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Turning the Page [v1.0.0] ($5) Game Access Release & Post-Game Analysis
🕑 Added 2025-02-26 16:07:01 +0000 UTCHey everyone,
With the announcement of our upcoming project just days (or hours?) away, we wanted to take some time to look back on Turning the Page’s development and share some of our reflections on the process as well as the final product, with an eye towards what might change going forward.
Since the post might contain spoilers or color your impression of Turning the Page’s finale, we recommend you wait until you finish reading it before proceeding. Speaking of which, today is the day it’s become available for our Game Access patrons, so all of you lucky ducks can feel free to download v1.0 here:
Turning the Page [v1.0.0]
Okay, finished reading it? Great! Hope you enjoyed it. We really do.
Working on Turning the Page was an unforgettable experience. We are deeply passionate about it and are grateful for the success it brought us. However, working on it wasn’t always easy.
After the first couple of projects, we wanted to do something a bit different in terms of story and art. So, as many of you know, we took a very prolonged break between Misumi and Turning the Page to allow Operae to improve his technical skills. Although we dislike that it caused such a content drought, we think this turned out to be a good decision and are pleased with how Operae was able to use the time to sharpen up his skills.
That being said, we don’t expect such a repeat will happen again going forward. Our subsequent projects might release with minor gaps between them, but we don’t think it will be much more than that. Operae spent a lot of time practicing his art in the background and doing a fair bit of experimentation during Turning the Page, particularly during the final year. As a result, we are pleased with the level of quality we will be able to bring to our next project from the beginning.
Expect to get a glimpse of what that will look like very soon, alongside our announcement.
Now, as we mentioned, the second major change to Azienda during Turning the Page was the writing, and it was a pretty dramatic change. The writer changed entirely, as did the pacing and tone of the game. After two darker games, everyone on the team was curious to see if we could write another kind of story. One that was a bit more focused on the heroine falling in love with another man. Something very heavy on cheating and romance. We wanted the romance to lead into a long, slow burn, resulting in a heroine that is very different by the end of the game. In addition, we decided to change the way the story was told, allowing the player to choose between two different points of view.
While we are happy we decided to do this story, over the course of the development we realized a few things that we didn’t feel were working very well. We are going to speak about them frankly:
1) It was too long
This is the first and most obvious point. In particular, the buildup was too long and the post-corruption period was also too long. We found that as time progressed, it became more and more difficult for new players to hop on board, as there was a pretty insane amount of story to get through. We read some comments where people mentioned they skipped through the text, and while this is a VN and certain players tend to do that, we feel that we didn’t do enough to counter that problem. Compounding this issue is our next point.
2) Felix’s point of view didn’t have enough happening
We love mystery netorare. Seeing the story from the male POV and wondering what is happening and when, almost like a detective. It can be incredibly fun and anxiety-inducing in the best way possible. Unfortunately, we don’t think we did justice to that experience. There were long stretches of Felix being oblivious and not witnessing enough enticing material for the gameplay to be independently enjoyable. Combined with how long the game was, that resulted in an experience that alternated between fun and boring for hours. Our biggest course-correction to Turning the Page’s direction midway through development was attempting to beef up the Felix POV, and while it certainly improved things, it wasn’t a smooth experience. Simply put, we can do better.
3) The point of view system caused a lot of repeated dialogue
Another issue with the point of view system is that it causes dialogue to be repeated twice in short order if a player wanted to read both POVs in a given month. We heard some complaints about this and tried to shift things slightly, but maintaining a balance of a story that could be read from both POVs individually and together was challenging to write. In fact, writing those scenes would end up being the lowest point of the writing schedule every month. Mint dreaded them. It sounds like it would be the easiest thing to write since the dialogue is already written after one POV is done, but it would cause a lot of rewrites or awkward shoehorning of inner-monologues to paper over plot issues. It, simply put, was not a fun time for many involved and it kind of left the feeling that the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.
4) The choices were hard to integrate
One of our major criticisms early on was that we didn’t introduce enough decisions into the game and it was little more than a kinetic novel. This is true. It took too long to get to the first decision. Speaking frankly, one of the big reasons for this was because they were hard to work with, given the POV system. If we introduced a minor decision in Sophie’s POV, how would Felix’s POV interact with that? It didn’t seem like there was a good answer to that, which led to us avoiding decisions more than we’d like.
5) The decisions were not dealt with gracefully
Although the decisions took a while to come, they did eventually come. When they did, they caused a major split in the game’s story, which seemed fine in theory. However, that route split ended up being fairly awkward for both the writing team and the players. It caused a situation where we had to rewind our thoughts back months in time without much of a way of naturally reminding the players what was happening. Overall, we don’t believe the split, presented the way in which it was, created a very positive experience for the player, instead causing more confusion and loss of interest than anything else.
