The Results Are In!

Alright! I rolled out a big series of surveys to cap off a big series of posts talking about how I think MVOL has gone and what I’m going to do from here, and I gave a healthy amount of time for everyone to give their opinions before I downloaded all the data and spent some time wrangling it up into a bunch of useful numbers and graphs. It’s taken a lot more time and work to get this all put together than I expected, but I’m definitely getting some helpful info! Today I’m gonna go over the results from the first three surveys and how I’m interpreting them, then talk about how it’ll influence my choices from here.

This has already turned into a huuuuge post, so I’ve decided to hold off on the final survey and talking about the write-in feedback I got from folks and go over that in another post a little down the road! If you’d like to just get the short version of what stood out most, there’s a link to skip to the conclusion in the table of contents below.

How I’m handling the data

If you don’t read this, you’re probably gonna be pretty confused looking at the rest! I’m gonna show some of the graphs I’ve made here, skipping some where I feel like I can summarize the results easily, but these are probably gonna look pretty confusing at first, so let me explain what I’ve done with the data.

First off, I didn’t just take all the data in one big batch and see what people thought. I downloaded the results for all of them immediately before I released v0.91 (which I used to promote the surveys to a lot more people) then downloaded the results again a few weeks after. I was interested to see if there might be a difference in responses between people that actively check my news outlets and those that only see news that’s blared out along with a new version of the game.

Secondly, as you may have noticed, I asked for Patreon emails to check if the survey taker was a supporter. I set up a formula to check those emails automatically against a big list of emails I have for recent supporters and took all those responses as a subset as well. This means that all the data has been split into four categories: supporters that responded before v0.91, all people that responded before v0.91, then all supporters, and all people that responded, period.

The numbers fluctuated some from survey to survey, but roughly, about 1/10 of the respondents were usually supporters. Between pre- and post-v0.91 respondents, supporter responses would increase between 10% and 50%, while the responses as a whole just about doubled. Very rough ballpark numbers here, but it partly explains why supporter responses can be a little more “jagged,” since it was a smaller sample size.

This turned out pretty big, so here’s a small table of contents to help you get around quickly!

Introduction/Data Handling
Survey 1: My Very Own Lith
Survey 2: Design Priorities
Survey 3: Sexual Content
Summary and Conclusion

With all that out of the way, let’s start looking at the results! I’ll go over the mass data for each survey, then talk some about the comments and such that I received at the end.

Survey 1: My Very Own Lith

This was the smallest survey, with two basic series of questions. The first was about:

The BEST part of MVOL to you

I tried to encourage folks to vote low for anything they didn’t really care for or notice, but overall the results in this category were all very heavy toward agreeing that each aspect described was good. On a five-point scale, most of them got a max result of an emphatic “Yes!” from at least 50% of you, and none of the options averaged lower than a “Yeah, Kinda.” So it looks like you guys largely agree with all of the aspects I described as things I thought were successes with MVOL!

The notable standouts in this category were on these two questions.

Where most of the questions were consistently a slope upward towards “Yes!” the question about the game feeling “alive” actually peaked at just a “Yeah, Kinda.” But if you look at the numbers, I weighted each result from 1 to 5, and all response groups averaged a 4 our higher– meaning that on average, half of the population falls into the range of mildly agreeing or better. Still, I did find it interesting that this question scored relatively low. The only other question with a similar result was “The twists, turns, and secrets were exciting and memorable.” So if any of the game’s strengths didn’t shine particularly bright, it may have been its responsiveness to your choices and its unpredictability, but those were still strong aspects.

Conversely, feedback on the sex scenes was the most enthusiastic by far, with 86% of supporters emphatically agreeing that it was the best part of the game. Sex is arguably the big draw for new players and a strong reason to lure people to keep playing the game, so it’s excellent that I’ve been able to deliver on that in a powerful and memorable way for players.

The next series of questions was about:

The weakest part of MVOL to you

I didn’t want people to hold back here. I need constructive feedback to know how to improve, and I was happy to see some much more varied results on this side. There was a strong leaning toward disagreeing with any given part being “the weakest,” and barely anyone voted “Yes!” on any of these, but it was much more even across the board. Supporters were less willing to criticize overall, but had a peculiar tendency to say “Not Really” more and “No!” less than the average responses.

Here are the results I found interesting:
You can see the “hook” the supporters tended toward in the last one, with a low “No!” and a high “Not Really,” that showed up in a lot of them. The question about “Way too much reading” had the lowest score, meaning very few people thought it was a weak part of the game. I could speculate that anyone that didn’t want to read that much would never make it very far into the game anyway, but it’s good to know that my fanbase feels pretty strongly overall that lots and lots of reading is just fine.

The second one was interesting to me just because it was an unusual shape– supporters agreed more with the public than usual, and just about everyone responded with a resounding “Ehhh…” on whether it was hard to convince other people to try the game. This was the second highest rated “weak aspect” of the game, as well. I think this shows that I’m right to feel like the early game being weak and uninviting has been a big weakness to the game– if it’s hard to convince someone to play even with a friend encouraging them, what are the odds someone finding the game out in the wild will give it a fair chance?

