Which of these is most important to you in a VN?

[ramifygames]

Hi, I'm Paul with Ramify Games. I created this poll on Google forms to get some feedback as I start planning my next visual novel. If you haven't played Drinks with Abbey, please skip the first question. Follow the link below to vote!

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIp ... w/viewform

[verysunshine]

I feel like these questions are too general. How do you define the length of a game or the meaningfulness of choices? What constitutes a romantic option?

With all of these things, quality is more important than quality. I would rather play a 10-minute game that is well written than a 10-hour game that is written poorly. I like having lots of choices that appear meaningful even if they don't change anything under the hood. I usually don't like it when a choice is extremely important, but the game doesn't inform you of this or only makes the consequences of a choice known hours after you made it. (For example, choosing to buy a red car automatically gets you a bad ending in a dating sim.) A game with one well-written romantic option is more interesting than a game with ten love interests that are all boring.

"Drinks with Abbey" has 92 reviews on Steam. Some of them are jokes, but others mention actual positives and negatives about the game. It can be confusing when the reviews conflict. (Matt Locke says your characters are charming, while Julius Cesar says they are flat.) Look at things that worked and things that you could improve on, and design your next game based on those.

[ramifygames]

Thanks for the feedback. The options are things outside of quality that typically can't all be done at the same time with modest resources. If I can get a decent number of responses, the idea is to use that to determine which things to spend more time on next time. For the sake of the question's purpose, just assume all are high quality. If you'd rather have a good, long story, but with 1 romantic interest (dateable person) and minimal branching, you'd pick the first one...and so on.

Some did have good feedback, but basically all of it, positive and negative, came from people who recommended the game. Generally, people who didn't recommend the game and weren't trolling either didn't understand what kind of game it was going into it (because they didn't read the description or they don't know what VNs are) or they misunderstood the dialogue because it uses a subtle form of humor. That last part is the biggest thing I learned and contributed to a lot of the conflicting reviews. A lot of people just don't know how to interpret it with text alone. With the style of humor I'm using, voice acting is a must, if not also other means of making it clear what the characters mean.