Survey results 2023 (so far)

Hey everyone, as mentioned in the previous devlog, here's some insight to the survey you took part in! This covers just a part of the results, since the poll is still ongoing (2.250+ participants as of today) and many questions also include free-form responses. We need some time to read through thousands of individual sentences and consolidate them. ;)

The first and likely the one you're most interest is about your favorite girl(s). Shani and Ain have in the past frequently switched places, although I am never sure if it's because of her looks or... other features. Might be an interesting idea for the next poll.. Character or looks?

Zahra comes in with a solid third place and I suppose Queen Merneith got much more sympathy because she got more approachable recently - her story is not over yet, there will be more opportunities to learn about her past, and/or corrupt her.

Worth mentioning is that some characters that many of you like have not been that popular before the latest updates - like Queen Merneith - and some characters that you might learn to like a lot have yet lots of content to come for them, like Ivy's friend, or characters that haven't even been introduced yet! However, if this poll shows one thing, is that the content for these girls is well received - and that makes me excited to show you what's in store for them.

Now, let's look at the top 5 characters you would like to see more content of. Queen Merneith and Ivy have stopped with a decent cliffhanger, and I will confirm we won't have to wait much longer for the next bit of Ivy's content.

Surprisingly Kitty has made it to 5th place. Why does she act -or rather does not act- the way she does?

Now onto a few gameplay-specific questions, and some ideas of how to tackle potential issues. First one, important choices.

What you said about the important choices aligns with what we already suspected a bit when playing through the game for some testing before. We have many choices in the game, but not all are as equally impactful. And some might feel a bit cryptic or obscure or mislead the player.

Regarding this, we are toying with a few ideas and potential solutions, like marking choices that have a big impact differently so they stand out, without changing all of them or removing part of the freedom a player has. We want to avoid making the players feel like they're railroaded, but also make it clear that a certain choice has a significant impact (missing out on an entire faction for instance). We will find a decent solution eventually.

Next one, the amount of markers on the buttons. You guys seem to be mostly happy about the way we mark nearly everything (bar the repeatable content), although a decent portion of the playerbase would like even more of them.

Also, a small percentage of people are finding the amount overwhelming at times and this is something we can definitely understand, especially in certain parts of the game, where the entire household menu lights up at the same time. This one is a bit tricky, as we want the players to always have an idea of where to go next, but not spam them with notifications.

Is the end-of-content marker visible enough? Apparently not good enough, since one third of you say that they didn't know it exists, or that it doesn't help you in the way it should. So we will try to improve it, either by making it available not only at home but everywhere, or making it more visible.

The reason why we don't want a forced end-of-content-screen is because it would be annoying to see it after every update, because you'd think a new scene is coming when there isn't.

Also, did you know there are randomized end screens? Every time you click on them and don't scroll back, you get another one, including a fitting soundtrack. And maybe you can find some of last years' special, not in-game renders in there, like Raider Queen Ain. :o

Last but not least, the question about whether it is clear if a room has no more content or if you just need to sleep. This one is an issue with the majority of players, and honestly a result we were kind of expecting. It is something that was made very early in the game (0.04 or so) and was not given the proper attention since then.

We are also having ideas on how to improve this, either by using a different icon for when a player needs to simply go to bed/progress a day vs. no content at all.

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That would be it for now, thank you again for participating. This one was more on the technical front, but it's important to help us make the game more enjoyable to play, after all renders aren't everything if the gameplay is annoying.

The poll is going to last until the end of the year, so there might be some developments in some polls still. 🤟