More Chapters?!
We've gotten a ton of positive feedback about the game, but we've also gotten our fair share of criticism. We agree with a bulk of both the positive and negative comments about Choices. The critiques ring true.
In tonight's post, we'd like to tackle two of the most common critiques - why aren't there more stories and why are we so stingy with keys. The answers for both are intimately related.
We've been hard at work creating new chapters, books, and stories as fast as we possibly can. In fact, for awhile these blog posts will likely not be written by one of our many writers simply because they are all so focused on writing for the game. But because we launched with less content than we'd like (a problem that happens when your launch is dictated by how much money you have left in the bank), we tuned the rate of key generation higher than we personally like ourselves. We basically did this so that most players don't run out of chapters too quickly.
It looks like we failed on both the amount of content we launched with and our corresponding time for key regeneration.
As far as key regeneration time goes, I personally apologize for that. Our plan has always been to make keys harder to get while we're short on content and to slowly make them easier to get when we have more content. I've been super scared that you'll run out of content too quickly, stop playing the game, and forget all about it before we get more chapters out for you to play. I also thought that pacing the speed of reading makes for a more involved experience. We didn't think we had enough books and chapters to change the rate of key generation for this update, but we may be able to consider it for the next update.
We are addressing the requests for more stories by having all our writers write as if a hurricane of keyboard eating moths is about to descend upon our office. We're also going deeper into debt and hiring writers faster, making a bet that more content will help us get to long term profitability faster.
As many of you will have realized, we're dropping new chapters every week - usually on Wednesdays. With the launch of our fourth story, Rules of Engagement, we're now releasing 3 new chapters every week.
We also have a fifth story that is being created, too. The working title for that one is Endless Summer, but we're still letting that name sit with us for awhile while the story develops further. This story is still in it's early stages, so don't get your hopes up about seeing it anytime too soon.
Hopefully, seeing new chapters for our stories come out every week is reliable proof that we're not only working hard, but have split into multiple mini-teams of writers, artists, and QA all working together to get more content out.
Thank you for your patience when it comes to both keys and more stories. We're in this for the long haul and hope you are, too!
Oliver