itch.io

This is looking like it’s going to be a JUICY update. Can’t wait

Can’t know when that started and at this point the ship has sailed etc, but Godot 4 has been amazing. Anyway, whatever works, works, as long as Unity doesn’t try to pull another Unity. Hope you settled nicely into the new workflow=)

Excited to check the new version out, even if I am disappointed the about the choice of Unity over Godot =)

I ran into this as well. That save is just dead now, it seems u.u

I’m enjoying how the game’s been shaping up but 0.5.2Hotfix01 still has some rough bugs

I managed to soft lock myself a couple of times by, I THINK trying to move while spamming through textboxes. Once talking to the orc cook again after having already got the Gruole and once when talking (again for the second time) to the memorial on the revisit to the cave. In this second one I managed to unlock myself through redoing the fight which was only slightly less annoying than having to restart the application

Eventually I got in a worse soft-lock that I think just killed my save outright. I played the Dog minigame and it got confused about screen transitions. It took me from the first to the third and, afterwards, would always bring me back to that screen when i reached the end and chose to exit to world map. This too was a revisit and meant I couldn’t even find out how much of the doggie snack miniquest was implemented, may have missed out on some good stuff. Since I had saved on that screen I think that’s just gone for that save slot and i don’t feel like going through the whole game again at this point… Between this and the other softlocks, MAYBE an “abort mission” option that just takes you back to the world map regardless would be a great option in order to avoid these types of issues

In the dog minigame, I think I mentioned this in a previous update but it bears repeating that the way you’re detecting whether the player is allowed to dash in the air is not satisfying and feels pretty jank. A better system would be to set a “canDash” flag when the player gets airborne. Not being able to dash on the way down from your jump is quite annoying

Final dog issue is that the exit trigger for the redstone room is tricky to find, actually. I thought I was stuck

In the cave, I also don’t know how much of Felix Quest is implemented. It got stuck at “report back to Felix” after finding the ghost and fighting the elemental. One small detail of the elemental fight is that the little hint near it implies you should be patient when patience 100% gets you killed in that fight and you need to keep mashing to stunlock the elemental instead

The Torrasque sprite seemed to be missing, every time it was supposed to be on screen I had a massive black square instead, a bit unfortunate

For other graphical things, some textboxes were misplaced and/or the text just flowed out of the screen. Two that I remember were Loba’s dialogue and also some of the dialogue in the final fight…. I think it was the explanation for Luccia’s ultimate thingie. And the textbox for lorestones is centred in the position of the lorestone itself. This can cause it to bleed off-screen if the lorestone is not properly centered. Easy to do in the initial area

For some reason the Orc Village replays the ending dialogue every time you leave it, even in revisits, which is quite annoying

There seems to be some continuity issue with Orcosaurus quest. Scab tells you to do the quest so he’ll give you the key with which you can free the half orc. But since him being freed is part of the main quest, that just happens in the first visit and there’s no point to the key itself, which you still get

I don’t know what happened but the fight against Grumaz in the main quest is also kind of a crapshoot now? Feels like I was mostly dependent on lucking out throughout the combat with timings and whatnot. Since Luccia gets stuck in attack animations and has to pay stamina to block and use spells, that whole section is too difficult now, I think. The only one in the game, imo, the rest of the combat is appropriate

Flappy Rhed feels a bit unfair, he doesn’t respond fast enough to make it feel like your inputs are very meaningful. That star feels unreachable as everything is apparently mostly luck dependent

A fair amount of new content and it’s all nice stuff. May sound like this post is all complaints but this is just pointing out some particularly sharp edges in what is otherwise pretty great. They are all punctual and can all be fixed but DO hurt a lot the enjoyment.