The third question was mainly interesting because it was the only one where supporters actually agreed with it more than the total sample. Usually they’d average about 0.3 points lower on all of them, but it looks like my supporter base in particular feels like there’s not enough gameplay in MVOL, very nearly putting 50% of the supporter population in the “agree” half of the spectrum. I could speculate that this is because gameplay becomes more important for adding replayability to a game in the long term, to give those that really dive into a game and keep coming back to it more to engage with. I think it’s important to make sure gameplay doesn’t “get in the way” too much early on, but that it gives long-time players lots to really explore and refine, to reward that tenth playthrough.

And the strongest positive response was that yes, finding the collars for the first time is too hard! This is another one that slows down new players. I took some aggressive steps to make that easier with v0.91, so I’m hoping that’ll help some on that front, but that’s also a reminder that I should be careful about placing serious challenges too early in any of my future games.

Results

The final results for the entire survey for the best part of MVOL, ranked high to low, was:
4.53 The sex scenes were exciting and satisfying.
4.52 In general, the writing was high quality and worth the wait.
4.29 I connected emotionally with the characters.
4.21 The story drew me in and made me keep playing.
4.09 The twists, turns, and secrets were exciting and memorable.
4.03 The game responded to my choices naturally and felt “alive.”

And for the weakest part of MVOL, ranked from strongest agree to least, was:
3.01 Finding collars the first time is too hard.
2.80 Hard to convince people it’s worth trying.
2.77 New content came out so slowly.
2.74 The early game is kinda boring.
2.65 There’s not really much gameplay.
2.37 Releasing every other month sucked.
2.28 Way too much reading.

So folks did enjoy the writing and feel it was “worth the wait,” but there was also a strong feeling that content came out too slowly in general. However, the sentiment that releasing every two months was too sparse was lower than I expected. The quality of the writing and the sex were the biggest highlights to people, while emotional connection scored well but didn’t top things off as much as I thought. This is pretty interesting to me, as it can be easy for me to get a little skewed in how I see the audience when folks with a certain kind of reaction to the game tend to be more likely to show up on the Discord talking about it and such.

Overall, some interesting results! I’m more confident in a lot of my assessments, but also have a few new possibilities and questions to keep in mind.

(Click here to return to the Table of Contents!)

Survey 2: Design Priorities

This survey was probably the most information-dense out of the series, with a lot of questions asking you to choose between two important features in design that sometimes work against each other. There’s no easy way to really summarize this one, so I’m going to show and discuss the results in full detail. The first section was:

General Design Priorities

I’ll hug the explanations around the graphs.

I’ve noticed that just about all the results tend toward a bell curve shape– few people were willing to go to either extreme rather than vote for one of the middle three, so if they do, that’s a pretty strong indicator. Gameplay vs. Feel is a strong example of that. It’s definitely leaning toward immersion, but almost nobody actually wanted to completely forsake gameplay for the sake of immersion. I’m glad that folks want a balance! And I’m also glad that immersion is still a priority overall– that’s arguably the entire reason I don’t make finding collars TOO easy in MVOL. That’s been a harsh lesson for me, but I’ll try not to be afraid to hamper gameplay if it helps enhance the “feel” of the game.

The strongest results I got in this survey were pretty surprising to me. Disturbing Content and Themes was the third most dramatically shifted from center, with the total responses averaging 0.81 points away from the center value of 3. I sometimes worry that the content I include is “too much,” and it’s nice to see that overall, people enjoyed pushing the boundaries like that. Of course, this is the sort of question that’s likely to get pretty biased– people that were driven away by the themes are probably a lot less likely to stick around for these surveys. I’ll still have to weigh the pros and cons carefully in future disturbing content, but it’s good to know I’m certainly not including it for no reason.

Now, it’s important to pay attention to how I phrased these questions as we go through this. Complicated Topics and Philosophy does look like overall people were happy with how philosophical the game got, but I didn’t phrase it like… “Less philosophy vs. More philosophy” so much as “Less philosophy vs. This is a good amount.” So the fact that a lot of people still voted in the middle or leftish side says to me that maybe I should tone it down a little, but folks won’t be too angry if I keep it around the same levels as in MVOL.

Similarly, Character Age & Maturity seems to have most people right in the middle– meaning they don’t want to drift too far from teen/college age characters, but a little more maturity could be nice. Still, the average leans toward the younger side, with a fair number of people even going all the way right, so I should be careful to make sure at least some characters are young most of the time. My target audience tends to be around that age, so it makes sense to keep things relatable!

And on to the next one…

This one was interesting both for its shape and the disparity between general voters and supporters. Emotional Connection vs. Gameplay shows a definite leaning toward preserving emotional content, but about 80% of people are at least willing to sacrifice a small amount of it to have more substantial gameplay. Supporters were less likely to sit in the middle, though, and more likely to lean toward only making the smallest sacrifices. We showed an especially strong desire for gameplay in general from supporters earlier, so it looks like they’d have me walking a pretty fine edge between these priorities. Thankfully, these things can feed into each other to some degree, but I’ll have to play it very carefully where they contradict each other.

And supporters reinforce their desire for gameplay in Gameplay Complexity! The average for all voters only leans slightly toward complex gameplay (and granted, only 10% of voters really want to go all the way on complexity) but here the supporters show a strong willingness to embrace complexity, at least within reason. This is probably another case where I should be careful to keep it simple to start, but add more depth in the late game and replayability to reward the diehard fans.

