So there's a review section on F95 and I went through them to get a feel for people's reactions to the game. Thanks to you guys who pitched in, by the way!

I am left a little confused by this exercise, though. Everyone seems to agree the base difficulty is too grindy so there's that.

But:

• Some people love that there are girl packs, others hate them and want them removed
• Some people love the management part, others say it's boring
• Some people love the story, others say it's the worst thing they've ever seen in a game
• Some people think the UI is good, others that it is clunky and barebones
• ...

I guess now I know what these game developers must feel when they read Steam reviews.

What do you think is relevant criticism and what is more noise? Do you think I could implement some kind of skippable tutorial or 'welcome to the game' part to explain things to new player, to hopefully make it less deceptive?

I would rather not turn new people away in the first few moments with a bad presentation of the game, if I can avoid it.

I don't think you should pay too much attention to those, F95 has its own hivemind thing going on.

But some thoughts:

• Tutorials never seem to work for everyone, unless you invest a massive amount of time and effort into them. Better access to Bootypedia and a set of linked articles, maybe? Otherwise, you'd have to make something like a 'tutorial mode', hold the player's hand a lot - and that's a turnoff to many.
  
• The girl pack hate is hard to address. The best way would be to make something like the basic girl pack's worth of unique/generic BK-specific slave types that are not based on existing charaters... but who's going to make those?
  
• People who don't like the management part are not the game's target audience, plain and simple. They saw 'VN' in the tags, downloaded, and are now trying to twist the game into something they'd actually want. Best ignore them.
  
• Story-haters have already been addressed by the 'free play' mode. I don't see what more you could do for them. Polish that, and I'd consider this issue covered.
  
• I doubt UI issues are even possible to meaningfully address. I've never seen a Ren'Py game with noticeably better UI, and plenty with worse. They want AAA UI, they're gonna have to pay for the team who makes that.
  
• What can be done to some degree is girl differentiation - stronger traits, more differentiation via personality, more personality-specific dialogue and even mechanical choices. That's going to be a lot of work, though.
  
• Another thing that could be spiced up is regular brothel messages - more variety, personality-specific dialogue, even traits/perks playing a role. Don't know if that'd address the 'my dick was flaccid' problem fully, but I'm not sure what else one could even do.
  

QoL aside, ultimately it's about what you want in your game.

I checked the F95zone forum, they gave your game mostly 5 stars. What is the issue?
You can't please everyone. The evaluations show that the direction is good.
Too grindy? This is a management game, what did they expect? It would be boring if we could move faster.
Low quality, small girlpacks? There is a lot of packs from different players, everybody can find their packs according to their tastes.
The UI is one of the best.
A short tutorial can be handy for the newbies, if it will be skippable.
The only problem (at least for me) is the speed of development.

For players in the Chinese community, we are more concerned with the completion of the game rather than more gameplay.

You mentioned earlier that the biggest challenge in game development is creating the main storyline. For us, this is actually the easiest part because we have a lot of literary works to draw inspiration from.

The way I see it, the story goes like this.The princess is not simple. She wants the throne. Claude was in league with the assassins, and he was saved by Claude, brainwashed or hypnotized into working for him.The protagonist increases his status while expanding the scale of his business, and exposes Claude's true colors with the help of the NPCS he meets. Kenshin and her father, Ninjas and their wishes, the slave Guild of the tax collector's Chains, the sister quartet that came to Zan, and much more......

We （translation group）are trying to optimize the game.Including sounds，pics，Universal pictures，UI and so on.
Too many materials are so old，I understand you like some game（like Rance）and its NPC.But if you are limited by the amount of CG in your game，The story will be limited too.

Why not focus on completing the main story，and promote with mods makers or people like us？

For me the reason to play this game is that：it provide a chance to make characters' story come true. Especially Famous characters from mobile games and comics animes.Your greatest strength is the frame，we can infill many ideas into it.

Quote from: PANDA129 on Nov 18, 2024, 04:54 PMwe are more concerned with the completion of the game rather than more gameplay.