I’d also consider adding an option to skip or speed up cutscenes. Some of those go on long and can get frustrating on repeats (either new save or accident)

Looking forward to further updates =)

Urgh… I’m sorry to hear. Hopefully you can come over to the happy side of computing at some point, where things actually work and you can tell your computer what you want it to do instead of just paying for the privilege of getting ads shoved on your face all the while every single feature of the software you use just turns to garbage

This one is known. It’s more accurately: “raises your Cha by 5 if it is less than 85”

So the actual maximum is 89 if you start from a 4 or 9

Discipline gain through sources, at least other than “Explain:Chores” seems to be bugged in 0.8.3h

Could be I’m just immensely unlucky, but I’ve got a couple of important slaves I’m improving as mistresses and they’ve been locked onto 38 and 60 discipline for ages now despite, fully upgraded horse riding, high affection and happiness…

Also a minor bug is that the “inventory” button on the followers menu is not working, so the player needs to go through the full-blown NPC screen

oooohh, nice stuff

A bit sad in principle to see the stool go but, honestly, I never managed to make it be useful in any way so, definitely understandable

Going through the game at this point I think that what I’m missing the most is some sort of infirmary? There’s at least one point in the game where running the Redhaven Girls ring is by far the best way to profit but this becomes high maintenance with girls having to recover. If a player wants to keep going at it, they need to manually buy soothing salves at the general store and manually go over each girl to apply them. If you have 30-40+ girls this can become super cumbersome

Building an infirmary where you could assign nurses sounds like a predictable solution. Caitlin herself, when acquired, bargains for her position within the house and her own personal plans using her Medicine knowledge as the stakes: “I’m good at medicine and can be very useful for someone like you”

But as far as I can tell, we can’t really get any use out of her Medicine skill directly? Though she does have the most involved and, perhaps, most rewarding character quest. Being able to invest in automating this… worker care would be pretty helpful

Back to this game after a bit

Excited with the new changes but the game feels way harder now (maybe I just botched it). I was struggling to get on top of stabilising an economy (still having a good time, mind you)

One thing that remains an issue, IMO, is the lack of information within the game. Masters of Raana is a game that is very intense on management and decision making. Even if most decisions are small, you’re making them all of the time (what actions to take, what tone to take, etc…)

But a lot of these things are hard to grasp/understand: “Raise fear of a slave”… okay, do I WANT their fear to be high? Why? I can’t tell. Similar to other stats, like willpower. Someone mentioned that, in combat, it’s hard to tell what weapons to use for best capture chance and the only real hint I got is at one point during the tutorial(?) it’s mentioned that the whipping cane is the ideal, but I’ve also noticed that pistols MAY not be too bad, as Bud seems to incapacitate more often than others

A round of “adding a help toggle” and/or extensive use of mouseover tooltips would do WONDERS for this game. I remember having a hard time telling if I was actually doing well the first time I played this game and this still remains

FINALLY: the “advance another day” button in the new day report being a little house right next to the “okay” button has made me accidentally click it a decent amount of times

That sounds fine enough. My fear was being locked into steam, which seems to not be the case.

Wouldn’t you be able to just make that new version available as an update to the old paid version, though?

I’m getting a bit confused with the business model here and couldn’t quite find clarification

I’ve purchased the original version way back, actually could never manage to get it working but it was being worked on so I decided to just wait

The new version/remake seems to now be well under way, which is good BUT some of the language around Q&As here seem to imply that this new version will be available on steam but not on itch and that for people in my position, a steam key will be offered so they can add the game to their libraries

I think the first question is: “is that all correct?” But, if so, what are the alternatives, because I do not want this game on steam, I’d like to just download a DRM-free binary, actually, this is what I purchased

This wasn’t behaving well for me on the web. Fairly commonly, when I trap a rat, the trap will, internally, be tagged as occupied (it can’t capture any more) but the animation and processing counter won’t trigger so the cage is just permanently disabled. This was quite frustrating, unfortunately

Ah, you’re looking more for CAD stuff, now I get it. I know stuff exists but not really what’s good, I’m afraid. Not really my area =P

For 3D modelling, Blender is a given. Not sure what people use outside of that as that is already plenty and then some for the very little I need

For a lot of the general stuff, there’s good enough alternatives (or sometimes the best thing already is multiplatform, like coding IDEs). So I’d check those things to know if there are any deal breakers. Say, maybe you want to use some specific DAW you can’t get working. But, largely, it’s fine. If you use desktop office, there’s Libre Office, if you need Photoshop there’s GIMP and Krita, if you edit videos, there’s kdenlive… but it CAN be a sticking point

