DATA! So much data!

Some of it is even useful! The Next Fest Demo went live earlier this month, even though we technically missed the Next Fest, so our feedback Google form has been collecting data. First off, the feedback so far through the form, forums and personal messages has been very positive and that's been great to see. We are aware, of course, that only the people who liked the demo enough to finish it and fill in the form are going to be represented there, but other sources of feedback have also been very positive. Combined with the fact that this was literally the least sexy/exciting part of the game, being the build-up, we assume it's somewhat fair to extrapolate the received feedback to an overall player impression. So let's take a look first at some of the polls:



Let's start with the character polls. These were very surprising to us. We've done polls in the past to see which character people were most interested in and wanted to see more of. In those polls, Jitsuko was always last. Dead last. Not even in the running last. I genuinely mean: "She only got 2 votes and one of those was me" last. It's crazy to us that she's scoring so high on all 3 character polls.



Quick update: these screenshots were taken 3 days ago, after no new reviews came in for almost a week. After already writing this post, Jitsuko climbed back up to 51.6% on the Dominance Battles poll.

Next, we have interesting data on the Dominance Battle system:



The vast majority really liked our combat system and it's great to see all the effort that went into designing, testing and tweaking it paid off. This is also largely thanks to our own testers who helped give an outside perspective on what the balance was like for players who don't know the mechanics inside and out like we do. With their help, we reworded parts of the tutorial and added the Hints screen, which seems to have paid off when we look at the feedback we've received here.



Players also found the combat to be somewhat challenging, which is good. The Stage 1 battles featured in the demo are the easiest, but we expect players to also get better at understanding the mechanics and developing a strategy as they play more. Finding abilities and loadouts that work for you should offset increasing difficulty and the hope is players will continue to find the game challenging enough to be interesting without getting frustrated. A little behind the scenes lore here: in the first ever combat test build that never went beyond internal testing, we made the game so laughably easy it was basically impossible to lose. Unsurprisingly, this was no fun at all and led to a drastic rework of all combat abilities.

To round out the feedback polls, here's what people thought of the demo overall:



Based on that, I think you guys have sent a pretty clear signal that we're on the right track. Obviously, no game is ever gonna appeal to everybody, but we were expecting a wider spread of ratings going into this. Rather than smugly pat ourselves on the back, though, we also want to talk about some of the constructive feedback we got and what we're gonna be doing with those:

1. Combat UI Clarity. Several people reported they couldn't always clearly tell which abilities were available to them. This is more of an issue on some backgrounds than others, but obviously it shouldn't be a problem on any background. We don't want to use different UI colours for different backgrounds, since that might just make the UI more confusing rather than less, but we're gonna make the available abilities darker and see if maybe we can do something about a border or brighter text on those abilities. We'll test several variants internally. If we're unsure what we think looks best, we might put it to a vote down the line.

2. Character variants for the combat theme. We discussed this internally months ago and were like:"Eh, I don't think anybody will really care. Just one combat theme should be fine." We were wrong. So wrong. It's literally what everybody who filled in the open question about music asked for. We're probably gonna keep the current combat theme for the tutorial and final Hana fight, but make variants for Tomie, Jitsuko and Emily. Considering how much this has been asked for, future DLC characters will also have variants or possibly completely different combat themes.

3. Text speed options. I'm a fast reader and felt the dialogue during combat was a bit slow, but we didn't wanna assume most people read at my speed. Then we started getting feedback that some players also want the combat texts sped up. Sounds good, until you factor in the other players who say the combat and tutorial texts went by too quickly to process fully. Not gonna lie, this one's on us. Our team consists of people who technically speak English as a second language, but fluently and also we know the texts. Our Spanish tester was the first to point out the tutorial was impossible to follow for someone who has to translate the text in their head to understand it. So we're gonna implement a text speed option using the current text speed as the baseline. Bookworms like me who breeze through texts will be able to speed them up, whereas players who might need a little more time will be able to slow them down.

We'll continue to monitor the feedback form. If anything changes drastically, we might mention it next month, but for now we'll just continue cracking the whip on the Shizuru dlc. Except some Shizuru goodness in next month's update.