itch.io

Some more bug/oddities I found over the course of the first singleton pregnancy:

• Going to sleep produces a string of "cannot find a closing tag for macro <<if>>" message that quickly skips to the 'Go to Pregnancy Handler' link.
• Beth's dialogue during the very first appointment is simply "[undefined]".
• Living room activities (napping, yoga, etc.) still show the 'going out' interstitial scenes - additionally, those scenes only seem to reroll at the start of the day, so I ended up seeing the same ones multiple times per day.
• Several of the work dialogues replace instances of the word 'to' with an equals sign (e.g. "grab something = eat").
• Trying to wear the work suit in the bedroom produces an error message.
• I was a bit confused on how the stress stat works - looking at the game's code makes it look fairly intuitive, but I was also running into several instances where doing yoga repeatedly would move the display back to "Feeling OK" from "Chilled Out".
• The mental health stat feels a bit opaque for how important it is, namely in its ability to trigger bed rest and - in the current state of the game's rest handler - early labour. Only a small number of activities can lower it (two of which, the bath and the pep talk, aren't implemented yet), and since it's never visible to the player, it's all too easy to let it slip down even if you're being completely mindful of the other stats.

Despite this, I'm a big fan of all the new additions to the project thus far. The office text's variety kept it interesting even with repeat visits, and I can't wait to see the next wave of planned features.

I'm extremely excited to see what this new update has in store, although I did run into this error shortly after starting the game:

The work and thought put into the descriptions here are absolutely fantastic, with a steady and compelling progression through each level and size (I love how the pace of description changes quickens as the player character approaches their due date, or how we get more and more of the player character's perspective with larger numbers of multiples). If this project continues its trajectory and reaches ever closer to being a proper 'simulator', I should expect to find myself awaiting each update with a palpable sense of anticipation.

Time for a story. On my first run through the game, I began with a singleton pregnancy (as the game's code mandates), moved on to twins and triplets with the second and third cycles, and then quit after seeing another singleton, assuming that I had reached the end of unique content. This was a perfectly effective rising narrative, and ultimately left me with a strong enough impression of the game to return to it today, where I was instead greeted by a streak of four multiple-less pregnancies. Figuring that the first duplicate was just the result of avoiding the café on my second playthrough in the interest of expediency (and being proven dead wrong shortly afterwards), I embarked on a series of mechanical experiments—spaced out between the monotonous process of clicking through the weeks of yet another singleton cycle—to determine what separated my initial run from now, culminating in me pulling out my meager web dev knowledge to inspect the Twine code directly. This curiosity led me to the last revelation I would have expected: the size of each pregnancy, the factor that decides how the player will spend the next 20 to 50 minutes of their playthrough, was in the hands of a simple random number generator, bounded by the player's total number of births. The next visit to the doctor yielded quintuplets.

Had that ideal first playthrough been more like the second one, I'm not sure I would've enjoyed the game enough to even consider leaving this comment. The situation here is one where the game's core outcomes, be they desirable (larger multiple sizes) or undesirable (smaller sizes or, worse, sizes the player has already seen) are entirely out of the player's control, with enough unpredictability that two different runs can feel like night and day in terms of presentation.

Although game development is hardly my area of expertise (feel free to drop a message if you need a banger soundtrack sometime in the future, though!), I sense that the path to fixing this is twofold: allowing more player agency around the main character's size, and unburdening the experience of rolling Yet Another Singleton. The game's existing stress stat—difficult to manage at first, but eventually freeing up once the surrogacy checks and payouts start entering the picture—feels like the perfect tool for improving the former (alongside some potential extra factors like food consumption and work), while I could see the game ameliorating the latter with some combination of events that can't be seen in a single pregnancy (giving the player a reason to engage even without a new set of multiples to work with), or simply including some 'auto-play' functionality to skip unwanted cycles in exchange for money and added stress. Even then, I would appreciate it if the game stored the player's previous sizes somewhere to protect against the four-singleton pileup I witnessed today, akin to how modern Tetris games include checks to prevent I block droughts or massive strings of S and Z pieces. Although mitigating randomness arguably clashes with this project's simulation goals, the rush of reaching new content through a balance of serendipity and careful planning is arguably one of the F-game's greatest strengths over other media options (i.e. reading a dump of isolated text data).

Most of my other critiques boil down to fairly minor nitpicks:

• The player character's advancing pregnancy ultimately bears little impact on the activities of each week—unyielding fatigue and increasingly-limited mobility don't stop her from waking up at the crack of dawn, going to bed deep into the night, and spending long hours at work. Adding some subtle (or not-so-subtle) shifts in mechanics as the weeks progress would be a great way to heighten realism while also giving the player more to think about beyond rote repetition of their weekly tasks.
• Working always skips the time to evening, even when it's already night. This does open up some interesting strategic pathways, but is a bit of a loss for realism.
• I was a bit disappointed that the game's wonderful clothing descriptions run out of new things to say after a singleton pregnancy—I was especially looking forward to seeing how the summer dress would hold up to further expansion, or how well the maternity clothes would handle something on the scale of quintuplets.
• The game skips over any aspects of the postpartum experience, which seems like a bit of a missed opportunity.
• On two separate occasions (both during this playthrough) I entered a glitched state. The first of these was a sextuplet pregnancy that had the home descriptions of an overdue singleton and the Beth dialogue of twins, while the second seemed to ignore the ending of a prior quintuplet birth, with overdue text throughout, and yielded 0 children. The first resolved itself after its completion, while the second persisted through three pregnancies before I finally accepted defeat. I suspect that both of these are related to the newly-added week skipping feature, but I wouldn't know for sure.

I apologize if any of this comes across as overly harsh or demanding. An embryonic game with this much potential doesn't come around every day, and I wouldn't have written nearly a picture's worth of words about it if I didn't think that it could meet that potential. I sincerely hope that this feedback proves valuable as you continue to take this project to new heights.