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A jam submission

Secrets of the BastionView game page

Lead a team, satisfy your sexy guests!
Submitted by Impy — 15 minutes, 52 seconds before the deadline
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Secrets of the Bastion's itch.io page

Results

CriteriaRankScore*Raw Score
Novelty#43.7653.938
Play#83.5263.688
Aesthetic#83.9444.125
Narrative#103.2273.375
Overall#113.1673.313
Sound#113.2273.375
Harmony#153.1083.250
Horny#173.1083.250
Kink#182.6302.750
Stealth#191.9722.063

Ranked from 16 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.

Did you start early?
I made some sketches for major characters and gameplay concepts for a poll to decide which game I should work on for this Jam. The credits page was mostly lifted out of another game I made. No art or code in the game was made prior to the start of the jam.

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Comments

Submitted(+1)

"Anomaly research but horny" seems like a pretty interesting concept, and I like the way you can rearrange people's schedules before the day begins. However, I can't help but feel like falling behind an audit makes catching up to the next one harder.

Developer

Currently the next audit goal is equal to your current secrets rounded down + 2. So you get larger targets if you're ahead and smaller ones if you're behind. I plan to add ways to reduce your loss of glory from an audit in future updates.

Submitted(+1)

Okay! I finally had some time to sit down and play this enough to be able to give a rating. Like the others have already said, having so many gameplay elements with so little introduction makes for a very confusing first experience. During my first try, my actions were haphazard, leading to a swift room breach (and multiple subsequent failed containments). For my second try, I made myself a little diagram with the stats and their effects written out. From there, I just focused on mood/stress/atmosphere/tension stats, and then eventually learned what stats rooms require, and then learned that I can strategically schedule characters to buff them for later. I think if you end up adding a tutorial, it should only introduce a few concepts at a time. Even in the absence of a full tutorial though, it still would have been helpful to have some sort of diagram, overview, or guide.

The game feels like it draws a lot of inspiration from table-top games.

Others have also said that they wanted dialog portraits, but I think even without that, there are ways to communicate who is talking, like having the character sprites move, even just up and down.

Perhaps this genre is just not one that I get along with, because I could definitely see the gameplay strengthening one's bonds with the characters!

Developer

I'll try to figure out some sort better ways to introduce new players to the game. I'm currently working on adding success estimates for tasks to make it more clear what's good and what isn't. I might also just add another help category that gives a very basic overview of what to do.

 I'm definitely planning to add portraits, probably even as soon as the v2 patch.

Thanks for playing!

(+1)

I really like this, I like the mix of strategy and horny.

I'm not well educated in management games so I got lost preaty easy in all the options, and got a little overwhelmened.

But that's on my end I believe, the breach game was fun and quick to understand, maybe if I were better at the managment game the breach would be easier XD 

In general I would like to see this game developed and polished :D

I believe a tutorial level that explains step by step the options of the managing game is what I need to fully enjoy this gem :3

Developer(+1)

Thank you! It's not as difficult to play as it looks, but I'll try to make the important stuff more clear. Definitely planning to add plenty more content to the game over the year.

Submitted(+1)

Very cool! NTR isn't exactly my scene, but I still had a good time playing this, which really speaks to its strengths as a game.

As the other commenters have mentioned, there's a lot going on here. You've got two distinct modes of gameplay, each with its own set of mechanics, and multiple character and room stats to balance. The instructions screen helps, but it has to explain a lot. An interactive tutorial would be super cool to see, if this ends up being developed further.

The mechanics do end up working together in a cohesive whole, and I'm really impressed by how well it all works.

Developer(+1)

Thanks for trying it out! I definitely plan to keep development going throughout the year. I'm not too sure how I can do a tutorial without overexplaining things since it all kind of works together. I think the best way to figure this game out is to just go through a couple of days and see what happen. I do want to keep adding little touches to make some of the mechanics more intuitive however, like maybe list the success rates for various tasks.

Submitted(+1)

wow this is so polished for the result of a four week game jam, not to mention mechanically complex. i had a great time playing it

Developer

Thank you, I was pretty scared that I wouldn't be able to get all the mechanics working together on time. I'm happy to hear that you liked it!

