Dev Log #27 | Feedback and how it changed for me.

It's another Monday but this time I'm not writing an Update post, as pretty much all I'm doing is waiting for Steam to approve the final build for MIST and working on a trailer for the next project, which I can't say too much about. So I'm gonna use this moment to talk about something that is pretty important to me, feedback. 

From the very first post of my very first game builds I've always invited you guys to give me your feedback, and I've always read the comments and messages on F95, Discord and Itch. As some of you can probably imagine, it can be very exhausting and outright hurtful to read unfiltered comments written by people with absolutely no empathy whatsoever. But while it can be very hurtful, there is also often a grain of truth in every criticism no matter how dumb it's written. Especially when I was just starting out and was lacking skills in pretty much every single area of game development that feedback pushed me forward and made me want to improve the game as much as I could. 

But then something strange happened. As my skills grew and the game got better and better, so grew the amount and intensity of strangely angry and negative reviews and comments. Something that sounds counterintuitive, but let's be honest here, everyone that's been on the internet long enough knows not to be surprised by it. It's the same for me. It didn't take me by surprise, but at the same time, as I've always taken feedback seriously, I also couldn't just dismiss it. So for about a year now I've been very unsure of how to deal with such feedback. Comments that often felt like outright lies or someone just wanted to troll or simply hated the game for whatever reason and was desperately looking for something to declare it as the worst erotic game in existence. But that isn't actually the worst. While in the past if something sucked about the game people would generally agree about it, now the comments started feeling very torn. In one comment the writing is praised in the next they say it's absolute shit. A third comment mentions that they like the scenes, the next says it's the worst content they've ever watched. 

The importance of feedback is that it can help me realize shortcomings that I've overlooked. I spend so much time with the game, that it becomes very easy to simply not notice when something is detrimental to the overall gaming experience. Feedback always helped me to see those mistakes that I didn't even know existed. But now, that the feedback has become very diverse and equally conflicting I don't know who I should listen to anymore. On top of that I've been developing games for over three years and while this may sound a bit arrogant, I just think I sometimes know better.

Which brings me to the conclusion of this post. Navigating feedback has become very difficult for me (especially on F95, Patreon is still very chill) I'm still gonna try it and I'll still ask for your feedback with every single release, but I need to start trusting in my own decisions a bit more. I've realized that feedback comes in different qualities and I'm just not gonna listen anymore when I realize the feedback is just plain dumb or intentionally written to be hurtful. Obviously I know It's a fine line between filtering stupid feedback out and ignoring pressing concerns because I don't want to admit my mistakes, but I think I value the games success over my ego and will always look out for those grains of truth. And if not, if anyone feels like I'm ignoring valid criticism, let me know!

And that's it for this weeks post. I've gotten sick a few days ago and have just been lying in bed the entire weekend which is actually not so bad. It also gave me the opportunity to start rendering the first frames for the trailer. Getting that one done is gonna take a looong time. That said, I wish everyone a good week!