Conversely, Gameplay Difficulty shows not only a light overall leaning toward easier gameplay, but a strong leaning from supporters to keep the gameplay easy! That’s pretty interesting to me. So it’s okay to have gameplay get fairly complicated, but most people want it fairly balanced in difficulty, and the people keeping my bills paid would prefer things to be on the easier side overall– including a healthy 25% that strongly want me to keep it easy! That stands out just for getting such a strong edge response, as well as for one of the larger changes in average between groups.

Here’s one that I saw coming but kinda dreaded. Getting art and visual elements for the game has always been super stressful for me, but Graphics vs. Text clearly shows I should find a more sustainable way to enrich the game graphically. I might be able to fumble around with such things a little myself, but I’ll have to look into what products or services I can pick up to help me along there. The response overall isn’t an overwhelming outcry for graphics, but barely anyone voted for an actual lack of graphical elements. I might not need to go overboard, but I’d estimate MVOL’s current display falls well short of what folks are looking for here.

Past halfway through the larger section of this survey…

And here’s one I was simultaneously happy and a little exhausted to see. Quality vs. Quantity shows a strong leaning toward maintaining high writing standards even if it means slower production. Some folks are willing to see a small shift toward a faster, more relaxed style, but almost nobody wants a substantial shift in that direction. I’m glad folks are willing to wait to see only the best I can provide, but that means it’ll be harder to rough out new builds as quickly as I’d hoped.

Now, this one was a huge relief to me. Experimentation vs. Comfort shows that even among my biggest fans, you guys are willing or even excited to see something new and different. If you guys all wanted “just another MVOL,” it’d make it a lot harder to try and open up my games to new audiences, but this is pretty liberating. I just hope I can live up to your excitement! This was the second strongest response from the voters as a whole, and the strongest response from my supporters!

Now, this was one I wasn’t sure how to feel about, and it looks like you guys weren’t either. Character Cast Size seems to indicate almost nobody really wants my future games to just be about two people again, but very few people want an overly diverse cast either. My supporters especially shied away from strong diversity, but heavily voted for something in between. This is pretty interesting to me. You could argue MVOL is very much about two people, but it’s also true that there are other characters in the mix eventually. Where would it actually fall on this graph? In any case, I should be careful not to let my future games turn into a two-person deal just because that’s where MVOL started.

And now we come to one of the questions that directly puts me at odds with my audience’s desires. Story vs. Freedom shows a VERY heavy leaning toward open-ended experiences and choices mattering, albeit most folks don’t want to sacrifice the storyline entirely. I think this connects to the response on MVOL that the game feeling alive and responsive was the least notable strength in the game. My style tends to lean toward a certain amount of linearity, where characters will “take control away” and do their own thing, following their own logic and taking you along for the ride until they reach a key moment where it’s up to you to make the critical decision. But players can find that frustrating at times, and want to feel more like their decisions matter in the end, that they have more control over what the character does. This is an inherent conflict in game design: the more control you have, the less the story will “make sense” or be consistent, and the less emotionally powerful the characters can be. I can work some cheats with this and shift design focus, but this is probably going to be a key conflict I’m wrestling with in the future.

And lastly, two more before we get to the sexual content section.

It looks like I was right to think the text walls were wearing on people, but maybe not as much so as I thought. Text Length & Presentation shows almost nobody wants to go all the way on “banishing the walls,” and the average still leans toward maintaining the huge chunks of text MVOL is notorious for (though that may bring some bias with it again) but over 80% of the voters, and about 65% of the supporters, at least wanted things shortened down a little bit just to make the story easier to read. This is another one where I think people are scared away by the walls, so there’s a “silent potential audience” out there on the far right side of the graph, but it’s good to know that most folks are at least willing to go a little in that direction. I’ll have to think on the implications that so many people, especially supporters, specifically want my games to read like books, though…

And rounding out the non-sexual design questions was Gameplay vs. Reading. This one shows a very healthy balance, maybe even nearing a textbook bell curve right in the middle between “a balance of gameplay and text” and “just text.” I guess that means you guys do want some gameplay, but don’t want it really on even footing with the text so much as supporting the text. That’s really interesting, and makes me concerned that some of my ideas might be “too gameplay focused,” so I’ll have to weigh my options carefully there.

(Click here to return to the Table of Contents!)

Alright! And that brings us to the next section:

Design Priorities with Sexual Content

A lot of similar questions, but focused on specifically weighing things with sexual gratification. Let’s jump in!

A lot of my questions here revolve around the idea, “how much sex should I actually have in my games?” Because I think it’s not the sex alone that makes me a notable creator, but I also know I wouldn’t be here doing all this right now if I hadn’t included a lot of sexual content in my work, so it’s important to feel out that balance for the future. Natural Sex vs. More Sex is a promising start on that: overall, you guys don’t want to see sex scenes forced into the game to keep some kind of quota up– though it looks like just about everyone falls somewhere in between, meaning you’re willing to see it at least “a little forced” rather than 100% only happening naturally. Of course, if I’m doing my job right it shouldn’t feel forced anyway, I should be building premises where sex is going to happen naturally anyway, but I guess this means folks may not mind if the world-building and such feels just a touch contrived in spots to help make sure there’s lots of sexy goodness. I don’t like doing that very much, but it’s good to know folks are willing to go for at least a little of it.

