Good point. Pity that you did not get an answer. You could have replied that if your game makes that much money you would start commissioning real art.
I am not a fan of AI pics in general. But for some games they are one of the few ways to make a game at all and have visuals. And I think any game developer that has the choice is wise to not chose AI. It is unpopular. It looks boring. There is a reason a lot of the AI games are instantly recogniseable.
If nudity is all that makes this an "adult" game, maybe consider scratching the adult tag and replacing it with erotic and or even plain nudity. People browsing for the adult tag might expect a little more than sans clothes. And the qq tag might be a typo. Same for the erotic-scifi. Your game is the only game that has those tags.
Or maybe make more clear in the description, how explicit or unexplict the game is planned to be
I missed the part in the description that your game is mostly video and based my first comment around the assumption that your images are very big. They are, but contribute only marginally to the file size. Still all your images could easily be compressed to less than an average of your already compressed videos.
Maybe highlight that fact with the video heavy content and put as first or second screenshot part of one of the videos as an anigif. It makes your game stick out, as such kind of video sequences are rare. And the first 2 screenshots appear when hovering over a game while browsing. Actually, you could also make the game capsule image be an anigif.
I know little about video game movie compression, as this would be tied in to how those videos were created. But I do know some bits about video compression in general. And something is off here. There are too many artifacts and the files are (still) too big for their quality. For "mp4" compression, I assume some variant of h264 was used and there are worlds in quality difference achieveable. For the x264 encoder you would need to adjust some values to fit your content and not blindly encode in a bitrate. That sounds like a hardware encoder or some other bit of software that is optimised for real time encoding. Which will give very bad results for encoding - but is real time and meant for streaming.
The videos are artificially created and continuous. It just should compress a lot better with higher quality.
I cannot tell how webm configurations would look like, but mp4 with x264, you would select something like preset veryslow, tune film and try out the quality setting from 20-35 and since the source was created and is continous, it should still look good at very small sizes.
That is just an estimate. Most games of this type that are overly big have png images. And by switching from png to jpg or better lossy webp a size change can easily happen from 2MB to less than 200KB per file. You just fiddle around with the compression setting till you would notice the quality loss. Factor 10 is a good starting point for testing out the quality loss. You might see some slight dithering at sharp edges like the black dress and skin, but you should not see any changes in the face till you go down in size further.
There are other tricks, that depend on your creation process. Like separating backgrounds and characters. Lossless compression as in png is for buttons that should be pixel accurate.
Anyway, if you are at the beginning and would have continued in that fashion your game would quickly be several GB big.
Edit.
Uhm. I have no idea what you did compress or how, since I did not download the big version. But your images are png. You can make that images folder from 74 MB to less than 10 MB without effort or quality loss. And if you do things like make the bra a separate image and overlay it with the engine, instead of in the pic, you can do even more, but that would be overdoing it at the moment. But it is a hint how games only 2GB big can have a huge amount of different images.
They probably also do not have the amount of videos you have. I have little experience in video compression for such games. But if you add more images, consider switching to lossy webp.
Edit 2. Fun short game. But it is rock papier scissors and that exhausts it's fun factor quite quickly as a game. Animations look good in combination with music and voice.
And as clarification, my comments above were for the pictures. How to compress videos like your's, I have little knowledge.
Just to be clear, my initial post was meant jokingly. Hence the stammering. There is no doubt about the lighthearted booba nature of your game.
I never saw ecchi used outside of anime I watched. Except by nerds on wikipedia. Hentai, yes, but not ecchi. Maybe it really is getting established as a word. And while we are at it, we should add booba to the dictionary.
I do not think that the word hentai is used outside of Japan as they would use it in Japan either. On the one hand it is funny how different people use the same words and mean different things. On the other hand, this can get frustrating if they use this to classify things and talk to each other about those things. Misunderstandings are bound to happen. Using "H" seems to have a long tradition in Japan, and there seems to not even be consensus about the origin or meaning. At one point in history it even meant gay. Not kidding. The translated Japanese wiki site for ecchi is a fun read. So saying it is an ecchi game and not hentai could have once meant, it is a homosexual game and not a perverted game. Language is fun.
