Let me start off by saying I truly love your works! My favorite is Weekend with a Stranger. I bought the PDF since the teases on your deviantart were so tantalizing. That being said I love seeing you take this new direction and I wanna give feedback so you can grow and continue to make awesome work like this. I'll start with what I really liked and go on to talk about what I think needs work.
Good:
Concept. You nailed it with the main character covering up her BDSM hobby with the excuse that its from a video game she plays, and I liked the dynamic of two friends that knew the other was super into the BDSM stuff. Would love to see more concepts like "come over and help me get into cosplay"
Frames. The poses and rendering were well done, and I was a big fan of her outfit. Personally I'm a huge latex fan so the padded jacket didn't do it for me but I loved the shiny fantasty :)
Pace. There was just enough buildup for the tension to get high, and the payoff with her getting gagged and enslaved felt natural. The spiral into deeper and deeper bondage was great.
Bugs/issues. I had none! No crashes, no malfunctions, no visual artifacts.
Needs Work:
Animation. The animation of the walking: phenomenal. Hot af. I love the time and love that was put into it. The mesh distortion of struggling: a bit immersion breaking. It wasn't my favorite to see, as it seemed you could have replaced that animation beat with dialogue or a different frame. I'm not sure how I would do it differently, just that it broke my immersion. The animation of the sybian inserting: could have been better. I think it would be great to get a close up or an x-ray of those fun bits going in. The trend I see is that those effortful animations were top notch and really increased my enjoyment, but those that were not ended up coming off as lower quality
Choices. When I downloaded this visual novel I was excited about the possibility of branching choices. I was a bit disappointed when I booted up the game to see that the story had no other path. I think it would be awesome to see different dialogue options and responses.
Having read your response to other comments on here, I see that you put tons of effort already into this format with more than double the amount of illustrations than normal. To put that into a visual novel from a comic is already an amazing deal for an enjoyer of your content like me. I think the price is fair for your situation and the work you put in, and in the future with improvements and more added features, I would pay more.
Thanks a lot!! I'll definitely want to get into choices next time and extra transition scenes with more detail are a must, I'll see what I can do there. Actually I'm currently thinking of making the next one more like a dress up game now that the characters relationship is more developed. I've gotta learn how to use Live2d though, but I don't want the development time to skyrocket or that will mean a price increase again. I think it'll be best to make a few experiments with the app first and find a way to keep production time low before going for a full new project.
Btw, in terms of choices, is it ok something like the dress up game (of course, I don't want to make it with the character just from one angle all the time) where you get the chance to try different gear on the character or were you thinking more like seeing whole other scenarios or storylines? I didn't like too much the idea of good or bad endings and minigames or point and click adventures feel a little too distracting to help build up the sexual tension of the game, so I was trying to go for something diferent and kinda ran out of time at the end.
Dress up games are awesome! I’d love to see the dynamic between the two characters in this VN translated into a dress up game. It would be awesome to dress her up step by step, applying restraints and flirting with her about her outfit. It would also really help the choices/agency of the player to be able to choose the kinky restraints you put her in, from the type of gag to how her arms are restrained.
And as for storylines, it’s what you can expect from visual novels like dating sims and the like, but I understand it would be hard to implement. Going through and making different endings means making new illustrations, and that would practically double the workload just to make two different paths. That doesn’t seem to be the direction your passion and workflow lies in and that’s all good.
$18 feels way too much for what is essentially just a pdf like your other works. I would have atleast liked to have some choice in the ending. Plus some bug is causing my monitor to be super dim after closing the game and I need to restart my pc to fix it. Really considering requesting a refund atleast for half the money because the actual content is still good but way too overpriced for my liking.
