Rise of Jessica

Hi all, and thank you for joining me for today's public update!

Last week, a record 164 of you were kind enough to give your verdict and feedback on Best Frenemies. Today I'll talk about the results of that poll and reflect a little.

If you're just here for the status update, we are a couple of days away from the big reveal of the headline quest of 0.11, so that will be in next week's post. I have done a little remastering with my downtime and started writing some sexy new events and scenes. Soon, the school council will vote on what else they'd like to see in 0.11, including which of the characters' ongoing progressions will receive attention and where my efforts will be focused in delivering new side content.

So, onto the dissection!

Nearly a third of you that voted had no notes. This is a big vote of confidence and higher than previous such polls, so I'm very pleased with that. I'm happy you're happy!

The traditional temperature-check on the tone yielded broadly similar results to previous polls, with a small minority thinking I went too far, about 30% happy and most thinking I should have been a much bigger prick to my unfortunate characters. These are numbers I'm broadly happy with as while I'd love to be able to move some of that bottom box to the middle, it also risks filling up the top a bit more. I offset the isolation, terror and hopelessness of the girls' situation with humour, and hopefully that worked.

I'm actually a bit glad that this didn't go over all that well as it definitely won't be happening again. 60% of respondents thought the sequence in the slaver base was too long, though some qualitative feedback suggested that a save point midway through would have helped, as the decision was coming up. This is easy and will be in the next update. However, given that this mega-scene added so much to the development time and wasn't that well received gives me something to think about in some future quests that contain lengthy sections in which Missy is at someone's mercy.

Broadly good numbers here with well over 3/4 pleased. Many of those that weren't happy did offer qualitative feedback on why and while I'm grateful for that, I am leaning towards this being a case of not being able to please all the people all the time. Each of you will have had an idea of where you wanted Jess's story to go in your minds and this will have been closer for some than others. To the doubters, I should remind you that this isn't the end for Jessica, and she'll be getting new scenes and content more or less constantly. She is, after all, one of the most popular characters in the game with only Poppy running her close. We're just moving out of the "she's your bully" phase and into the "she's your girlfriend as well as your bully" phase ^^

I fucked up here. I can't believe I forgot to include one of the options, and once I had, it's not possible to edit the poll options. I can however extrapolate what the numbers who would have voted for the missing Romance option might have been. 10 votes were missing from this section, though that number may be a little higher as a few double voted, checking both the willing slave and defeat mode boxes, so instead a better indication may be the Discord snap poll that asked the same question and revealed 18% did romance. Since the rest of the numbers are more or less bang in line with that, we can assume that about 30 people would have voted for Romance.

I'm actually a little surprised more people weren't playing Defeat Mode, but there's also a lot of willing subs out there, and as always, between them, they were by far the most popular choices.

I'm not really sure what information I hoped to gain by asking this question, but it was interesting to see where people's minds were with it. If anyone wants to provide additional feedback on what kind of other choices you'd have liked to see, the comments section is below. It'd just be interesting to know.

Thank you to everyone that provided feedback, and I hope you enjoyed Jessica's relationship quest!

Trinian