This is more or less where I'm at, too. I would have considered the game 'mechanically complete' sometime around 0.15. While more interesting mechanics like the farm cards are cool, and Brothel King is obviously a mechanics-first sort of game, there isn't a lot that needs to be done with the existing stat progression.

The one thing I would consider in terms of the Chapter 1 experience is integrating First Girl into character creation a little more, maybe even to the point that she gets her own tab on character creation. You spend a lot of time with whoever your First Girl is, so my impulse here is to give the player a little more control than usual over who they are, instead of putting the choice at the mercy of the market.

(this is in no way influenced by my habit of frequently rerolling the slave market gacha any time I start a new game)

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 18, 2024, 08:34 AMDo you think I could implement some kind of skippable tutorial or 'welcome to the game' part to explain things to new player, to hopefully make it less deceptive?

The intro is already the tutorial, since it walks you through buying your first slave and assigning her a job. It might be worth expanding with a tutorial that gets into the 'first time meeting slave' dialogue, first training, items, maybe scheduling, maybe city exploration. Maybe make the intro separate from the tutorial?

Quote from: Calob on Nov 18, 2024, 08:32 PMThe one thing I would consider in terms of the Chapter 1 experience is integrating First Girl into character creation a little more, maybe even to the point that she gets her own tab on character creation. You spend a lot of time with whoever your First Girl is, so my impulse here is to give the player a little more control than usual over who they are, instead of putting the choice at the mercy of the market.

(this is in no way influenced by my habit of frequently rerolling the slave market gacha any time I start a new game)

That would make you do more work. And for me it's look like the first Strive for Power game where you pretty much just create your first slave just to use her for your 1st "quest" at the guild.

Edit: Oh and dont forget your first slave in this game is Sill.

Jman hit most of the points I was going to say.


Goldo:
We, the players, may chip in from time to time with some ideas and will give our reasons for why we think an idea is valid.  You may decide that it is something worthwhile and we will bounce ideas until we got something feasible that is within the design scope of the game and is worth your time and effort.  That is fine.  You may decide that some ideas are not within the scope of the game or require too much work to be implemented.  That is fine too.  We will get over it and move on, otherwise we mod it to our tastes.

Ultimately, the art direction, story and gameplay are yours to decide for the game.  So don't dwell too much on those who wish to completely change what is already there as BK would not appeal to them anyway, otherwise you might lose who you already have by changing what they like already too much.

For me at least i would say that the gameplay/mechanic/ui are abit overwhelming at first. But it something that you just "click" in your head overtime. And the more i play the more i enjoyed it because it has a lot of depth to it.

 The girl pack i completely agree though. Sure it's nice to have any girl you like to be easily in the game but most of them lack meaningful story/interaction. You can have 100 different girl and at the end of the day they're all the same.
I used to wonder if it's possible to have the community to contribute to the basic girl pack like they did with the dialogue pack but idk.

Quote from: darkzerotor on Nov 19, 2024, 09:52 PMFor me at least i would say that the gameplay/mechanic/ui are abit overwhelming at first. But it something that you just "click" in your head overtime. And the more i play the more i enjoyed it because it has a lot of depth to it.

 The girl pack i completely agree though. Sure it's nice to have any girl you like to be easily in the game but most of them lack meaningful story/interaction. You can have 100 different girl and at the end of the day they're all the same.
I used to wonder if it's possible to have the community to contribute to the basic girl pack like they did with the dialogue pack but idk.

I think the variety of personalities in the game are enough though. There are also some special mechanics for certain personalities like the masochist. Also some girls with more open personalities respond to sex acts more openly and never refuse you even try to force her.

Having pack specific events/interactions would be a bit too VN-like and I'm not sure that would make sense with the game's mechanics of selling and buying slaves. Like you could sell X pack girl with half her events finished but because she's ranked up and worth some money now you sell her. Then you get her pack again from the slave market and repeat the same events but that doesn't really make sense since they're not the same person. *Tbf being able to see repeats of girl packs is already logic-breaking so I mostly disagree with the story-first approach to the game design aside from the main story ofc.