Auch hast du wahrscheinlich gedacht es wäre ein Bordellmanagement-Spiel
Äh, nein. Aber das ist ein Teil des Spiels, so wie ich die Beschreibung verstanden habe. Die Heldin will Geld ranschaffen. Mit allen Mitteln. Inklusive selber Anschaffen und Anschaffen lassen. Und wenn sie in der Bäckerei und anderen Orten arbeitet und dabei nicht ihre Vorzüge nutzen sollte, stellt sich die Frage, ob das ganze Spiel nicht vielleicht als reguläre Wirtschafssimulation mit RPG-Elementen besser funktionieren würde. Defender of the Crown war nicht umsonst so beliebt damals. Spiele dieser Art sind natürlich komplexer geworden und mit Erotik kann man das nochmal anders angehen.
Das Tutorial ist natürlich auch nur Optional zu lesen - mal sehen ob ich es irgendwie deichseln kann das beim ersten mal Pflücken
Das war nur ein willkürliches Beispiel. Bei so komplexen Spielen hast du immer das Problem, wie du einen neuen Spieler in das Spiel bringst und ihn dort hältst. Informationsüberflutung am Anfang ist da nicht hilfreich. Dazu zähle ich auch, dass ich gleich am Anfang auf die Oberflächenkarte wechseln konnte und buchstäblich planlos umhergeirrt bin. Was ich seit je her bei rpg maker artigen Spielen hasse, ist die Grenze am Bildschirmrand. Es ist nie wirklich einsichtig, ob die Grenze etwas tut oder nicht.
Es gibt den Begriff der Gameplay-Loop. In einer Wisim wären das z.B. die üblichen Dinge die man zwischen Rundenstart und Rundenende so tut oder tun muss. Also Ressurcen ausgeben und verwalten. Oder auch Ressourcen sammeln zu Anfangs, wenn man noch keine Angestellten hat. Rundenende wird wohl im Bett ruhen sein. Meiner Ansicht nach sollte ein Tuturial den Spieler durch so einen Schleifendurchgang führen und Schritt für Schritt komplexer werden. Mit zusätzlichen Tutorial-Tipps, jedesmal wenn eine neue Mechanik eingeführt wird.
Um das willkürliche Beispiel aufzugreifen, sobald die Heldin in den Bereich geht, wo sie farmen könnte, sind da die drei verschiedenen Pflanzenarten mit je einem Schild drüber und wenn sie das Schild liest, steht jeweils die Besonderheit. Und vom Leveldesign könnte man die Heldin durch eine komplexer werdende Anfangsregion leiten.
Genre ist zwar reichlich anders, aber vielleicht kennst du ja den Anfang von Skyrim. Man weiß natürlich was da gemacht wird, und warum, aber man wird in dem Anfangsszenario durch die meisten Spielmechaniken geleitet und kriegt dann eine Mission als Vorschlag wo man die Reise beginnen sollte.
aber zumindest schon einmal cool dass du einen Weg in die Wälder
Wie gesagt, ich bin planlos umhergeirrt. Da waren dann irgendwelche Zombies oder so ähnlich und ich hab auf Auto geklickt und eine Weile später war Game Over. Von einem unbeschwerten Erotikspiel erwarte ich sowas nicht. Da gibt es genügend andere Dinge, die da passieren können, besonders bei einer weiblichen Hauptfigur.
Morgens und Vormittags
Wie die Zeit im Spiel voranschreitet, ist an mir vorbeigegangen. Aber ich hab auch nur wenige Minuten gespielt. (Hab es gerade in der Beschreibung gelesen.)
Außerhalb von Japan bezeichnet man mit H eigentlich Sachen die an japanisches H angelehnt sind. Das ist in etwa so, als ob du ein Spiel mit Lesben-Content als Yuri tagst. Ja, Yuri ist lesbischer Content, aber das ist halt eine Untergruppe vom lesbian tag. Die Meinungen werden da auseinandergehen und es gibt über ein Dutzend "nsfw" tags die alle nur das gleiche aussagen: es geht explizit zur Sache.
