Turning the Page [v1.0.0] ($5) Game Access Release & Post-Game Analysis (Patreon)

Hey everyone,

With the announcement of our upcoming project just days (or hours?) away, we wanted to take some time to look back on Turning the Page’s development and share some of our reflections on the process as well as the final product, with an eye towards what might change going forward.

Since the post might contain spoilers or color your impression of Turning the Page’s finale, we recommend you wait until you finish reading it before proceeding. Speaking of which, today is the day it’s become available for our Game Access patrons, so all of you lucky ducks can feel free to download v1.0 here:

Turning the Page [v1.0.0]

Okay, finished reading it? Great! Hope you enjoyed it. We really do.

Working on Turning the Page was an unforgettable experience. We are deeply passionate about it and are grateful for the success it brought us. However, working on it wasn’t always easy.

After the first couple of projects, we wanted to do something a bit different in terms of story and art. So, as many of you know, we took a very prolonged break between Misumi and Turning the Page to allow Operae to improve his technical skills. Although we dislike that it caused such a content drought, we think this turned out to be a good decision and are pleased with how Operae was able to use the time to sharpen up his skills.

That being said, we don’t expect such a repeat will happen again going forward. Our subsequent projects might release with minor gaps between them, but we don’t think it will be much more than that. Operae spent a lot of time practicing his art in the background and doing a fair bit of experimentation during Turning the Page, particularly during the final year. As a result, we are pleased with the level of quality we will be able to bring to our next project from the beginning.

Expect to get a glimpse of what that will look like very soon, alongside our announcement.

Now, as we mentioned, the second major change to Azienda during Turning the Page was the writing, and it was a pretty dramatic change. The writer changed entirely, as did the pacing and tone of the game. After two darker games, everyone on the team was curious to see if we could write another kind of story. One that was a bit more focused on the heroine falling in love with another man. Something very heavy on cheating and romance. We wanted the romance to lead into a long, slow burn, resulting in a heroine that is very different by the end of the game. In addition, we decided to change the way the story was told, allowing the player to choose between two different points of view.

While we are happy we decided to do this story, over the course of the development we realized a few things that we didn’t feel were working very well. We are going to speak about them frankly:

1) It was too long

This is the first and most obvious point. In particular, the buildup was too long and the post-corruption period was also too long. We found that as time progressed, it became more and more difficult for new players to hop on board, as there was a pretty insane amount of story to get through. We read some comments where people mentioned they skipped through the text, and while this is a VN and certain players tend to do that, we feel that we didn’t do enough to counter that problem. Compounding this issue is our next point.

2) Felix’s point of view didn’t have enough happening

We love mystery netorare. Seeing the story from the male POV and wondering what is happening and when, almost like a detective. It can be incredibly fun and anxiety-inducing in the best way possible. Unfortunately, we don’t think we did justice to that experience. There were long stretches of Felix being oblivious and not witnessing enough enticing material for the gameplay to be independently enjoyable. Combined with how long the game was, that resulted in an experience that alternated between fun and boring for hours. Our biggest course-correction to Turning the Page’s direction midway through development was attempting to beef up the Felix POV, and while it certainly improved things, it wasn’t a smooth experience. Simply put, we can do better.

3) The point of view system caused a lot of repeated dialogue

Another issue with the point of view system is that it causes dialogue to be repeated twice in short order if a player wanted to read both POVs in a given month. We heard some complaints about this and tried to shift things slightly, but maintaining a balance of a story that could be read from both POVs individually and together was challenging to write. In fact, writing those scenes would end up being the lowest point of the writing schedule every month. Mint dreaded them. It sounds like it would be the easiest thing to write since the dialogue is already written after one POV is done, but it would cause a lot of rewrites or awkward shoehorning of inner-monologues to paper over plot issues. It, simply put, was not a fun time for many involved and it kind of left the feeling that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

4) The choices were hard to integrate

One of our major criticisms early on was that we didn’t introduce enough decisions into the game and it was little more than a kinetic novel. This is true. It took too long to get to the first decision. Speaking frankly, one of the big reasons for this was because they were hard to work with, given the POV system. If we introduced a minor decision in Sophie’s POV, how would Felix’s POV interact with that? It didn’t seem like there was a good answer to that, which led to us avoiding decisions more than we’d like.

5) The decisions were not dealt with gracefully

Although the decisions took a while to come, they did eventually come. When they did, they caused a major split in the game’s story, which seemed fine in theory. However, that route split ended up being fairly awkward for both the writing team and the players. It caused a situation where we had to rewind our thoughts back months in time without much of a way of naturally reminding the players what was happening. Overall, we don’t believe the split, presented the way in which it was, created a very positive experience for the player, instead causing more confusion and loss of interest than anything else.

How are we going to deal with these issues?

Well, while we aren’t going to detail about every single one, we will talk about our broad plans, starting with the length. Our next project will be much shorter. Not as short as the projects before TtP, but closer to that range. Our aim is that projects will last 18 months or less. So, in essence: you get two complete, but still satisfying, netorare corruption stories in the same period, and we get to shake things up creatively more often. A win/win situation, we think.

In addition, we are going to be changing up how our POV system works. Rather than scrap the male POV and go all in on the female POV, we are going to put a lot more effort in the male one. Our next project will still present an option, but the option will be between seeing the story from the male perspective exclusively, or seeing the story from multiple ones. We think that will cut out a lot of the problems while still allowing the user a choice in how they experience the story. In particular, we will focus on presenting each POV as a complete and satisfying experience that does not require the other. 

So if you want to read the male POV before the mixed one, you can do so without worrying about having a tedious mixed experience, since you will be able to skip everything you saw before. Or, if you want, you can skip that experience altogether and just get to the mixed POV, which will tell the story completely as well. Finally and vitally, if you want to play the game from the male perspective only, you should have a fun and titillating experience that perhaps won’t be as complete and all-encompassing as another way of playing it… but if you are into that kind of thing, that’s part of the thrill isn’t it? 😁

So, we hope you found this not-so-brief look into our thoughts about Turning the Page interesting. While what we discussed today isn’t every change that we will be implementing going forward, it’s a starting point for our next journey. Trust us when we say we have given this a lot of thought and are giving the next game our all. We want to create the best NTR experiences we can, and every step along the way is a lesson, allowing us to do even better.

I guess we’ll see you in a couple of years (or less) for our next post-mortem, and we hope the list is a little shorter next time. But in the meantime, enjoy!

Thank you for everything,

Azienda