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This caught my interest immediately and held it tight. The look, feel, and style of it all were coherent and cool. Getting that presentation right is so important for first impressions. For the most part it always answered my wishes, too; right as I was hoping to see levels that don't funnel you into a single designated path so readily I got them and the pacing was tight enough to where dying in a level kept you close enough to where you left off that it wasn't frustrating to try again. If anything felt underbaked it was the story. Your setup has plenty of classic charm - a hardboiled detective, an intriguing dame, a colorful villain group and a charismatic villain - but it feels like we only got the bare minimum from them. 

Sweet Pea is a bit dull because she had such a one track mind. Her motive - save the girl - was so basic, and she was -so- singularly focused on it that she didn't show any curiosity toward the people she met or the situation. You wouldn't know that she's a detective by the way she acts. Though it was kind of cute how she tried to make action movie one-liners but couldn't really think of anything other than variants of "uh, I'm gonna kill you now", it would have been more interesting for her to engage with the villains more. I ended up agreeing with how the bad guys saw her; Cotton was right that she was just someone who got taken in by a pretty face and Stonecrop was right that she came off as a kid, someone just barely in their 20s, who hasn't lived long enough to have anything meaningful to say about subjects like life and death. Hardboiled detectives are usually past their prime because connecting their tortured past to the present is more interesting, especially in a story with these themes, than throwing a kid who barely knows anything into a situation where they don't take the opportunity to grow a bit.

By contrast the villains very apparently had a richly detailed history (and I am glad that we only got a taste of that, some things work better that way) that made their actions compelling, but I would have liked to see more come of their plots, grudges, regrets and interactions with each other. This is also where I think you could have done a better job connecting the lewd elements of the story to the rest of it; there are some hints that sex revitalizes the undead (or something) and that seems like it's going somewhere but then it never truly becomes a plot point. Most of the storylines involving these guys just seem to fizzle, too; the Cotton rivalry just blunty ends with no emotional resolution, Bitterback's seemed very underwritten (if they're both former lovers of Zephyr Lily you would expect some tension between him and Yarrow but they don't interact at all), there were hints of discontent from Stonecrop toward Yarrow that died just as quickly as they were suggested &c. Even when it comes to what they were planning it's all a bit vague and generically nefarious. I was left wanting for a scene that brought it all together. Lots of room to expand on the bare minimum.

Most of the time I knew what I needed to do even if I didn't immediately know how to do it. Stonecrop tripped me up because I immediately figured that I needed to bounce her shots back at her but didn't know that you get infinite bullet time during boss fights. I was trying to dodge by dashing (which kind of felt useless without any i-frames, especially here where the shots homed in on you) and getting frustrated with how tough it was to get the bounce angle. Some were saying that there could have been more of an indication for when she's going to fire, but thought the sound cue, her aim steadying, and the glowing cannon were enough as far as that's concerned. If anything a tip off early on that boss fights have that inexhaustible bullet time was what it needed. Seems like I'm not the only one who stumbled upon that by accident and if you don't know to use that then you'll likely never manage to consistently bounce her shots back. The other moment was the vine at the end of the final boss fight. While shooting the glowing weakpoints is obvious to anyone with gamer intuition it's not immediately obvious that this is how you stop the screen-filling thorn vine. A couple of warm-ups where you have to shoot them to remove an obstacle or something leading up to that might have been good to prime the expectation. 

Destroying the field did feel a bit anti-climactic, too. That's a moment where you'd usually bring the mine down on him with TNT or cobble together a flamethrower or something. It just kinda catches on fire for no reason.

Had a lot of fun with this, though, and the couple of spots where gameplay segments were a bit arcane only stood out because it usually struck a balance between letting you know what to do and giving you some room to experiment with getting it done. 

Each time it happened I had visited the boiler room 3+ times without enough teeth. I had the white heart transformation.

There's a gamebreaking bug that will spawn rooms that can't be exited. Three times now I've had it happen, all in different rooms. It seems to have a chance to happen in any room that doesn't have hostile NPCs in it.

