For the repeating dialog, apparently the technique in RPGMaker is to use a 'switch', basically a global variable. See this tutorial
https://rpgmaker.net/tutorials/601/
I appreciate that even this does require writing the replacement dialog to follow on from the original dialog.
I do like the repeated "Spread 'em". :-) However it does not need the prior full explanation of the consequences of the search to be repeated each time. I'm not even sure the player needs a second chance every time as to whether they really want to leave the mine.
ah ok I was not referring to the Patreon development notes, just your comments here on itch.io
To try to be clear about "consistency" I mean that the preferences of one character (Talice for example) should be more consistent, more predictable, for future encounters with that same character. But hey, yeah, maybe not, maybe it's more fun to never really know what they are going to demand of you and often fail to satisfy. Maybe I am treating it too much like a game and "playing to win" - I do have that tendency alas.
I totally appreciate you're a part time one man army. The results are impressive! I totally get that you need to prioritize your time and I didn't realize the dialog flagging is a limitation of the RPG Maker architecture. Makes sense.
I am now incredibly pleased with myself because I suspected, from the nature of the very tiny number of minor grammatical errors, that your native language is German. :-D
You really are nearly native-speaker perfect, and that's incredible. My German is terrible. Awesome job!
On the gay thing, you said your patrons squick over that. Where I come from we have a saying that goes back a long way: "It's not gay, if Mistress orders you to do it." Words to live by. I could add, it's not female "dominance" if the male enjoys it all or wants it all. That's just dress-up man-servicing. Maybe that's too hard core of an idea?
You are giving the players a choice, which their male slave characters definitely would NOT have. I think that's more than fair.
Ok so on to my major point 2 - and just for clarity I love the game - the other thing I have trouble with is pleasing the women. I know this has already been called out in your development notes. So let me also point out I strongly support your principles, which as I understand it are, no free lunch (haha!), tough choices, you can't just automatically have them all in your harem with maxxed affection. I totally agree with that. That's sound game design, 'tough but fair', the kind of decision that leads to a stronger game. I also agree with the principle that the women have different likes and dislikes that you need to discover, are differentially easy vs hard to get. And I like the fact that none of this is openly telegraphed or spoon fed, you have or figure it out yourself, eg by failure.
But so having said that - and this is early days for me, I haven't run through the whole game and I've only really done one run - I think there's a frustrating randomness to the process. I don't mean literally random. I mean that the game doesn't give enough information for the player to be able to plan sexual encounter / sexual training investment decisions, or even learn much from failure of those, in ways that they can effectively adapt to. Now partly you could say, rightly, that this enhances the realism/immersion of the slave captive scenario. Slave captives don't get advance warning of what their captors want and they don't get to say "ah couldn't we do something else?", let alone "No". So ok that's probably generally right, but it would help greatly if there was a way to obtain hints about the preferences and desires of the women, in advance of them actually doing it to you and you fucking up because you weren't prepared. And I do also agree with you that failure is instructive and failure needs to be part of the experience. But it equally needs to feel like the player has some chance to influence it or try to plan for it and it's not just like it was pure RNG. Consider that the player has to make a pretty big investment of say 2SP - 2 levels of grinding - into a skill just to play their hunch of what might work with 1-2 of the women. So TBH the only specifics I would change apart from a way to get more hints, ahead of time, about their preferences, is
- when their preferences are revealed, probably through a 'failed' session, keep those preferences more consistent. I get the impression, and I might be wrong, that what they want is more than 50% likely to change from one session to the next. Rewarding player effort with serial failure and a feeling of no possible influence on the outcome is probably not a good dynamic, even in a game targeted at masochists! :-D
- needs to be clearer whether you take an affection penalty after these failures? I know you discuss this, but to the player (me) the distinction you make between casual dialog and dialog choices isn't clear. Penalty after a first time failure is ok, but I think it's harsh when the woman has increased her requirements for a repeat session of the same act that satisfied her first time, and you still get a penalty because she now wants more. (Maybe this doesn't happen but it feels like it does.) That should be a zero, neutral, unhappy maybe but not a penalty, not a minus, I think. The minus is very demoralising because you got one shot to get it right and now you have gone backwards. It leads to a strategy of, don't approach a woman unless you are now +1 better in what pleased her last time, and even then be prepared for her to want something totally different that you're shit at.
Thing is, in real life women are generally creatures of habit and what pleases a woman one day will usually please the same woman the next day. Not always but usually. Not a different woman, for sure, but the same one, usually. Particular if (like a captor) she has no reason to fake it. And of course there are exceptions and different people and yadda. But it's a reasonable expectation. In this case bearing in mind these Drow girls are starved of cock and quite into sex, and are well aware they have a limited pool to fish in. So I think it would be reasonable for the game to hint information pretty strongly, when what satisfied a captor today was going to be inadequate for her, next time. That's very easy to convey in dialog and gives the player a fighting chance. Then you can have some women (Druuna, Eloara maybe) who are fine with the same thing each time. Others who escalate up to more severe acts - that's pretty normal in life and BDSM. And maybe a few who crave greater intensity on the same act each time. That's cool when it's part of the variety and uncertainty but it's kind of frustrating when it's the standard behaviour. In general I would like to see the women (via dialog, or some mechanic - Talk about others, or Observe) provide hints about what they might want next time. Without making it too obvious or mechanical of course.