For gaming, things have come a LONG LONG way with Wine. Some titles CAN be a bit of a headache, but usually you’ll find what you need to sort out in protondb or something like that. That’s becoming rarer and rarer, though

As for Linux encouraging you to code… maybe in a way? it’s one of the things that’s WAY WAY better to do in Linux as opposed to Windows where none of the tools actually work properly. But day to day you won’t need to do much, if any. Maybe a shell script here and there to make something easier but for most distros these days, you don’t really need to be getting under the hood (even if it can be fun)

A lot of the fun in Linux is exploring and finding your comfort zone. If you don’t like something that Apple or MS did with their OS, screw you. But in Linux there’s a lot of distros with different ideas and goals (PopOS wants to be easy for gaming people, OpenSUSE wants to be stable and friendly, ClearLinux wants to be the fastest, Debian and Rocky want to be the basis for servers, Arch wants to be flexible and malleable…) as well as a lot of different desktop environments so while it can be a hassle to distro-hop, some exploration can be very valuable. If you’re not feeling what you’re on and don’t have a lot of setup already in place, might be worth checking other stuff out. I myself use Arch but the install of this distro is really rough if you’re not used to Linux already, and though it’s easy to work with, you do need to do a lot of things yourself, so not something I’d recommend to someone just getting into the space. Arch Wiki is a fantastic place to check for any Linux thing you want to know, though, well worth keeping in mind

Hijacking this a bit.

I’m on 0.65 and this part of the quest seems to be stuck for me as well.

I gave him the glue and he might have glued himself to the house because he’s never left….

Definitely been more than 3 days, I can’t seem to find him in any of the usual places. Maybe some flag got weirdly crossed because I gave him the glue while in the tavern at night?

UPDATE:

Nope, wasn’t that. I reloaded a previous save and did all of that during day time. This locked me both out of finishing the house as well as out of progressing the main quest as I cannot gather the signatures for both the drunkard (who’s missing entirely) as well as the barkeep

Eh, no worries. I’m sure once you settle you’ll find that life is much better in these parts, actually, even with the rough edges =P

If you’re still interested/trying to make this work, do give Bottles a try. That’s a wine manager thingie

For optimal Wine performance most things rely on a translation layer called “DXVK” which will translate DirectX calls into Vulkan calls. There is some effort to do that with OpenGL too (and not just for wine) called Zink, but that is still early days and a bit limited. If you use any sort of gaming dedicated wine helper like Bottles, Lutris or Steam (through Proton), they’ll automatically do the whole DXVK shenanigans for you. It all happens under the hood and you don’t have to worry about it

I myself haven’t had a Windows PC in years and play very very nearly everything I want, old and new so once you figure this whole wine layer out, things do work. For me Heavy Hearts was one of the more troublesome titles, actually, as I could only get it working through Bottles, so if it’s giving you trouble, you’re not the only one. Here’s hoping you’ll find your footing, if you do stick around

Just had a go and must say, as many, I’m positively surprised by this game. Looking forward to what’s next

Was playing as a Druid/Rogue, stacking degen was a powerful and interesting strategy but I did run into some issues:

Notably, the equipment penalty of the Rogue locked me out of a LOT of stuff, in particular I was losing my mind trying to figure out how I’d get the strength to use the weapon for the final blacksmith quest. I ended up lucking out in finding out that you can just change your classes whenever, which was a relief. Looking back now, though, that extra money was absolutely invaluable

I think it would be good to find some way of letting the player know they can do this, that your initial choice is not permanent. In here too, if the idea is to let the player be more free-form in experimentation, then I’d also consider reworking how the skill learning work. Instead of unlocking skills individually, you could let them upgrade their “aptitude” in general, so that when you switch classes, you have all of those available. This was compounded by some weirdness I was finding in the load calculation. Sometimes it’d look like I was good to go but once I clicked travel, then I would suddenly be overburdened. Since you can’t manually equip to be overburdened, that was something weird going on. This limitation also prevents you from equipping a piece of gear that WOULD give you the strength to wield it. So it’s a bit that could use a polishing go when time allows

