Survey Feedback (Patreon)

Hey guys, how is it going?

It has passed 20 days since we published our ‘Patrons Quality Survey’ and now we are here to share with you some insights and discuss how it is going to affect our next moves. But, first of all, we wanted to give a big thank you to all of you who took some time to answer our questions. We had a massive participation and your support is awesome! Thank you very much!

On track

Now, about your answers… Well, this is another thing that makes us very happy. We say this because, in general, most of the responses we got from the survey show us that we are on the right track when it comes to planning Shale Hill Secrets.

We already knew, for example, that our patrons are more demanding when it comes to the main plot and the story of the games. Our survey shows that almost 70% of you guys consider this one of the most important aspects of a VN. Also, more than 67% of you like to have good relationships and emotion depth in the game. We have been very cautious planning Shale Hill Secrets, focusing on having a well-tied and fun plot. The construction of the characters and their personalities is also being well worked out. We know that you like to interact with people with unique characteristics and this will certainly not be left out.

Choices And Features

Almost 79% of the supporters pointed out that it is cool to have different paths based on choices when playing. We are also bringing more importance to your choices. Depending on how you react to the situations, not only will the MC’s personality “change”, but your relationship with the characters will also be impacted – and this can define how some things are going to play out in the future. Also, in Shale Hill Secrets, we are planning on giving you more control, offering you the possibility to do some chores and “side-missions” using the locations menu. We had a little taste of it on the first release when you had to do some things for Hank.

As you have seen in our first release, we have some new visual effects coming to the game. About 43% of you said that the lack of animations was our weak point, and we are tackling this problem on several fronts. For example: text lines are animated and some interactions are triggered as the text progresses. Backgrounds have dynamic blur/focus. Also, we have a few lighting effects in some scenarios, characters are now blinking and they interact with the camera getting closer to you when needed.

Of course this is not all of it. We are aiming on having a new “sex” experience on the future scenes. We don’t want to reveal much of it now because we are still testing and planning those changes, but it is certainly going to address some of the messages we’ve got in terms of graphics, interaction and animation.

Regarding the engine itself, we’ll continue working on it adding features, shortcuts and other tweaks that will make the experience closer to what can be found in Ren’py - thus providing a more familiar environment for most players. There are also a lot of changes going on about how the game is developed and, as you know, we like to do things right by focusing on quality, tweaking little details and doing as much testing as possible to ensure our builds are stable.

Release Schedule

This is an important point some patrons were worried about, and we’d like to explain in detail why we decided to drop monthly game releases and go for a more flexible release schedule (six to eight weeks).

Quality

With each new game, we challenge ourselves to raise the quality bar and do things better than before, always taking into consideration our supporters' feedback. More attention to detail, more features and more content per update takes time to develop. With DFD and Double Homework we trapped ourselves into a very tight schedule that made it very difficult to address several of the issues you guys were pointing out, such as the length of the updates and the lack of branching.

One month is simply not enough time for us to craft the kind of game we want to make, and we are confident that the extra development time will increase the overall quality of the game - which at the end of the day, in our vision, is always the most important thing. To quote Shigeru Miyamoto, “A delayed game is eventually good, but a rushed game is forever bad”. We really want Shale Hill Secrets to be better than our previous titles, and we are taking measures to make sure we will succeed.

Life balance

I (Ricky) was unsure if I should comment on this matter, since I do my best to avoid complaining about what I have. I’m able to work full time crafting games, and I’m aware I’m extremely lucky to be in this position, for which I’m extremely grateful. That said, over time, the monthly release schedule created some life issues that were getting harder to ignore, and I’d like to be honest and talk about it.

The truth is that releasing a full update every single month is extremely stressful for the whole team. Working on weekends becomes a rule, and working hours easily surpass (by much) what’s considered healthy. Over the years, inevitably, that pattern leads to burnout, both mental and physical health problems and unhealthy habits that deteriorate everyone’s well being - which at the end of the day also affects our work’s quality.

Palmer’s unexpected departure had a great impact on the whole team, and it made us reflect a lot on what we were doing with our lives. Ultimately, we reach the conclusion that the more important thing is to take care of each other and have a better working environment for everyone to continue to thrive. If that means slightly less frequent updates (and possibly less money), so be it. We will continue to do our best to craft the games we love, but we will do it at a slightly slower pace to make sure we are taking care of ourselves.

All that said, we know that the new release schedule affects the perception of value of the tiers (since Patreon charges supporters monthly). Although we don’t have anything concrete to announce right now, we’d like to point out that we are working on new ideas to have better rewards, so the extra waiting time is compensated.

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To finish, more punctual details that you guys pointed to are going to be considerate in our planning. We hope to announce more good changes to come in the future! For now, we just wanted to thank you again for your support, for sticking with us even in sight of sad and challenging times and, of course, for giving us your thoughts and feedback, helping us to improve our games.

Stay safe!
The Love-Joint Team.