🦨people have been really enjoying fox stamps and have been saying it's really good, but unfortunately the amount of people playing it is not a lot. so far we're not really seeing the numbers or engagement counts we were hoping for, so we're probably gonna have to scale back our plans for features

🦨for instance, we were hoping to have a nonogram editor, zoom controls for big puzzles, more stage themeing and large puzzles made of smaller puzzles at launch, but these are probably gonna be pushed back to "if the game sells well we can do it later, if it doesn't we can just move on" territory

🦨we want to ship as complete of a product as possible when the game releases, but this is coming up *heavily* against the fact that we simply just are not making money doing gamedev and it's been long past the point we should move on from it, but we're stubborn and are just going without instead

🦨anyways, at the current rate with the way things are going, we still want to make good on our promise of having roughly 250 puzzles when it comes out, but otherwise we're likely not gonna have much time to do much else besides finishing the songs, polishing it up, and putting it out there

🦨we want to make a complete, ultimate nonogram experience, but hopefully people are fine with a pretty nice nonogram experience

thank you for reading

@IceWolf 🦨 thank you 🧡

@roxy ive never really done nonograms before and i do want to check the game out, hopefully tomorrow me will remember this

@roxy why aren’t you doing any yesyesgrams

🦨addendum: we thought about early access before, where we just have the game and the puzzles we have and then add on to it later, but we've been using this demo release as an interest/viability test, and the numbers we're seeing don't translate into this option making sense (cont.)

🦨as it is, we don't have enough of an audience to justify releasing in early access and making enough off it to counterbalance the amount of people who would pass it up/say "I'll wait for the full game" and then never come back for that. people treat EA as 1.0 release, and it's not worth this risk

@roxy i think early access isn’t that good for puzzle games, because they don’t have enough replay value. EA works best for games where you’ll pick it up again every big update (sandboxy titles, rougelikes, etc)

@eri 🦨 the general idea was that with every update would also come new puzzles, so there'd be a reason to go back

@roxy Sorry to hear you aren't getting enough engagement. It's a fun game and I wish more people would look at/play it.

@roxy One thing I just realized. Have you looked into joining the Wholesome Games community? I think that's how I discovered Squeakross.

@VANTABlack2000 🦨 you know, maybe we could actually look into that now. people brought it up before but like, shield cat and cosmogelica had too much cartoon violence we felt, and stephanie blobun literally blows up. maybe it wouldn't have been a problem, but yea nothing bad happens in fox stamps so maybe...

@roxy i remembered! i shall autistically talk about anything i want to talk about with the demo and hope it’s appreciated

@roxy yay for linux native! and yay for audio not shipping at a volume of “explode your ears”

@twinkle 🦨 that was a request from someone who tested the prerelease build, so we just set it to 50% by default because it's better for it to start too quiet than to announce to everyone you're playing the game

@roxy the “escape replays the intro sequence” is really cute actually. i missed the AI disclaimer (i.e. No AI Used Ever) text because i was tabbed out and then clicked on the window and wanted to rewatch the intro animation to catch the text again, and i thought escape would’ve just closed the game so i had my steam UI ready

@roxy transgender UI

@roxy i really like the UI! good job on the interactiveness and anims. don’t know if this was intentional or if you actually had all the music in the same signature and BPM or if you actually had that info per track somewhere in the files, but the anims on the arrows seem to match up with the measures, which feel really satisfying. oh and good job on keyboard nav

and i like how many options there are for the puzzle-solving, i may be inexperienced but i dont like handholding, so theres a lot i could just disable and that’s really nice

@roxy a nitpick on the keyboard nav is that idk how to navigate to the steam wishlist button with keyboard, and that conventional wisdom tells me i should be able to flip pages with left/right arrow, but i cant

@twinkle 🦨 finally someone noticed what mika put in

@twinkle 🦨 that's actually by pure coincidence, we *could* do music timing stuff though... maybe one day

@twinkle 🦨 you can't, sorry we actually just slapped that on there for the demo and said "there it is" and that was that. roxy's been speccing out the next version of our menu/UI code and that one should be able to do this just fine

@twinkle 🦨 also I am going eepy now so we will read any more tomorrow

@roxy keyboard navigation in a non-one-dimensional UI is the only thing harder than text editing and text selection nod, good luck

@roxy gn!!!!!!!!!

@roxy i squeaked when i solved this. thank you for the wonderful mouse

@roxy could you have an option to display the row numbers right side up instead of rotated 90deg? my autism says that i cannot read any texts that isn’t right side up (thanks dysgraphia)

@roxy ohhhhh heh i was wondering what this icon meant. i don’t like hints so i turned them all off

@twinkle 🦌 you KNOW mika had to do it to em

@twinkle 🦌 we actually thought about it when we put in the numbers but figured we'd see if anyone mentioned it. will have to think about how we can implement this without adding too many options

@twinkle 🦌 yea! that was for the newspaper achievement that we took out, but we left the icon in anyways so that people can feel cool about themselves

@roxy I am not sure where to find it, but they have a Discord server. I am about to leave for work, so I can't send an invite to you though sorry. I can try to figure something out tomorrow if you want.

@VANTABlack2000 🦌 we might be able to ask john alblune about it so we should be ok, but thank you!

@roxy i indeed feel cool about myself even though i only learned about what a nonogram even is like a week ago