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April 24 Update (Patreon)

Published:
2022-04-24 16:48:32
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

Whew. I'd hoped this would be a quieter week when I could begin shifting priorities and energy, but it ended up being completely filled by OEA work.

Reviews: Been seeing more negative ones than usual. Some of them might have been avoided with different game design or writing (and I do intend to improve whatever I can), but I read the majority as a fundamental rejection of my goals. I did manage to flip one negative reviewer via politely responding to their concerns. If anyone is playing on Steam and hasn't reviewed yet, I'd appreciate it. You could be the one that gets us over the 50 review threshold!

Algorithms: If you haven't already, go upvote some good reviews. And I don't mean only the positive ones: the people who dislike the game will congregate to upvote a negative review, so it would be nice if it was one that accurately described the game instead of misrepresenting. The ones that say the story is good but there isn't a lot of adult content... they might be negative, but they're probably an honest signal to those who will or won't like the game. Also consider upvoting some of the guides to feed the algorithm.

Community Stuff: Do check out the art page if you want to see some nice drawings! I think that nearly all the OEA fanart that exists has gone there now.

OEA Scene Suggestions: It's not decided, but I'm considering adding a few more scenes to the early stages of the game to balance out the sexual content overall. I am entirely open to suggestions, provided the scenes support Ingrid's character arc (I'm thinking her witnessing good sex that varies from the Bangville formula). One appropriate suggestion was a flashback to Wilhelm and his partner.

I keep thinking I'll take one of these weeks for longer reflections, but my schedule remains too busy. Let me simply finish by pointing out the artwork above: absolutely consider it canon that Vhala and Riala are friends. It means a lot to me that I've inspired people to create fanart like this. ^-^

Files

Comments

Joker

That's such a nice picture. On the topic of scene suggestions. Maybe something for the first hoodtown section. Maybe walking in on brunhilde with someone. Maybe a boobjob scene, that could serve as a soft preamble to when she later does it to wilhelm. Another Idea would be maybe she walks in on fenris and hood when they stay over after first visiting the isolated tale. The last major gap without one would be between new canison and saving fenris. Maybe something in bangvile. Hmm. Maybe some sort of vision in the dungeon there? Could be explained as just something that came from the sleeping dreamer. With that reasoning the scene could be pretty much anything. Maybe along the lines of how the dreamer intended their tale to end.

Jeffrey Lebowski

Oh hey that's some good fanart, whoever commissioned it must have good taste! *Whistles aggressively nonchalantly* XD Damn it really sucks that it seems like every time things might slow down and give you some room to breathe, that just... doesn't happen. Hopefully once OEA does calm down at some point, you can actively carve out some time to take a step back, reflect, do something restful. I'm tempted to suggest that a good response to the people who wish they could see Ingrid in all the outfits just get an image of her in the Sexy Walrus Outfit as a gag. Also props for actually managing to flip a negative reviewer. Hurray for talking things out like reasonable adults, I guess! Unlike that one review that spawned a toxic pit in the comments, and I agree with your approach of not engaging with opinions and just addressing the objective misrepresentations of the game for the sake of future people who may see that review. Anyway, hope this next week actually is the quieter week you've been hoping for EDIT: In terms of possible scenes to add... I can't think of much that would actively impact Ingrid's arc, but maybe add a scene to one of the empty rooms in the Hoodton Inn? Maybe have them break the posted rules against acting out dramatic stories and make it be a silly roleplay scene or something, then have them get kicked out. Maybe have Ingrid be confused that the roleplay/storytelling aspect was treated as more shameful than the sex itself, since at that point she just came from a Tale where sex was ostensibly shameful (at least for her). Could also be a bit more introduction to how everyone who is self-aware is extremely wary of the powerful storytelling rules permeating the world

Jeffrey Lebowski

On a less pleasant notes on the lines of adding something to the Cumgeon, it would be an option to flesh out one of the flashback scenes for the other Ingrid. But given how her arc is... that would be very far from my first choice

Joker

If the scene is "How the dreamer intended the tale to end", then it would be that regardless, wouldn't it? The other went through the whole thing multiple times with aware memories after all. But I would also prefer if it's something less heavy. I think pretty much any scene would make sense for that dreamer.

logan80

Hmm ... I wanted to complain a bit about the latest TLS but I can see that this is probably not the best moment

Jeffrey Lebowski

Eyyyyyy just noticed OEA reached 50 reviews!

