Champion Sick

Hi guys, I’ll update you on the situation. This post will be put everywhere.

I’m going to make a speech as a person and not as a developer, I might be unprofessional or something like that.

Yesterday I said that for now, I had to stop 0.30, this is because today I find myself hospitalized.

I’d rather avoid the details, I had my PC brought so I can write this stuff; I don’t like to write from the smartphone version of Discord or any other forum.

I’m warning you to understand why I can’t release new content for the moment, and it seems to be correct as a developer to tell you this rather than being silent.

Since we’re here, I’d like to take an outside look at the game and the entire ecosystem around it.

What I’m going to say may sound stupid, maybe also because I have a high fever and my sense of reasoning is not the best, I might as well get rid of the whole message when I can better connect the synapses.

In what condition is Champion? Decent, not the best, not the worst.

Why do I think this way? I think the interest in the game is fading. Maybe it’s caused by me, maybe it’s caused by the updates, or maybe it’s caused by the surrounding ecosystem.

The game has been around for 6 months, but there seems to be something that I don’t understand at the moment, that doesn’t allow it to spread or to be talked about.

For example, there are forums where Champion’s discussions are around 50/60 pages, while other younger games there are over 200 pages. Same for Discord, where the most active channel is the meme channel. I know you could say that’s normal, but finding me 500 messages and even more of all the servers, then there’s something wrong with ours.

So what did I do wrong? Maybe, the game was in this situation from the beginning, with the old team leaving the project or the fact that the game has always been attacked by toxic fandom or other elements.

Maybe, the solution would have been to change the name of the team and the game, to avoid problems.

As for these “attacks”, from now on, I will solve the problem in two ways: the first will be to ignore idiotic stuff, the second will be to go to the source of the problem.

You could say, “There’s no point in complaining if you want to make the game grow, make it speak for you.

This is correct, but the problem is when even you cannot do it because of people’s stubbornness.

Many times I have found people who avoided the game for all sorts of reasons and then after trying it they realized that it was good, but at the moment there are few, but I can imagine that there are many others.

You could say: “do more.”

I’ve been doing it for a while now, I stopped following the goals I had set on Patreon and started putting in content that wasn’t supposed to be there, like or custom animation and other stuff. And let’s not even talk about the fact that scenes are not just "fast -> fast! -> finish!" , but they are sequences of 10/15/20 videos, it’s already a lot of work, despite the resources I have.

Or: “You have to create interest”.

There are a lot of things you could discuss, I know of people who talk about dead characters or something like that every week. Also because I read things like: “Finally a nice update after 10 versions of useless plot” .....okay?

Also, the lack of review or feedback is a problem, I can’t understand what I need to do to improve further, and I’m not talking about the simple “the game is bad because I can’t repeat event x or y”.

I’ve always asked what was missing from the game to improve on quality, what the most famous games have, but I was never told what it was.

That’s why I made a decision: I decided that I will play every single “famous” game in existence (only KoiStyle) to finally understand what’s missing in the game, and once I’m done I’ll draw my conclusions. Some have been tried, some have not.

If I don’t understand anything, I think I’ll go crazy.

To this, I also add a list of the improvements already taken into consideration to improve the game:

improved navigation is more open

better dialogues with more interactions able to earn you points, like a dating sim.

additional events to better explain what happens and the relationships of the characters.

hint improved that they tell you exactly what to do and where to go.

collectibles and secrets scattered around the world.

As for the version that was supposed to come out today, I decided to release a simple bugfix with some additions, such as the possibility to review all the old events, although I don’t see much use for it since the gallery exists.

Many polls will be made to better understand what to fix, mainly on the Discord server.

Also coming soon there’s a wallpaper for Halloween, another one and the special Halloween event.

Having said that I hope I haven’t offended anyone and you have understood the situation of my poor brain.

I would like to thank everyone who supports me and I hope I can understand something more from all this. I look forward to your thoughts on this.