Noted! The increase in price is mostly because converting a PDF into a visual novel required putting triple the hours because as I just found the hard way, coding stuff ain't easy, debugging is way worse, nobody is offering updated translation files for Ren'py and while I loved to make a bit of animation and half of it was just using mesh distort here and there, the other half was actual animation (all right, not the best, but actual frame by frame animation). I didn't had previous experience for any of this as for all you can see, I'm not a programmer nor an engineer, just a cheap artist playing at being a dev. I'm sorry that this is the best I can offer right now, but be sure I'm taking notes to make it better next time, or at least cheaper. It would be awesome if you could give me more data on the bug, like your PC or MAC specs, monitor brand or if you found it already, someone's post with the same issue you had. Also, I really didn't intend to come across as dishonest, do you think that stating clearly the amount of game time or the number of screens would have helped to decide if the game is actually worth that money, before the purchase?
I hesitate to buy this (and some of you other comics) and knowing the amount would help me choose. But if it's more $ than page I don't think I will pay.
Thanks for your input! I'll add some of this to the game description in a bit for clarification but I can say in advance that not counting the main screen, the whole thing has -sadly- only 16 screens total. However 6 of those screens are 3 image sequences, from which some of them are animated (and it's not just camera movements, it's actual frame by frame animation with a loop). Then, there are three more screens with an alt version and the final 2 screens have plenty of alts, animation and some ren'py tricks to add some spice. The whole thing required 64 illustrations, which is WAY more than the usual 20 I make for my PDFs. Soo even considering the alts that make use of previous illustrations and not counting those that required little work to do nor the animation work, the whole thing has 31 whole illustrations. Add to that the coding for the various effects, writing the full dialogue (something I don't or barely do for the PDFs) and you'll see why I ended pushing the price so high.
That said, I do take note, I've seen cheaper VNs here in itch.io and while mi initial calculations brought the price to $24, I did my best to lower it to $18. I know it's not enough, but the whole deal took so long to make that my bills piled up. Then there was the whole Gumroad fiasco, that used to be my main page for sales and now that's gone up in smoke. Taxes here on Itch.io are strangling me. I'm really, really thankful to everyone that bought the game despite the price, y'all helping me pay my mortgage and put feed my family. I really didn't want to put my prices so high because y'all have been so good to me all these years. I'm really sorry for that.
What I can actually do is to put the PDF for free for all those who already bought the game, and later sell it separately at $10. You can wait until then, it shouldn't be more than a week or two. Again, many thanks everyone for the heads up.
The bug seems to be unrelated to the game, something to do with either the monitor or windows hdr settings, just that this was the first game to cause the problem.
For the content, yes telling how much content you would be getting would go a long way in tempering expectations. since I went through this in like 15-20 minutes, $18 feels way too much, but if I knew it was only 16 screens maybe I would have reconsidered it or at least would not be as disappointed in the runtime
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Its a weary nice visual novel ant executed perfectly, nice art. Do you do commissions?
Thanks a lot! But no, I'm retired.
Let me start off by saying I truly love your works! My favorite is Weekend with a Stranger. I bought the PDF since the teases on your deviantart were so tantalizing. That being said I love seeing you take this new direction and I wanna give feedback so you can grow and continue to make awesome work like this. I'll start with what I really liked and go on to talk about what I think needs work.
Good:
Needs Work:
Having read your response to other comments on here, I see that you put tons of effort already into this format with more than double the amount of illustrations than normal. To put that into a visual novel from a comic is already an amazing deal for an enjoyer of your content like me. I think the price is fair for your situation and the work you put in, and in the future with improvements and more added features, I would pay more.
Thanks a lot!! I'll definitely want to get into choices next time and extra transition scenes with more detail are a must, I'll see what I can do there. Actually I'm currently thinking of making the next one more like a dress up game now that the characters relationship is more developed. I've gotta learn how to use Live2d though, but I don't want the development time to skyrocket or that will mean a price increase again. I think it'll be best to make a few experiments with the app first and find a way to keep production time low before going for a full new project.
