Devlog Update - Version 1.0.14 Released

Hi all! This week I had to slow down my development of JOI Training due to urgent work for my freelancing job. Now I am more free and happy to be back!

This week I released version 1.0.14, with these changes:

• I started working on new content for the game. It will be about new scenarios and endings for Patreon supporters.
• The menu page now shows counters for the number of games played and the number of Patreon supporters. We are already at more than 20,000 games played and 6 supporters (thank you very much)!

• Smal updates:
  • I've fixed the position of the "New" badge that appears near the changelog button in the menu page when a user visits it and a new version is available. I've changed it a couple of times in the previous updates as well, now I can finally say that I'm happy with the result.
  • Fixed a bug that wasn't updating a database field storing the date when a user would become a supporter, specifically for the case in which a user would resubscribe after canceling the subscription. A "very edge case" bug...

Then I've made some improvements to my analytics dashboard. I've basically developed a simple dashboard that allows me to see how the website is performing. Here's an excerpt of it.

This dashboard is super helpful also to spot bugs. For example, I can see what combination of operating system and browser leads to games of shorter duration, which usually means that something is not working (either the images are not showing, or the audios are not playing, etc). Then, I can use a desktop/mobile simulator service like LambdaTest to see how the game plays on a specific device and with a specific browser. This way I can be sure that the game works for most of the devices and browsers, and it helps me solving bugs.

Another thing that I did this week was posting on the r/joi subreddit. Here's my post. This subreddit is probably the most suited for getting visibility for this project, and the post performed very well! The huge spikes in the charts that you can see above are because of this post. On February 4th, more than new 3,000 people played at least one game! Some people also left feedback and bug reports to me, either directly from inside the game, or by commenting on the Reddit post. The next developments will be influenced by these feedback.

For my Reddit post on r/joi, I decided to use the link to the itch page of this project instead of using directly joitraining.com. This is because I was afraid of the mods deleting my post because it contained a link to an unknown website. I thought that seeing a link to a itch.io game would have been perceived as more safe, and the post stayed alive. Maybe it would have worked with joitraining.com, I don't know.

Because of this, now I also see some data in the analytics from my itch.io dashboard. All the views of the game are due to the Reddit post, as the game is not yet indexed in itch.io unfortunately. Normally, new games correctly indexed would get a few hundreds views daily directly from users coming from itch.io (e.g. from their internal search engine), but it's not the case for my game. I wrote an email to their support team on Friday and I didn't get an answer yet. I've read online that it can happen and they usually answer in a few days, so for now I'll just wait.

Other data that I have comes from the Google Search Console. From there, I can see how many impressions joitraining.com gets in Google search results, and how many clicks. Web search clicks increased since starting posting on Reddit, but people are finding joitraining.com by googling "joitraining", which means that are returning users that already know the website. This is perfectly normal, as I haven't done any SEO content on the website yet. I plan to write content about femdom, maledom, consent, etc in the future, whose effect will be to attract people to the website who were looking for related content. When it will happen, different queries will show in Google Search Console.

Here are some of the next things (high priority) that I'll be working on in the next days:

• Users are reporting problems on Firefox about images not loading. I'll investigate this.
• Other users are reporting problems on iOS Safari about audios not playing. I'll investigate this.
• Adding volume control. Users will be able to adjust the volume of the mistress audios and the volume of the "beep" metronome sounds individually.
• I'll add a button that will allow users to skip jerk off sessions and continue directly to the next dialogues.
• Right now I'm posting a devlog on both Patreon and Itch. This is ok, but on Patreon the post needs to be accessible to only paying users because it contains NSFW content and it needs to align with Patreon rules. However, there are several people that are members of the Patreon page and are not paying members, and these people can't see my posts in full because of the NSFW limitation. As a solution, I was wondering if it's possible to write a simple public devlog post on Patreon with a link to the devlog on Itch. This way, the post would be free from NSFW (if the link is not considered) and it would be visible to everybody. I wrote to Patreon support about this as I understand that it's a gray area.
• New content for Patreon supporters.
• Give the possibility to users to vote for the next features to work on. I have yet to think of a nice way to do this. I'll be checking out the feature voting app Fider, which is a popular open-source project that addresses this use case.

If you want to support the development, please consider joining a membership on our Patreon page, as it will help us allocate more time on this project! Thank you for reading and have a nice day!