And here’s another where almost nobody wants to go to either extreme: Sexual Content vs. Story & Character Development shows a mild leaning toward characters and story being developed before we get into anything sexual, but relatively few would lean all the way into always needing the full story first, and even fewer want to just skip all that and get to the fun. So I’m taking this to mean that I should aim to mostly keep things developed and meaningful surrounding the sex, but not go overboard with it– and it’s okay to mix in some stuff where maybe there’s less or no real context to the sex here and there.

I didn’t play all that much with Sexual Objectification in MVOL, but I know that can be a touchy subject in some crowds, so I wanted to get a feel for that here. I have the impression that the player base for MVOL tends to be on the sweeter/more vanilla side for sex games, so I was pretty shocked to see just how positive the response was for playing with non-consent and sexual slavery! If anything, this is something I think Patreon’s policies might object to more than my audience does. This is very interesting, and brings some of the ideas I had tucked away to a more prominent position as concepts you guys might be interested in.

And Sex Scene Length seems to suggest people do love how long the sex has been, but there’s at least a mild leaning toward making it a little shorter and more focused, with that peak in the middle. Still, hardly anyone actually leaned into the “shorter scenes” side entirely, so it looks like I shouldn’t try too hard to push in that direction. Which is good! Letting them blow up to ridiculous sizes tends to be one of the harder habits for me to fight once I really get a roll going.

Not quite as many of these, let’s flip to the next big set…

If I were to place MVOL on the scale for Sexual Content vs. Emotional Connection, I’d probably place it pretty far over on the right, so I was surprised with how much you guys leaned left for this one. Maybe it’s the phrasing– so far you guys have expressed a lot of openness to trying new things, and since I phrased this less as “giving up on emotional connection altogether” and more as kinda “experimenting with more intense sexual content with less emotion,” maybe that prompted more of you to say that sure, you’re at least open to it. And I mean, I’d probably have a really hard time ever giving up on adding that emotional context to the stuff I write, so that’s good! That means I don’t have to be afraid to experiment with that kind of thing, especially given how excited you guys seem to be about sexual objectification.

Sex Scene Frequency probably had the most unusual shape, haha. About 10% of voters each went to each extreme, but also only 10% of supporters voted for in the middle! Questions like this tend to push people toward voting in the middle a lot, so this is pretty shocking, and that trend carries through somewhat for total votes, too. So what does this mean? Few people sincerely want to make sure sex scenes come up often and reliably, but few people are completely willing to have long gaps between sex scenes. And out of the people floating in the middle, there’s a strong tendency to lean partway into one or the other, but you guys seem a little divided about it. Maybe this represents a certain dichotomy in my fanbase, where some people are more enthusiastic about the story and emotional content while others are annoyed when there’s too much of that “getting in the way” of sex? I’m not sure, but it’s fascinating that of all things, my supporters made an M here. I’m pretty sure that’s wildly unusual for this sort of survey. Overall though, the result in total is very balanced! Try not to go super long, but some longer gaps are okay, I guess!

This is another one that’s sort of pitting me against you guys, so to speak. Character Strength vs Customizability shows a strong desire for customizing characters, with little interest in keeping characters feeling unique and strongly developed in their features. At least most people have some interest in a balance, but this speaks to one of the ways that MVOL maybe falls short compared to other games, and the way I choose to write is a part of that. As a matter of fact…

Customizability vs. Text Variation addresses that pretty directly, with similar, but even stronger results. You guys aren’t very worried about scenes reading in a “clunky” way if it means you can get more customization! Now, I have a lot of mixed feelings about all this. I tend to write scenes by focusing on the emotions involved and the motivations and letting push the physical action, which feeds into the emotions, creating a really strong feedback loop. But the more I have to change things to accommodate different possibilities, the less I can do that and the more “generic” I have to write everything, which tends to turn a sex scene from something fun to just… a mind-numbing slog. So this is definitely a challenge I’m going to have to wrestle with. I knew I’d have to work on that to an extent, but it looks like the demand from you guys for customization is even stronger than I expected. Maybe I’ll have to develop some ways to like… write a scene smoothly in one go, then add in “clunky customization” after the fact as a compromise, where it will read a little strangely for different configurations, but at least it will be accurate. I’m not really happy with the idea, but if you guys are okay with clunky, it’s something I can experiment with.

And to round out this survey’s results…

This was the single strongest response on this questionnaire, and in a very similar vein to one of the other strongest answers! Disturbing Sexual Content shows that for all the bizarre sexual situations I threw you into, you guys are more than happy to see more of it, to get into content that feels “very strange, wrong, or dangerous” and explore that dark edge of what sex can involve. I was pretty surprised with this, as I’d honestly assumed a lot of that was probably pushing people outside of their comfort zone, and I know I’ve gotten a few complaints– but over 40% of you went all the way to the right on this! I guess I should embrace this kind of content and explore more of it as we go… though I may need to start including some clearer warnings or options to skip for those who aren’t ready for it.

And the last entry here, Quantity of Sex Scenes, picks up again on the peculiar dichotomy and balance we saw in the question about sex scene frequency. It might be my imagination, but you can almost see a slanted version of that M again here, where more people prioritize sex, but there’s still fewer people willing to go all the way and a certain tendency to the 2 and 4 slots. But it looks much more like a normal curve certainly, and with a heavy leaning toward sex that I find interesting. Of course, with the way I phrased this question, the left side is especially radical, suggesting not even having sex scenes at all anymore, so I’m not too surprised it didn’t garner a lot of support. Still, I’m a little surprised how heavily people leaned into the far right to say they’re here for sex first. If there is such a division in my audience, maybe this just kinda “smushed them to the right” a little with such an extreme left option? I figured it’d be worth checking, but it looks like everybody is still quite eager to see plenty of sex in my future work, regardless of what else is in there.

