Okay, clunky title, I get it, but I couldn’t find a topic similar to this and wanted to make it clear this isn’t about suggestions for new games, or for writing suggestions. I’ve noticed a few thing recently that annoyed me that are more decisions on the business end, rather than on individual writers, and wanted to have a place to air my own ideas, as well as give others a place to put their ideas as well.
As a starting point I have two that I really want to have happen ASAP.
In Steam, if a book is part of a series have a bundle available to purchase all in the series. I only recently got into Wayhaven (I missed it when it was first coming out) and when I went to purchase the first, having played the demo, I knew I was going to want to read all three. But I had to purchase them all individually, rather than simply buying a bundle.
Please, for the love of god, can we make black background the default. I am so sick of having to go into change it in every game so my retinas don’t get burned out staring at a bright white screen for hours on end.
I would also be interested to see whether I’m in the minority playing on black background. I don’t understand how anyone could play on white background for any length of time.
I’ve never played on anything but white background. I’ve been reading black text off white backgrounds for nearly four decades now - any other way feels kind of weird to me.
If the background is something you feel strongly about, I recommend playing in the omnibus apps. You can choose your preferred background on the Settings tab, and it will apply to all games.
You must have eyes of steel. Everything I own is now set to dark mode all the time.
I have the omnibus app, but I rarely actually play on my phone. Usually I play on PC, either on the website or on Steam. I wish there was a way like the omnibus app to set your preferences on the website, given that you have all your games listed under your profile.
(As for my eyes, I think I just have the brightness set rather low, so the effect is very much like looking at a print book in a well-lit room. When I turn it up much more than that indoors, it’s like being stabbed in the retinas with a glow stick.)
I honestly don’t like any of the themes. I prefer the light one because it’s what I’m used to, but I would love a dark theme. The white text on black background hurts my eyes so bad that I just stop reading altogether. I prefer a ‘dark’ theme, with a background like #3B3B3B, white text, and #F0DE69 yellow for links, which makes everything so much more bearable. This is how it looks like:
(The screenshot is from Lithium, an app I use to read my ebooks. I think the screenshot messed up the colors a bit, but it’s not a noticeable change unless you use a color picker tool.)
The newer titles actually have a better ‘black’ theme as it’s not pitch black, but older titles are a pain to read.
On the topic of Steam I feel like it may be a bad idea to include the “Every Hosted/Choice game” bundle on the store pages of every product. I feel like psychologically that’s a stumbling block for a new buyer to come in and say “Oh, wow, they’re trying to sell me $1000 worth of games? Maybe this isn’t for me”. It feels like a negative for very little positive. I doubt there are many people actually purchasing that bundle (though I’m not privy to the numbers, maybe $1000 worth of text games is something people buy on the regular).
Sepia and white are almost similar, would love for sepia to be more like color of a actual book page. Also would like a different dark theme than the current one, something like white on grey or black with a blue tint. Also why does CS not have custom themes like Twine games do, seems like that would solve the issue a lot
I always disable animations and pick the black background.
And I know we’ve been over the badging before, but the Pride logo looked so good I’d love it if the orange bar could go (at least as a choice) in favour of a black one with an orange logo on it. I just think it’d look really nice.
When doing release announcements can we please put the time it is expected to be released and the time zone. You have an international audience, at least make it easier for us to know when to check the website.
There really is no precise time the games are expected to be released, though. At best, it would be a range. Their position is that the release is “official” when the announcement is made (when the game is available for purchase on all platforms), which can be anywhere from less than an hour to several hours after it first becomes available somewhere. There’s one person uploading the game to various platforms one at a time, so when it becomes available depends on what platform you buy from. Announcing a precise time, even if they could, does nothing from their perspective - they don’t care whether you buy the game the second it goes live or a few hours later, and there’s that much more potential for complaints when unforeseen delays occur.
That said, if you really don’t want to wait, you can start checking the website between 1400 and 1500 UTC and it will usually go up sometime in that range.
Is UTC the timezone they use? Because at least then I know what DAY the release date is in. I’m in Australia, so 2pm UTC on the 24th is the 25th for me, so I know to just wait until the day after it is expected to be released.
And yeah, I get that it’s a niche complaint, but it’s still a small annoyance for me.
They don’t use UTC to my knowledge. CoG staff aren’t even all in the same time zone, but I’m pretty sure they’re all in the United States, so that’s their point of reference. I just used UTC because I figured it would be easier to translate that to whatever your time zone is than if I’d said “between 7:00 and 8:00 AM Mountain Time,” which is what time it is here when I buy my games.
I can understand why it’s annoying to have games constantly announced as “coming Thursday” when you can’t buy them until Friday. But at least you can go in with the knowledge that there’s no point checking the website until Friday morning (or the middle of the night, depending on where exactly you live and what hours you keep).
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