Re: Beach Party by Pusooy
Posted: Sat, 12Jun23 00:12
I like how everyone is so committed for or against Pusooy and his games. Why does the internet seem to wipe out all the shades of grey in between?
First on capitalism: Pusooy most certainly has gone the way of capitalism. I'm not debating the pros and cons of capitalism. The point is, he decided he has a talent, and he'd like to get paid to employee it. I did enjoy your implication, Greebo, that $10 is not a significant enough donation on the part of those wishing to become elite ("...if you're feeling mean"). I believe that amount gets one, what is it, 6 months? Six months is roughly the time it takes Pusooy for each new release (maybe occasionally he runs closer to 4 with his new methodology). So for $10 you get roughly 30 minutes to 1 hour of new game play. While that's not exorbitant, nor is it a discount rate. Anyone can easily go online and purchase game apps for $1-10 from indie developers all over the world. As one starts drifting into the $20-40 range for games, most people expect hours and hours of gameplay. He has also continued to withhold his later Farmer's Daughter creations for the purposes of getting more people to pay rather than wait for them to become free.
And I don't want to hear how older titles add to the 30-60 minute game-play hours. Old games quickly lose their value. Walk into any software store and look at the bargain bin of software. Plus, even if one counted the old games as bonus, this is a subscription service. The plan is for people to pay more than once. Future payments have no new old-games to add bonus play.
All that being said, Pusooy does spend time and money producing something. That something is fairly unique and enjoyable. Whether he wants to share it freely with others, ask those that enjoy it to reward his time and effort, or keep them completely to himself, it is his right and privilege to decide. I'm not knocking the guy for it. Just don't try telling me he's a noble Saint that we all should emulate.
Moving away from the money aspect, to the comment from fusdarii about advertising. This is a games forum (a sexy games forum at that). It's nice to hear about all such games. Granted it is also nice to have a place to look where I can expect to find free stuff to play around with. Pusooy does make it more problematic as he continues to be unclear on if/when things will be free. One could always suggest to shark to make a separate thread grouping for pay games.
Lastly I suppose that leaves Eligarf's commentary on Pusooy's games. He brings up a couple points. One is the reaction/commentary of other players to the games. In truth, most people are not good game reviewers. When it comes to adult games of the type Pusooy makes I find the tendency of snap decisions towards like/dislike to be even more pronounced. Most of the commentary is based on how sexy the sexiest screen shot was and how much did I like the specific fetish(es) he choose to use this time. Those aren't always the points the speakers bring up, but if you pursue their thoughts and listen to the underlying trends, those are the base causes.
Those commentaries actually tie directly into Eligarf's other main point, that of playability. I have seen too many times people be annoyed, frustrated, and just plain angry for hours at a time and it flip instantly at the sight of a reward. The person goes on their way and talks about the wonderfulness of the reward. Oh, how it all could have been so much more wonderful. If only I could have gotten the reward, but the previous time been enjoyable, or at least progressing. Might as well go with some specifics.
Text bubbles: sometimes they progress on their own, sometimes players must mouse over them. Consistency would be nice. Also, mousing over is a poor choice. A keyboard button or mouse click to advance would be much better, especially when I'm controlling a man's arm and so he reaches up and around in odd ways as I move my cursor up to deal with the text. Oh, and now that the text is gone, I need my mouse back where I had it to keep using his arm, only my cursor is now up where the bubble was.
Next, having something to control, but not knowing what to do with it is infinitely better than not knowing what to control. Say there are 2 people on screen. I think the next thing to happen is the person on the left needs to stand up. I move my mouse around a little but nothing is moving yet. Ok, let me try mousing near their head and pulling them up. No, ok, maybe the other person should ask them to stand. Mouse over other person's mouth (no action). Ok, first person's waist (nothing). Right person's hand? maybe they will pull left person up (still nothing). Back, shoulders, feet... okay, still nothing. Just start blinding moving the mouse over the screen and hope something happens. Oh, hey, right person's right hand started moving. Dang, I guess I only did try their left hand. What do you know, right person grabs left persons shoulder and they stand up. (Note, it could have just as easily been that touching the head [my first action] was correct, but that I was supposed to move down for the person to lie down instead of stand up. Feedback to the player is always king) Currently Pusooy's technique to deal with such a situation is if enough people have problems here, put in an arrow to say "grab this hand here". It would be much better for the mouse to already have control of the hand without finding the trigger pixels. Ok, I need to make this guy's hand do something. Among other things, having that hand moving tells me that the game isn't loading or frozen. I am causing something to happen, this hand is moving around.
