0.7 - Reception and Plans for the Future

Hey everybody, Gunzil here! Now that it’s been a week after the 0.7 demo release, I thought it would be a good time to give a quick breakdown on how things went, where we’re currently at, and what’s next for Mice Tea.

0.7 Demo Reception

I love numbers, so I thought I’d share a couple related to this release!

In the past week, the demo page on itch was viewed 2,881 times and received 781 downloads, far exceeding our expectations! For reference, 0.6 only received 472 views and was downloaded 41 times in its first week. That’s a huge increase! Hopefully that means we’re doing something right!

For those that turned on analytics, we recorded 225 play sessions with 173 unique users and an average session time of 21 minutes. For our first release after a major rewrite, 20 minutes feels pretty good to me.

Survey Results

In the last week, 26 people filled out our survey. I’d like to thank all of you for taking the time to do so! This sort of feedback is super helpful for ensuring we’re making the best game we can.

Overall, the brunt of the praise was aimed at the story, humor, art, characters, and transformation sequences. These were the parts that we primarily focused on, so I’m glad to hear that we’re doing well in this area. That’s ultimately why we’re all here, after all.

As for what people thought could be improved, most comments fell into the following categories...

More Lewds!

The number one request was for more lewds. This has always been planned, but didn’t make it into the first demo for two reasons. First, we wanted to have Margaret start out a bit sexually repressed so we could incorporate increased libido as a part of her transformation. Second, we were planning on showing the demo at Anthro New England, which is strictly safe for work. Lucky for you, we’ve pretty much already covered the entirely of the non-lewd portion of the plot, and the next release will have an abundance of sexual content to it.

Art / Writing

Some of the critique was aimed at specific cgs, sprites, scenes, or pieces of dialog. We appreciate anyone that took the time to point these things out, and plan to address the brunt of these in the near future.

Animations

Some people found the animation style a bit off-putting, and suggested some tweaks to make it less so, the major one being how characters slide on and off screen, or walk by bobbing up and down. I personally like this style, but agree that we can probably make some tweaks to make things a bit less off-putting.

Backgrounds

You may have noticed a couple of the backgrounds are very clearly non-final. Since our current team is composed of two writers and two character artists, backgrounds have been on the back burner. We have a couple leads for artists we’d like to commission on backgrounds, and will be following up on that sometime in the future.

Audio

You may have also noticed that there’s no sound or music in the game! We actually do have an audio guy that’s willing to do sound for us, we’re just waiting a bit on funding before we start commissioning him.

The Font / Interface

A couple people pointed out that they didn’t really like the way the font or the interface looked. We’re currently using the ren’py defaults, so that’s understandable. We plan on updating these sometime in the future, as well.

Lack of Diversity

While demoing the game at Anthro New England, we heard some concerns over the lack of representation for people of color. As someone that lives in a fairly homogeneous area, this was completely off my radar when coming up with characters! We think this is a completely valid criticism, and currently discussing how we’ll approach this.

Where We’re Going from Here

What are we working on next?

Our current plan is to fill out the “neutral” path of the game before moving on to any of the character-specific paths. The main reason is to ensure that can establish how things are “supposed” to go so players can see how their choices throw a wrench into things. Unfortunately, that means no shrinking path, feral TF, or TFing characters besides Margaret as much as it pains me to say it!

I think every character path will be a ton of fun, and we have a lot of great ideas on where we want it to go, so hopefully our desire to start on the character-specific paths will drive us to work extra hard on completing the first path.

As for the content of 0.8, it’s going to include another TF sequence, some lewd scenes, and another short-end.

When is the next release?

Our ballpark estimate is April/May, so about 2-3 months from now.

It took us about 4-5 months to get where we’re currently at for 0.7, which required us to:

• Rewrite the high-level plot summary
• Redraw all the character sprites
• Draw the CGs for 0.7
• Write / animate the script for the content of 0.7

Since we already have the groundwork laid out for the rest of the game, 0.8 shouldn’t take us anywhere near 5 months. That said, we do want to make sure each update has enough content to be worth re-downloading and playing, so ultimately releases are going to happen when we’re happy with how much we’ve added.

Thank you to everyone that played the game, those that provided feedback, and those that became patrons. Without your support, we wouldn’t be anywhere near where we are now!