Mini teaser and status report on the Itch stuff (Patreon)

"How was Flin?""Excuse me?""How was his singing? Is our daughter dating a talentless hack?""Oh...he was amazing. Really amazing.""Well, good. Sounds like you had fun?""Yeah...a lot of fun."

^ I want to add this to the ending of the early rock band party sex scene. The only trouble is that I don't track whether or not specific sex scenes happened in the game, and the aftermath of the rock band party is currently coded outside the scope of whether or not you have sex with Julie there. In short, it means it's going to be a bit of a hassle, but probably worth it for the sake of a little fun.

(Also, that sweat droplet is one of the earliest things I ever made back when I first modeled these characters, and I've never used it in LLRR before now lol)

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Itch Stuff

So anyway, I wanted to give a little update amidst all this drama that's happening on itch.io. If you haven't heard, you can read the details here, but basically Visa and Mastercard applied enormous pressure to Itch two or three days ago, calling for them to remove any adult games that contain...let's just say, "nonconsensual stuff," and stuff involving being a little TOO "family-friendly" if you catch my drift. Neither of which are things my game has any of whatsoever.

In a panic, they decided to de-list ALL adult games indiscriminately, including Love, Lust, and Rock 'n Roll. De-listing only means that you can't search for it. The game's page still exists, and currently you can freely access it if you have a link such as this.

Their stated plan is to manually review EVERYTHING and bring the games that are within policy back online. A ton of games have been banned in the past two days. I have not yet received any notifications on the matter, but as you all know, my game's only fucked-up fetish is cheating, so we should be in the clear.

So what does this mean for me?

Hopefully and probably, not much.

Very little of my game's traffic is organic Itch traffic. Most the people who follow it are on f95zone, and if you take a look at this analytics chart for Itch, you'll see that both the number of page views and number of downloads in the past 3 days has not deviated from the average any notable amount since being delisted:

Granted, we're dealing with very low numbers here, but the point is I don't think it's affecting me very much.

That said, this timing is annoying because I'm getting ready to release soon, and releases are the one time my game does get notable new itch traffic via the recent updates section. It's also possible that things aren't going to return to normal for Itch, where they just ban adult games altogether, at which point I will be forced to consider hosting my game's files elsewhere (which I would just hate having to do).

Discord?

This is only tangentially related, but I've been considering integrating a Discord server into my Patreon for quite some time now.To be honest, the biggest reason I haven't is because...I always have Discord open and I'm always on my computer. I'm not joking, a friend once told me in full sincerity that sometimes when he's checking to see if his internet cut out, he'll just check my discord icon for the green dot that signifies I'm online 🤣

And I fear that if I had a Discord server for my game where you guys could talk and stuff, I'd never get anything done because I'd be too easily distracted by it. Even if you were just talking to each other about random shit I'd be like "ooh what are my peeps saying?"That's why if I DO make a Discord server, it would likely be very narrow, at least to start with - no chat, you're not allowed to say anything, just me making random posts that you guys can see and that's it. Functionally it wouldn't be that different from Patreon, except you couldn't even leave comments. But it would allow me to post about smaller random things I'd like to share that don't seem big enough to warrant posting about, and it could potentially be a better means of collecting most the fans of my game in one place. I'd make it free to join, though I'd consider the full Patreon integration so higher tiers have access to certain channels.

I also have some fun discord-related ideas that could be pursued at a later date.

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Anyway, just wanted to make this post to let you all know that I'm still moving forward with the update, things haven't changed much for me for the time being, and hopefully we start seeing some resolution on this whole debacle in the next week.