Ich glaube eigentlich schon, dass ich recht gut verstanden habe, was für ein Spiel das werden soll. Aber seine Ressourcen so zu verwalten, dass man irgendwann genug Geld hat, um ein Königreich zu erobern, ist im Kern eine Wisim. Nimmst du die Wisim raus, ist es ein anderes Spiel. Nimmst du die Kämpfe gegen Zombies raus, bleibt es das gleiche Spiel mit weniger Details und Nebenquests. Eine signifikante Änderung wäre, wenn du dein Reich Stück für Stück erobern könntest und diese Stücke auch wieder verlieren. Das ginge dann schon etwas in den 4X Bereich.
Von der Immersion der Geschichte her, warum kann die Heldin "Armeepunkte" sammeln, ohne dass die jetzige Regierung was davon mitbekommt und dies unterbindet. Das ist immerhin eine Rebellion.
Ein paar Worte/Feedback nach dem Lesen der Spielbeschreibung und ein paar Minuten reinschnuppern in das Spiel. Ich hab schon eine Menge nsfw Spiele hier gesehen und einige Elemente des Spiels fallen in mein "Beuteschema". Ist natürlich alles auch Geschmackssache.
Zu viel Text und Disclaimer. Ja, ich erkenne die Ironie da mein Posting auch recht lang ist.
"Hentai" ist nicht wirklich das richtige Wort hier. Da ich xxx-Spiele normal auf Englisch spiele, bin ich gar nicht so sicher, was der korrekte Begriff ist. Aber Hentai ist es nicht wirklich.
"Koitus". Wie niedlich.
Im deutschsprachigen Raum ist die Legalität von Dingen in Videospielen eigentlich weniger streng, als im englischen Raum. Die unterscheiden teilweise nicht zwischen gezeichneten und echten Bildern. Das Problem ist nur der Jugendschutz, also an so ein Spiel ranzukommen. Steam beispielsweise drückt sich um den Jugendschutz, weswegen es keine Hardcore-Erotik-Spiele auf Steam für Deutschland gibt. Und so Sachen wie Inzest, da hat auch nur Patreon Bauchschmerzen mit, aber die pushen auch ihre eigene Agenda, wo es geht. Sieht man auch an deren Verwendung von Gendersternchen.
Dass die Texte mal geschönt werden könnten, hast selber schon geschrieben. Allerdings ist das eine der essenziellen kreativen Dinge des Spiels: wie es geschrieben ist. Im Prinzip muss man ja praktisch ein Buch schreiben, das jemand lesen will, wenn man die Story eines Spiels ausformuliert. Sauschwer sowas.
rpgmaker. Ich muss vorausschicken, dass ich ganz wenige rpgmaker Spiele mag - aber doch ein paar. Diese Engine ist ... nicht besonders gut. Jedenfalls nicht für Spiele ausserhalb des jRPG Genres. Das sind viele Kleinigkeiten die da zusammenkommen. Von der Aufmachung her würde ich eine erotische Wisim erwarten, mit fortschreitender Korrumpierung des weiblichen Hauptcharacters. Mit dem Avatar durchs Gelände zu hoppsen, sogar mit diesen unsäglichen jrpg Kämpfen, lange Dialoge in diesen winzigen Dialogboxen, umständlich das Equipment auszurüsten und so weiter, das lenkt mich da nur ab. Ich bevorzuge da diese Mechanik die man von Dating-Sims her kennt, mit Ressurcen wie Energie und Zeit und relativ fixen Optionen die man für den Tag hat. Eben die management Steuerung um es mal so zu nennen. Klar kann man das realisieren, indem der Char durchs Feld rennt und mit Leuten sprechen muss. Es nervt halt. Was in einem Managerspiel ein Mausklick ist, ist minutenlanges Rumrennen in einem rpgmaker Spiel. Von der Immersion her mag ich das in einem 3d Spiel tolerieren, aber für 2d bin ich da irgendwann rausgewachsen.
