Comments on comments
I keep finding myself writing these blog posts in the dead of night, right before I go to bed. I've been so preoccupied with working on the website during the day that I end up putting these off...!
Even though I'm tired, however, I want to say two things:
- Apparently, this website template supported adding comment sections to posts? I might experiment with it later on, though I might also take a similar approach to deaddeaddeath's website and have links to off-site comment boxes for my games or other pages of interest.
- As ever, my seasonal depression brings out the worst in me. As happy as I am when I see my friends and fellow artists receiving tons of praise, attention, and glowing comments about their work, some insecure part of my mind, inflamed by Winter's touch, sulks with envy: "Oh, so we get barely so much as a trickle of views on any of our stuff even on release, while they all get thousands of downloads and dozens of comments about how these games changed the commenter's whole personality, cleared up their acne, opened their third eye, and made them curl up on the floor while crying and vomiting profusely for hours? Are all of our games just complete shit by comparison or something?"
Expanding on the second point there, obviously I recognize that comparing my games to those of my friends is like comparing apples and oranges. We're clearly telling very different types of stories, and a great deal of my work is as strange and inscrutable as anything else about me, while their games are vastly more grounded in reality (and thus vastly more accessible, say, to the average Itch.io commenter). And in a community of predominantly queer and trans folks, it's to be expected that the stories centered on widely shared queer and trans experiences will get far more attention and acclaim than the Kyou System's opaque attempts to recreate the more lurid images of their nightmares.
I also have to consider that a huge proportion of the traffic going to their games, especially on Itch, comes from their games both featuring and being tagged as containing adult content. This fact also helps to account for the difference in the number of comments, since a significant fraction of them appear to come from people who stumbled across these titles while looking to masturbate and ended up getting blindsided by the emotional depth of the storytelling and characters. Meanwhile, I haven't released any sex games yet, so I don't see any of that traffic, which necessarily means my work will systematically receive less attention on Itch.
Not that it really matters all that much at the end of the day. These intrusive flare-ups of insecurity aside, I love the work I've been doing on my projects; and even if my games are never included alongside those of my peers in the "Awesome Games / VNs You Gotta Play Right Now" recommendation posts, I'm going to keep making them anyway, heheheh~
And I truly am delighted that my friends' works are getting so much praise! In all honesty, they deserve every last bit of it: They've all improved so much as artists even just in the time that I've known them, and they've been releasing some truly excellent VNs lately! The gratification of my ego is infinitely less important than the fact that the community is growing and everyone is supporting each other as we express ourselves together~