To be honest, I don't think it is so much an issue of losing focus on playability. Pusooy's creation, control, and manipulation of graphics has gone up leaps and bounds beyond where he began. I think he creates a theme, then a story, much of the artwork, and then builds the game into that framework. Some of the scenes afford playability and some do not. And by expansion, each game has a mix of more and less playable scenes. As with any artist, the question of trade-offs is a frequent burden. The playable scenes stay as is, and to what extent do I scrap scenes, stories, and art, to which I'm not finding a smooth means of play. Pusooy seems to tend to stick more firmly to the original plan. A one-man development team also suffers from the difficulty of, it all makes sense to me all the time because I'm the one who made it work this way. Difficult parts are often found very late in development making it that much more time consuming to redo.
As for some of the backlash went towards Pusooy and his games (not that there is tons, but there certainly is some on his elite service change), I do think it was quite a bit stronger because of the fact that as elite was brought online, there was much promising of the content coming soon to those unable/unwilling to pay. Such delivery to the free public was delayed, delayed some more, and then mostly taken completely away. People are free to argue justifications one way or the other. Bottom line is, people feel once they are promised something, they have a right to that something. The unfulfilled promise is responsible for a lot of the negativity.
If I understand Pusooy's plan correctly, I think he plans to continue developing games in 3-4 parts. As part 1 of new series is complete and in elite for a short time, it will be released to the general public. Parts 2 and beyond will stay elite as they come online. Basically part 1 becomes the free teaser-trial to entice members that they want his product. But it has sounded like once an entire new series comes to conclusion, Pusooy will then consider releasing all of the previous series.
And that's far too long of a post, so I'm off for now...
First on capitalism: Pusooy most certainly has gone the way of capitalism. I'm not debating the pros and cons of capitalism. The point is, he decided he has a talent, and he'd like to get paid to employee it. I did enjoy your implication, Greebo, that $10 is not a significant enough donation on the part of those wishing to become elite ("...if you're feeling mean"). I believe that amount gets one, what is it, 6 months? Six months is roughly the time it takes Pusooy for each new release (maybe occasionally he runs closer to 4 with his new methodology). So for $10 you get roughly 30 minutes to 1 hour of new game play. While that's not exorbitant, nor is it a discount rate. Anyone can easily go online and purchase game apps for $1-10 from indie developers all over the world. As one starts drifting into the $20-40 range for games, most people expect hours and hours of gameplay. He has also continued to withhold his later Farmer's Daughter creations for the purposes of getting more people to pay rather than wait for them to become free.
And I don't want to hear how older titles add to the 30-60 minute game-play hours. Old games quickly lose their value. Walk into any software store and look at the bargain bin of software. Plus, even if one counted the old games as bonus, this is a subscription service. The plan is for people to pay more than once. Future payments have no new old-games to add bonus play.
All that being said, Pusooy does spend time and money producing something. That something is fairly unique and enjoyable. Whether he wants to share it freely with others, ask those that enjoy it to reward his time and effort, or keep them completely to himself, it is his right and privilege to decide. I'm not knocking the guy for it. Just don't try telling me he's a noble Saint that we all should emulate.
Moving away from the money aspect, to the comment from fusdarii about advertising. This is a games forum (a sexy games forum at that). It's nice to hear about all such games. Granted it is also nice to have a place to look where I can expect to find free stuff to play around with. Pusooy does make it more problematic as he continues to be unclear on if/when things will be free. One could always suggest to shark to make a separate thread grouping for pay games.