In short, after I grind levels in the Zelda Sex-mines I want the chance of me getting it on with my captor to be more than just a crap shoot. Not too much to ask of a game surely? (I mean this shit is frustrating enough in real life right?)
(Edited:) Now my major critical feedback, this is the stuff that *might* - *might*- stop me - or some other people - playing the game, or enjoying it so much.
1 - the mining minigame
First off, as I mentioned in my first comment (probably anonymous?), the Zelda style mining minigame is kinda tedious. I grant you that it does give the immersive feeling of grinding like a slave. Oddly enough it succeeds in that. Even more oddly, uniquely even, in this game feeling like a grind is actually a good thing. But it's very scrappy and clunky. On an Android sized screen the icons are really hard to differentiate. Icons like pots and corpses that are 'containers' need to give a feedback when they're searched after they're empty. I am never sure if I am clicking in the wrong square or the wrong facing. I'm forever routing around and around Khadra's desk when I try to talk to her. It's like the Keystone cops. Routing paths sometimes fail. I trigger repeated warnings from the guards by pathing failures and button mashing. Most immersion breaking probably is characters spawning in unreachable locations that I have to mine to get to. That's pseudo-challenge as well as immersion breaking. There's plenty of reasons to mine, but reaching another slave character should not be one of them - not unless say it was a short cut or for a clandestine conversation.
Also on the lower levels the drop rate of valuable drops seems to go down dramatically? I assume the drop rate is Luck based so I expected it to go up not down.
Losing everything to the robbers is darkly funny and fits with the atmosphere of despair, but it's also kind of pointless. When you know it's coming it means you have more resources than you can use, and it makes your interactions with the alchemist almost pointless. I would suggest adding some useful thing that can be done with those resources from part 1. Either giving them to people or something, if not actually being able to stash them somewhere.
It is quite frustrating that there is more or less nothing you can do to influence the monster attacks, apart from stop mining and leave the mine. The battles themselves are tactically very limited, even after you get special attacks, but particularly before. It is frustrating that you can't even attempt to run away or attempt to get help from the guards or other slaves - which could have interesting effects on story and affection. At minimum you need to demonstrate or explain why escape or aid (vs these slow moving creatures) is not possible. Have the guards block your way to "protect the others" and leave you to it, for example. It could even depend on your Affection level with the particular nearby guard (or slave), and perhaps change over time.
There is, TBH, an internal inconsistency between Matron needing the slaves alive and useful and the guards low interest in protecting them that at least needs clarification. We get the impression that the guards are handling the major threats, and as the story goes on we see this more, but frankly the "Darwinist" approach is doubtless their beliefs but it doesn't make sense as an action when slaves are scarce, time is short, everyone wants this over and done with, and the Matron is demanding results not excuses.
Hmm, if guards or slaves would arrive to help after some rounds of combat, that would give value to the Guard action in single combat. Of course calling for help would reduce experience and loot gains, create obligations, lead to punishment and affection loss etc.
1a - Less serious
Probably the values for Bread and Water (and Apples) should be openly declared. I figured them out by experiment. That's not bad, it's just inconsistent with openly declaring the exact effects of Cheese and Sausages. Declare or don't declare, for all items equally.
There should be more opportunity to use Items (or spend skill points) just before being summoned to the Torture Chamber or arena. Like a "please give me a minute" option. It's a win-win for them if you are properly prepared.
1b - Other Minor UI stuff
Minor issue, the acronym "SP" is ambiguous, you use it to mean both Stamina Points and Skill Points. Change one of the terms or one of the acronyms.
I am often seeing only the first 3 digits displayed of the "next experience level" part of the XP display, clipping off the last 1-2 digits which makes the information meaningless. If that's hard to fix just leave off the next level value and just show the actual value. There's other places we can see our progress towards levelling.
Ok so now after the high level positive feedback here is a shopping list of fixes I believe are needed. In no particular order. Most of these are technical rather than fundamental.
'Random' special attacks - on Android at least it's really unclear whether, or how, I'm supposed to target these multiple target attacks. Given the description being 'random' targets, I'm surprised that it appears that I need to select a target to commence the special attack. From trial and error that's what it looks like. Like I select one target like a normal attack or single-target attack, then the special attack engages random targets. (Sometimes the same target twice or even three times, which is unexpected and can be frustrating). So this could be clarified better. An issue of explaining the combat UI I guess.
The enemy slowly advances in combat - does this have any effect?
The Guard option seems essentially useless unless you have multiple characters? Even if it wasn't the case that your attack ability exceeds your defend ability, Guard just means you take damage while doing no damage, so it's kind of the same as a "Lose Slowly" option? Still it's in keeping with the game vibe that encourages fearful male/slave behaviour so that's cool. In party combat it's fine.
As mentioned earlier it would be nice to have dialog feedback after combat that actually reflects who did the killing and who took the hits. Filtered through appropriate layers of Femdom arrogance and scorn of course. This could also influence affection/disdain.
