10 Reviews Quest

Happy new year! 

I'm back at work (I'm a high school teacher's aide) after a pretty nice winter holiday. I had a list of winter break goals, and I was able to accomplish most of them! I do wish I had gotten more rest, but to be honest, no amount of rest is ever enough. I am devastated that the freedom is over. 

One goal that I didn't quite hit--reaching 10 user reviews on Steam, which have to be from people who bought the VN directly on Steam. As of today FFF has 11 reviews, but 6 of them are from beta testers and Patreon supporters, and Valve doesn't count those reviews towards algorithmic success.

This post is how I found out that there is a secret 10-review threshold in Steam's algorithm. Pretty messed up that this is like a secret requirement for getting good exposure.

In case you haven't seen it, I'm just gonna pop the teaser trailer in here:

If you like what you see in the trailer/devlog, please consider buying FFF on Steam and writing a review! Positive or negative, just speak your truth. 

I recorded voice lines with an actor friend who will be portraying the big bad villain of season 1, to be introduced in episode 3. He knocked it out of the park and I'm really excited for folks to hear his voice work. He brings the number of trained actors in the cast to 2! Most of the voice talent (including me) are a scrappy bunch of creative folks doing our best and having a good time. I think more people should take this approach to adding VO to their indie games. I pay $20/hr which keeps VO affordable on my nonexistent budget and with a relatively small amount of voice lines per episode because the VN is fully linear. It feels wholesome and in the reviews that have come through, people have actually had good things to say about the voice-over, not just the roles done by professionals. One drawback that I'm aware of to my VO approach, is that since we're doing it remotely and with different sound equipment, the quality and volume levels aren't the same. Right now my priority is finishing the rest of the episodes, but down the line I might do some re-recording or pay someone to equalize and clean up the audio better than I know how to.