Leveler All

even though i can see why you will want to see whatyou can do to change their pov ofa review, as long you dont get over work over it, all the reviews that are a matter of taste should be at that, though its always nice to see how dedicated you are, dont let it over work you

sierralee

I don't have a lot of bandwidth for major work on other projects, but you're welcome to if you want.

sierralee

With a negative one, sadly, but it's an example of how review volume can matter. That negative review moved things from "Positive" to "Very Positive". Now hopefully it can stay that way.

sierralee

You've identified two of the longer stretches, though I'm inclined more toward the earlier ones. Something in Hoodton is very likely, I just need to decide on what.

sierralee

The Sexy Walrus Outfit is too sexy to be allowed on Steam and would get the game instantly banned. Appreciate your thoughts on scenes as well. I haven't decided yet, but I'll take your ideas into consideration.

Jeffrey Lebowski

Hmm that is an interesting little phenomenon. But really, while it does suck that you've been getting more negative reviews than normal, I might interpret that as a sign that you are getting seen by more people and breaking further into that gaming niche. You've always gone against many/most of the conventions of 18+ games, so running into more people who fundamentally like those conventions and don't want them subverted seems inevitable as you grow while gradually carving out a more sizable niche of your own on Steam. There's also the fact that OEA got more reviews in a little more than a week than DoW has to date. So I think there are encouraging signs here as well, but I also don't really know the finer details of the game's reception or how this market process works. And of course seeing those negative reviews still sucks.

Desertopa

One thing I think might be setting Once Ever After apart from your earlier games on Steam is, it's the first game commercial game you've launched on the site which actually features NSFW content in the screenshots and clips lineup. The Last Sovereign also has those now, although it didn't used to, but people are a lot less likely to leave negative reviews of a free game, since people who try the game out aren't losing anything except for time. I think it's worth keeping in mind that the overwhelming majority of the game's reviews are still positive, but players who see explicit content and assume that the entire point of the game is to serve as a delivery mechanism for porn, and are disappointed when that turns out not to be the case, are clearly a thing. Compared to your earlier games which came out before Steam allowed games to be sold openly and unpatched with 18+ content, the marketing of OEA much more clearly projects "porn game," whereas with earlier games the reviewers would allude to it to clue in potential players, but the advertising for those games led more strongly with other elements of the games. Comparing it to Desecration of Wings, which I think is the closest point of comparison as a complete RPGMaker game of comparable length and cost, DoW has fewer reviews even after being out for years, and I'd assume did much less rapid business, but it's also much harder to get the impression from looking at the game page that the main point of playing DoW is for porn. There might be a tradeoff where OeA's more explicit focus drives more business, but with an increased fraction of disappointed customers, or it might be that OeA could lean more into presenting other game elements and still do similar levels of business, but with fewer disappointed customers due to more accurate expectations. I think, if there's a weakness of the current game page, it's that players who aren't already familiar with your work and don't check out the reviews first don't have much to set their expectations for what the writing is actually like. I think the video intro is good, but past the opening, it's not until more than a minute in (further than most viewers are going to watch,) before any character dialogue appears. And the only screenshots right now which feature any dialogue are from early in the game, with Ingrid while she's still in bimbo mode, and Ulfina giving a line of exposition which doesn't mean much out of context. I think you have the right impression that samples of dialogue are probably not going to be the strongest hook to catch large numbers of players' attention, but I think more characteristic samples of writing are probably valuable to temper potential buyers' expectations and give them a clearer idea of what sort of game OeA *isn't*. Since there are clearly plenty of people playing and enjoying it, at some point I think you stand to gain from filtering out players who'd ultimately end up leaving negative reviews and lowering its success with Steam's algorithm. Plus, some good samples of the game's writing might pull in some on-the-fence viewers whose tastes are more aligned with what the game actually offers.

