Fixing the grind

Hi everyone!

First, I want to give a huge thanks to all the people playing and supporting Yugembo. It's been almost three years since I started writing down ideas and creating prototypes. Since this game has many aspects that need to be worked on - storytelling, voice acting, character design, cinematic music, puzzle mechanics, etc. - it has taken a lot of time and energy to get to this point. The game is still far from perfect, but it makes me so happy to see that people are already enjoying it.

Right now, (v0.1.5,) I guess you could say that the game is in a pretty rough state. Although a lot of it has already been polished (to make an early release like this possible), it is still kind of a concept version of what it should be in the very end. This means that playing Yugembo at this point should give you a clear vision of what I have in mind: a game in which you can flirt with interesting fleshed out characters through a match-3 puzzle (similar to HuniePop, but the puzzle itself being original and fast-paced), getting to know them better as you level up your connection with them, resulting in visual novel style scenes that get more and more romantic/erotic as you progress. This all taking place in a small open world where a mystery needs to be solved, that ties it all together.

The biggest issue of this rough state is probably the feeling of grinding. I think the match-3 flirt game works well on its own, but if you have to play it over and over again for every character, it gets boring after some time and starts to feel like a very harsh grind. I believe there is a short-term and a long-term solution. Short-term: The amount of flirt games that have to be played to level up will be reduced, so less flirts have to be done to reach the end of a character's storyline. Long-term: The flirt game will be improved. As you progress and level up characters, new playstyles will be introduced. This will give you more freedom and variety to choose your own way of playing the flirt game by combining the possibilities, giving it more depth towards the ending. It could be compared to a metroidvania game, in which you gradually gain new powers to play with. (Obviously Yugembo is not a metroidvania, but the way of making the game more complex with positive additions is pretty similar.)

The short-term solution will be implemented directly in the next update. But the long-term solution needs a lot more time for creating/eliminating ideas, balancing/tweaking, etc. So these will be spread out over multiple future updates.

Besides this grind issue, there are a lot of other, smaller problems that need attention. I get lots of useful feedback, which I don't always react to (due to a lack of time,) but I do note it all down. Since I am a single developer creating this game in my spare time, I need to filter most of the feedback and choose which issues to address first. So please know that if an issue isn't directly solved in the next update, it doesn't mean I haven't noted it. I highly value every comment with constructive criticism.

I'm working on this project with lots of passion and dedication. So if you like the concept so far, I hope you'll stay tuned for future versions!