Phew! That was a lot of heavy concepts to explore! And a lot of valuable and important lessons for me on which projects I should work on from here and how I should maybe develop them further. But there’s still a lot to discuss about just what you guys are looking for in sexual content, so let’s take a look at the next one!

(Click here to return to the Table of Contents!)

Survey 3: Sexual Content

There were tons and tons of questions in this one, but they were all pretty rapidfire and in big sets of similar questions all at once, so hopefully that made it easier to respond to, and it should also make it easier to summarize everything. The first section was:

Would you play a game with this content?

This was a big set of possible subjects I’d be willing to explore, to get into more exotic and fetishistic content than the pretty vanilla stuff you see in MVOL. Looking over all the graphics, I actually see a little bit of a trend toward a W shape: it was very common for people to vote right in the middle for “That would be fine.” but either options to the side, “Maybe if it’s minimal.” and “I’d like at least some of that.” tended to be much less popular. The extremes were less consistent, but usually at least one far side would spike up again, meaning each question would have a whole lot of either “None of that!” or “YES, please!” responses.

I’m not sure if that means I might have phrased the “slightly yes” and “slightly no” responses in a way that made them less likely to be picked, or if it’s more that a lot of these fetishes tend to be things you either hate, love, or… are okay with?? I’m used to seeing stuff like vore be very polarizing with people either loving it or hating it, but the fact that it still spikes up in the middle is strange to me. Let’s take a closer look at some noteworthy results from this set.

If you look below, you can see that the single least popular option on the poll was to be a predator in any kind of vore. Vore is a guilty pleasure of mine in particular and I thought I might by some luck have a lot of folks interested in the subject in my audience, but it looks like that isn’t really the case. I also had a question for being a prey in vore and it was very slightly more popular, which at least lends credence to my suspicion that that’s generally the more popular option for vore stuff, but it looks like in the end, it would probably be a good idea to keep vore content somewhat minimal in my future projects. I was also stricken by just how much my supporters in particular were willing to… tolerate…? The subject. I’m not sure if that means they know my weakness and are trying to be nice, or if they just tend to be the open-minded sort, but in my experience it seems like usually vore is something you’re either very much into, or completely uninterested in seeing.

And after how positive respondents have been in previous subjects along similar lines, I was actually a little surprised that sexual slavery was only somewhat popular as a subject. Maybe folks are willing to deal with it, but not overly excited about focusing on it as a whole. Still, more than 25% of the voters and over 35% of supporters went for a big YES on this one, which also made it one of the strongest differences between how supporters and the general public voted on subjects in this set. I’m not sure what to take away from that except maybe that my supporters have a slight bent towards more intense dom/sub content? I know I tend to hear a lot about people loving submissive content among my more vocal fans.

Next, I was pretty surprised with just how unanimously popular the concept of resolving combat with sex turned out to be. It was the second most popular theme in this set, and the shape of the curve definitely stands out among a lot of Ws: almost nobody actually dislikes the idea, and everyone else is almost perfectly split between being just okay, liking it, or being excited for it. I think that we’ve seen similar ideas here and there in other games, though arguably moreso the idea of winning sex as a prize after combat, which was also popular on the survey but less strikingly so. Actually using sex mid-combat is more unusual an idea I think, so I was surprised how consistently popular it was! This definitely lends weight to one peculiar idea I’ve kept percolating.

But that wasn’t nearly as surprising as just how popular the idea of content with feral animals was! Feral, sapient animals was the most popular theme in this set, and non-sapient animals scored a 3.27 with a very similar curve, except the two negative responses came out around 15% each. I certainly enjoy this theme and have the impression it’s fairly popular, but considering there’s no real content touching on that in MVOL I was surprised that it was this big a hit! Granted, there were a few more people in the negative camp than with the previous graph, but the average is still higher just because almost 40% of all respondents gave a resounding “yes!” This is definitely going to have me thinking things over some, but the main issue there is that, to my understanding, Patreon definitely would not allow this kind of content on their platform. This, among other things, has me looking pretty hard at other options for supporting the project as a whole.

Results

The final results for the section on what content you’d be willing to play with, in descending order of popularity, were:
3.77 Feral, sapient animals
3.73 Using sex to resolve combat
3.62 Winning sex through combat
3.44 Corruption
3.40 Alien/bizarre creatures
3.33 Sexual slavery
3.29 Tentacle creatures
3.27 Feral, non-sapient animals
3.24 Prostitution
2.83 Cub/young characters
2.20 Being prey in at least one kind of vore
2.09 Being a pred in at least one kind of vore

What would you like to play as/with?

The next two sections were identical except for a single word, so I’d like to go over both at once. First I asked what you would like your player character, then what kind of character you’d like to interact with, sexually. This one is a little tough to summarize as it comes out pretty information-dense. Overall, it was much more popular in both sections for a given character to be flexible rather than specifically submissive or dominant, though some certainly showed a weight one way or another. Also, I did notice one odd trend: in almost every category, supporters tended to vote less for… everything, and early supporters especially didn’t seem to like any of the options. Glancing over the result tables, it’s not like they were skipping this section altogether (though one supporter did skip the “with” section), I guess they were just a little pickier than the public as a whole?