The parser-based descriptions sometimes spit out weird-sounding sentences. For instance you can give a male companion/peon/slave whatever giant breasts but the parser might describe their body as "manly".  It'd probably be worth going through to ensure that it's throwing out descriptions based on their proportions rather than strict values like their sex.

That's a common misconception. The truth is actually much, much sillier than that: it's a reference to an old Admiral Ackbar line that would be used as a joke (oh I thought it was a girl at first but it was actually a boy etc) when westerners discovered otoko no ko art (which in itself is a silly Japanese pun). This style of art/character is one where boys look feminine enough to be sexually androgynous and may or may not include crossdressing. It's actually entirely free of implication of sexuality or gender; otoko no ko characters are depicted as liking girls, liking boys, both, crossdressing, not crossdressing, as identifying as a boy or as a girl - there's really no standard to it at all because it's an aesthetic, not something people use as an identity marker of any sort.

So anyway after that joke got so prevalent people then organically began calling otoko no ko characters "traps" and so, naturally, the reverse (a girl who's handsome enough to be sexually androgynous whether crossdressing or not) became known as a "reverse trap". That alone should tell you that it's not actually referring to some notion that the character in question is actually trying to "trap" or deceive anyone; "reverse trap" would make absolutely no sense whatsoever in that context.

The misconception is very easy to make if you're not familiar with the etymology of the term but it's not a slur. It's a goofy-but-now-it's-in-the-lexicon word for an archetype/aesthetic; it's really only used to refer to fictional characters.

Those're definitely some encouraging thoughts. On the gameplay side one thing that has always irked me with strategy RPGs is how so few of them have towns and dungeons. Even when the story's engaging and the battling is fun and fresh between encounters running from one fight to the next without the sort of monotony-shattering breather that towns provide or the curious interest that dungeons hold can make them a trudge if you're not playing in short bursts.

I did like the challenge of navigating the maps - the she-wolves give a good indication of how you'll need to plan when, where, and if you'll take on a tough fight - and the stances do feel like they'll allow for some diverse builds once some balancing and progression is in place.

As we get to see more of your thoughts on the core femboy aspect of the game make it down "on the page", so to speak, I'd definitely consider supporting the game.

The basis of the battle system shows merit for sure (even if it's currently in that functional-but-super-broken pre-alpha state) but I'm curious as to the bigger picture here. Love the idea - there aren't nearly enough games with femboy content that not only allow the player to -be- the femboy but focus on it - even on your patreon, though, I didn't get a good sense of what the outline is for the game as a whole.

Is there going to be a fleshed-out story to this or is it primarily planned as a roguelike with a barebones "get from here to there and have encounters along the way" sort of focus? Will there be a character creation system? Appearance/clothing customization? Dungeons and towns?

Since the release is in the style of those games that're centered on clicking around the cells of a map and repeating the same few encounters I'd like to know whether this is going to be the meat of it. One thing that bothered me was that, while I did enjoy playing around with the battle system and you're clearly having fun designing encounters to be as dynamic as possible, as of now it feels less like a femboy RPG and more a minor gimmick tacked on to a game that's about bedongled monster girls trying to rape the player into submission.

So what I'm wondering is what sort of vision you're driving towards - what, specifically, is going to make this a femboy RPG? Are we seeing a fairly accurate depiction of what the game's going to focus on (i.e. is this to be another one that's going for the Monster Girl Quest format)? If not then what else can we expect to see?

When it comes to player femboy content the primary avenues to catch the appeal are exploring the character first getting into it (the process of becoming a femboy, in other words) and/or the character playing around with it: teasing with their ambiguity, enjoying looking cute, flipping freely between 'girl' and 'boy' dynamics in different situations, with different people, and in their own thinking - that sort of thing. With what you've got there's some potential to sprinkle femboy flavoring over the sex aspect of the combat (right now it feels more emasculation focused which again presses those monster girl game over rape buttons rather than anything directly relating to femboys) but other than focusing the scenes themselves more on the main theme I do feel like there'll need to be more to the game, whether it's a story with persistent characters to banter between map crawls or a dress-up mechanic or whatever else to give you room to explore those avenues and hit on what's appealing about a RPG focused on the femboy theme.