Again, that’s an IF that’s the sort of experience you’re looking to provide

A great Quality of Life change regardless would be to move the loadout screen for when you’re about to leave into it’s own equipment tab. This way you can assign a loadout and don’t have to, say, look for pickaxes and skeleton keys every single time in your inventory. You also can’t back out of that travel loadout screen if you then realise you forgot something, which did happen to me a couple of times

All in all, those are a few small details in a game that is getting a lot of things right. I’m looking forward to the next release

Oh, that’s not Android, though I might be able to play THAT through waydroid

I’m trying to run it in plain old Linux, but Wine is having trouble for some reason and the error output isn’t very helpful (to me, at least)

Anyone managed to get this working through Wine?

Wanted to give it a go but couldn’t get it running

Hmmm, interesting to see how much it changed. I guess it’ll be easier to build content for? It looks like we’re moving towards a way more coherent story though, which might be good in the end

I felt a little betrayed by having some lewd options along the way which turned out to be completely unaccesible

I like the general gist of the new combat system but it really needs some tweaking. Just some better visual aids as to what the different postures represent would be great. I also agree with everyone else that the tickler fight feels very RNG. Having him be able to start the match with a one-shot is just not fun

I had a bug where if I saw the scene where Saria loses to the random thugs the sticky white stuff would never leave the screen even through loads (except for combat)

Overall I do like a lot of what’s being built here and I think the game will be better for it once content catches up, just a bit of an annoying transition phase

Sorry if it came across a bit too negative. In the end, as much as it isn’t my cup of tea, there is a lot of good work put into it and it’s got its own audience for it.

All the best and hope you find your groove

Just played through this and…. it’s awkward and with some nasty bugs

Could never equip the lava swords. Saw a comment that it’s supposed to just have a small strength requirement but I was way past that. Also ends up not mattering since you lose them before the end stint anyway

The game flows somewhat decently up until the turning point in the middle. It came before I could conquer the towns and, at that point, there was a bug preventing me from doing so: If I conquered a town it would send me to the final camp where I couldn’t do anything.

Since I hadn’t started the final quest, I couldn’t even progress, but since you can’t leave once you’re there, I couldn’t quit.

The money from towns every 30 days feels utterly pointless though. That whole bit of the game felt so awkwardly grindy.

It didn’t get much better at the end. I came into the ending quest with I THINK 200 soldiers and it was BARELY enough to get me through, I thought I was soft-locked at the very end, actually, since you can’t acquire money freely. If you’re at the very end and it’s not enough, tough luck, i hope you had a save just before moving out

Bonus points that I had a corruption on my stats which reduced my Vitality to 0. I thought it was a different bug because enemies just started doing huge damage and I thought it was just poor scaling in the end. But it also meant I couldn’t use the large medikits. you can’t use an item which would heal you past maximum in this game so I thought my inventory was bugged.

The story has many sour twists which come out of nowhere and make for a pretty unpleasant… entire second half, I guess. The main character is just…. weirdly swingy? Sometimes he’s “just a guy trying to survive a shitty situation” but he turns into some incel random violence on a dime which is uncomfortable even though I do play a bunch of other stuff of questionable taste

All in all, kind of regreted pushing through to the end, past all of this buggy jank, very unsatisfying.

Also some translations seem to be missing and the game will fall back on original russian randomly

Can’t wait!

=3

Glad to hear the worst is over. Take care, we’ll be waiting =3

That’s surprising to hear. Very very different from my experience. Have you been using any sort of helper software such as Bottles or Lutris to help you with stuff like DXVK and whatnot?

I play all sort of stuff in wine from AAA stuff to random Ren’Py novels and it’s usually just fine, this pc isn’t even very strong, GPU is from like 4 gens back

Give Bottles a try. I’ve had a hard time getting this to run on wine the first time around, but some other user suggested it and it worked just fine

ty ty <3

Can we get a changelog for what’s actually in 0.5.0 compared to the previous one?

