After sharing my first WIP a few days ago for Exit Through the Gift Shop, I have felt good about learning this system (how to use Choicescript, ChoiceScipt IDE, & cogdemos.ink) and now deep into my second chapter. For research I am pouring through three 1930s museum visitor guides to both get ideas and get the details right (super fun).
I need to figure out when a chapter is overstuffed, but I figured write the chapter first then figure it out afterwards. I am also confused about how many characters I can have in my title.
Question for the authors here that’s come up due to a conversation with a friend. When considering the more negative reviews you’ve gotten, do you think that any could have been prevented by readers/players reading the demo and description first? Is it common for players to just not know what to expect and being surprised for the worse?
True! I think this being a relatively niche space does play a huge factor in that and it’s true that no matter how well you market something there will be limitations. Just always surprises me when I see some Steam reviews and wonder if people did any reading at all before buying because it would’ve saved them the money and time and saved the author an undue review in my opinion.
Maybe, but I’ve seen negative reviews with messages like things like “When is X different game coming out”, “Why are you working on Y instead of X”, “Not as good as X”. Etc. Not gonna change those. Fact is, some people are always going to vote down games they don’t want anyway thinking it’ll make the “company” produce less of them. (Not everyone is on the forums and knows the exact situation with HG or cares if they do.)
Big complaint is often mismatch of expectations. They might have liked the demo, but found the game shorter than they expected, romance not as good, game went in a different direction etc etc etc all of which again is not going to be solved by if they read or didn’t read the demo.
Regardless, even if some complaints are related to anyone not reading the description, it doesn’t matter as there’s nothing you can do about it either way.
Even though I’ve written a disclaimer about Falrika the Alchemist having more text and less choices, it seems some people still didn’t get the memo. Maybe they need to read more Japanese-made visual novels to get a feel of my inspiration and writing style.
As someone who 1) reads a lot of visual novels and 2) plays Atelier games, I would say this. I got the memo and I played the demo portion of your game, but I think choicescript just isn’t designed for effective visual novel storytelling.
Plus, visual novels use a combination of visual and sound effects to entertain readers, but it is technologically harder to put this sort of razzle-dazzle in a choicescript game, so we play to the strengths of the engine by having more choices.
Anyway, the choicescript engine is good at what it does. Maybe try out a couple more choicescript games to get a sense of other writing styles?
I am a firm believer of the story having to speak for itself (as in, not having to read materials not in the story to understand what’s going on and what’s the setting and the like), so I prefer to not read blurbs unless I’m unsure of the genre, but that’s why demos exist.
Again, from my experience, most demos do not allow the story to speak for itself, unless they are specifically made demos to highlight mechanics, narrative and specific features.
Usually, using the first three chapters of a game’s narrative is a hit or miss depending on what exactly is in those three first chapters.
My belief on this topic is that an adaptive process can be used to make a CS vn project both viable and successful.
Edit:
Yes; I hope that by giving it until January 2025 to take root, the list will blossom and grow into the tool I think it can be.
Can I ask how? (Genuine question!) I mean yeah with modding to an extent you can (I mean with my little ectocomp game I can think of ways to simulate very basically a bit of a VN type narrative with images, gifs, background music, customising the colour themes etc) but it’s still trying to remake something that other dedicated VN programs already do so much better (and published HG games can’t have their base scripts fiddled about with so you are a bit hamstrung that way by how much you can play with the settings and build scripts.)
Now. I will be completely sincere. There are a lot of REALLY BAD presented demos and merchandise in general here. We all should be sincere. And the number of demos that end in a place that will make ANYONE believe that would go further in a line and then people buy it and that lines are not closed and the demo is basically the meat of game and the rest is a teaser of the next volume.
Then games are highlight at X genre and you play and is clearly Y.
Yes, many on reviews don’t read. But be all honest with the elephant on the room. Many times writers don’t do anything for clarify things and sell their game like what The game really is almost hiding that the game is one of the series.
Sure … Patchwerks is my testbed project for my theory.
The term “Visual Novel” has two main components, and most efforts I have seen to date emphasis the visual aspects.
By emphasizing the “novel” aspects of the genre, I feel you play into CS strengths instead of its weaknesses.
One example is using the episodic nature of most vn series. Most vn series are 3-6 stand-alone games with word counts often between 20,000 to 150,000 words. Here is an excerpt from the game description of a vn I was last playing:
This company made 3 complete games to form an entire arc.
My adaptation for Patchwerks means I will be releasing in 5 planned installments a pentalogy that forms a whole (Think of JimD’s Zombie Exodus: Safe Haven title).
My releases will emphasize the different romance options, with the 2nd-4th installments each having two of the six romance options available in the “routes” released.
It is my plan to allow the customer/reader the flexibility to purchase and play any and/all of the 2-4 romance routes and skip those they may not be interested in. (This is me trying to use the strengths of the CS engine)
Only the 1st and 5th installments will be “shared” and those along with one of the other installments will be required to complete the entire arc.
There are many other things, both big and small, that I am doing to adapt and overcome and (hopefully) launch a successful cross-over product.
One of my favourite exercises is diving into a game without any info and watching how long it takes for the game to tell me what kind of technology level we are in.
I have seen negative reviews for CoG games that were basically “this game is just text, it has no graphics”, so some of them could have been prevented by even just looking at the Steam screenshot carousel, let alone playing the actual demo.
Thank you. Yes, I saw that. So when I see games with much longer titles, like at COGDemos, should that just signal to me those are either placeholders are not ones destined for Google and Apple?
Exactly. Finding the real title is a very important part of selling and marketing. So, many wait until the product is done to finding out what title goes well with their audience. Some even do polls to choose the final one.
You could add an input with the label “Please type what the previous warning stated here”, with copy-paste disabled and a blink tag on, and it’d still not help everyone.
I wonder what skywriting costs these days…
Probably best to focus on a work’s strengths for the literate part of the audience, instead of the complainy bunch, though.
Edit: I like making typos when talking about other people’s literacy. My middle name is Karma.
