Flying High took a ton of work to create across about 1.5 years, so to end up staring at mixed reviews, seriously caught me off guard. How was the game any different from previews shown??
Apparently some players bought the game with the wrong expectation, so I'm here to clarify and address some of these issues.
TLDR:
To make it easy to judge Flying High for yourself, we'll be releasing a demo very soon, so that you can play a good portion of the game for free before buying.
And here's a table that describes what the game is and isn't. I've added this prominently to the description. I have zero interest in anyone buying something they don't want:
The long version:
Not a full animation.
Yes, unlike our previous full length animations, this is our first attempt at a game, a visual novel game. The visual novel format consists of moving still images and animated sex scenes, that's just how they work. I shouldn't assume that everyone's familiar with visual novels, so I've adjusted the game description to point out that this is a visual novel, not an end to end animation and not a real-time 3D game, which should be obvious from the gameplay trailer.
Story is too basic.
Yes, the focal point are the sex scenes, isn't that the point of an AVN?? At least that's the approach I wanted to take. The story is light, simple and doesn't take itself too seriously. It's not Shakesphere, but serves its purpose and I think it has its moments.
Game is too short.
Yes, it's short. Around 2.5-4 hrs (if you don't race through everything). In my mind it plays more like a movie and in that respect it's longer than a full length movie. It's also not something our testers had an issue with but I can see that if you need your 10 hours of visual novel gameplay then Flying High is not for you. I've explicitly added that to the description. I'd personally take 3hrs of good game play over 10hrs of boring.
Every screen was fully rendered, almost a 1000 of them. Since every screen takes a lot longer to make that does constrain the versatility in storytelling. So for longer story telling sprites on background would have been the more efficient approach. We also started with an image set, which wasn't made for long storytelling. In future I would of course start with the story and build the set around it.
Sub-par Chinese translation
Yes, we shouldn't have released the game with a machine translation. So, I've disabled Chinese language support for now. The good news is, we've found a professional Chinese translator so we'll re-enable it once the Chinese translation has been completed and proofread. All other translations have been human proofread.
Judge for yourself. Demo coming soon!
Having said all that, I love the game we made, but I'm biased, so the best approach is to give you the tool to judge Flying High for yourself. So we'll be releasing a demo version of the game very soon, so that you're able to judge for yourself whether it's worth it for you.
Agree or disagree with my take? Let me know in the comments below.
I would also love to hear from others who have played the game. How did the actual game differ from the previews shown? What am I missing?