October Poll Results + News

Hey everyone!

I feel like it's been longer than usual since I've posted. This actually relates to the subject of last month's poll, which was something pretty substantive.

Basically I did some some exploring of the other adult games/visual novels in the scene and started feeling kind of weird about my own work. When I first started this journey, my main influences were Captured by Dark Elves and Femdom City both by Darktoz, which are great. Those games made my ideas seem possible, that I could do something like that. They also kind of spoiled me when looking for other games like them. Everything I could find online looked like some kind of dating sim with vanilla sex, though to be fair I didn't play any of them.

Well, a month or so ago I played one that I really enjoyed called Estate Dominate by Henissart. To be honest it has a lot of content I don't care much for but the key scenes it does have really blew me away. Especially how they integrate the writing, music, and images.

Just like Darktoz games inspired me to start my own, Estate Dominate made me wonder if I should start upping my game so to speak. And as I got into my workflow working on 1.1.7, I started to get a nagging feeling that the images just weren't good enough. It was so bad that I just couldn't include any at all, and just did writing + game logic + spritework, etc.

Out of curiosity, I got my old gaming computer out of the closet and downloaded Daz Studio to see if I was even capable of some nice renders with my posing skill + hardware. Well, the last few renders I uploaded are the result of this experimentation, and I think most of you enjoyed them.

So I thought I could probably switch over my graphics workflow from the posing software I was using to something really nice like Daz. With such an important change though, coupled with the fact that Harshville is facing a content backlog already (farm updates, marta arc), I thought that instead of a content poll I would ask the Creator tier about switching.

Well, the Creators voted 7 in favor, 7 against, and 1 undecided xD

I think what I'll do is that for this upcoming update I'll do really nice renders, and you guys can tell me if the difference is too jarring or not. Another example of this is when Salia from Fem U did some guest work on Harshville and added one of her characters to the massage parlor. The image quality is different, but nobody complained (maybe out of niceness?).

One thing I'll need to do is double the amount of RAM I'm using, but thanks to all of your generous support this is a non-issue (thank you!)

Anyway, the reason I'm not calling for a tie-breaker is that I think deep down this is something I want to do, but since there are a lot of you backing these projects I don't like making big decisions unilaterally like that. I think a 7-7 tie is ok. BUT if this ruins your experience just let me know and I'll rethink things.

So tl;dr

I did some R&D with other adult games, realized I could do much better than what I normally produce, and have been proving that to myself before committing. Now I'm going to optimize image quality going forward unless the game suffers from it.

Please let me know your thoughts, I can't read people's minds :D