Gosh. Well I for one desperately hope you continue. Character design, style, tone... not to mention this is a gameplay format I really enjoy. I can see what you mean about it being time consuming - is there a way you can moderate the art demands? Reusable sprites or the like with only art for the really significant moments? Only establishing imagery for locations, and leaving scene description to the text?
There's a not completely dissimilar game called Roadwarden you might want to glance at for ideas about balancing gameplay and art and all.
As for direct feedback on the demo... well you can tell I enjoyed it. My only two points of criticism would be:
1 - The 'You the player character are coming to hear the story from the main character' framing is kind of neat, but it also sucks the tension out of the story a bit. If nothing else, it forces the player to view the potential negative events through the frame of 'Well whatever happened it can't be that bad if she's giving a talk on it in later life. If nothing else I know she survives and has moderate success in the end' whilst also making them raise a brow at some of the intimate details she's apparently sharing with an audience. Is it really necessary when the story could just be first person narrative?
2 - In an 'explore all the events' type game, which the demo is even if the full work probably wouldn't be, having to rely on chance to see all the paths can be a bit of a sod. Obviously succeeding on rolls automatically is out without the kind of scale would merit a difficulty setting, but what about the option to flub rolls on purpose?
Anyway yes gosh I hope you push on with this lord knows I'd pay full price for something like it complete x.x
I have Roadwarden but haven't gotten to play it, I will need to do so when I have the chance xD
Figuring out how to balance the scope is the next step, for sure.
The first person thing allowed me to have fourth wall breaking with the narration and keep the narrator entertaining without much effort. But yes, her being super graphic with her experiences is part of the type of person she grows to be :p
I had considerations that story can still end up with her like... enslaved for rest of her life and then someone would ask 'Wait, but you are not a slave now?' and she would just shrug and make up some excuse that would reinforce she likes to lie and exaggerate.
But if I continue on, I will probably not use this framework, there is a lot of issues with the past/present/future tenses and the convolutions of her external knowledge regarding situations she wasn't present for.
The exploration of events is definitely a thing I considered for the full game. Already some people are just so lucky they can't fail and complain about it xD
For now there is a cheat to hold ctrl+shift when clicking to accept a roll. That will make it proceed with the opposite result.
I wish to finish this one since I believe in the concept, but I need to sort a few other things out first.
Some people prefer their lewd fantasies to be low commitment, and with the replayable nature of these games, it fits in pretty good, even if impact of decisions is lessened.
But I may go for a different set up later, I am not completely set on the way I will need to rewrite things in the future..
I thought about it and it could help to extablish a "budget" for how much text and/or images each event and outcome is limited to. Which could help pace yourself and boost efficiency by discouraging yourself from getting carried away.
Naturally since this is meant to be a soft limit to pace yourself you can always disregard it for events you want to be exceptionally long or give certain scenes a bigger or smaller "budget" depending on how long you want the events to be.
After all creativity is often rooted in needing to work around limits so maybe self imposed limits can be the key to your time.
You can also have a dynamic notebook of sorts in your menu that keeps track of certain terminology or fill the player in on key events to help trim fluff while keeping it around for players to read up on when they want to know.
Also this is unrelated but an issue I kept forgeting to mentiom is that in browser on mobile sometimes with longer scenes the diologue box can scale incorrectly and leave you unable to hit the continue/option button.
I wanted to attempt the budget being as low as I can get next, remove ALL the fluff, just get points across. But we will see how far I can hold back xD
I did consider having an encyclopedia of sorts for different terms (even have text as hyperlinks to take you there when they pop up) but I kept it like this since I struggle a lot with the limited color scheme, for text readability especially.
Interesting that mobile fails sometimes... May be that the browser headers takes up more space than I expected, which is not good. May need to look into patching that (though going fullscreen should fix it, but I heard full screen button covers parts of the UI too sometimes, bleh).
Full game will probably not be in a browser anyway, but I should keep it in mind.