Ist halt die Problematik eines Genre-Mixes. Bordellmanagement plus jRPG-Kämpfe als Beispiel. Theoretisch könnte man meinen, dass man damit die Fans beider Genres abholt. Praktisch ist aber die Gefahr groß, dass man Fans beider Genres vor den Kopf stößt. Als ich in den Wald oder was das war gegangen bin und den typischen jrpg Kampf initiiert habe, hab ich erstmal mit den Augen gerollt. Das war als Actionspiel vor 25 Jahren vielleicht interessant mit Secret of Mana. Als Rundenbasiertes Kampfsystem hat mich sowas nie begeistern können. Und dabei mag ich rundenbasierte Kämpfe eigentlich.
Ambitioniertes Projekt. Am besten in viele kleine Dinge aufteilen. Für mich das wichtigste an so Spielen ist, wie der Spieler herangeführt wird. Leute heutzutage sind ungeduldig und haben gewisse Erwartungen an Spiele. Nur so als Beispiel wie man etwas kleines ändern könnte, um den Anfang schnittiger zu machen. Da war dieses "Tutorial" wo einem erklärt wird, dass es unterschiedliche Ressourcen gibt. Langweilig. Die Tutorial-Meldung erwarte ich beim ersten mal, wo ich sowas pflücke oder erhalte. Und nicht vorne weg als Lese-Hindernis. Das macht nur den Kopf voll mit Dingen, die ich jetzt im Augenblick nicht anwenden kann.
Wie im anderen Thread schon erwähnt, KI Bildchen sehen halt erstmal langweilig aus. Da bevorzuge ich sogar den eigenwilligen Stil von Harlot's Path (gibt ne kostenlose Version davon auf Newgrounds und ist eines der wenigen rpg maker Spiele falls es dich interessiert, was jemand der keine rpgmaker Spiele mag dann trotzdem ok findet). Wär das KI gewesen in dem Stil den du und so viele andere verwenden, ich hätte das Spiel wohl nicht näher angeschaut.
dann würden viel mehr Nutzer sich hier melden
Leute melden sich generell sehr selten. Da müssest du schon ein sehr populäres Spiel haben. Archive packen und entpacken is kein Hexenwerk und 7z ist nicht bekannt dafür, irgendwelche Probleme zu machen. Im Gegenteil.
Eigentlich sind die ja alle mit AI erstellt. Einer der Gründe weswegen ich dieses Spiel auf jeden Fall kostenlos belassen werde. Wer weiß was da rechtlich noch alles kommen wird was AI-Art angeht.
Soweit ich weiß gibt es da höchtens Bedenken und Diskussionsbedarf wie es mit dem Copyright aussieht. Aber nicht durch die Erstellung der Modelle, sondern was man damit erzeugt. Also Uneinigkeit, wer das Copyright an einem generierten Bild hat. Sprich, wenn du ein erfolgreiches Spiel hättest und dein Hauptcharacter dann von anderen kopiert wird. Mal schaun was da noch rauskommt. Ein Fotograf hat ja auch Copyright, obwohl er die Bildinformation nur durch ein Gerät erzeugt und nicht selber malt, also so einfach ist die Argumentation nicht, dass da Bilder ohne Author erstellt werden und deswegen kein Copyright hätten.
Und ob du nun mit KI oder von Hand ein geschütztes Werk nachahmst, ist egal. Es kommt auf das Resultat an.
Das größere Problem ist meiner Ansicht nach, wie es bei den Spielern ankommt. Und da sieht es düster aus. Ob nun ideologisch, ethisch oder aus anderen Gründen, KI generierte Inhalte sind nicht wirklich beliebt. Das ist kein Aushängeschild, mit dem man Werbung machen kann. Ganz pragmatisch, die meisten KI Sachen in Spielen, besonders Erwachsenenspiele, die ich bislang gesehen habe sind sterbenslangweilig. Alles der gleiche Mist. Haste eines gesehen, haste alle gesehen. Das ist meist dieser Pseudoanime-Stil, wie auch deine Hauptfigur. Einfach mal vergleichen https://itch.io/games/tag-ai-generated-graphics/tag-rpgmaker Da heben sich nicht wirkliche viele von den anderen ab.