Instead maybe we could add a Community Event Project like the Community Dialogue Project but rather add personality specific events. I think there are 23 or 24 personalities in the game. Say we make 2-3 events for each personality that would be ~50+ new events. There are also some variables for the girls such as their origin and guardian (like their brother, teacher, mom, etc) that are just trivia. Maybe we could make some meaningful events from there that actually effect her. Rn asking her origin just gives exposition dialogue.

Girl packs were an important part of my vision for the game when I got started (maybe even the number 1 thing), so I'm definitely not going back on that design decision.

Edit: To expand on that point:

Spoiler

- I thought it was a cool feature in whoremaster (I think) and wanted to expand on it
- I'm just a one-man team, so finding a way to outsource some of the workload was key to allow me to make this game, and girl packs was a way to do it that was fun for people
- I know people can be particular about art style (personally a bad pic can take me out of immersion), and girl packs gives them the flexibility to choose the art style they like most (that's why I'm excited about the new 'ignore' feature too)
- It allows for emergent features, for instance i never at any point in development thought that the game could be used with real girls' pictures, but people made it happen on their own and it's cool.

[close]

What I could do however, is give more control to pack makers on a girl's story by providing more hooks for custom events and the like. But to be clear, this puts the writing work on pack makers; there are already not many people taking advantage of the hooks that are already in _BK.ini to make their girl packs more 'alive', so I'm not holding my breath that more complete modding features would make a difference for 80% of the packs out there.

I guess it'd be nice if we could reach a critical mass of girl packs with stories, though, so that people who want to play with unique girls only would have enough to play with.

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 21, 2024, 05:34 AMGirl packs were an important part of my vision for the game when I got started (maybe even the number 1 thing), so I'm definitely not going back on that design decision.

I think most of us here love the freedom to make whatever girlpack we like. I also got suck in and tried to make a bunch myself. My only problem (and most likely other reviews) with girlpacks is that there're too many of them and alot of them are low quality.
The game is about buying/selling slave but since you can also build relationship with the girl of course some people will not want to focus on the slave management aspect and want more of the "building a brothel with your fav girls". But since none of the girls aren't truly unique it would turn them off.
Making a girlpack is not an easy process, making one with story and unique event is even harder so i guess it is what it is.

Quote from: Goldo on Nov 18, 2024, 08:34 AMSo there's a review section on F95 and I went through them to get a feel for people's reactions to the game. Thanks to you guys who pitched in, by the way!

I am left a little confused by this exercise, though. Everyone seems to agree the base difficulty is too grindy so there's that. (...)

As for F95 community, they want to have a game that spoon feed them or will be "I like jack of nine tales and this is [insert anything]". So don't let it bother you that someone does not like something in your game.

For my opinion about the game:
The game is good and interesting (been playing this before you added Rangiku as the first girl), so have some confidence in your work. If you would swap out for original assets and throw in like 10-12 original girls as the starting pack you could go with this on steam, or any other platform. The only downside of this project is the development speed. 

Packs are cool for me, because you can switch up the game roster and have something new/fresh in every run.

Tutorial, at this point I would suggest just adding it in the main menu as a couple of screens or a short video that explains what is what (or not adding them at all).

Quote from: Kyzer on Nov 21, 2024, 10:20 AMI think most of us here love the freedom to make whatever girlpack we like. I also got suck in and tried to make a bunch myself. My only problem (and most likely other reviews) with girlpacks is that there're too many of them and alot of them are low quality.

If you consider it most of the girlpacks was made years ago. So the quality on the images was limited back then what they could use. And most likely why they not remaking it is either they dont play this game anymore or dont have the time. (Some girlpacks can take up days to make because of the amount of images)

Quote from: Kyzer on Nov 21, 2024, 10:20 AMBut since none of the girls aren't truly unique it would turn them off

Thats why there is the option to make an event for it to make it more unique. But comming up with a story etc for it is harder then you think if you are not the creative type in this matter.

Bruh you just say what i said back to me 😅. I'm not trying to flame anyone since I already know how long making a girlpack is. I spend a week during my covid sick days just trying to understand the code and looking for pictures for just 1 girlpack.
The point still stand though if you start playing this game now the amount of girlpack is while overwhelming but not really high quality and outdated.