May 25 Update

It'd be difficult to overemphasize how much more on top of work I'm feeling compared to two weeks ago! Lots of things have fallen in order and I no longer feel like my vacation will handicap the entire year.

My first priority remains TLS. This postgame is a really heavy lift... and I'm getting a bit nostalgic because this is the last heavy lift. There will be more work afterward, but that's polishing and revision and art direction. This current period is the last multi-month stretch where I'm dedicating the vast majority of my creative energy to the world and characters of TLS.

There will be a lot of positive posts in the future, and celebrations of the game, but I'm afraid we have to talk about a sad thing first:

As you can see, TLS has lost it's "Overwhelmingly Positive" rating on Steam. T-T I knew this was inevitable, as the rating has been dropping since release; because long term fans can't review more than once, catching stray negative reviews keep accumulating regardless. To maintain 95% positive, the game needs to get 20 reviews for every negative one, which is tricky.

Now, if you look at the negative reviews you see some people who just dislike the game, that happens. But on Steam you also get things like this:

TLS has a lot of Russian fans, but any game on Steam has to deal with these:

And then there's this gentleman who is deeply concerned about everyone's psychological health:

Every time the game gets one of these, TLS needs to find 20 new people who love the game just to balance it out. Of course, it's amazing that my little project has been able to keep that up for this long, but I think there would be concrete benefits to holding a little longer.

I said that losing the Overwhelmingly Positive rating was probably inevitable, but I've hoped to maintain it until the big 1.0.0 release, because that's the game's last boost on Steam, when many new players may pick it up. Right now it is right on the edge between 94% and 95%.

The majority of people here have probably already reviewed, but I'm asking now: if you have a viable account you're willing to review NSFW games with, please consider leaving one now!