logan80

To start with, it is really very rare for me to be disappointed in some way with your work. One of these was the situation with Wendys where, in my opinion, her transformation from an Abomination that even someone like Anak couldn't underestimate into Simon's Scary Wife was way too fast and way too easy. Also, I was always amazed that there had never been any serious conversation between Wendys and Robin. But update 0.60 is here and I must admit that first time I'm angry after finishing one. I don't mean Qum, of course, although I was one of those who had various theories that maybe she is some ancient goddess that centuries ago had her brain fuck to mush by some IK, or that she is some mechanism of the Tower, like Ginesta - her being, ,,only sevant '' is enough for me. My problem is with Simon. Unfortunately, I only had time to go through the latest update once, so please correct me if I'm wrong somewhere . Simon spent a tremendous amount of time in this prison - I'm not sure, but the word eon seems to have flashed somewhere. Not only that, this place was designed with the intention of destroying him, where not only he had to constantly fight to survive, but also wage an internal struggle against his own lust fueled by all the shards he has within him. In short, he was in Hell and he was there completely alone. It is hard for me to imagine that such a situation does not change a person diametrically. I expected that some animal possessed by lust would emerge from there. Contrary to Yarra however , I was not disappointed with the decision to push him to the other side and completely clear him of emotions.And this is where the problems begins.After all these years of torture, someone completely broken should emerge from this prison. I don't say this because I'm some sadist, but first of all I don't know how this whole stress could have a different effect on his psyche and secondly it would give us a great opportunity for the harem to try to help him. After so long, he should barely recognize them. For a while, he might not even believe he actually got out. He might then show his dark side as a sign of despair and helplessness. We could see each of them trying to help him in their own way - but it should be a very long and very difficult road. At one point, I also hoped that Simon would feel better enough to tell them something about this prison, what helped him survive there, about some troubled choices or sacrifices that this place forced him to make, or maybe that he had moments of weakness and thought about death, etc. I apsolutely do not see the possibility that he returns to work almost immediately - as if he spent maybe a week or something in this prison.And that's the Simona you gave us in this update, everything returns to normal as quickly as if he spent a week in this prison, not hundreds (?)of years. In addition, his recovery mostly needed short conversations with three people and a hug ....

Jeffrey Lebowski

She made the threshold for Simon's recovery extra short in this update so people could actually access it. It is going to become a substantially harder to let Simon recover as more content gets added to this section

sierralee

I have my own theories, but I'm cautious about drawing too many conclusions this early in the process. How well this game sells month to month, and if the 1.0 launch or sales are a significant boost, will have a significant role in its lifetime performance.

sierralee

Sorry you didn't enjoy this aspect. Some parts of this won't change the way you want, but what Jeffrey said is correct: Simon can complete his recovery early in this version of the game, but the recovery requirement will increase as more quests are added. If I'd set it there from the start, no one could have accessed much of the content this time.

sierralee

I'm open to suggestions for what kinds of screenshots would better represent the game, but showing off a game's writing remains something that I'm not sure is possible.

Desertopa

I think you may be underestimating the capacity of your own prose to attract attention. When I'm considering whether or not to buy a game, I always look for samples of the game's text to make an assessment of its writing, and it usually only takes one or two lines for me to form an opinion on the quality of its prose. For some time before I was born, my mother worked at a publishing company, and she was often put in charge of reading the slush pile, or unsolicited manuscripts, and she told me that the vast majority of all submissions would get chucked within the first paragraph. That's what reading snippets of text from a video game is usually like for me. You can't assess a work's plotting, narrative pacing, character development, etc. from just a few lines, but you can tell a lot about the level of prose, the wit, and what kind of impression the writer wants to cultivate with the lines they choose. And skill with things like plot and character development is also correlated with quality of prose, so you can make educated guesses about those based on very small amounts of content as well. Usually, it's more of a rule-out factor, where just a line or two is enough to tell me "okay, this game has bad writing." There have actually been visual novels I wishlisted before they received English translations, where reading just a couple screenshots of the English release when it came out was enough to change my mind about buying them. But every now and then, I find a game with screenshots that tell me "whoever wrote this really knows what they're doing." When I check out a game like that, I can be almost sure I'll enjoy it. There are probably other points from elsewhere in the game which would make for good standalone examples of the game's writing, but these are a few screenshots I shared with a friend from my own playthrough of Once Ever After, which represent some of the parts I thought were worth sharing with little context. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/634245783490920478/966178477759926312/unknown.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/634245783490920478/966151756163739668/unknown.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/634245783490920478/966150504528891944/unknown.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/634245783490920478/966150541208064051/unknown.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/634245783490920478/966150037107245146/unknown.png https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/634245783490920478/966150080748994610/unknown.png It's not from Once Ever After, or even one of your games at all, but there's one screenshot from an RPGMaker game which sticks in my mind more than any other for selling me on the developer's writing within the space of a single text box of dialogue. https://rpgmaker.net/games/7360/images/55006/ I think the ideal case for a game writing screenshot is that is shows off, not just something that stands on its own as interesting or clever without context, but something which shows off something about the character of the game by suggesting an interesting context. https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/634245783490920478/966888076142051378/unknown.png The game this screenshot comes from is a treasure trove of lines that stand on their own without context, but I think this one in particular is a good example of one which would grab my attention as much without knowing what led up to it as it does when I know the context.

