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Oh, man. I feel like there's a lot to unpack here, so apologies in advance if this gets a little unwieldy.

I have a lot of praise for this game, especially for the writing and worldbuilding. Some of the things in this game I already knew I was into to some extent, but the descriptions are so wonderfully vivid that things that'd normally repulse me didn't phase me at all. I also appreciate that you made the world itself fairly open, but still worked out a plot that makes perfect sense.

As far as issues, criticisms, and suggestions go (I'm not sure what's a bug and what's just incomplete), there's a few things on my mind; gonna number them just to keep it tidy.

1. Brulvundojn's misspelled as "Brolvundojn" at least once, during the "knock me up" scene. Wouldn't be a big issue, but I'm not sure how to pronounce his name in the first place, so it threw me off a bit. Also, the word "spar" is used to refer to cocks multiple times... Do you mean "spear?" In that case, it's misspelled in every instance that I've noticed.

2. I get a "can't find matching endif" error when walking up to Raven at the caves. His sex scenes seem to be tied directly to the ones he had while the town was occupied, and "so what are you doing around here" is the only thing you can ask him. Nothing changes if you go back to town, so there's no way to get him to move to town.

3. Once the soldiers move into town, or if they "stay," they vanish. These two prompts are the only ones I've seen:

  • you first see Max sitting in the ĝheist camp w/ Khru sitting on his lap
  • Raven, out of his gear, is waiting at the edge of the village, sitting on the old cobblestone wall

After that, they're just.. gone. No way to interact with them again (Though the glass mountain cave still says there's smoke coming from it even after Leraje leaves). Not sure if this is a bug or if they're just unfinished, but I'd really like to see it addressed, even if as something like a "postgame storyline" of a sort. Raven's probably my favorite character, and I bet he'd love to meet Brulvundojn... Threesome~?

4. I know it's been mentioned before, but only moving four tiles before being forced to camp gets frustrating quickly. Changing it to 5 or 6 would help a lot, I think. Also, if there's a way to fix the movement buttons to a specific spot regardless of other text on the page, I think that'd help a great deal, too.

5. Are digging and crafting actually used for anything? I honestly can't tell if there's any point to doing them at all, currently, though I saw you added more crafting recipes at some point? I'm a bit confused on that point.

6. Getting into "definitely suggestions and not bugs or not understanding something" things now; Great Beast transformation variants would be great. You can get Brulvundojn's cock at the start, and some extra hair from fucking him, but it's also mentioned somewhere that the Great Beasts have different lightrot strains than the gheists, so having full transformations for Astau and especially Brulvundojn would not only make sense, but also be great for people that don't want to look like a gheist themself. Plus, if you start out estranged from Brulvundojn, you mention having been scared of getting a wolf head or something along those lines. What if I want a wolf head and explosive saliva, huh?

7. An expansion on Brulvundojn in general; If you start out as fuckbuddies there's no real talking with him, and even if you don't you only discuss your shared history. It feels like we know Astau better, sometimes. Also, since Brulvundojn acknowledges you as his consort when you visit with Khru (even if just to tease you), it'd be really hot to make that an actual thing, like an at least somewhat romantic relationship. Honestly, that'd be fun to see with Raven too, and maybe Gawann?

8. A "postgame" option would be great, and likely doable without TOO much extra work.  When talking to Zhalk the final time, an option like "not ready to end this yet" could appear, and clicking it could reopen the other gheists' menus to repeat their quests so you could play with them more if you want without replaying everything to get to them, and same goes for the humans (though I don't know if they have content in town already). Or hell, even an option to stay in town but promise to visit the hive so you can chat with them all there, though that'd require more writing. Regardless, a more "sandbox-y" point would be nice so people don't have to replay to access scenes that vanish after a certain point, which is most of them.


Uhm... I feel like I had more somewhere in my brain, but this is getting long already. I'll tack it on as a reply if I think of something else. I'd love to hear your thoughts on all of this if only to sate my own curiosity. 

And again, the game's writing is some of the best I've played. Thanks for the read.

(+2)

hey, thank you! i'm glad you enjoyed the game, and it's always nice to get a big substantive comment on a thing.

1. whoops, i'll fix that. apparently that one scene is the only place where that specific typo exists, but who can really say what other misspellings are lurking around. also it's spar! as in 'a stout rounded usually wood or metal piece', like a piece of rigging. it's got connotations of like, jutting out and being pointy, so, you know, dicks.

2. whoops, i'll try to fix that. a few of the exile encounters were bugged out in various ways, and i think i've managed to fix most of them while working on 1.1, but it's been a while since i worked on that bit so i don't remember if i already fixed that one.

3. yeah, one of the things that i never really got finished before the release was having the various human squad characters meaningfully stay around in the town. once you complete each character's little 'sidequest', they just show up in town once and then vanish, since i never finished writing their dedicated town appearance sections. (a lot of town interaction got cut -- other npcs, more interaction between gheist in town, being able to talk to the gheist characters in town and redo most/all of their sex scenes if desired, etc)

4. yeah, it's an issue. the problem with adding extra moves at this point is that a bunch of content is structured assuming that there will be at least one camp between the village and the destination -- for example, the lightrot caves are four steps away from the village, which means if i bumped up the moves limit by just one then it'd be possible (and likely) to totally skip jinn's camping sequence during his survey, or the pregnancy trip pre-birth and post-birth scenes, or a bunch of other scenes. so i'd also have to move around a bunch of things to make them further away from each other, which would just make the world map seem even more big and empty. it's definitely not ideal, and if i was redoing things from scratch i'd try to avoid the issue, but at this point too much stuff is paced around there being a camp sequence or two between events for me to change it.