Those two are actually quite good external hosters. No clutter, no fake downloadbutton advertisements and bad stuff like that. Sucks only, if you download over their limit.
The file is over 4GB. Maybe it could be compressed more, but storage increase on Itch might take a while or not be granted. I think standard available space is 1GB or 2GB and with 3 versions, this would be about 12+ GB right now.
Sorry for elaborating so much. It was just so obvious in this case. It is good to be careful, and very worrying how much this interpreter triggers. And some game engines in general.
But yeah, the game itself lags af. It is 20 years old tech. That means single threaded and limited memory usage. I could pamper the game with literally a hundred times it's current memory usage. And about 10+ times the cpu load. If you do certain things it even locks up sometimes for a few seconds.
A freshly loaded save games and doing nothing: the game takes up 0% cpu and 113MB. And I need about 2-3 seconds to go from room to room, while the single core it uses barely gets used to 50%. This normal?
You might give a hint that the standard download includes the Danaume Model. Since the gblorbss are not zipped and are bigger than the standard download, this is not intuitive.
And maybe put up a screenshot for the other models' artwork.
I sure hope this gets a modern interface and modern tech under the hood some day.
Sorry, I can't answer, because my rig got hacked and is busy mining coins. Blame those thousands of people on the discord. They must be all in on it.
Joking aside, this is about trust. This is the official Itch and it is the official site and discord. They are crosslinked to each other and it is a discord with several thousand people. The biggest threat would be an impostor site or a recently hacked developer account.
If you want to see a lot of red, look at this
https://www.virustotal.com/gui/file/5b489c671f8d52d5a33e95e27b8dc4b3de0690589756...
It is git 138. I have never seen a report with 58 triggers before...
This game needs an interpreter to run. A virtual machine basically. The format is called glulxe and you need an interpreter that can run those files. Arrive there by indipendent internet search and you will find things like this:
https://davidkinder.co.uk/glulxe.html
With the foot note of
Also available is a Windows port of a faster Glulx interpreter, called Git. This uses the same Windows I/O layer as Windows Glulxe, so it looks the same, but it plays games up to five times faster.
and links to https://github.com/DavidKinder/Git/releases/ with the above git 1.38 that currently triggers a whopping 58 scanners.
I do not know which is "best" to run the game. git 1.35, the custom git from tq, git 1.38, any other grulxe interpreter. But they all trigger something on a scan on vt. Interpreters do things, that scanners do not like.
To answer your question: nothing out of the ordinary so far. The game itself is a bit sluggish, which I assume is the reason for the custom made git version. The engine is like 20 years old and does not utilize modern hardware. It barely uses one of my cpu's cores and a tiny amount of ram. Browsing this website here takes up more ram than the game. A lot more.
You do good to be suspicous, but I have seen malware here that did not trigger anything on vt and a lot of legit games that do trigger. With common engines no less. One would think that the likes of renpy, godot, rpgmaker and all the others are well known to the virusscanners, but apprantly, nope. They are triggerhappy, which is a huge problem, because how does one know if it is the usual false positive for godots exe packing or a real virus.
So do not rely too much on vt. Establish trust to the developer's page. Is the account hacked? Is the game available at other places? Do those places link to the same Itch? And so on. Oh, and the crosslinking is important, I have seen impostors link to the patreon of games. And sadly not all devs link back to their Itch, so a missing link is not even a sure sign of anything.
Try some renpy or godot games. Even rpgmaker gets flags often.
The git.exe itself inside the zip will trigger 4 instead of 3. And different ones at that. Think about that. And the git 135 will trigger 2 other ones. Virusscanners do not like interpreters much.
Which is a huge problem for indie games. Whom to trust.
The website links to the itch, the itch to the website, and to the discord. The discord to the website. There are thousands of people on that discord. I believe it is safe to say, this is not malware.
Your images are way too big. Use lossy compression exactly as you would for photos. I hope those 1MB+ files are not your master images, because they do not look very detailed for their resolution.
