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I'm at kind of a pivotal moment with the game, because I'm honestly quite burned out with the outrageous hours I've been working to make it, combined with the game severely missing my growth expectations for several releases in a row.

Your advice is extremely solid and helpful. I may need to take a brief break to recharge my battery, but I am going to try to take this to heart.

Specifically, I'm going to:

* Consider significantly shortening the failure delay. Maybe more like 1 minute for free players?

* Start doing delayed updates for free players, but continue to give away the vast majority of the content

* Trying some different ideas for Patron content. I've already got a development console in the game that opens when you hit tilde, but I've got most of the useful commands disabled when it's not running in the Unity editor. I use it constantly when testing out new code and content. It would be easy to use build flags to enable some (or maybe even all) of them for patron builds. I could also build a cheat menu if people would prefer the accessibility.

* I was planning to do some additional outfits for patrons, so I think I may already have this on the roadmap, it just hasn't been implemented yet. But hearing you echo something that I've already been considering is encouraging.

* Futa and impregnation are interesting options. I suppose they'd be easy to implement with the outfit system, but getting them into dream fragments would be a little more demanding with art. But it's possible. If it drives some patrons my way then it could be worthwhile.

I think you may have just convinced me to stick with this game for a while longer. I really can't express how much I appreciate the advice.

EDIT: After further consideration, I’m going to try the mini game idea and get rid of the wait times. I’ve got an idea for how to get a lot more lewd content into the game with it.

I have experimented with an Android build, and it worked reasonably well aside from the fact that the interface is too cluttered to work on a phone. But I might do a tablet-focused Android build in the future. It could also be a good way to get the game running on Linux, which is another request I've gotten repeatedly.

The rolls are driven by stats, and I have plans to eventually allow players to gain levels and upgrade stats, but it keeps getting bumped back in priority for other features.

There are no plans to introduce combat right now.

Yes, that's a side effect of a few things.

First, I plan to add more text message conversations, which will provide something to do while waiting for failure cooldowns. Those aren't in the game yet, so this part drags a bit. I'm also adding a side quest right now, so you can try to grab a few toadstools while you're doing other things. I think the cooldowns will be less punishing when there's more stuff to do.

Second, there are only two gameplay rewards for being a patron. One is that you get access to a few extra scenes. I'm trying to be generous with what I give away, so it's just 3 locked scenes right now.

The other patron benefit is that failure cooldowns are faster. How fast they are depends on the Patron tier. The free build is 2 minutes, the $3 tier is 1 minute, the $6 tier is 30 seconds, and the $10 tier is 15 seconds.

I don't love it either. I hate having to put up paywalls and things to stop players from enjoying the game. It feels awful. But I've been working crazy hours to build this game on top of my day job over the last 6 months, and I've made a grand total of $114. When you consider the thousands of downloads I've gotten across several sites over the last few days, and the mostly positive comments, I'm clearly not doing enough to push people towards supporting the game.

I'm considering a number of ideas. Maybe the free version stops getting updates and all new content is just for patrons. That means I could ease up on the cooldowns, and the free version basically becomes a demo. Maybe I could keep updating the free version, but lock all of the lewd scenes. I don't like that idea, because people deserve to have some idea of what they're paying for.

So, I don't know. Finding a balance is hard. I don't like spoiling anyone's fun, but giving 95% of the game away isn't working, and if things don't improve soon then I'm going to have to shut the game down.

From Itch or from the links on Patreon?

If you’re talking about Patreon then the file host might be overwhelmed. If you read through the full post then you’ll see a list of mirrors at the bottom. Alternatively, I think the Itch download here should work.

Hi, I'm Rue, the developer of Locus Tenebrarum.

https://locus-tenebrarum-rue.itch.io/locus-tenebrarum

Locus Tenebrarum is a lewd 3D adventure game with visual novel and dating sim elements. You're a 300 year old vampire, and your friend/maker has gone missing in the city of Tenebrarum, which exists in a liminal space between reality and the world of dreams. Meet vampires, witches, succubi, and other seductive creatures, and find out what happened to your friend.

You can play for free (Windows only for now), and there's bonus content for patrons.

I've just released an update that adds a quest log to help players keep track of what's going on, revamped the UI with a more modern look, and added a chat system for text messaging characters while exploring the world.