Lastly I suppose that leaves Eligarf's commentary on Pusooy's games. He brings up a couple points. One is the reaction/commentary of other players to the games. In truth, most people are not good game reviewers. When it comes to adult games of the type Pusooy makes I find the tendency of snap decisions towards like/dislike to be even more pronounced. Most of the commentary is based on how sexy the sexiest screen shot was and how much did I like the specific fetish(es) he choose to use this time. Those aren't always the points the speakers bring up, but if you pursue their thoughts and listen to the underlying trends, those are the base causes.
Those commentaries actually tie directly into Eligarf's other main point, that of playability. I have seen too many times people be annoyed, frustrated, and just plain angry for hours at a time and it flip instantly at the sight of a reward. The person goes on their way and talks about the wonderfulness of the reward. Oh, how it all could have been so much more wonderful. If only I could have gotten the reward, but the previous time been enjoyable, or at least progressing. Might as well go with some specifics.
Text bubbles: sometimes they progress on their own, sometimes players must mouse over them. Consistency would be nice. Also, mousing over is a poor choice. A keyboard button or mouse click to advance would be much better, especially when I'm controlling a man's arm and so he reaches up and around in odd ways as I move my cursor up to deal with the text. Oh, and now that the text is gone, I need my mouse back where I had it to keep using his arm, only my cursor is now up where the bubble was.
Next, having something to control, but not knowing what to do with it is infinitely better than not knowing what to control. Say there are 2 people on screen. I think the next thing to happen is the person on the left needs to stand up. I move my mouse around a little but nothing is moving yet. Ok, let me try mousing near their head and pulling them up. No, ok, maybe the other person should ask them to stand. Mouse over other person's mouth (no action). Ok, first person's waist (nothing). Right person's hand? maybe they will pull left person up (still nothing). Back, shoulders, feet... okay, still nothing. Just start blinding moving the mouse over the screen and hope something happens. Oh, hey, right person's right hand started moving. Dang, I guess I only did try their left hand. What do you know, right person grabs left persons shoulder and they stand up. (Note, it could have just as easily been that touching the head [my first action] was correct, but that I was supposed to move down for the person to lie down instead of stand up. Feedback to the player is always king) Currently Pusooy's technique to deal with such a situation is if enough people have problems here, put in an arrow to say "grab this hand here". It would be much better for the mouse to already have control of the hand without finding the trigger pixels. Ok, I need to make this guy's hand do something. Among other things, having that hand moving tells me that the game isn't loading or frozen. I am causing something to happen, this hand is moving around.
To be honest, I don't think it is so much an issue of losing focus on playability. Pusooy's creation, control, and manipulation of graphics has gone up leaps and bounds beyond where he began. I think he creates a theme, then a story, much of the artwork, and then builds the game into that framework. Some of the scenes afford playability and some do not. And by expansion, each game has a mix of more and less playable scenes. As with any artist, the question of trade-offs is a frequent burden. The playable scenes stay as is, and to what extent do I scrap scenes, stories, and art, to which I'm not finding a smooth means of play. Pusooy seems to tend to stick more firmly to the original plan. A one-man development team also suffers from the difficulty of, it all makes sense to me all the time because I'm the one who made it work this way. Difficult parts are often found very late in development making it that much more time consuming to redo.
As for some of the backlash went towards Pusooy and his games (not that there is tons, but there certainly is some on his elite service change), I do think it was quite a bit stronger because of the fact that as elite was brought online, there was much promising of the content coming soon to those unable/unwilling to pay. Such delivery to the free public was delayed, delayed some more, and then mostly taken completely away. People are free to argue justifications one way or the other. Bottom line is, people feel once they are promised something, they have a right to that something. The unfulfilled promise is responsible for a lot of the negativity.
If I understand Pusooy's plan correctly, I think he plans to continue developing games in 3-4 parts. As part 1 of new series is complete and in elite for a short time, it will be released to the general public. Parts 2 and beyond will stay elite as they come online. Basically part 1 becomes the free teaser-trial to entice members that they want his product. But it has sounded like once an entire new series comes to conclusion, Pusooy will then consider releasing all of the previous series.
And that's far too long of a post, so I'm off for now...