Hello, everyone! We had a pretty great launch this past weekend on itch.io, and I want to thank each and every one of you who decided to drop by the page to check it out! Even if you decided it wasn't for you, I appreciate you giving me that chance. 

In this first public build since returning Four-Letter Word to active development, I implemented a player survey to get some generalized feedback. In many ways, the experiment was very successful and probably got more respondents than I might have heard from otherwise. However, in some other ways, it was a little lacking. This was mostly due to some poor execution on my part. When setting up the survey, I tried to strike a good balance between getting targeted, usable feedback and going too granular and having a billion different questions to answer. Unfortunately, I didn't do a great job of it in some areas, and so some of the responses I received are a little too vague. For instance, when people selected "Pacing" as an area that needs improvement, that left me unsure whether that meant the pacing was too fast, too slow, or just uneven in parts. I also thought that the breadth of topics was broad enough to encompass every bit of the user experience, but I still got some very confusing results that are difficult to parse, such as one respondent who rated all characters but one 5/5, (the one outlier was 3/5) and said that all of the art and audio was great as it was, and yet when asked about their overall experience with Four-Letter Word, they chose the "Satisfactory, but needs major improvements in many areas" option. So while there is a lot of great data collated in the survey as of now, I am going to have to look into improving it in the future to eliminate some of the confusion.

This also leads me to another point; while it's been very nice to hear from more people than I used to about what did and didn't work for them, I do miss having a conversation about it. In the past, when I released new public builds, I would get more long-form feedback that gave me a much clearer picture of that person's thoughts, and the ability to have some back-and-forth discussion about it to clarify points was invaluable. The survey's strength, meanwhile, lies in showing me the broad strokes of what's been successful or not and which areas are in need of the most work in terms of raw numbers. Ideally, I would like to have both. Some of the survey respondents did go the extra mile to write their opinions in their own words, which is awesome and greatly appreciated, but even in those situations, not being able to have a discussion about them is fairly limiting for me. I don't want to ask too much of your time, as I know you've all got plenty of other things to juggle in your lives that are much higher priorities, but if you're able to make the time to write to me somewhere where both you and I have the capacity to respond to each other, that would make my day! (The comments sections of either the public release devlogs on itch.io or the submission file on FurAffinity would be ideal.)

In the meantime, I would like to address some of the individualized criticisms and suggestions I've already received through the survey that I feel warrant some attention. In most cases, this is either because I don't fully grasp what is being said or it's something I'm unable to deliver on, but want to offer an explanation as to why so it doesn't seem as though I'm simply ignoring the feedback. If the criticism was clear and understandable, I usually won't go out of my way to comment on it because there isn't really much else to say other than I've heard it and it's something I will try to work on in the future.

"If you are going for a "messy" look, if i could name it that way, then you are doing dreat job. Otherwise I would recommend to maybe work with someone else(if you are already not) and ask them what they think about it. I can just imagine how hard it is to do a game by yourself, so tell your ideas to someone you trust and get from them their honest opinion."

So there's two parts to this comment I want to talk about. The first, if I understand it correctly, lines up with the most common complaint I've received about the art in Four-Letter Word; the character sprites need more refinement. In the intervening years between when I stopped development and picked it up again, Ren'Py introduced a feature that allows for composite images. I am planning on converting characters on a one-by-one basis into these composite images, and while doing so, I will take the opportunity to touch them up and make them more presentable. Hopefully you'll all be happy with results, but it will be a long process.

The second part of this comment is the reason why I wanted to tackle this one first, as it pertains to the reasons for my other responses as well. Yes, Four-Letter Word is a one-man show, and yes it is difficult and very time-consuming, but that also isn't going to change. This devlog is already running quite long, so I don't want to bog it down with an overlong explanation as to why, so if you are interested in hearing more about this, let me know and I can do another devlog summing up the pros and cons of going solo and why I won't ever hire another person to work on this specific project (though I am open to the idea of collaborating in the future on other endeavors.) For now, just know that even if I wanted to, I simply can't afford to pay anyone else to work with me at this point in time.

"I would recommend you to res it up to 1080x720 so more details and UI quality improvements can happen and so do the sprites, I think the sprites could go for a soft rework, that is, doing the sprites again with your current style so the game doesn't become an amalgamation of different sprites."

This was actually a concern of mine when I picked up development again. While newer VNs are made in widescreen formats, back when Four-Letter Word was first created, 4:3 800x600 was pretty standard for Ren'Py VNs (you can see this in some other VNs that existed around the same time, like Echo, Blackgate and Repeat.) I was worried that modern audiences might not accept a low resolution VN anymore, but uprezzing the game would not be a simple task. This is because Four-Letter Word currently has 400 art assets between its backgrounds, images, and UI folders, and all of them would have to be overhauled to some degree. Aside from the backgrounds, every image was drawn to size, which means to match a higher resolution, character sprites would have to be blown up and then painted over, and UI elements would have to be redone entirely from scratch. Backgrounds, while originally drawn larger, would not be the right dimensions and would have to be extended and blended extensively to make sure the additions were seamless. Since, like I mentioned before, I am a one-man development team, this would be a long process. I estimated the whole process would take a few months and posed the question to my patrons on Patreon. Since they would essentially be paying for several builds with no new story content, I wanted to know whether they thought putting development on hold to uprez the VN is something they thought would be worthwhile. The majority voted against it, and when I asked the opinions of other VN creators on the FVN Discord, the consensus was that it simply wasn't worth it. That said, as I mentioned earlier, I am planning on converting sprites to composite images and giving them a makeover over time, which is something I can do concurrently with story updates, so there will be improvement on that end, at least.

"It's kinda pedantic, but the songs sound very much like it was played through a MIDI player. It could be more authentic with either better VST instrumentation or live instruments."

I don't believe it's pedantic at all, and believe me, if it were within my means to, I would love to have much higher fidelity sounds to work with. You're absolutely right that my VST library is vastly out of date, and the only somewhat modern additions to it are all freeware, and thus don't sound as good as they could. Like before, this all comes down to cost for me. I simply can't afford to get better plugins, and definitely can't afford live recordings. If you or anyone else does have recommendations for some free VSTs that are big improvements over my current batch, I would be happy to replace them, though!

There are some other responses I received that I would like more clarification on, but without a means to have a discussion with any of the respondents, it's a bit impractical to do so, so I would like to end by encouraging you to open a dialogue with me if you have any specific concerns you'd like to bring up. Don't worry, I won't bite your heads off or anything like that! I understand that all of these criticisms and suggestions come from a place of caring about the project and wanting to see it be successful, and I feel very fortunate to be able to create something that matters enough for people to care. Thank you for your time!