As we look ahead, I am now trying to give this story the satisfying conclusion it deserves. I wrote the scene the other day in which all is revealed, and I am absolutely fascinated to see how it's received.
One last note, the Sapphory Wiki has been updated with information from Chapter 5. These updates are:
Added Scarlett Raine
Added The Mulligan Corporation
Added Governess Kisimi
Added Cordelia Kisimi
Updated Abbie
Updated Fivaviana
Updated The Nobility
Have a great week!
Trinian
Comments
JD
For me, the reason why it felt like there was a lack of choices is because the quests seemed like they were set up for them. Every quest had a good quest giver, and a "bad" antagonist trying to get them. I was surprised they didn't have options to sell out the waitress to the noble or get the slave purchased by someone else as alternative means to get the information we wanted.
WannaFlyWD
This is a great point. Seen way too many promising games become a mess or never finish cause they tried to both be super long *and* have a ton of customization.
Mysterious Girl
I wouldn't read too much into the "we want more choices" result. More choice is better if everything else is equal, but everything else isn't equal because there are tradeoffs involved (diverging choices = split dev time). But the way the question is worded makes us select either 'more choices' or 'less choices,' and if its worded like that most people will take more choices because they aren't necessarily thinking about the tradeoffs.
Iztari
This is true, my first playthrough of the game was when the beginning of the Reign of Jess came out, so the difference between chapter 3 and chapter 5 is that I played ch3 with the rest of the game. For ch5 I only played that part as everything else I have played already. I think once the full game or at least future content is available this chapter will not feel short.
Dee_Zee
I wanna expose sominthig that i was not thinking before cuz i voted to have more choices but now that i'm solidating the experience into my mind i'm preatty sure that the way i'm experiencing the game is influencing that sentiment since a relativley short segment with no choises expecially when you are not controlling the main heroine is not something that i would be against in a full game
