Haha sorry for the odd blog post title! Anyway, the basic concept is this one: any feedback from you is welcome. You, who bought and played my games. You who never bought any of my games and pirated them all. You who have somehow played my games and think they’re awesome and the very likely few of you (really, just a minority, I’m sure of it!) who think they are bad ! 😛
Jokes apart, I always welcomed feedback, even when it was made in a somewhat arrogant/presumptuous way, like “why have you done XYZ when clearly nobody likes that?” and often I laughed looking at the statistics in my possession saying exactly the opposite.
Tastes are tastes, but stats don’t lie
Doesn’t matter if what you think is “right” or “wrong” (also because we can’t really say that, it’s all about personal tastes), I am interested in hearing it. If you follow me I know that I always try to reply whenever I can, explaining why I do what I do, even if ultimately the main reason of all my choices is that I run a business and I need to make money.
For example, I already said a while ago that I won’t make any more yaoi only games, but this doesn’t mean that there won’t be anymore yaoi romances in my games, especially RPGs. It means simply that there won’t be another Heirs & Graces game, with 4 love interests, all gay. This is not about personal tastes (even if I personally like more yuri) but based on the statistics in my possession. It’s better for me to do a game with two romance combos or even all romances, maybe with fewer love interests or with all characters bisex (like Love Bites) instead.
Anyway, sorry for derailing! But if you have any comment/suggestion to make, feel free to do it, here in the blog, in my forums, on my discord server (even if I sadly I don’t check it often) or in the social networks. Even if I mostly base my decisions on my data/stats, many times suggestion also helped me come up with new game ideas, gameplay or other thing. Small details, big changes.
Indeed, several times I made choices based on people’s suggestions! For example I have:
- named a main character (Nicole)
- tried making a game in a new genre (PSCD, Amber)
- changed an ending/epilogue (Cursed Lands)
- made a game more “hot/explicit” (PSCD, Roommates)
- named a game (Heirs & Graces, Amber)
and the list goes on. So as you can see, I take them seriously into consideration! Then maybe of 10 suggestions only 1 gets implemented, but doesn’t mean I don’t care about them or that I don’t read them.
Some examples
PSCD is a good example of features implemented based on suggestions. The manga art update, which increased sales by 300% and showed me to never make again a game with non manga art. Or for the same game, the “quick match” option in the main menu. At first I was reluctant but in the end was probably a week of work more to implement it, and people definitely liked it.
Or for those who beta-tested Cursed Lands and participated in my forums, I changed the epilogue of the game after talking with people and Loren’s original writer to remain faithful to a certain character (I won’t go in more details since is a spoiler).
The only case in which I definitely don’t implement something, is if the idea itself requires an insane amount of extra money or work and I simply cannot afford to do it. If you haven’t, check a post I made a while ago about feature creep and vocal minority.
Keep the suggestions coming and even if I don’t have time to reply to all of them, I swear I read them all!
not so much a suggestion as a question but are you ever doing another game with card based combat like colonial defense i thought it was fun
Yes Undead Lily should be like that, with several tweaks 🙂
Omg Undead Lily is still in progress? I was trying to find an update for it last week and couldn’t. When was the last update? How fsr along is it?!? I am apparently desperate for info
I am not working on it right now, since I need to redesign the whole game to be a card game and the story must match. With so many romances/characters I also need to find a way to write it without making the story 900.000 words long 😛
So in practice don’t get too much excited since I have no clue when I’ll finish it myself! But I plan to work on it after I finish PS2!
Here’s a suggestion for a potential future game, how about a game with an antiquity setting? Could be roman/greek inspired theme. Maybe the adventures of a roman centurion, or a greek hero doing the bidding of gods. Of course it would be the basic inspiration to create a whole new world and mythology. Think there’s a lot of potential to explore there.
Yes it’s a cool setting but it’s more difficult since there needs to be historical references, even if you can put some mythology in the mix (I mean like the assassin’s creed games). But I like that kind of setting too!
2 things I’ve always loved are psychological horror n comedy.
Is it possible we’ll see any of that in the future? 🙂
Yes I don’t see why not 🙂 In the next years I’ll focus on RPGs myself but also produce some “smaller” (still around 100k words at least lol) games alongside!
Loren 2 If only to possibly address this very difficult request. I loved how in Loren the 3 personality types offered a choose your own adventure style game you could craft into a new story on multiple plays. Now to the request. How about letting us pick a mage class and actually have the game provide different scenarios based on class choice. Loren and 4 seasons didn’t so much do that. Cursed lands at least had different dialogue depending on class just not different scene’s or story branches. It’s actually kind of hard to get a good adventure game story with mages right now that isn’t a harry potter rip off. I might be missing dragon age and baldur’s gate a little too much but that’s the request.
It’s planned to allow 4 classes choices: Warrior, Thief, Cleric and Mage. I could have variants thorough the story based on your starting class (nothing major but some side quests maybe).
I like the idea, the main issue is the amount of romanceable characters that is going to take a lot of time on itself already.
The game College Romance II – Rise of the Younger Brother no longer runs because it needs activation via a dead website.
Because of unusual circumstances, I (legitimately) have a full version with the activation bypassed that I downloaded from Winter Wolves. I have been asked for copies, which I am unable to assist with unless the original developer Celso Riva gives written permission.
If possible, I would like to seek that permission. I apologize if this isn’t the right forum to ask.
See this post from the game writer:
https://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?p=520770