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Gosh. Well I for one desperately hope you continue. Character design, style, tone... not to mention this is a gameplay format I really enjoy. I can see what you mean about it being time consuming - is there a way you can moderate the art demands? Reusable sprites or the like with only art for the really significant moments? Only establishing imagery for locations, and leaving scene description to the text?
There's a not completely dissimilar game called Roadwarden you might want to glance at for ideas about balancing gameplay and art and all.
As for direct feedback on the demo... well you can tell I enjoyed it. My only two points of criticism would be:
1 - The 'You the player character are coming to hear the story from the main character' framing is kind of neat, but it also sucks the tension out of the story a bit. If nothing else, it forces the player to view the potential negative events through the frame of 'Well whatever happened it can't be that bad if she's giving a talk on it in later life. If nothing else I know she survives and has moderate success in the end' whilst also making them raise a brow at some of the intimate details she's apparently sharing with an audience. Is it really necessary when the story could just be first person narrative?
2 - In an 'explore all the events' type game, which the demo is even if the full work probably wouldn't be, having to rely on chance to see all the paths can be a bit of a sod. Obviously succeeding on rolls automatically is out without the kind of scale would merit a difficulty setting, but what about the option to flub rolls on purpose?
Anyway yes gosh I hope you push on with this lord knows I'd pay full price for something like it complete x.x
Thanks for the feedback :D
I have Roadwarden but haven't gotten to play it, I will need to do so when I have the chance xD
Figuring out how to balance the scope is the next step, for sure.
The first person thing allowed me to have fourth wall breaking with the narration and keep the narrator entertaining without much effort. But yes, her being super graphic with her experiences is part of the type of person she grows to be :p
I had considerations that story can still end up with her like... enslaved for rest of her life and then someone would ask 'Wait, but you are not a slave now?' and she would just shrug and make up some excuse that would reinforce she likes to lie and exaggerate.
But if I continue on, I will probably not use this framework, there is a lot of issues with the past/present/future tenses and the convolutions of her external knowledge regarding situations she wasn't present for.
The exploration of events is definitely a thing I considered for the full game. Already some people are just so lucky they can't fail and complain about it xD
For now there is a cheat to hold ctrl+shift when clicking to accept a roll. That will make it proceed with the opposite result.
I wish to finish this one since I believe in the concept, but I need to sort a few other things out first.
Thank you for the reply! o.o I admit I hadn't considered the unreliable narrator angle... it still deflates things a bit maybe but -
Well anyway.
I'm so glad to hear you plan to continue, though! ><
Some people prefer their lewd fantasies to be low commitment, and with the replayable nature of these games, it fits in pretty good, even if impact of decisions is lessened.
But I may go for a different set up later, I am not completely set on the way I will need to rewrite things in the future..
I thought about it and it could help to extablish a "budget" for how much text and/or images each event and outcome is limited to. Which could help pace yourself and boost efficiency by discouraging yourself from getting carried away.
Naturally since this is meant to be a soft limit to pace yourself you can always disregard it for events you want to be exceptionally long or give certain scenes a bigger or smaller "budget" depending on how long you want the events to be.
After all creativity is often rooted in needing to work around limits so maybe self imposed limits can be the key to your time.
You can also have a dynamic notebook of sorts in your menu that keeps track of certain terminology or fill the player in on key events to help trim fluff while keeping it around for players to read up on when they want to know.
Also this is unrelated but an issue I kept forgeting to mentiom is that in browser on mobile sometimes with longer scenes the diologue box can scale incorrectly and leave you unable to hit the continue/option button.
I wanted to attempt the budget being as low as I can get next, remove ALL the fluff, just get points across. But we will see how far I can hold back xD
I did consider having an encyclopedia of sorts for different terms (even have text as hyperlinks to take you there when they pop up) but I kept it like this since I struggle a lot with the limited color scheme, for text readability especially.
Interesting that mobile fails sometimes... May be that the browser headers takes up more space than I expected, which is not good. May need to look into patching that (though going fullscreen should fix it, but I heard full screen button covers parts of the UI too sometimes, bleh).
Full game will probably not be in a browser anyway, but I should keep it in mind.