sadcat

Will there be any gay content in your future games or updates? Please :(

sierralee

I'm sorry, but I don't think I'm the best person to provide this content, and I'm sure you're aware of the unfair bias against it.

sierralee

Well, I've always been clear about my inability when it comes to marketing. If those screenshots were worthwhile to you, I'll pick two with unique backgrounds and place them on the Steam page. I'm less than sanguine about the effect of signaling, though. I accept plenty of criticisms about the presentation of the store page, but it's not accidental that I began this game with the bloody version of Ingrid and then the subversion of the Hood/Fenris scene. I feel like the players who finish this and then ask why they failed the "Make Ingrid Sluttier" quest are impervious.

Desertopa

Anyone who plays through the beginning of the game and thinks they were supposed to succeed at the "Make Ingrid Sluttier" quest was probably a hopeless case, and it might be an inevitable pitfall for games of this type that there are going to be some players that dumb who immediately assume this game is for them and won't pick up on any of the signs otherwise. But if the game telegraphs its real nature clearly enough before people actually buy it, then hopefully the number of people who charge through and buy it anyway will be reduced, or at least some of them will recognize it as their own poor judgment and not leave negative reviews.

sierralee

I've added two screenshots to the Steam page and remain open to any other suggestions for improvement.

WaxerRed

RIP Mestan and Simon ship.

Decanter

This is quite late, but honestly, the quest log seems like a poor example to me. While there are some thick-headed people out there, I think there are also people whose base assumption is that a quest log is obviously not a diegetic element of a game unless loudly signaled otherwise. They expect the quest log to be communication from the *game* to the *player*, and failed quests to be an indication that the *player* failed at something. They don't expect a quest log to be, essentially, an unreliable narrator. And I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a quest log to be reliable and non-diegetic. And mostly, OEA's quest log *is* reliable and non-diegetic, except for that one "quest", so I think you've also potentially created a bad expectation for the rest of the game with that exception. You could, potentially, have made the quest journal an actual journal that Ingrid kept, that occasionally gets corrupted by Tale bullshit. This is not what you did, and it's far too late and too laborious to change that, and it'd frustrate many players if you did change it. Plus we'd first have to believe Ingrid starts the game literate enough that this comes naturally to her. You could probably address that specific concern by just making the quest succeed instead of fail, even if every individual objective is marked as failed. Then if a player is bewildered, at least their reaction can be "I don't know what happened there, but apparently I met whatever criteria there were." Which would be completely true.

Desertopa

This strikes me as a practical adjustment, especially when you consider that it's already implemented elsewhere in the game, where you can "succeed" at the quest in Ulfina's tale despite failing every subgoal.

sierralee

That may be valid, but my focus was not on the quest log. I feel that the introduction to the game leading up to the corruption meter breaking is unambiguous enough about the game's themes that, while there could be confusion or irritation about the quest log, expecting that the course of the game will be to make Ingrid sluttier is not reasonable. While I am theoretically open to changing the resolution status of this quest, I think the better solution would be to stop making adult games.

Desertopa

You're the one who's in a position to decide what's best for your own happiness, and you're the only one who has access to the sales figures for the game, but I think it's worth keeping in mind for perspective that the vast majority of the reviews and commentary *are* positive. Not only from your existing audience base, there are also lots of reviews from new players in the vein of "came for the porn, stuck around because it was a really fun game." I admit, trying to make thoughtful, nuanced 18+ games is a pretty lonely endeavor. I'd be happy to see more people get involved in the field, so on that basis I don't think I'd be able to help being sad to see you leave it. But, at some level of budget and exposure, I think it's inevitable that the profitability of SFW games will surpass that of NSFW ones. It's possible that there's an intermediate point where creating games with optional 18+ content, which has to be deliberately enabled or patched in, will be more profitable than games with a fully NSFW focus, even though those measures are no longer mandatory on Steam. I don't know if the inclusion of sexual content would be worth the cost if a large fraction of players wouldn't be exposed to it at all, but I suspect in a lot of cases it would, and it might lead to significantly different sorts of audience distributions and expectations. ETA: I don't know whether you're at that point now, but at some level of exposure I think you'll probably get more audience traction out of games which project themselves as "adult" in the sense of, say, Game of Thrones, rather than "adult" in the sense of Rance or Nekopara.