(+1)

There's a lot going on with this game that both impresses and intimidates me.  That's a compliment!

Submitted(+1)

I'd say this was an interesting game to try out. The character sprites are very charming and well made. The choice of music fits well to this game too.

While it took me a short moment to figure the gameplay, I think it has a lot of depth put into it. The various resources, the stats of the characters and sexy scenes all make it interesting to try out different things in game. The info system can be helpful when you don't know what you're doing.

One thing I'd like to see is chat heads for the characters when they're talk, or just a line pointing towards the talker. It could make it little easier to follow the conversations. Overall I did enjoy playing your game a lot, well done.

Developer(+1)

I was hoping to get the portraits done before the release, but there just wasn't quite enough time. It's definitely one of the thing's I'm planning to prioritize adding. Thank you for playing, I'm really happy to hear that you liked it!

Submitted(+3)

I definitely feel like this game suffers from information overload. I don't know how to earn values and what action change what numbers. There are so many symbols all over the place. Did make me feel like I was suddenly in charge of running a complicated hotel. I might have to give this another try to fully understand everything. Although, I did manage to figure out the containment breach combat system tho.

I think my one piece of feedback would be adding tooltips when you hover over icons. I know my own project could have used some more useful hints when you hover over stuff.

Also, that centaurs dong is absolutely massive, I am in awe of its sheer size.

Developer

Yea it's definitely a bit of a plunge. I just don't know how to simplify it with the way everything's interconnected. Tooltips might help, but I can't really add them for every icon since they're part of the text. I'm mostly hoping that the starting difficulty is low enough that players can won't feel like they're being punished too much for trying things. Trying and failing does also result in making progress with secrets towards the main objective, so I'm mostly hoping that players will slowly figure out what's what without feeling too pressured. If you just don't try a bunch of new actions on unknown rooms right before an audit, you don't even need to know the icons and you'll do alright.

HostSubmitted(+2)

There is a lot of video game in this video game!  After playing it for 45 minutes I think I get the general idea, except I'm still fuzzy on exactly how I'm supposed to find secrets, so then I lost two audits in a row and my dumb ass was fired.

This is an impressive pile of mechanics that all seem to thread through each other (and each "mode" of the game), which is quite an accomplishment; at first I feared this was going to be a jumbled mess, but it makes sense once I got the hang of it, and a lot of the costs and rewards are pretty intuitive.  I have no idea how you could teach them to the player gradually, since they all seem to matter at once...  But then, I felt like figuring out the game was part of the game, and interesting in its own right beyond merely trying to min-max all the numbers.  So maybe that's fine.

I kind of wish there were more in-depth character interactions so I could get to know who the heck any of these folks are; maybe in response to the post-task response (praise, instruct, etc.) to make it feel less like merely picking from a menu?  But then you already did a lot in a month so maybe I'm just tossing out things you've already had in mind for weeks.

Bravo on sheer grit alone, damn.

Developer

Thank you, it was definitely one of my biggest coding challenges. There's over 4000 lines of original source code in this and many C# expressions that I never even used before. I only had the schedule menu done in the first week, so I feel quite proud to have built a functional game out of it in the other three.

I don't really know of a good way to introduce the mechanics a bit at a time, but you can generally just click randomly to get through the first couple of days. Secrets are obtained for every new type of interaction with a unique room you experience. There's a scrollbar in the schedule menu that keeps track, but maybe I should show them in the daily report screen too?

Character interactions and events are definitely a weak point right now. The entire intro sequence and a few of the events were written just some 30 hours before the due date. I also wanted to add portraits to the dialogues to highlight the personalities a lot more, but that too will have to be a feature in one of my future patches. Ultimately I want to have a unique interaction for every character in every room and two levels of temptation events.

Thank you for playing my game and organizing the jam. This is my absolute favorite event of the year and I'm already looking forward to joining Strawberry Jam 7!

Developer (1 edit) (+13)

For those who are curious, here are the sketches that I mentioned in my "early work" section. Since the game's major content was decided by a poll, I had to have something to show as a option, so that bit of early conceptualization was impossible to avoid this year.