You could have better quality images for 1/10 to 1/5 the file size. PNG is the wrong file format for the content you make. And this factor 5-10 is not an exaggaration. Try a JPG with setting 90, it will be about 20% the size and you will not see the difference. Especially with the low details you have you can easily go down to 75 which is about 10%. Or use webp with lossy setting to achieve the same size reduction. 10-20% of your current average image size should be your goal. And if your master files are higher resolution, even better. Use those and make files that are only 20% the current size.
Add more tags that describe the nature of the visual novel. At first glance and after playing this looks like it might become slice of life, drama, corruption, female protagonist, management and so on. In the current state it is more a kinetic vn with no actual choices, other then to watch or not to watch a scene. You currently only tell us, it is an adult vn with three tags that mean the same. You can have 11 tags and only use 2. Use the tag "milf". Itch has free tagging and a milf prot is a rarity. https://itch.io/games/tag-female-protagonist/tag-milf
And make sure people know who the protagonist is. The husband being cucked will bother some people, no matter how you spin that angle. If he is not essential to your story, consider removing him somehow from the story. She can also have fun because she is bored and not because her husband encourages her.
The beginning is a bit confusing. The first decision is not the decision of Cat, but of the visting friend. Also the exposition fails to mention the husband. And the visiting friend is fantasizing about her. We see his pov. Not she is thinking about what he might be fantasizing about or fantasizes herself.
The conversations she has with Seb might be more fitting with a female friend of her's she would be asking for advice. Unless of course you aim to deliver the cuckold fantasy. Like when he tries to whore her out for a business deal and then promptly falls asleep while she is screwing the business partner.
I do not like your current usage of audio. Feels more like a jump scare and out of place "borrowed" voice overs from dubious sources.
We shall see, where the game is going. I like management games with corruption mechanics. I dislike kinetic novels. But you should create what is most fun for you to create.
heavy and criminal are ambigous terms.
The criminal thing is subjective to the applicable laws. And since this is fictional pixels, it can be as criminal or rather not, as anything you could read in a book or watch in a (xxx) movie happening.
I mean, there are places where the whole game would be illegal. Or the cheating of that married woman.
Ingame a criminal fetish would be, when the protagonist get off because of doing criminal things. Like stealing a car and getting it on in the car.
But in practical terms, huge turn off/on for players are ntr, pregnancy, gay things, futa, incest, noncon, femdom and even mmf group things. Those are not inherently "heavy", but dealbreakers/of interest to some players.
A heavy fetish would be doing naughty stuff in public. Like being completely naked and giving a boob job on a park bench ;-)
I think you should make more clear, what people will get, if they give you money here.
The expected outcome would be to buy the early access version. But from what I could read about your plans, you will have to create a separate project to release the game here on Itch. Some people might not quite understand, that they did not buy the early access version that will get updates, but rather gave you support money only.
The term subscribing is ambigous. It could mean following. That is a subscription, since your followers will get notifications. What you wanted to tell is "to support the game's development without subscribing on Subscribestar/Elsewhere". In big bold letters that leave no room for thinking a purchase of this project will grant the full game later on.
Well. Itch seems to have a policy of not telling much about these things. So let us hope for the best.
But I do want to add, that you have a very high number of followers. Which can explain a lot of things, be it people complaing about your disappearance, high click rates and so on. Or make other things look suspicous. I remember seeing your games always on page one of the ranking pages. Yet if I look at the ratings of your games, this does not correspond with the usual ratio of followers/ratings. Maybe it is because you are rather a studio/publisher and not a single dev. A typical ratio is 10/1 to 5/1 with a high variance. So one would expect your top games to have something like 2000-5000 ratings.
You might want to reconsider having two different levels of individual priced files. Itch currently has no way of increasing the amount. Someone paying 10 and later deciding to want to get the extras from tier 18, can only do so by paying another 18.
You could also make a dlc project page to offer the soundtrack separatly or something like that to mitigate the shortcomings of Itch payment options.
Gay isn't an activity. It's an orientation.
In context, it is a tag. And that can very well mean an activity in the game, that can be called gay, even though the characters might be bisexual.
