some notes from about 3 hours of play, reaching turn 103:
- extremely unique format! or at least, I've never seen a game that works like this! I have to respect a game that's got such a dense and out-there idea. my overall take on the game is positive
- seeing as this is an alpha, I'm not expecting the game to be perfect, obviously - I'm hoping that these notes' criticisms might be helpful!
- the tutorial is a real infodump and I was still not at all sure what I was to be doing by its end :P
- my playstyle towards the end had me with more resources but I still don't really know if I'm "doing it right"
- I didn't know I was into twinning, but I really like the twinning event descriptions! it was very fun turning a low-value incarnation into a robot like my player character :3
- the little icon melding animation for tfs is super lovely
- I was constantly losing matter and energy to something, and I have no idea what; my guess is that housing incarnations or performing training or going on events might cost those resources, but I do not know what's costing me stuff or how much it costs. it meant I really couldn't afford any buildings after the first one for quite a while
- I got a captive soul relatively early and despite all my trying and constantly doing obedience training, reinforcement, and torment, I couldn't make her a servant. I don't know if I need some specific room type or something? it was pretty annoying! I can't find anywhere to read the "Compliance" value, and her will remained high no matter what I did. she had 108 Loyalty by the end. screw you, Victoria
- trying to download the asset packs just didn't work for me for some reason, it'd do the entire download and then tell me the download failed. I dunno what's up with that, I have the disk space. it happened with the main pack and with the robot pack
- I'm not the target audience for the automation tools, I did not try them
- I couldn't find activities I liked
- I didn't want to sell characters; my soul income was exceedingly poor because I hate bimbos & always declined bimbo soul fishing, so I didn't really have spare to sell. if there's a good place to get more souls besides bimbo soul fishing, I either didn't get it or didn't recognize it
- "transform this character to this particular specification" seems just about impossible unless you're really kitted out, I did not try any of those. even reading their descriptions is a trial
- the most lucrative event was Bored Succubus, which got me 3 or 4 succubi in much, much less effort than any other character-accruing method I could find
- my favorite event was the robot factory because it gave me another robot and I like robots :)
- I'd often explore a location and get a batch of events and none of them would be events that I'd want to do, which was a little frustrating. part of that is individual taste, but also I didn't really have a way of seeking out events I wanted to see besides, e.g., exploring tale realms over and over hoping to get monstergirl cave, hoping to get fun monster incarnations (which did not happen)...
- I'd have appreciated a few simple "get energy" or "get matter" activites, but they felt rare relative to the consequential and unclear-in-reward "sell a character" activities
- I don't know what the skills do
- ...because I'm not reading the event descriptions, right? but it's also not really clear what, e.g., "Trapper" would do for any quest. the glossary doesn't tell more than is evident from the name: you can make traps like fred from scooby doo! but what kind of activity is that useful on? will it help me get energy? will it help me get souls back? I have no clue, it just says "trappers can trap" which is evident from the word itself. somethin's gotta be done here, I think
- if I read through every modifier in every event, I would be reach turn 6 by the year 2745. there's a lot, and cross-referencing which characters have which abilities is a very manual process. it's just not time efficient, or it didn't seem like it to me - shift-clicking to autoassign alleviates it somewhat but it leaves me in the dark as to what I need to improve. there is UI ingame to help when you click on each event, it tells you which aspects of a character are helping, I probably could've used that more
- even more self-evident skills like agility or strength or toughness don't cleanly map to the existing activities in my opinion. I was waiting for an activity like "Wagon Raid - Everyone's gonna run really fast on foot to catch up to a wagon train" so I could be like "aha! my player character has Agility ++! I'm gonna make so much money!" but instead I got events like "extracting a shard of the heaven realm is best done with two Attractive++ characters" - huh?? maybe Activities could state in plain English the roles they want? it certainly seems like they're made with roles in mind... it's difficult to micromanage these things when information is buried, and it's difficult to manage on the macro scale because the Activities that exist are a mystery until you see them for the first time, and the locations don't really telegraph what you'll get... it's a big fog of war. some of the fog of war is good and mysterious, some of it makes the game opaque, I'm not the game designer, I'm not the one who says what's what but all I'm sayin is I can't see six feet in front of me
- parsing visual information can be very difficult
- in Activities' descriptions, all the abbreviations are indistinguishable to me and it's also just a lot of info all at once. more often, I wound up holding click and drag on incarnations manually to peek their modifiers, which is a nice feature! but then I have to do it on every incarnation individually, and it doesn't work for character-on-character jobs like obedience training
- I have no idea what the icons in the top right corners of each card mean, nor can I see them very well when zoomed out
- scanning the numbers like Exhaustion or Boredom on a character is pretty difficult to do quickly, and I was doing it constantly. maybe I could've made some automation rule to take exhausted or bored characters out of rotation but I'd really prefer to be able to see which characters are exhausted. maybe that's what the icons mean, but I can hardly see the icons either :P
- I'll note that I do appreciate how colored borders distinguish different classes of character, and the boxes-in-boxes visual formatting is effective! that part is totally fine and good
- more exotic monster girls pls, lamias and driders maybe? kobolds?? :D
my stats when I stopped playing:
- 207 Matter
- 441 Energy
- 4 Fate (I spent a couple, and I do not know how I got some back)
- 12/15 Incarnations
- 3/17 Souls
- 4/70 Items (none of the items I got were those I wanted to use)
I hope this wall of text is useful! I've played a decent number of tf games and I don't think any of them have inspired me to give notes like this. this game's trying a lot and I think that's super cool - and it's way better than Fetish Master already! it's so mechanically detailed already! it's just bound to have rough edges & I hope that notes like this can be helpful