Btw, in terms of choices, is it ok something like the dress up game (of course, I don't want to make it with the character just from one angle all the time) where you get the chance to try different gear on the character or were you thinking more like seeing whole other scenarios or storylines? I didn't like too much the idea of good or bad endings and minigames or point and click adventures feel a little too distracting to help build up the sexual tension of the game, so I was trying to go for something diferent and kinda ran out of time at the end.
Dress up games are awesome! I’d love to see the dynamic between the two characters in this VN translated into a dress up game. It would be awesome to dress her up step by step, applying restraints and flirting with her about her outfit. It would also really help the choices/agency of the player to be able to choose the kinky restraints you put her in, from the type of gag to how her arms are restrained.
And as for storylines, it’s what you can expect from visual novels like dating sims and the like, but I understand it would be hard to implement. Going through and making different endings means making new illustrations, and that would practically double the workload just to make two different paths. That doesn’t seem to be the direction your passion and workflow lies in and that’s all good.
$18 feels way too much for what is essentially just a pdf like your other works. I would have atleast liked to have some choice in the ending. Plus some bug is causing my monitor to be super dim after closing the game and I need to restart my pc to fix it. Really considering requesting a refund atleast for half the money because the actual content is still good but way too overpriced for my liking.
Noted! The increase in price is mostly because converting a PDF into a visual novel required putting triple the hours because as I just found the hard way, coding stuff ain't easy, debugging is way worse, nobody is offering updated translation files for Ren'py and while I loved to make a bit of animation and half of it was just using mesh distort here and there, the other half was actual animation (all right, not the best, but actual frame by frame animation). I didn't had previous experience for any of this as for all you can see, I'm not a programmer nor an engineer, just a cheap artist playing at being a dev. I'm sorry that this is the best I can offer right now, but be sure I'm taking notes to make it better next time, or at least cheaper. It would be awesome if you could give me more data on the bug, like your PC or MAC specs, monitor brand or if you found it already, someone's post with the same issue you had. Also, I really didn't intend to come across as dishonest, do you think that stating clearly the amount of game time or the number of screens would have helped to decide if the game is actually worth that money, before the purchase?
I hesitate to buy this (and some of you other comics) and knowing the amount would help me choose. But if it's more $ than page I don't think I will pay.
Thanks for your input! I'll add some of this to the game description in a bit for clarification but I can say in advance that not counting the main screen, the whole thing has -sadly- only 16 screens total. However 6 of those screens are 3 image sequences, from which some of them are animated (and it's not just camera movements, it's actual frame by frame animation with a loop). Then, there are three more screens with an alt version and the final 2 screens have plenty of alts, animation and some ren'py tricks to add some spice. The whole thing required 64 illustrations, which is WAY more than the usual 20 I make for my PDFs. Soo even considering the alts that make use of previous illustrations and not counting those that required little work to do nor the animation work, the whole thing has 31 whole illustrations. Add to that the coding for the various effects, writing the full dialogue (something I don't or barely do for the PDFs) and you'll see why I ended pushing the price so high.
That said, I do take note, I've seen cheaper VNs here in itch.io and while mi initial calculations brought the price to $24, I did my best to lower it to $18. I know it's not enough, but the whole deal took so long to make that my bills piled up. Then there was the whole Gumroad fiasco, that used to be my main page for sales and now that's gone up in smoke. Taxes here on Itch.io are strangling me. I'm really, really thankful to everyone that bought the game despite the price, y'all helping me pay my mortgage and put feed my family. I really didn't want to put my prices so high because y'all have been so good to me all these years. I'm really sorry for that.
What I can actually do is to put the PDF for free for all those who already bought the game, and later sell it separately at $10. You can wait until then, it shouldn't be more than a week or two. Again, many thanks everyone for the heads up.
The bug seems to be unrelated to the game, something to do with either the monitor or windows hdr settings, just that this was the first game to cause the problem.
For the content, yes telling how much content you would be getting would go a long way in tempering expectations. since I went through this in like 15-20 minutes, $18 feels way too much, but if I knew it was only 16 screens maybe I would have reconsidered it or at least would not be as disappointed in the runtime