It was great to be in combat alongside the Mistresses and see how bad-ass their stats are. I wish I'd seen that before as it really makes them feel scarier and more powerful. Just an idea - the game could begin with a mini combat in which you fight them as a lowly L1 male and are easily subdued. Just to establish how much more physically powerful they are. The artwork and dialogue does a great job of that, but reinforcing that via the game mechanics would not hurt.
A lot of the dialogue options repeat and that damages the immersion in the characters. It is pretty simple to set a binary flag on each dialogue option and turn it off once it's been said. Also, remove the menu item that triggers it. This kind of housekeeping adds polish to the game. Certain phrases will get repeated, that's fine. But even eg the repeated message about being searched could do with being slimmed down after the first time. For messages that are helpful hints, maybe give the option to ask "again", just as long as the game is making it clear it understands this has been asked and answered before.
There are some minor spelling and grammar errors that are slightly intrusive. Ingredients, and Definitely the main examples, and sometimes the wrong preposition. I can proofread all of these if you want to send me the strings file or something.
It would be good to have a key explaining what the different affection state icons mean. I am mostly guessing. It's often unclear if the icon shows her current state, or her *change* in state (friendly to unfriendly). Also, the colour coding on the name, seems to be significant - red blue green grey - what's the significance? (Again I can guess but I hate to have to guess the meaning of a UI feature).
There are some instances of what feels like inconsistent affection state. Eg Astrid gives me a hand job - success due to Endurance - but then won't respond to Talk, saying she is private. While that is a possible personality, it's an odd one, and would probably need more explanation ("just because I wanked you off doesn't mean I trust you with my feelings" or something). I suspect it's a glitch rather than character design?
I love how their responses depend on where they are, their current duties, and who's watching!
The Dismiss Druuna option needs to be on the dialogue with Khadra to trade, not just with the mine exit dialogue. Also, both of those Druuna dialogues - the Khadra one is very hot! - repeat endlessly. The Druuna - Khadra one in particular should only run once. Then simplify into just a glare and "..." etc.
Druuna's dialog when she begins to protect you for the day should be clearer about how to dismiss her. Her saying "leave me here" is too ambiguous- I was trying to bring her back to her start point and mashing the screen there. She should say something like "we will part when you do trading with little mage girl" or something like that. Bearing in mind that having Druuna as companion totally blocks trading or any other interactions with Khadra. Khadra is hot by the way. And very kinky!
I am also liking the fact that some of the Mistresses and female slaves are 'easy' and some are very hard to get. I love the progression. As I move into Chapter 2 , the Matron has my total attention! Though I still haven't cracked the locks of Ka'sarr (?) the pale-skinned one. Challenging and pleasantly frustrating! I also am totally smitten by Druuna, that was really unexpected. I was not expecting a fellow slave to be a female dominant, and just so naturally so. She's amazing. Very well drawn character. I also really liked the joint combat scenes with the Mistresses and with Druuna. It would be nice to have feedback from the women re those combat scenes. (eg I did nearly all the fighting with the Mistresses on Guard, but then their dialogue says I did nothing- fine if that's just them being arrogant and dominant of course!)
Having got the hang of the controls and played for several hours I can give more detailed (and hopefully more balanced) feedback.
First of all I really like the game, on many levels. The art is great. The somewhat challenging difficulty, while a surprise in this genre, works very well. The dialogue is (for me anyway) the perfect balance between fetishy and funny. The characters have real difference and real integrity, and (so far in the story) appear to be showing progression. Again, very rare in this genre (rare enough in games in general). So that's outstanding. And taken as a whole, this makes the game succeed as a roleplay of being a slave, vulnerable at the hands of very powerful and quite dangerous female captors. This could easily have been constructed as a disguised "harem game" with a Femdom "skin". You have consciously and skillfully avoided that, and that is also impressive.
Thanks for that clarification. Yes it was clear in hindsight that that's how Stamina works. It was just weird to find special attacks under a menu called Stamina, rather than say, finding them under a menu called Special Attacks and discovering - which would not be surprising - that they consume Stamina.
I'm very grateful the game is starting to be multi-platform otherwise I wouldn't have played it. I think as part of making it multi-platform you will have to remove in-game instructions that are Windows-specific, like the ones that appear on the first animation. I did figure out how to stop the animations but Ialso spent a long time trying to guess how to speed them up. Now you're telling me that's not possible in the Android version, which is fine, but that needs to be communicated. So the hint messages either need to be made more generic, or customised to be platform specific. Again I realise this is the first iteration on Android so it's totally understandable.
I want to say, it's a really good game, not just superficially but it's clear it has proper game design thinking behind it, which is unusual for an NSFW game. Please take this feedback as constructive.
I'm stuck as I can't figure out how to select the improved attack (double strike or whatever) on Android in the battle with the crawler. Great game however!
ok right - it's in the Stamina menu - that really makes no sense, but, whatever.
Similarly you need to say, in the first animation scenes, how Android controls can speed up or end the scenes. I have no idea how to do either, and the two finger tap does nothing in this situation.