Reading this data feels a little odd, but basically, you need to remember that it’s essentially a huge series of yes/no questions. So if it scored a 40%, then 40% of respondents would like to play as/with this particular character type. You can see how popular each option is in the tables, and the numbers show the average “weight of dominance” preferred: voting submissive counted as a one and dominant as a three, so a 2.00 would be perfectly in the middle, and a 2.50 means a heavy preference toward dominant characters.

Let’s start conventional and work our way around to the more unusual archetypes. The confident, young adult female actually looks to have been the second most popular option, and playing with one was the single option with the highest average rating! This is also the only one that came close to 60% popularity in a single category, and playing with a switch was one of the few times supporters were actually more excited about it than the group average. Overall it looks like it’s very balanced besides that, with just a slight bent toward dominance on either side. I’m surprised this rated so highly out of all the options! The only character in MVOL I’d think is even close to this is the female avatar. This might be an archetype I don’t pay enough attention to in general.

The traditional masculine male also rated fairly well, almost exactly as popular to play but less popular as a partner, with a stronger desire for dominance. I’m actually a little surprised how balanced these two are as player characters– this might be my old school internet mentality, but I’m used to assuming most of my audience is male, meaning there’d either be a strong lean toward playing a male, or sometimes, a strong desire for escapism and playing a female. Either way I’d expect some imbalance! Now I’m tempted to run a more direct demographic survey sometime just to get a better idea of who my central audience actually is.

Now, for an archetype we’ve seen just a little of, but is maybe a touch off the beaten path…

I have to admit, I was actually a little surprised with how unpopular fatherly males were. Maybe there’s another term for the archetype I assumed would be fairly popular? Playing with someone you could more easily call daddy was apparently the second least popular option out of both sections, but those that do like this idea lean toward a more dominant fatherly type, which makes sense.

Motherly types did get some love, though! People weren’t as excited to play a mom, but having one for a partner got a very solid rating on average, though voters seemed just a little more split than usual on making her submissive or dominant, with less strong of a desire for a flex mom than other categories. I’ll have to admit I like this type better as well, so it’s nice to know it’s pretty popular.

That said, they can’t hold a candle up to these…

It’s really no surprise that the effeminate male was popular here, not just because of MVOL, but because they seem pretty popular in the furry community in general. If anything, my main surprise with this was that the desire to play with a dommy girly boy wasn’t all that high, considering how much it seems like people are always shouting out for more dom Lith content. The effeminate male was the most popular overall archetype out of the bunch, with a heavy leaning toward submission– on the playing side actually had the strongest leaning out of all the responses! It’s kind of a running joke that I built MVOL “backwards” and I should’ve let the player play as Lith, and it looks like this underscores that idea.

This one I was just a touch more surprised to see get such high ratings, but then, girl Lith probably fits square in this category, and it’s still not quite as popular as the “confident female.” But it seems that overall, girliness is very popular! And while I hear lots about how great it is to be dommed by effeminate types, overall people are still wanting their girly girls on the submissive side… though for partners, there seemed to be a healthy swing toward fully submissive or fully dominant girls rather than switches. Interesting.

Now, for a category of personal interest to me…

I haven’t tried to keep it a secret (especially if you hang out on the discord) that I enjoy the idea of a woman with a dick, so it was nice to see a pretty strong overall rating for the archetype here– and it’s personally gratifying as well to see that folks seem to agree that it’s hot when they’re dominant. This was another one where supporters actually jumped up to match the average in at least one category, too! Of course, the fact that “half of respondents would play as at least one kind of woman with a dick” is a strong rating is, itself, a strong reminder of just how varied the tastes out there are, and how hard it is to really plan to give any character a single archetype to build around if you want them to be successful. It’s rough!

Now, this was probably an odd question on the test. I knew that if I was including a lot of options for men and women and even for one kind of intersex, it would only be fair to include something for other intersex configurations. And if it turned out to be really popular, I might have to follow up with another survey to see what kinds in particular interested people. But I knew that the archetype I was most interested in myself was the girl with a dick, and it seems pretty dang popular in the community, and it looks like that pretty much panned out in the results here as well. I still plan to keep other intersex options available when it’s practical to the game’s design, but they don’t tend to be the kind of thing I personally get excited about, so it’s good to know I shouldn’t need to force it too much.

And lastly, the rather out there options…

It’s not too surprising to see this was popular after the earlier results, but I’m intrigued to see so many people interested in the idea of playing a feral character directly! Most fantasies I see focus on playing with one, though I often feel like taking on such a familiar yet alien role comes with a lot of interesting challenges and possibilities. So it’s pretty cool to see that maybe you guys are pretty interested in that too! This was one of the most popular options overall, though people would slightly prefer a feral partner, and overall lean toward their being dominant.

