I think I need to do a better job of managing expectations. I'll probably start by, in my next marketing push, no longer referring to TPE as "an RPG Maker H-Game".
When people hear "RPG Maker", they bring with them a whole set of expectations about what the game will be. The game I'm in the process of making is not and will not be a standard JRPG, and when people see these incongruencies, they are apt to interpret them as faults. For instance, people expect most content in a standard RPGM game to consist of either a) talking or b) turn-based combat. Anything else is thought of as a "minigame", and thus largely irrelevant to the game as a whole. In Metal Gear Solid, for instance, sneaking isn't "a minigame", it's a
part of the game. Another expectation is the turn-based combat. When (if?) I get the game to where I want it, the combat will still be turn-based, but will be much more strategic, involving tanking, doing burst dps at specific times, etc. This is not what people generally expect out of RPG Maker. And in 0.3, you'll see the first real boss fight, which will involve things like out-of-combat movement and actions. Is it a "minigame"? I personally don't think that's a relevant distinction in the game I'm making. Some people may not like that, and that's cool. I'd wait for 0.3's boss fight to see if you want to abandon ship, though.
There's also the thing about managing difficulty expectations. People expect an H-game to be easy, with the non-porn stuff serving mostly as a Skinner box (in the case of time management games), or as a way to give a little bit of context to the porn, and thus increase its fappability. While I will be implementing easy modes in 0.3, I intend for normal mode content to be a bit challenging, and a small portion of the porn content will be gated with normal modes. Once again, this is not typical among H-games, and if people aren't expecting it, they're likely to see it as a fault. I'm not really sure how to communicate to players beforehand that they're not going to be able to faceroll their way to the bewbs, but I'll be thinking about it.
I guess this is a long way of saying that I won't be implementing any 'skip' buttons.
The chicken minigame was fun, because it was kinda silly. It's not going to be fun having to play it again for the 3rd time in upcoming versions where saves don't transfer.
I'll try to keep more of an eye out for save compatibility.
This is one of the funniest RPGs I've played in a long time. I was surprised and kind of sad to see the first page of this thread filled with negative feedback about the minigames. They hardly took me any time at all to get past, but I suppose the complaints are still valid.
My biggest gripe is probably the sparsity of H content, but I guess Proxxie isn't setting out to make a fap-and-forget title. I just wish the scenes would be longer or more frequent.
Still, the demo was very enjoyable and I'm really looking forward to seeing more of this game.
Thanks!
For my first release, it was hard not to take what little criticism I saw personally, but I'm becoming pretty inured to it now. I have a vision I want to implement, and criticisms often help me figure out which things didn't work as intended, or which things need tweaking to better implement it. Other criticisms deal with core parts of my vision for the game, and then I simply have to shrug.
On the whole, the criticisms are pretty useful.