A Small Update About the Future of Between Rounds (Patreon)

A Small Update About the Future of Between Rounds

Hey everyone.

It’s been a few weeks since the completed Prologue was released, and I want to be honest about where things stand.

First, thank you. The response from people who finished the Prologue has been really positive, and I’m grateful to everyone who supported it, shared feedback, or simply enjoyed it.

That said, the release reached far fewer people than I expected. Based on the traffic I can measure:

First release: ~72,000 new views

Second release: ~98,000

Prologue finale: ~37,000

That’s roughly a 62% drop compared to the previous release. At the current level of support, Between Rounds isn’t sustainable at the production pace I’ve kept as a solo developer.

So for a while, I’ll be slowing down. I need to focus more on my main work while I figure out how to make Between Rounds sustainable in the long run.

Between Rounds isn’t stopping. Over the past few days I’ve been coding and testing a phone system inside the story, with chats, social media, and even an exclusive FistHub app. You’ll see it soon. And this week I’m starting to lay out the foundations and premise of the next chapter using this new approach.

I’m also changing the way I produce the game. From the start, I wanted Between Rounds to feel more immersive, with more angles, more shot variety, and more dynamic scenes than what you usually see in this kind of game. But your feedback made one thing very clear: consistency matters more than variety.

Every new angle is another chance for the AI to change a detail, and those details ended up drawing more attention than the scene itself. AI still has a hard time keeping those details consistent across so many angle changes, and now I understand why so many developers prefer more controlled compositions. So from now on, scenes will be more controlled and consistent: fewer camera changes and more variations within the same shot, like changes in expression. The quality stays, I’m just putting the effort where you’ve told me it matters most. Important scenes will still get the attention they deserve.

I also want to use this time to fix some remaining issues in the Prologue and seriously explore a future Steam release. That takes extra work, including reviewing licenses for some third-party assets, so it won’t happen right away.

I’ll keep posting progress here.

I’m not going to pretend I’m satisfied with this release. Honestly, I expected the project to be in a very different place after completing the Prologue. But I’m also not going to abandon a story I’ve put so much into and that I still want to tell.

The goal hasn’t changed since day one: I want Between Rounds to become one of the leading references for AI-created adult games and visual novels.

Thank you for sticking with me.

— Mr. Voxel 🥊