​Launch Retrospective & Devlog #1

It's been a week since I've launched Stakes so I think this is a good time to go over some of the stats of the release weeks and my findings about them. My goal here is to be transparent and I feel like I it's good practice to keep you all up to date with the basic behind the scenes stuff. First things first I should say that I botched the release in several ways. 

My original plan was to release the game as in synch as possible with F95zone, Patreon and SubscribeStar. It quickly became apparent that this was going to be quite impossible since to verify my account with SubscribeStar and Patreon I'd have to release it first so they could check that I was actually creating something and that it would comply with their guidelines. Okay, no biggy I thought, I'll just do a soft launch on Itch, link the project to my Patreon and SubscribeStar to verify those accounts and then get the game indexed on Itch and post it on F95zone. I'd already created accounts on everything, set up the initial release pages as drafts and made sure my F95zone account had the three posts necessary to be able to post a thread in the Game Requests section. And then, after uploading the latest PC and Mac version game files to Itch.io I accidentally released the game and apparently it ​did ​get indexed automatically (something I mistakenly thought would have to happen seperately). I only found out I had released the game proper after a couple of hours while I was going over the draft of the F95zone thread I was going to make that my game popped up in latest updates! I go over to my Itch.io page and yep, it's been released alright.

Now in retrospect I don't think the simultaneous release plan was ever going to go swimmingly and I now very much doubt it was going to impact overall numbers a significant amount, what I did completely screw up however was the release of the android version. The Android release was honestly a complete afterthought in the first place. I'm a PC gamer through and through and I honestly don't play any games on my phone whatsoever nor do I own a tablet. I'm honestly quite a bit behind when it comes to all that stuff. When I uploaded the Android version to the Itch page through the Ren'py launcher I thought I put it on private but apparently it got released along with the updated versions of the PC and Mac builds. Untested. Yeah, I'll come back to this mistake after going over the numbers so I can put it in perspective.

​Okay so these are some of the stats I get to see from Itch.io It also gives me some seperate numbers in regards to which game version (PC/Linux, Mac or Android) was downloaded what amount of times: 227 downloads for the PC/Linux version, 25 downloads for the Mac version, 350 downloads for the Android version, and 14 downloads for the Windows/Linux update patch. I'd say about half of the total downloads were made within the first two days. That's the numbers for Itch.io, I also have some rough estimates in download numbers from F95zone (I say rough because I only have the numbers of about half of the mirrors since Mega for example doesn't track how many times something has been downloaded). The numbers I do have are a total of 1273 downloads for the PC/Linux version, 29 for the Mac version, 308 for the Android version and 19 for the update patch. That makes a total of 1629 downloads, which with the other mirrors taken into account I'll make a conservative estimate of between 1800 and 2000 downloads in total. 

So the good news if we take into account both Itch.io and F95zone: holy shit my game was maybe downloaded 2500 times! That is way more than I expected! Bad news: the Android version was unplayable until I was alerted it was broken on wednesday. (Thank you Fap_Master_69 and betaboy_69. A sentence I truly in my wildest dreams would've never imagined ever typing.) That means that more than half of those Android downloads were instances where I absolutely disappointed those people. For my sanity I must assume that people must've thought their download failed and perhaps they attempted to download the game again, meaning that I disappointed fewer people BUT that also means that I've wasted even more of those people's time! And then I must assume that of the Android users that maybe tried this game again after the Android rebuild, there will be people who downloaded it before I fixed the font size! That means yes, the game was technically playable but they'd likely need a damned magnifying glass to play it! (Thank you Pgsurprise who pointed out the necessity of a text size slider). So all in all I just have two things to say to Android users: I'm sorry. I'll do better in future. Due to the borked launch I don't have an exact estimate how many of you there are but hey, what I do know is that basically nobody plays games on a Mac​. (Jokes, sorry 54 Mac downloads but I have no idea if your version works or not since I can't test it, but since nobody let me know I assume it does.).

Now about the money. Yes, only a single person donated on Itch. No, I'm not too disappointed by that. If the main aim of this release was to make cash then I wouldn't have released it for free! I'm immensely grateful to the person that did, I don't know if you played it and then donated afterwards or if you're just that nice of a person that you donated the suggested amount not even knowing if the game was any good. I sincerely hope though that you aren't one of the people I disappointed with the Android release. In regards to support on Patreon and SubscribeStar it follows the same trend with one paying member on each, which I'm also absolutely grateful for that there are even people out there who want to support me financially! I promise to do my utmost to deliver with every subsequent release of the game. Also shout-out to the 51 Itch users that put this game in a collection, the 17 followers on Itch, the 10 free Patreon members, and everyone who left a review or commented on Itch or on F95zone.

​TLDR:
- Botched the Android release, sorry
- Holy shit 2500 downloads?! (itch + F95zone)
- Thank you!

​Development Log #1
So first two days of release week was spent mostly on making the first two fixes and obsessively refreshing every possible online page related to the game (yeah, the adrenaline rush was a bit larger than I'd anticipated). When that initial hype died down I got back to work and properly scripted out the dialogue for the first four 'scenes' of Episode 2. The way I divided up scenes in Episode 1 was mostly location-based (which meant that the two Litmus wrestling matches and stake claiming segments were technically all one long scene) but now I might tweak that slightly with the first scene of Episode 1 shifting between two locations and not taking up that much time. I also created five character models for new characters that will appear in the next episode, one of which will get a lewd scene. Lastly I created 50 renders for the first scene of Episode 2, not a huge amount but it's a good start. 

My goal for next week is to finish up the first scene, both creating the images and coding the scene into the game, and start work on scenes two and three. If development goes smoothly I plan to release the first preview version of Episode 2 (hopefully consisting of around four scenes) in the first week of August for all Enhancement Talent-tier Patrons/Subscribers and above.