5. nope! they will be in the 1.1 patch, whenever i finish that, but currently there's not really any scenes locked behind scavenging and crafting stuff.

6. oh yeah, it's like... that would be nice, but that would be an _enormous_ amount of content -- having the wolf dick tf was bar none the biggest content addition to the game, since it required not only a bunch of totally unique sex scenes / large content splices for other sex scenes, but also there's a whole bunch of custom dialog: all the city human sex scenes have branches for having a human dick / gheist dick / wolf dick, as well as several for other gheist tfs, and some of them get pretty elaborate. like, adding a wolf head tf would mean i'd have to go back to add a custom branch for every kissing / oral scene to change the blocking for having a muzzle, plus whatever custom branches i'd need to add in generally (like, custom dialog for basically every interaction with a city human). actually in the various drafting stages of writing this, i had outlined like five dick tfs and three more great beasts, each with an associated bodily tf, (...and an entire other half of the game's story) and i pretty much immediately had to cut all of that just because it would have easily quadrupled, quintupled, the amount of writing in the game.

7. yeah in retrospect i could've added a lot more... dialog, to the game. for a while i was using the same dialog toy you see in the human siege section with the gheist, and there's no reason why that couldn't work with astau / brulvundojn / dante & malsatante / ophion, it was just at the time i was looking at writing another six-or-seven dialog topics, with multiple responses based on game state, for all the gheist characters _too_ and i just cut it. but something like that with custom topics for all the great beasts would probably help a lot towards actually fleshing them out as characters; one of the weirder aspects of the game is that you only ever get to talk in-depth to the city humans and not to any of the other characters (well, astau, once) even though the city humans are the characters you're most antagonistic with.

8. yeah, like i mentioned a few points above, at one point the plan was to just be able to talk to the gheist in the town, and after you'd done their survey section you'd be able to rerun their sex scenes, or get threesomes. that might make it into 1.1; it's partially focused on adding stuff to the town so there's a bit more stuff there. about sex scenes being non-repeatable, i was actually a little surprised myself -- one of the things i've added already in 1.1 is a big chart of sex scenes that gets tracked as you play the game, and something i realized is that i don't think it's possible to get even half of them in a single playthrough, since so much of the content is mutually-exclusive or single-change. i feel like there's a balancing act between every sex scene being repeatable (and thus kind of contextless and unmoored in the current story beat) vs. every sex scene being really tightly written into its story context but being a one-time missable sequence; there's definitely a lot of the latter in this, which is kind of unusual for a somewhat 'sandboxy' game, but that's how it is i guess.

you might notice a general theme here is "oh yeah this was planned but i ended up cutting it"; when i was like a year-and-change into writing this i really buckled down and made a list of everything left to write (and it was a really long list), tried to realistically look at my writing pace (slow), and started ruthlessly cutting stuff down in the hopes of finally being able to release the game. most of 1.1 is just gonna be re-adding in cut content that was never finished, and fleshing out some of the bits of the game that are noticeably barren and empty right now.

(1 edit) (+1)

Thanks for the response! I definitely can't fault you for prioritizing, but it's really nice to hear that you plan on adding a lot of stuff back in over time!

Edit: To elaborate now that I've woken up a bit:

1. Huh, I learned something new today.  It seemed too consistent to be a mistake  but I'd never seen the word before.

2. Glad to hear it'll get fixed; Raven's my favorite~

3. At least that wasn't a bug. I'll elaborate on the "postgame" thing farther down.

4.  That does make sense... Maybe you could implement something so that you "move slower" while traveling in a group? So when you're alone scavenging or wandering, you can move five tiles, but when on a quest with an npc it's only four? That'd make sense mechanically without disrupting the things reliant on the four-tile movement system, I think.

5. Good to know! Not sure what all you have planned for crafting in the long run but you could definitely manage some fun stuff with it.

6. Wolf dick is definitely best dick. And yeah, can't blame you for being hesitant to go all in on something like that... I'd definitely recommend doing a full wolf transformation at some point though, if only because there's already two pieces of it implemented. And to be fair, TF is something that's perfectly doable to implement a bit at a time.  Like, the easiest next step would be making wolf dick achievable without starting with it, and a second stage to the fur TF already ingame, since I'm pretty sure that doesn't really come up in conversation currently... though a full pelt would, ideally.

7. I definitely agree here. Dialogue's important for connecting with characters, but also for lore and understanding the world. Currently though? I'm not sure what lightrot is, how/when it appeared, or if gheists are actual aliens or just a race derived from lightrot-mutated humans that gets referred to as "alien." There's a lot of world here, and a lot of interesting details, but very little greater context given to understand it in.

8. Yeah, I was surprised by the number of non-repeatable/limited-time scenes too. The "postgame" thought was mostly an "endgame sandbox" suggestion though; a way to access the scenes once you've hit the end of the game, even without context. Something like a... temporary "fix" for the fact that at the very end, you're locked out of nearly all sex scenes due to both the humans and gheists being unavailable.