(Future Fragments) The big "responding to survey questions from the last survey" post!

Back in June we ran a survey asking you all a bunch of questions about the game, and we had a section where people could leave questions and concerns and critique about the game.

Over 844 people responded to that survey, so unfortunately I can't cover and reply to everything; instead, I'll just present answers to some commonly asked questions, and then specific answers to two other questions I found notable.

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Q: Will you put controller support in the game?

A: It's already in, actually! Most controllers work just by plugging them in, and the game will auto-map buttons to them. Some controllers are a bit finicky and so we'll be testing those out more closer to launch.

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Q: Speaking of controllers, why does Talia move to the right or left constantly when I start playing?

A: This is almost always because you have another peripheral plugged in like a joystick or second controller, or a controller in general while trying to play with the keyboard. We'll have an option in future builds to "block" external peripherals from interfering with your main controller/keyboard you're using.

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Q: Will you put zoom features in the game?

A: This is also in too; just press Up on the keyboard during sex scenes to zoom in! Some cutscenes don't have this in the Patreon demos, but all sex scenes will have zoom, including cutscenes, in the full game.

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Q: Is there a gallery planned?

A: For the full game, there will be a gallery; it'll be similar to Parasite in City's gallery where enemies will walk into a room to interact with Talia, but with the storyline being that Vie and Talia have made a deal with the enemies to trade her valuable info (on the WORM, the Wildwoods, Seeber, etc.) in return for Talia screwing them.

The gallery will get its own song and background, too!

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Q: Would you put in the ability to "corrupt" Talia?

A: This is something we won't be putting in, at least not in the traditional sense; your choices during the game will affect your "sexuality value" though which, as a result of her experiences, will lead Talia to have different viewpoints about things regarding sexual situations in the game, as well as changing the final ending of the game.

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Q: Boss ability swapping feels hard to do; are you going to change how we use those?

A: A good amount of the game's design was based somewhat on Megaman's handling of things; as a result of that, we decided early on to make the "ability swapping" something setup similar to most of those games where you would need to press a button to move "down the list" of abilities.

While people have suggested something like having a specific button to use each powerup, we're likely not going to do this for a few reasons;

• Having three buttons specifically just for abilities would be more buttons to remember to hit, and on a traditional controller, it would likely be an awkward configuration with one button not being able to be on the "face" of a traditional modern controller.
• There are few places in the game where you quickly need to swap between abilities, and they're almost all optional; in these scenarios, we'd like the extra skill challenge being present of having to use an ability, then quickly swap to the next one, and then use that one.
• This late in development, it would require a fairly solid rework of the "flow" of the game's  gameplay, to accomodate the fact that you could use abilities back to back very easily (as well as reworking graphical elements like the GUI).

Alternatively, people have suggested having one dedicated ability button, but having directions be linked to the button (for instance, forward + ability key = fire dash, or forward + up = electric jump).

The main issue with this is that in an action-based game, if you're already using the directional buttons to move around the environment and jumping rapidly around it, the potential to fumble and hit the ability button + right, for instance, and then fall off of a platform because you hit "right" before you hit the button, would be pretty frustrating to some players.

(Also, if fire dash is left/right and electric jump is up/down... what would the ice shot be? having it just be a button press by itself would lead to more fumbling of abilities too, so...)

This entire setup though is something we'll highly likely do in Faye's game, as it'll be more of a metroidvania, and less of a platformer as a result (so precision jumps won't be as big of an issue).

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Q: Are you planning on anymore games after Future Fragments?

A: Yeah, we've got Faye's game that'll start up a few months after FF is done; to read more about it, check out this link --->  https://pastebin.com/LGeMsN7z 

Given that the game will be on the same engine as Future Fragments, development time should be much, much faster on Faye's game; we don't forsee it taking any longer than 2 years at most.

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Q: Are you going to translate Future Fragments into other languages?

A: Yeah, once the game's out and we can afford it (as translations are roughly $25,000 per language), we first plan to get the game translated into Japanese, Chinese, and Russian, likely in that order.

After that, we plan to get it translated into other languages as money affords!

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Q: I'm afraid I won't be able to afford the game in my country; what kind of pricing are you going to do by region for the Steam release?

A: Steam has auto-set regional prices that you can adjust yourself, but honestly we're likely not going to touch them because they already end up setting the game to be around $20 in places like the UK and Japan, but in many other countries, it's priced much, much lower by comparison to each region's specific average yearly income.

Here's an image showing all the prices;

If any of these seem extremely high, let us know!

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And now, two specific questions;

#1 Q: Ever consider putting in an idle animation for Talia?

#1 A: We actually just added one in in the last build or so! Expect other little touches like that here or there, although they'll be low priority compared to actual gameplay content and such.

#2 Q: The "red fadeout" that enemies have looks lazy/amateurish compared to everything else in the game. Why not switch it out for something else?

#2 A: We might make it look a little fancier, but the actual visuals there are entirely intentional. If you've been following the game for a long while, you might remember that the visuals for when enemies are defeated has never changed ever since the very first build; this was a deliberate choice.

Why keep it that way for the most part, even if we were to polish it a bit?

Obviously, that's because <redacted major plot reasons>

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I realize this time around the questions weren't too specific, but that's mainly because we just didn't have too many specific questions to work from; next time around I'll word the questions better to get more specific questions from people!

We hope you're all looking forward to the demo on the 21st; we're all trying our best to make it the best we can before we move onto revamping the Fire Level!