Hehe, it’s all good. Just sharing the impression from the other end. As mentioned before, I didn’t fear for this project, but there ARE some others I’ve followed that I’m getting more and more convinced have been silently abandoned, so this sort of semi-regular reassuring is always nice

Already have WAY too many Discord servers that I barely even lurk in and have perma-muted. It’s really not a good form for this sort of thing, though for people closer I bet it IS quite fun to be inserted in the “day to day” banter.

I didn’t really think the project was dead myself, just when I looked at it jumped out at me, that comms have been a bit silent for a while, so I thought I’d suggest at least dropping a heart beat or something with more frequency. To me it always feels very reassuring on the “passive following” end even when there’s not a lot of content

Looking forward to the next update.

We all know how it goes, take care of yourself and keep on keeping on.

Would just recommend having a bit more regular “pulse check” sort of devlog schedule? Even if you feel you haven’t achieved much, it’s always reassuring, as a player, to just know the project is still going, regardless of pace. Both as someone who’s already following and, perhaps, especially as someone who is checking things out, I always find myself having a quick check: “Is this done? No, looks like it’s in progress. Okay, when’s the last version from? And the last post? Is this abandonware?”

Personally while I don’t mind playing things as they’re being built, I’m less keen on checking out something I know for a fact it’s not being worked on any more and was never finished

Played through the entire game and had a good time. Agree with some of the other commenters that there is some jank, tho.

On the combat side, two things irked me a bit

1 -> You’re taught to mash melee but that, most of the time, leaves you open to be counterattacked because you can’t cancel an attack animation into a block. This makes things a bit frustrating in the sense that you’re always trying to guess when you can attack? By the end of the playthrough (0.4.2) I was mostly parrying and then countering with spells so it was less of an issue, but did feel like it was the only “correct” way to engage combat because of this

2 -> I also had a surprisingly hard time getting Luccia to actually trigger the charged heavy attack. Not sure why, it felt quite finicky, but it is very useful

Other than that having to go through the mushroom fights again to revisit the orc village was a bit annoying too. I know we’ll have extra content there later so a shortcut straight to the village would be handy. And the dog sections didn’t control too well? On the platforming side, I think two things could improve the feel

1-> You’re only allowed to air-dash if you’re in the upwards half of your jump, this makes it a bit tricky to reach some areas. The end of the first (?) castle room got me a cheap death like this. I ended up in a platform way up high, it had the level ending arrow so I jumped off… except that led me straight into a pit I couldn’t see. That did not feel good, not gonna lie =P

2-> He could use a bit of “coyote jump” timing. Dog also moves weirdly slow in both his sections too

Finally in more general terms, the font on the inventory felt a bit hard to read so I’d consider tweaking that once inventory becomes important. Having the dash button/key ALSO trigger interactions can be pretty annoying when you are, for example, trying to leave the vicinity of the Half-Orc’s prison cell

My final interaction with the game was checking the gallery. I chose the discarded Hundswold scene and actually got locked in it as no buttons had any effect, needed to force close the application. LOL

I ran into a bug where I THINK what I did was dash away from (while?) interacting with the lever that opens the castle gate. This seemed to lock out my buttons

But yeah, all of those, imo, are regular growing pains and mostly minor stuff. This is a solid core and I’m excited to see what’s coming next

I’m aware. Just thought it could be handy to have some readily-accessible info on this for other folks who may want to give it a go (with the appropriate disclaimer/reminder that, yeah, it’s unsupported/you’re on your own, etc…)

So… this has been a while. I tried (very very briefly) to replicate the stuff that Bottles lists for its “Gaming” prefixes but didn’t have much luck. HOWEVER I then installed Bottles and gave it a go and, as far as I can tell, things are working as intended now. I’m not sure if I’ll go back to try and replicate on Lutris, just to keep everything to the one launcher but, for the moment, I can play.

Could be worth a note somewhere in the description, dammitbird? “Game is not officially supported on Linux but users have reported success using the ‘Gaming’ prefix from ‘Bottles’”

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

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

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.