Thanks everyone for the comments! I’m still working on the update as much as I can.
I hope it’s okay that I post this. I’m not intending to start any argument and I’m not angry at anyone in particular. But I’m a bit tired, disheartened and don’t want to tiptoe around this any longer.
I’ve tried to keep myself from addressing this too much thus far, but it’s getting pretty tiring constantly being compared to Wayhaven as if I tried to copy it, so here I’m going to list the reasons why it might seem similar:
Before I discovered CoG I was obsessed with Visual Novels: interactive stories that usually comes along with along 2-5 or more love interests, whom you can choose to spend time with and develop romance with while following a story (or you go onto different routes, but that’s not necessarily something I’m as big a fan of as following an overarching plot and having romance as an addition, so to speak).
I originally always wanted to make TSS a visual novel, but I can’t draw and I at the time had no income to pay someone to do the art. So I pushed up the dream of making a VN for a long time.
As I played visual novels a lot, I also found the visual novels that the author of Wayhaven had made, and one of them I really enjoyed. I found Choice of Games because she had announced somewhere that she was making a text-based interactive fiction, and TWC was the first one I read before starting with TSS (EDIT: I completely forgot this at the time I wrote this response, but the first one I read was actually “Affairs of the Court”. That was a very long time ago, and since it didn’t really grip me and I didn’t try out anything else from CoG after that experience, I completely forgot that this game was from the same company. Just thought I’d mention that!). So I was under the impression that CoG was much like Visual Novels in text form, and that’s also how I modeled TSS. After reading more titles (after already having started the story), I realized this wasn’t the case but I didn’t think mine would be the only one modeled that way apart from TWC, which apparantly is the case?
As for the characters: perhaps there are a few similarities on surface level, but that’s because they’re common tropes. A cold and stern one, a happy one etc. Maybe not in CoG, but it definitely is in the Visual Novel world, so I didn’t think much of it or that it would be unusual.
And as for the supernatural element - even though the story, planning and writing on TSS is rushed (for reasons I’ve probably stated earlier), I’ve still had the idea for a long time of another world with shadows. I only added the love interests because I wanted to write romance and because I thought CoG books were expected to have them, like Visual Novels are. I don’t think TWC has that, so I’m not sure about that comparison, but if you’re writing about another world with a different kind of people, it’d be strange not to make the love interests supernaturals, imo.
I don’t know if I covered everything that’s been said. I do understand the comparisons but had I known that these things that I mentioned above only applied to Wayhaven there’s no way I’d have written TSS in this way. Unlike a lot of authors I was never a lurker here before publishing my work so I didn’t know how a lot of them were written, and now I regret it because it sucks being compared so much to someone else in such a negative manner.
Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say.
EDIT: I’ll come back to answer some questions later! I just needed to get this out and now I’m taking a step back for a bit. Again, thank you everyone for feedback 
