Play game
Testing: Dragon Star Story's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Stealth | #15 | 3.012 | 3.300 |
Horny | #16 | 3.286 | 3.600 |
Narrative | #18 | 3.195 | 3.500 |
Kink | #23 | 2.465 | 2.700 |
Play | #26 | 2.556 | 2.800 |
Overall | #34 | 2.384 | 2.611 |
Harmony | #36 | 2.465 | 2.700 |
Sound | #41 | 0.913 | 1.000 |
Aesthetic | #43 | 1.826 | 2.000 |
Novelty | #43 | 1.734 | 1.900 |
Ranked from 10 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Leave a comment
Log in with itch.io to leave a comment.
Comments
The way you easily allow to choose a Sub/Dom scene or entirely skip an encounter, explained in-universe as a debug mode, is pretty clever. Also, the way the characters discuss the mind-over-boby nature of the game in between encounters adds a nice layer of kink on top of everything else, specially on the water cavern path.
Hey, I'm really glad you enjoyed it. The mind over body thing was something I wanted to dip into absolutely and I'm glad that it layered on nicely for you. Thanks for the comment.
Play: It's a twine story. Or, well, probably not, since it doesn't resemble one in looks (different font, different sidebar, etc), but it's essentially the same. You read, and then click on links like a choose your own adventure sort of thing.
Aesthetic: I think you should spend some time tuning up the visuals a bit. Just because it's an interactive fiction story doesn't mean looks aren't important, and the font you have right now is... painfully default. It would also be nice to be able to choose your colors, accessibility etc, but I know that's really hard in Twine, so it's probably also hard in whatever you're using. One thing to note is that I had to zoom out quite a bit to get it to fit on my screen- imo, you shouldn't have to use the fullscreen function just to play the game.
Sound: There is no sound. My low rating is descriptive, not done out of malice.
Narrative: This is a visual novel, so the narrative is probably the most important part. I'll be talking about both the story itself and everything else to do with the words here, since I'm pretty big on well-done writing in games. This game is entirely writing, and it's... interesting. It's very confident, I have to give it that. The voice is confident, there's slang thrown around and the characters are written with personality. You act like you know what you're doing, which is always a valuable skill to have. That being said, it stumbles a bit too often. I wouldn't say they're straight-up errors, but there's many points where the grammar and sentence structure could be vastly improved. An extra comma or two, a reshuffling of the words, a few tweaks that could be made here and there to smooth over some jarring moments. A lot of extra commas, actually. Remember, placement of all punctuation (but especially commas!) dictates the way a sentence is read, so it should be placed to guide the reader's perception of the sentence and make it resemble real speech, ESPECIALLY in dialogue. It would be very strange if all of a sudden I just stopped using them right? If it wasn't supposed to be funny I would probably sound like a robot or something speaking with none of the natural pauses that we usually do and making it very awkward. It's not hopeless, though. Just go over it with a fine-tooth comb and you'll probably be fine. (My number one recommendation regarding checking for flow in voice is always to read it out loud, but... well, that might be a bit difficult. Just enunciate your thoughts, I guess?) Awkwardly-phrased as the dialogue is, though the way the dialogue fits within the story as a whole is very natural, you have a good balance of dialogue to description and they fit into each other well. Grammar rant over, onto the content the words are making- and wow, there is a LOT of it! When you don't have to worry about visuals or coding, there's a lot more time for writing, so games like these can be big even in a Jam timeframe. You've clearly got a really good picture of the world you've constructed, and there's a lot of love put into the environment descriptions immediately. Reminds me of me- I describe things at length because I'd rather be drawing them lol. I went for the cathedral route, since contrary to the amount I talk I do actually have limited time and attention span for these reviews, and it was alright. I'm not big on high fantasy, but the puppet character was very charming. I didn't get to see all of it, though, because the second choice on the dragon scene is broken. Did you not get to writing it, or was there just a coding error?
Horny: The sex scenes are as detailed as the environments, if not even more. Admittedly, my eyes kind of glazed over, but that's just me being me. You clearly brought your all to the table here.
Kink: I only read one route in detail, and I clicked fast through the other two to see roughly what the content was, and... it's furries and dragons, with a ghost thrown in for spice. If anyone has been paying attention to the saga of my absurdly long reviews they know what scores furries get.
Stealth: I hadn't thought about this category yet, but I guess it gets more points than the other games, just because it would be much easier to play this in more public scenarios. As long as you're not reacting too strongly, and no one's physically close enough to actually read what's on the screen, it just looks like you're playing any other text adventure game, or even just reading a web article or something.
Harmony: The aforementioned grammar stumbles and default font are holding it back.
Novelty: I was going to score it low, but you get some bonus points because at least the world you've built is solid, and a good setting counts as bringing something new to the table.
Final Thoughts: Why did I talk this much? Why did I talk this much??? The world may never know.
I actually had a bit of an error or three on this twine when it comes to codin' that I didn't notice. I fixed them after a few folk let me know what was up, was up and the game should be playable all the way through.