How are we going to deal with these issues?
Well, while we aren’t going to detail about every single one, we will talk about our broad plans, starting with the length. Our next project will be much shorter. Not as short as the projects before TtP, but closer to that range. Our aim is that projects will last 18 months or less. So, in essence: you get two complete, but still satisfying, netorare corruption stories in the same period, and we get to shake things up creatively more often. A win/win situation, we think.
In addition, we are going to be changing up how our POV system works. Rather than scrap the male POV and go all in on the female POV, we are going to put a lot more effort in the male one. Our next project will still present an option, but the option will be between seeing the story from the male perspective exclusively, or seeing the story from multiple ones. We think that will cut out a lot of the problems while still allowing the user a choice in how they experience the story. In particular, we will focus on presenting each POV as a complete and satisfying experience that does not require the other.
So if you want to read the male POV before the mixed one, you can do so without worrying about having a tedious mixed experience, since you will be able to skip everything you saw before. Or, if you want, you can skip that experience altogether and just get to the mixed POV, which will tell the story completely as well. Finally and vitally, if you want to play the game from the male perspective only, you should have a fun and titillating experience that perhaps won’t be as complete and all-encompassing as another way of playing it… but if you are into that kind of thing, that’s part of the thrill isn’t it? 😁
So, we hope you found this not-so-brief look into our thoughts about Turning the Page interesting. While what we discussed today isn’t every change that we will be implementing going forward, it’s a starting point for our next journey. Trust us when we say we have given this a lot of thought and are giving the next game our all. We want to create the best NTR experiences we can, and every step along the way is a lesson, allowing us to do even better.
I guess we’ll see you in a couple of years (or less) for our next post-mortem, and we hope the list is a little shorter next time. But in the meantime, enjoy!
Thank you for everything,
Azienda
Comments
NotMyMonkey
still too funny. Signed up for the $5 subscription, and the link in this post is still blocked. :)
Azienda
Thank you for your feedback!!
Pete
Absolutely dont agree with the first point you make. The VN was not too long, but it was not catchy enough towards the end. I totally loved that you did a long and juicy corruption progress (which was very good in the beginning and middle of the game), but there was too little fight, it was too easy, it wasnt a rollercoaster of emotions towards the end anymore. Also its a POV problem; People giving feedback for each update versus people giving feedback on the game as a whole. Thats a very different point of view imo. I think the VN beeing too long is the wrong conclusion. Its more about story development, story telling, character development, suspense curve. Your story needs more peeks and downs. More struggle, more fights, more drama. I for example have been missing Mrs. Page struggling more and fighting back. I have been missing more juicy scenes where she gets groped or harassed in front of Felix or students. There were many opportunities for in class harassment you missed imo. If anything I missed scenes towards the end I was sure you wouldnt miss and definitely implement. So please dont hasten or shorten the corruption process in the next VN. Try to find ups and downs, let the story progress forwards and backwards, implement some small gameplay features such as in Navigating the Rift, underlining the corruption and giving it a bit more uuumfff. Making a shorter VN imo is completly the wrong direction and leads away from what I would call your unrefined strengths!!
wt859
I agree with the problems you've identified with TTP and I like the changes you're making for the next VN. I'm excited to hear the other changes as well!
Tundrahare
Id say I identify as one of the viewers who fell off a bit towards the end, I think you did a great job explaining some possible reasons as to why. But, I’d like you and the team to know the writing and story even up to that point, and a significant amount through the corruption transformation has made a lasting imprint on me. It was made even more impactful because of reflections in my own relationship and some profound realizations about that IRL. The journey might not have been perfect, but you all created something very meaningful through this story. The writing really won me over on this one. Looking forward to what’s in store next. Congrats on such a large project finalized.
Demonix
IMO I think you acknowledged the game's major drawbacks, but one other thing I would also like to mention is the huge difference of timelength and CGs between the "romance/cheating route" with red hair Soph and the "sharing/3some 4some route" with Soph + Amy/Danielle. The romance route has almost like 40-50h of playtime and somthing like 85-90% of all CGs and the sharing route comes far too late, resulting in far fewer CGs and barely lasting 10h of gameplay. I know it's purely a personal preference and it collides with "the game was too long" problem, but if you had managed to balance the different routes more effectively, I think everyone including you guys would have been more satisfied and kept some scenes less redundant. But obviously overall, the game is absolutely fantastic, first time I finish a H-game starting from the first update in 2021/2022 to the end in 2025. Can't wait to see and to play your next game ! 🙌
LinenZero
This all sounds good to me. You actually addressed the issues I had with the game and I like the changes you're making (glad you're keeping the male only POV, mystery NTR is my favorite). Looking forward to the new game, your art and writing have improved a lot and are really good right now. You got a dedicated subscriber in me.