It is just tags. One has to balance people looking for/avoiding certain content. If you have m-m action in a game, "gay" does the trick. Nuances that one or both of the characters are not oriented exlusively gay, are better explained in the description.
So, yeah, it is not what "gay" means, but it is one of the things the tag "gay" can mean.
Oh, it is not about abuse of tags. What they mean and what they are used for is in the eye of the beholder. Usage, importance and applicability is often debateable.
But if I browse for certain tags, I have expectations.
To be found by people browsing for tags, just look what tags are used by similar games.
Disclaimer. I did not try the game. But some advice from a user's perspective.
Tag the setting, gameplay and game tags. Not the fetishes, except outstanding things. See popular adult games for examples. List the fetishes in the description if you want to. You only have 11 tags.
An outstanding thing would be weight gain. But a dude screwing some ladies is ... well, you did tag it adult already.
The only adult tag you need is adult. And you do not even need that, but it is better to have it, because people look for it. But you must mark your game as having sensitive content. You want tags like fantasy or gothic for example. And it is debateable, if your game is a 3d game. Just look at similar visual novel what they use for tags, so your game can be found by tags. Yeah, some tag simple things like the type of sex or sex itself. Or even indie for crying out loud.
If your main character is not gay/bi, do not tag lgbt or lesbian, just because there is lesbian sex in it. Assuming male-protagonist here.
You need more screenshots. And maybe a longer description.
Wish you well. And if this is not a kinetic novel, I might play it someday.
Oh, you can like the fetish and if the target audience really voted for this and the dev planned this all along, all is good and well.
But there are some kinks that I see a lot of people begging for or hating on. Often on games that do not feature the kink to begin with or feature it in a way that actually is not what people think it is.
Here for instance I do not see preg in the planned kinks. Adding it later is kinda a big thing, because it is one of the dealbreaker kinks. Like futa, ntr, gay, incest, furry and so on. Some people like it, some people do not care, but some people actively avoid it.
It depends on the game and the setting and how exactly one wants to implement it. Pregnancy in particular is delicate, because of all the realism it entails. We are talking about a suspension of disbelief lewd game, where things happen, that do not happen in real life and other things that would happen in real life will not happen ingame. Like the women having a headache and being not in the mood or the mc being too nervous to have a boner.
Anyways, it is a big thing to add in a game and not something trivial like the question, should a solo masturbation scene be added or not. Well, actually, adding it onscreen for the male mc would be a dealbreaker kink for some ;-)
Having no longer access to more artwork from the same source would be a reason to change the art. I was just lamenting because it read like you did it for other reasons.
I look at lots of nsfw games and comments and the impression I got was, that AI is not really popular. It is tolerated, not something to brag about. Pixel art would be a counterexample. People highlight it and advertise with it.
And the timing was just too weird. I downloaded a version with AI art, while the screenshots were still the old ones. And after playing a bit, I checked back with the page and wondered why I never got to the part with the screenshots. When I reloaded the page, you had changed the screenshots and made this devlog.
And here I was, wondering why your screenshots looked nothing like the game I just tried. The new "art" looks bad. There is nothing to sugercoat. It is same as you see in all those shovelware AI adult games. Yawn.
You might want to reconsider that change. If you did it to make the game look better, it failed. Tbh, with the new screenshots I probably would not even have tried the game. And I am not even an AI hater. It just looks bland and boring. People do not go looking for games because they have AI art, but some avoid them because of it. You have actual game play, AI art does not enhance your game, it degrades it.
At first I thought, after playing the game and looking at the 2d art again, aha, the dev is replacing the placeholder AI pics with real art...
The card game has some interesting mechanics. Plays too slow. Needs a speedup setting. It is like playing Monster Train on normal speed. Card animations look only nice for five minutes. Some of those upgrades are actually bad and you cannot refuse them. Like discard instead of expend. I cannot say I fully grasped the expend mechanic. But when I discard my 7 cost card, I do not get the 7 points to fuel the two mimics with the maso to one shot most enemies. Same with the upgrade to have a card cost 0. That is not really helping. The current game mechanics punish you for playing cards, so you only ever play your best cards. Also, too much text clicking. And your door mechanic and those chests and whatnot could use some tooltips to explain what is going on.