This is probably the most ambiguous category out of the whole set, but it was nice to see folks were pretty open to the idea of some kind of alien or strange creature. It looks like there was more overall support for having one for a partner, especially dominant, but plenty of people liked the idea of being a flexible creature, especially supporters. These responses came as a bit of a relief to me, considering the plans I have in motion…

Overall, there wasn’t actually that big a difference in average support for one archetype over another– even the least popular overall were still welcome in some form to half the respondents, and the most popular still didn’t get over 60% ratings even in one type. But you guys definitely showed some overall trends in preferences! I’ll have to keep this data and come back to it now and then as I start putting more solid lineups together for future characters.

Now, there’s one more section to this survey to take a look over!

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How do you like dominant characters to act?

This is another one where I managed to get some super dense information by carefully laying out the survey to be as easy and quick as possible. The basic idea is– how should dominant characters act? I introduced a lot of “styles,” and let you vote for whether you loved it or hated it, both in terms of playing that style and being a sub to that kind of style. In this way, I got a “three point scale” of “love, hate, or neither” for each style both for you and for your partner as a dom.

Of course, that means the data is super dense and even weirder to try to turn into something readable. I struggled to find a good way to graph the actual results I got directly and finally settled on these. For each style, you can see to the right what percentage of respondents loved playing it on top and subbing to it below, then on the left how many hated each. And in the legend at the top of the graph you can see the average approval rating as a percentage: if they hated it, a 0%, if they loved it, a 100%, and if they didn’t respond, a 50%. So 50% means people are completely ambivalent on average, 25% means they hate it and 75% means they love it. The legend lists the ratings for each subgroup, playing the dom first, then the rating for subbing to it.

Let’s take a look!

There are a lot of different tastes for how a dom should act, but in the end, it looks like kindness is the most popular all around– at least for this crowd. Sweet and gentle might be tied overall, with respondents loving to both play it and sub to it pretty much across the board. The only notable exception here is that it’s slightly less popular with supporters– the dip in approval from supporters from the last section didn’t really carry over to this one, overall, so it looks like maybe the supporters that especially like slavery don’t want too much kindness either?

And the slightly more rambunctious option of sexually vigorous but kind was also wildly popular, with subbing to it being the single highest rated option in the section. Again, though, supporters weren’t quite as enthusiastic overall. I have to admit, I expected more folks to lean toward something a little rougher, but maybe it’s more that even those that like some heavy dominance can generally love the sweet stuff too, especially if it doesn’t mean they hold back when it comes to sex.

And one step in the direction of roughness is…

Rough but caring is still pretty dang popular overall! It’s actually tied with sweet and gentle for subbing to it, but people are a little less excited to be the one that’s rough but caring. This is the beginning of a theme that we see throughout this section: people seem to be more excited to receive the rougher side of domination than to give the rougher side. In a way I’m not surprised to see this, but also– if you were ever tempted to be rough, wouldn’t playing that out in a video game be the best time to do so? Maybe folks weren’t really thinking of it like that, or maybe we’re more willing to admit to a masochistic streak than a sadistic streak, even to ourselves…

Rough and overbearing shows a similar trend, but takes a big dip in popularity overall. Being rough and overbearing was actually especially popular among supporters. Maybe the folks that like slaves and such want to have the slaves after all? But on the whole, this was one of the least popular options, and on average, respondents would rather sub to it than act it out themselves even if they do enjoy this sort of thing. Even so, 25% of respondents would love to be the overbearing dom!

And one step further down that path…

This format didn’t allow much room for description, so some of these are very short and kinda open to interpretation. “Merciless and objectifying” could probably mean a lot of things, but overall, people did not like the idea of subbing to such a dom, and being one even less. This was the least popular option of all, though 22% of respondents would still love to be that dom. Even supporters were less enthusiastic about going this far overall, and actually beat the average for rejecting subbing to such behavior.

And this was one that may have been especially unclear– “cruel emotionally, but not too rough” sounded fairly clear in my head, but I did get some questions from folks after. I don’t want to taint the interpretation of the data with extra explanations here, so let’s take it at face value. Rough or not, very few people want to be emotionally cruel or sub to it, and this option was nearly tied with the one to the left for “worst of the bunch.” Though if you’re only looking at supporters, they actually hated this one more! I know some folks enjoy some emotional cruelty in their domination (and the same 22% showed up to say so here) but it certainly makes sense, especially considering MVOL, that not many here would be looking for that kind of treatment. It’s honestly not my cup of tea either, though I do enjoy the occasional nefarious villain type.

Now! Let’s lighten the mood and look at a few other options.

I’m not personally a big fan of the “power struggle” idea, as you may notice in how MVOL plays out, but it’s stuck out to me how much some people have requested such a thing, and I’ll admit it’s true that when I’m playing other pervy games, sometimes I’ll think about how cool it’d be to have the option to “turn the tables” one way or another with a given character. So I’m not too surprised to see that flexible doms that can be turned submissive were very popular– though it’s interesting to see that this was more popular to play as than to play with. Actually, out of all the options, this was the only one with a significant lean toward playing it rather than subbing to it– meaning two things. One, it sounds like you guys are more interested in a sub that turns into a dom than a dom that turns into a sub. And two– well, that you guys seem to like playing the sub more in general! Of course, I’ve been seeing some feedback that I’ve swung too much toward providing subby content lately, so I’ll try not to forget that more than eighty percent of respondents still love playing doms. Honestly, that’s a huge positive response on both sides! I guess that the high “switch” responses earlier weren’t just a case of “indecisive voters picking the one in the middle.”

