Yep, a little while since the last Itch release, but we've been doing a bunch because of all the Patreon releases, so there's a lot of new stuff to see in this one. :)
Viewing post in New public release - love, lust and obedience! comments
So after playing it for a bit, seems like the game has, indeed, come a long way.
The management aspect of the game feels way more controllable now. It’s a bit of a rough start but once you have the essentials out of the way (Bedroom, Laundry and Kitchen upgrades, mostly) the game ends up settling on a decent rhythm. I think all this front might be missing now would be:
1 -> Maybe some player guidance into the urgency of updating these maintenance rooms ASAP. Like, say, you can’t really get started without upgrading the maid’s bedroom and I can’t really tell if other people will realise this quickly enough
2 -> Whereas those rooms make your life much easier and allow you to start giving your maids different tasks as the day-to-day gets under control, cleaning doesn’t really have anything like it?
So it’s hard to take poor Beth out of it, as that’s always harder to keep in check so you don’t start getting penalties. This just slows things a bit, turns are already somewhat slow so there’s this to watch for when it comes to regulating the grind. I think it could use a broad unlockable buff as well
Other than that, things are settling in a nice pace. I liked the new management events and all. I think perhaps my greatest “gripe” this time around was that I wasn’t sure if I had more content to go through or not. Like, I THINK there’s not a lot of reason to bother raising the Maid’s obedience (outside of a handful of events) at this point but since the ritual scenes also have more than one variant there was a bit of doubt.
A bit similar with Az’ea’s backstory scenes. I was all the time wondering whether there was more content to see or not. Also not sure if that counts as part of her “romance events” because I DID upgrade her lab once but don’t think she had much affection.
So in general just some minor guidance/information stuff. Once again, the core of the game seems to be taking really good shape
Finally: I had a couple of UI bugs. I was playing the native Linux version, didn’t really check if the Windows one had them too.
Bug 1 -> The kingdom event box had the wrong layout. The actual text box element only extended like, maybe a third of the entire red window? If this is unusual/new, I can get some more info on it (note resolution, check the win version through wine, provide screenshot, etc…). Just let me know if you want/need some of that
Bug 2 -> Sometimes the “Perform Ritual” UI layer (maid selection menu, etc) would just not go away. If I backed out of the Portal Room, it would stick around, on top of other menu layers. Don’t remember trying to trigger the Ritual in an unintended place, instead I managed to roll over to the next evening and did it then.
Thanks! That's great feedback. We get so little player feedback that can actually give us some perspective on it and now that the game's starting to take shape a little more it's very useful.
More guidance early on about how to do the management might be a good idea. It's good to hear the player's-side perspective on that.
One note was that I've planned to have a purchasable item from the merchant, once that's introduced, that would boost cleaning. Obviously not available now and maybe it'll still be a bit too hard to do early on anyway, so we might need to think about giving one of the rooms a boost to sweeping. Which one, though? I'm not sure. In past I've thought the only one that makes sense in-universe is the laundry again.
I've been wanting to add some more clear guidance on what's available or when players should stop playing. It's a little hard to figure out at the moment. We did put a note on the menu screen but that's not easy to see in gameplay. Maybe we should just slip some notes in on every area where we're going to be adding more content when you reach the end of the line.
Anyway, thanks again! I'll make notes of these points. I think we can probably act on a lot of this immediately.
Some temporary thing would be fine enough, when it comes to the sweeping, imo.
With regards to that, and the indication on what’s available, I think you can just expand a bit on the [WIP] tags you already have in place. Since there’s a lot of them, it’s a bit murky when it comes to the level of implementation they have. Splitting them in [WIP] and [Coming Soon] or something along those lines would already indicate what places HAVE some content already and which don’t.
For the questlines, a “This is as far as you can go in this version” final placeholder event works wonders. I hit those in some other projects I follow and they’re always reassuring. You could also take a similar approach to some other elements… take, for instance, the Rituals with the maids:
From the content we already have with Az’ea, I’d assume the idea moving forward is to have more options for the maids as well. In which case, say, Delia, could have a list of options that looks like:
[Footjob - 0 obedience] [???? - ???] [Not implemented]
For, respectively, an action that’s already open, one that can be unlocked, and a placeholder that indicates there is more content planned for that character. Looking at something like that would already tell me a lot about whether there’s more content in the current version or not.
For regular main quest stuff, just have a special “You have reached the end of main content for this version” special day event that pops up at the appropriate time. The player may want to keep playing for more side stuff, but that at least tells them they’ll be done with the main as well.
Finally, if you’re keeping track of the version differences and adding more content on later days, you can always have, during development, a cheat menu that expands on the current “start at first day of content for this version”. something like:
day 10 (version 0.4)
day 15 (version 0.5)
etc…
Could be a hassle, could be chucked out of the window if you rework the early game, but if you expect that players won’t be able to keep carrying the one save, this can give them some help if they’re coming back after waiting out a couple versions or whatnot. This last suggestion COULD be more hassle than it’s woryh, as it’s really kind of a tiny thing.
Hope this helps shape up some of these ideas better
Thanks, yeah, we'll have a look at what it makes sense to implement for all this. Some of this might work well for us, or at least we'll look at it as we figure something out.
While shortcuts to see the content aren't exactly a long-term priority, we also need to think about the player experience right now in early access.
They might be more trouble than they’re worth, definitely a long shot. Just more of a suggestion along the lines of “if you notice things fall into a pattern where this could be feasible without too much hassle, it would probably be quite handy”
But yeah, I wouldn’t waste a non-trivial amount of effort into something like this either, for sure =P