Pre-Campaign Poll - Share Your Thoughts


Hello, everyone!

Not exactly an update, but wanted to get some comments/input from everyone, especially with our Indiegogo campaign slated to launch soon. Consider this an unofficial poll:

1) How important are physical rewards to you when making a campaign pledge? If they are important to you, what kind are you most likely to pledge for? (E.g. T-shirts, keychains, plushies, pins?)

2) Whose routes are you most looking forward to?

3) Is 1 year per route an acceptable wait time for this VN? The most time-intensive part of development, we have found, is the background art, because of the detail involved and number of locations per route. But we also think it's given the game a certain look and feel that makes it uniquely vibrant, so we would love to keep to it.

Do tell us what you think! It may be very helpful in how we proceed with our decision making. Thank you, guys!

Get Queen of Hearts

Buy Now$5.99 USD or more

Comments

Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.

1) How important are physical rewards to you? 

Don't interest me too much, mainly because the few  so I've always pledged to an amount that has no physical rewards.

 2) Whose routes are you most looking forward to?

Most interested to least interested: Roxas, Thrace, Kadan, Iandir, Aiden.


3) Is 1 year per route an acceptable wait time?

I will wait how long you take to do each routes i love the game so i will wait for each routes are done

Gosh, that's so nice. Thank you for making my day with your comment! ^_^

1) How important are physical rewards to you? 

Don't interest me too much, mainly because the few I have seen didn't post to Australia so I've always pledged to an amount that has no physical rewards. 

2) Whose routes are you most looking forward to?

I'm interested to try them all, Kadan would probably be the one who interests me the most though, and then Aiden.

3) Is 1 year per route an acceptable wait time?

You've already had enough response to this regarding the overall time it would take to release all routes. I think that would scare away potential pledges. If art is the main concern with this there are artists out there that can adapt to other art styles, or at least be somewhat similar. The idea of having a different artist on their own route is a good one, because it'll lessen obvious differences. Personally, I wouldn't want to wait longer than six months, tops. Even then it would be pushing it if you're releasing as an entire route. Have you ever considered releasing it as chapters? If you release it with monthly updates, often it'll take a year to get through the route anyway, but it wont feel like as long wait due to the regular updates. 

Thank you! 

Not more than six months - do you mean for the first route? 

Monthly updates/chapters - Yes, we did consider that! : ) 

Although we feel it's safer to go route by route, just to make sure all the route's content is finalized, especially since everything affects each other, with choices and such. We will do this if we can put the routes out at reasonable pace, otherwise, chaptering seems like a good idea too.

I meant for the routes yes, I probably wouldn't want to wait more than six months for the first route or six months between consecutive routes. As a dev, I understand completely why you would need longer, as a reader I would get really paranoid pledging to something that will take that long to complete. :)

1) Physical awards don't generally interest me. I'm always more interested in early access or in game perks but I would be hard pressed to say no to a plushie of Screech. Also a keychain of the protagonist's butterfly brooch might be cool?

2) From most to least interested: Thrace, Kadan, Roxas. Iandir, Aiden.

3) 5 years is definitely a /long/ time, and I'll echo others about being leery of funding a project with that time frame. I've been burned in the past with promises of less development time. I can appreciate you guys being upfront about a long wait, though! I'm going to infer through your post that each route might take us to vastly different places (or at least different locations within the same area), and if that's the case, my usual suggestion of trying to reuse a bg a few times becomes harder to pull off. Perhaps a good compromise would be to get the /most/ important bgs for a route done. Reuse what you can in a route and then update with less important ones as they are finished? You could also go with a placeholder image for similar locations. I know in a lot of games, general outside scenery or travelling BGs are reused a lot. I personally very rarely notice this, as I'm far too focused on the characters or what's happening. You could also perhaps add a stretch goal with an appropriate amount that would allow you to hire another or multiple artists to help? 

I'm glad that people seem to like Screech! She is a cutie. But physical rewards can be challenging to manage, so we are leaning towards not providing them for now.

You are correct. We will be reusing a number of backgrounds, but each route will have some unique locations. Thank you for your sugestion, which another commenter brought up. I'm glad I posted this poll - I have a lot more clarity about how to move forward now.

I may even share a draft of the Indiegogo campaign with you guys later on, because of the helpful feedback you guys are willing to share :D

1) Depends on the costs of the tiers.  Overall I'm not very interested in physical goods (particularly with international shipping) but I'm also generally not willing to spend $10-25 for one digital reward either.

2) Most interested to least interested: Roxas, Thrace, Kadan, Iandir, Aiden.

3) So I'm torn about this.  On the one hand, a lot of the comments have really liked the art/backgrounds of the game and I get the importance of a unified aesthetic to a game.  On the other hand, given the history of crowdfunded VNs, I would be very, VERY leery of backing a one from a first-time dev that had a stated dev cycle of 5 years.  A lot can happen in 5 years and I'm just not sure that I'd trust the project would finish (sorry for the guild by association but bad faith players tend to ruin the game for everyone).  If it really is the backgrounds that would hold up the dev cycle, I'd be more inclined to back if there was a deliverable sooner that maybe had placeholder backgrounds.  Like if you could get the script, sprites, and programming done and release at least the story for all the routes at once, then finish them with updates as the backgrounds come in.

Hi!

That is a fair point. I'm a gamer and backer, and am well aware of many game projects that have had this problem, so it's a valid concern.

I think you gave a helpful suggestion, and this is something that we can do, if we have to. Awesome! Thanks for this, will need to do some planning and tweaking on our end, and we'll be back with an update soon :D

(1 edit)

Hi!

1) Not important to me, but have one would be nice, a keychain maybe?

2) Aiden. I have the feeling that there's more to say about him than the others. He's my favorite as well. :3

3) I don't get what you mean. You said 1 year per route and since we have 5 love interests, it will take your team 5 years to complete this game? @@

Hi, really appreciate the feedback! 

Understood, we believe we can halve the development time if we compromise either by simplifying the art significantly, or hiring a bigger art team so that they can work concurrently on different routes (though there may be differences in style. Perhaps each artist can take 1 route). 

Another commenter had a good idea to start with simple BGs first (maybe line art for example) for release, and progressively, they could get more and more detailed. 

On our part, we want the game to be out sooner rather than later too! So, thank you for sharing. And we will definitely tweak the timeline.