Weekly update - 28th March

Hi Folks,

I'm going to be a little up and down in this week's update, please forgive me in advance.

Starting with the positives. Excellent progress this week on Chapter 7. I have around 2 scenes left to go now, I would class neither as major effort scenes. Development I believe will end over the weekend or at worst early next week. If testing goes to plan, I should be able to roll out the completed chapter 7 by this time next week.

For the stats lovers out there, chapter 7 currently has a total of 626 unique renders and 6,000 lines of code. It was a challenging chapter to complete from an art direction perspective and also scripting, but I'm pretty happy with how it's worked out.

OK now my less positive vibe. Steam. If I judged my whole Steam experience on sales I would be in the positive camp however I'm very concerned right now over my presence there.

Perhaps I've been spoiled by the fantastic support I have received from you guys over here but it's been entirely negative experience from the player base over on Steam :( I've not read a single positive review, people have described the game as not fun and not what was described. There has also been wide spread exploitation of Steam's policies, I won't get into here because I don't want to highlight it. A common compliant has been the lack of choices. Which is true, but that is kind of what the Kinetic Novel genre is all about. The reason why I went down that route is primarily based upon my desire not to dilute the message the story is trying to convey. I am also not a massive fan of locking players out of content, which is in essence the mechanism used by a lot of these games to appear to offer choices.

I'm seriously considering whether it was the right move right now and have thought about pulling the game altogether from Steam. If the exploitation I spoke of continues I will have to revisit that. I also may think of the Patreon version of the game being the "Definitive" version rather than my original intent where the two versions would be the same.

I guess right now I need one of "Emma's" hugs, feeling very down at the moment. But I have learned a lesson through this experience and my next project will need to change from the way I ideally would have liked it to go.

So flipping back to positive Fae, watch out for the release hopefully sometime next week. I am really excited for you guys to get to play it, I've really enjoy building it.

Have a great weekend and I can't stress more, especially after my Steam experience how much you guys have done to help me deliver Best Friends to you. You're awesome, you really are.

Fae