itch.io

Thank you! That's very much appreciated. :D
Also, you're right, The Maids' Story was a key inspiration for the game!

Thank you!

Possibly, once the game is finished, though that will take a while and I don't think it's really the best medium for the game.

Well, we're not going to work it into regular gameplay because it would create SO MANY design and gameplay issues, but we've talked about some kind of "crystal ball" to show the future and at least see some of that. So the answer is mostly no, but in the future, there may at least be a bit of art or something.

I believe the bug was that it didn't always spawn in when starting in "new content" mode, but yes, we fixed that bug.

There's more content in the subscriber version - a number of scenes, mostly for the Az'ea romance. In the subscriber version, the Az'ea romance is now complete!

You might want to follow me on twitter at: https://twitter.com/BBBenAIF

Or join the Discord group for more regular updates on our progress. (There's a button on the game menu for that.) Our SubscribeStar has a free tier, too.

Definitely not abandoned! We've been working like crazy, but free updates on Itch don't exactly pay the bills, so they haven't been the priority. :D

Thank you! I've also just opened up a SubscribeStar since Patreon's banning people for no reason now and I don't trust them: https://subscribestar.adult/bbben

But either way, that would be great. :)

Odd; that's a very unusual error. I'm not sure what would be causing that.

Not yet, but it will be! I can't give you a specific time, though. We've got some development milestones we plan to achieve first.

I'm glad you like the selections!

They're all classical pieces and the performances have all been released under Creative Commons licenses that allow commercial use. I wish we could make these ourselves! You can probably find other performances of all of these on YouTube or Spotify.

I may not have put the credits for them in by the time of the Itch release, but we added them later, so here they are:

• Handel Water Music, Suite No.1 in F major, Suite No.2 in D Major and Suite No.3 in G Major, performed by the Bath Festival Orchestra.
  
• Saint-Saëns Samson and Dalilah, Op. 47, performed by the US Air Force Band. 
• Couperin - Pieces en Concert - Prelude, La Tromba, Air de Diable, performed by the Advent Chamber Orchestra. 
• Holst The Planets, Op. 32, performed by Skidmore College Orchestra.

We'll be adding more as development continues, too. :)

This is an old topic I didn't see before, but I'll reply in case anyone is wondering: this is an early state of the game so there are a bunch of work-in-progress features in there that don't function yet. A lot of those features are more functional now in the Patreon version of the game, but the free releases aren't fully up to date.

I will release a newer version after a while here on Itch, yes.

The Itch version is less optimised than the Patreon version (v0.17) definitely. The game does demand more system power than a standard VN because of the massive, complex art pieces for the castle screen, but we have made improvements to minimise those demands over time. The most recent version runs well on my Surface Go 2, which I use for additional testing.

I see, no right now there's no mobile port (and it's not programmed in Ren'py anyway). I do eventually intend to look into a mobile port, but it's a little more complicated and the game design doesn't entirely lend itself to mobile.

There's a Mac build available above. Actually, there isn't a Linux option above - what format were you looking for?

Probably don't need to reply as I did on Discord, but I will. ;)
It is planned eventually! But it's a tricky one to get implemented. Definitely I'll be trying to release one for the 1.0 release, at a minimum.

There's a little "close" button bookmark in the bottom right hand corner. :) 

That said, maybe it's not obvious enough. I'll look into whether we can make it close by clicking out of bounds too.

Yeah, fair. Just getting some kind of release done each month feels like a major achievement. :D

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.

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.

There was in the earlier version of the engine, though that seemed to have been successfully patched out. Since it worked the second time I think this is at least a rare one. Glad to hear it worked, at least.

A day 5 error? That's brand new; I've never heard of an issue there before. Do you know what was happening? Was it the end of a scene and then a transition back to the apartment or something like that?

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. :)

Ah, sorry that wasn't tagged - I've now fixed it. Not sure how that slipped through the cracks, thanks for letting me know.

As a rule I don't really write guides for my own games because I think that's better as a community thing, but I don't think anything like a walkthrough would really be relevant for this design anyway. It's more just a matter of managing your stats on a day to day basis.

Oh, but I'm glad to hear the game loaded this time!

Thanks. :)

I hope that helps, yeah! It's probably a memory issue.

We've optimised the game a lot, but that sounds like the machine you're running it on might not meet the minimum requirements, unfortunately.

I know we haven't published any minimum specs because we don't know what they are, but while it does run fine on some weaker devices we've tested like my Surface Go, if it's crashing at that point then the device you're using probably just doesn't have enough memory for it.

At that point in the game the "real" gameplay on the main screen is loading up and that's more demanding than a simple VN would be.

In the original concept I wanted to do something like that, but right now that's on indefinite hold and I'd have to say "it's not planned, even though I'd like to do it". The reason is that thanks to the art and the way the game is sort of semi-open, semi-story based, it's very difficult to fit that in. We'd need a lot of extra art and it wouldn't be too practical.

If anything like that ever happens, it'll probably have to be through some kind of fancy time-jump story contrivance, but like I say it's currently not planned.

We'll see, but not for a while if so. The focus is on PC/Mac play because the gameplay best suits that anyway and it's harder to distribute for Android.

Maybe eventually, but it's not likely any time soon.

Okay, I've now investigated this.

It seems like most of the payments were taking quite a while to process so now that they've all come through, I can get some of the money. The bad side is that after processing fees it comes to about half of what people donated. (This is the problem with very small payments on this sort of platform - Patreon's got a somewhat better deal with the processors, but it's still better to avoid stuff less than $3 there.)

As I don't want Paypal or Mastercard to be basically taking half of what people try to give to our project, I'll leave the donations off for now, although in future I do plan to sell the commercial versions on here.

Actually, I'm not sure if it's just mostly taking a really long time to process. I'm waiting to see how it turns out, but if it looks like I end up getting most of the money, I'll turn them back on.

No, I'm sorry! Those scenes you're looking for just aren't in the game yet. There will be some new Az'ea content in versions 0.7 and 0.8, but it's going to be a little while before we have the sex scenes in the game.

After factoring in fees, I discovered I was getting almost none of the money that some people have kindly donated to help support the game. That's a shame, but since this is a free release I don't want to lead people to just throw their money away.

If you'd like to support the game in a way that will actually get money straight to us, consider supporting on Patreon! You can also get the latest builds there in exchange for a pledge. :)

It seems like the itch community has been responding to the game and posting quite a bit, so I'll switch to a better format for fielding everyone's comments.

Thanks very much for the great responses so far!

For the moment no. The gameplay might not really lend itself to touchscreens anyway.

Too long to reply to everything, but I do appreciate the discussion and the feedback! I'll note a couple of things:

• The idea of affecting the cooldown timer on the rituals seems like a good one to me. While from a lore perspective I had that in mind as an ironclad rule of magic to justify the restriction, I can explain it away in a story scene that growing lust reduces the timer. That reduces grind and plays into other systems. Lust can still do other stuff too, like unlocking scenes (that's planned already). So I think I will implement this idea and it helps a lot.
• We did consider having maid skills grow when doing activities, but we wanted to put more of an incentive on the instruct action, which I'd like to also use to introduce some little scenes or some other reward, but I don't know what those will be just yet.
• Love will definitely dictate how the romance scenes go, as a different sort of track to the sex.
• I do also plan to have obedience be the stat to unlock new ritual actions.
• Some of this will come together more as we introduce a few more systems; Delia's potions and the merchant's gifts and items will help with some of it, so maybe we'll boost stats a bit for now but reduce them again later to allow for other systems to help out.

Still chewing on some of this because I have a lot to think about. :)