I sometimes wonder, if the adding of pregnancy content increases or decreases the potential audience. The people begging for this content sure make it look, like it is super popular. But I think this is a distored statistic. They beg for it, because it is unpopular fetish.
For me, pregnancy is a turn off. A big one. It puts realism in a light hearted lewd game. What next? No anal anymore, because they did not clean their rear entry preemtively? Also, if pregnancy is possible, the characters would know this and not have casual sex all the time without condoms!
I say, if you ad impreg, you should add condoms. And remove the anal content. Also characters should talk about birth control a lot more.
If there was a way to activate sleeping without running out of stamina, I did miss it.
I am used to some time management, but mostly in twine games. And they of course have digital time display. And typically there would be an option to rest or nap to gain a little stamina back. Or trigger a full nights sleep/end of day.
Don't read too much into a single experience of your game.
I think what irritated me about the clock was, that night and day of course do not correspond to 0-12 and 12-0. But there is daylight twice with some hours and the irregular sleep times disorient me.
Since you added night effects, you might want to consider using the sun as an indicator. Sun and moon wandering across the sreen. Or as a background of the clock or whatever. Or a more granular night and day, with dusk and dawn in between. Speaking about the lack of light on the map in night.
It is mostly the sleep times I think. If a day is scheduled regularly, I do not need to think about what time it is after waking up and have some inkling what time it is depending on how many things I did. What could do the trick is tell me how long I slept or rather what time I woke up. There is a sleep dialoge anyway. It could end with something like, you sleept till 6:00.
Your "conversion" includes a chromium browser. To play this not on windows, you would have to exctract the app (which is 27.5 MB) and run it in browser.
I cannot say that I understand how this game is supposed to work. It is rather confusing. I did not figure out, if it is possible to sleep on demand. Or how to gain favor with the ladies.
After reading your tutorial on ng, it got a little better. Sadly this information is not presented in the game. Or in a way that I would find it. I played management sims before, including yours. This is among the most non intuitive confusing things I experienced. For example the click that advances time. That happens just about everyhwere. And do I have to acknowlege work messages or not. Oh, and one click too many will advance time, because clicks outside of click areas still do something - but not rest. Most annoying is the time management with the auto sleep. Maybe I did not find the rest button, as the gift button also was hidden in plain sight. A game that has time slots for events to happen should have something like that, and not make me go sleep at the time I want to do something and give me not opportunity to shift my sleeping times.
An analog clock is nice on paper, but who can read those anymore. You could have both. And night is a little very dark.
If you make click areas visible, that is nice. But people expect all click areas to be marked, or at least the important ones. Like that pond. But more importantly, click areas suggest, that clicking elsewhere does nothing. This is not the case here.
When reading a skill up to 20, there is a bug. It just keeps telling you, that your energy is low.
Game could do with an introductory screen that tells you the basic setup (story). And maybe something similar as you had in that beach game, where you could see what each button would do. But maybe I just did not realize that the inventory button would be repurposed, because your tool tips are deativated when a girl is present. Changing the icon from storage box to a gifting icon would also do the trick.
Helpful tooltips can usually do most or all of the job of a tutorial. They are also not in the way and let a user advance at a chosen pace to new elements of the ui.
Will probably try again later, but my backlog is big.
I cannot tell what triggered it. But three of your projects are indexed and three are quarantined. Including the one that only has the csv file. Open a private window and click any download link. The message only appears when you really do click the link, and not earlier. Earlier the only indication is, that the games do not appear in search, if you search for LAGS.
It is weekend, so it might take a while for staff to look at this. If your account is not hacked (and it could be, without your knowlege. There is a thing called cookie theft), it should clear up.
There is an ongoing attack for years from scammers to upload fake games and stolen games with malware. I saw like 5 today. It stands to reason that Itch does something to fight those criminals. And that this something might give false positives. Those 5 were on older user accounts. That means, they did get hacked recently.