And out of all of them, I think this might have been the most… unclear, just from the name. I’m used to seeing the term “larger than life” used in a certain way to describe certain people and characters, but maybe that’s not something others see as often, or at least aren’t sure how to apply to a sexual dominant in particular. Whatever the case, this option ended up being less popular overall, though significantly more welcome than the roughest options above. Still, a hefty 23.5% were confident enough about what I meant to say they’d hate playing it, and 20% didn’t want to sub to it either. I think this kind of character can be pretty interesting to play with in a story, but it definitely sounds like something I’ll have to handle carefully if and when they show up.

And finally, a pretty simple dichotomy.

After how heavy the rest have been, this feels fairly straightforward. How should a dominant character act when you’re not banging? Apparently, the overwhelming response is that they should be relaxed and humble, maybe to go with that kindness we saw in the first set of responses. This was actually the only option that got a zero for responses on the hate side in any subset of respondents.

And while folks are at least amenable to the idea of an “always on” dom (and half of them love subbing to one), it’s clearly less popular overall, and about a quarter of people hate the idea. Though supporters are also more inclined to be that dom than average… I feel like I’m graudally learning about a specific subsection of my supporters that just really want to dominate the hell out of some pets. Neat!

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Summary

Phew! That was a ton of data to sift through, and I’m probably going to have to go over all this several times just to really absorb all of it. In the end, dividing the respondents into early and total didn’t seem to make a huge difference anywhere– but that’s actually good! That shows that at least for the total sample, this should be a very strong image of the average preferences of my entire playerbase, since I took a sample, then took a double sample, and they came out about the same across all the questions!

Supporter responses did vary more, especially between early and total, but I didn’t see much significant change in a way that could be said to mean something so much as what looked like probably some random noise. That’s why larger sample sizes are always better– the more people respond, the less chance that a few outliers will skew your results. Still, there were some pretty interesting differences between supporters and the total pool of respondents that seem a little too consistent to call coincidence. Thankfully I didn’t notice any huge disagreements between supporters and the public– that might have forced me to make some hard choices, but as it is, it looks more like there might be a couple things that would be especially welcome to the people putting food on the table for me, but not so much so that it should be a conflict or need me to go well out of my way.

So what did we learn from all of this? Let’s try to compress it down to the biggest lessons.

Looking back on MVOL, you guys most strongly appreciated the quality of the sex scenes and the general writing, and while you did like its responsiveness to your decisions and the twists and turns of the story, those elements were the least powerful overall. The difficulty finding collars the first time playing was definitely the weakest part, but you guys didn’t feel too much like it was ever “too much reading” or that having releases every other month was a problem.

Going into future content, you guys want to make sure I keep the content intense, even disturbing, both emotionally and sexually, and you don’t want me to shy from experimenting with crazy new ideas! Also, overall, you do want more graphic elements, you want me to take my time to keep the writing quality maxed out, you’d like more meaningful choices even if it means a weaker storyline, and you like long sex scenes, sexual objectification, lots of sex scenes in general, and more customization even if it makes scenes read “clunky.”

For sexual preferences, you’re not crazy about vore or cub stuff, but you love ferals and mixing sex with combat. You like “average” or “girly” characters more than the mature types, you like stuff with a woman with a dick more than other intersex options, and you’re generally pretty happy with the idea of feral or bizarre creatures. You’re on the subby side overall but definitely seem to like playing both dom and sub overall, with a leaning towards kind doms or maybe the type that get rough but still care about you. Some of you do like mean doms, but usually you’d prefer to be subbing to them rather than playing them.

Overall, this is probably the best set of results I could’ve hoped to get! You guys are being so open-minded and supportive it’s hard to believe– or rather, I kinda feel like I don’t deserve this kind of faith, that you guys must see me as much more reliably capable than the nerd with a keyboard that’s struggled to put all this together. I still feel like I’m just barely scraping by, keeping progress going, and it’s foolhardy to indulge myself like this, but I also feel like I need to push myself and keep exploring new things, to get out of my comfort zone and force myself to improve.

But I’m not saying it’s great just because I got some supportive feedback– I also got some pretty important feedback on things that I might not like to hear, but need to have laid out clearly for me. I guess that when you get down to it, the conflict for me as a game designer might be that I tend to approach it a little too much like a book– I want the storyline and the writing to come first, and I have a lot of trouble getting graphic elements added in that I can be happy with, but it’s important to players to have a strong graphic element, and you want to be able to make lots of meaningful decisions rather than feel like you’re playing through someone else’s story, with a character customized to suit you. And I mean, as a player of games I can respect and agree with that! It’s more me as a designer that sees it as a big problem to wrestle with.

And that’s not a bad thing. Some things come easier to me, but I need to know what elements are really important to work on developing and improving, and what elements aren’t really important to you guys and I should stop wasting so much time and effort on. I feel like I got some pretty clearly voiced requests from my playerbase from this, along with a lot of encouragement, and I appreciate all of it.

Thank you all for taking the time to vote and give me a better idea of how I’ve done and how I should work from here! Again, I’ll be going over the final survey and the write-in feedback from all of you next time, I just wanted to get this much of the results out there before I delay it any further. I hope this has been half as interesting and informative for all of you as it was for me! And if you think I might have misinterpreted the data or missed some important trend, let me know! Goodness knows there’s a lot to digest here.

Keep an eye out for more soon!