Hello,
First of all I am glad that we have had such a successful release on Steam.
Second of all, there have been a few issues brought to my attention.
Regarding negative reviews being taken down -- there have been several people accusing the development team in taking those down in order to maintain a positive rating on Steam. To be fully open, this is not true. Reviews can be flagged, but it's up to an employee of Valve to read through the review and decide if it has a place on the Steam Store page.
Any reviews that have been taken down were done so at the discretion of a Valve employee, not anyone involved in the development of the title.
Also, I understand that when a game is released, there will be reviews of all colors -- both positive and negative. I want to maintain as little toxicity in the community as possible. Jumping into the reviews that are negative and attacking the reviewer is not the kind of community I would like to maintain.
While I do not condone this behavior and cannot take any action against users who do this -- white knighting is just as bad as leaving an attack-laden negative review. Both affect the reputation of the title and its community as a whole.
This street goes both ways, we can't attack those who voice their opinion -- that's not the type of community we should have surrounding one of the first openly furry games on Steam.
So in closing,
The reviews that are being removed are being done so by Valve.
Please do not attack those who have a negative view on the game.
They are entitled to their opinion; and white-knighting also affects the community's reputation in a negative fashion.
Thank you very much,
Kyle "Klace" Lambert.
Also, as for putting my own character in the game:
The game touches heavily on the topic of snap judgments, how they're wrong -- and how people often differ greatly from their public perception by the masses. Rook, Kila and Jade also speak about this subject a couple times in Chapter One.
The reaction to the Klace character is exactly what I was going for. I can't wait until people meet the character in the game and see what he's actually like. How the game spends this whole time building someone up like that only as a perpetuation of mass stereotyping.
A large theme of the game is rumors and false information -- spreading disbelief and slandering the name of other people. This is why the game wants you to get to know these characters -- to dig a little deeper, and see who they really are under that surface judgment level.
I hope this sheds some light on the topics I have spoken about.