I played through the game a bit and it's not bad, so far! There is definitely a long way to go, but for where this game is at, it's a great start!
I can't say I'm a huge fan of the current saving and leveling system at the moment, but I understand that, given the fact the game is still in very early development, both these and most other current aspects of the game are subject to change in future builds, so I won't go too in-depth right now unless you want me to.
I also could't help but notice some similar this project is to Lustful Desires. I don't know whether you've seen/heard of it, but it's the same type of game as this; they do a really good job with combat and character advancement, so I really recommend it! Here are the links to the game's itch.io page and the dev's Patreon if you're interested.
I have seen and played Lustful Desires quite a bit. It was actually one of several games that kind inspired this. Combat is one of the things I kind of have an issue with in Lustful and most turn-based RPGs in this style. They pretty frequently end up being just 'mash attack until you win. If you don't, grind in an easier area until you're strong' Lustful fixes that to a degree with it's potions and item interactions but it can still be a little grindy.
I'd love for you to go in depth about what you don't like about the leveling system honestly. It's early access because I want to know what people think and how they play. It'll be a lot easier for me to make changes to the core systems now rather then later when I have a bunch of content.
(Sorry for not replying sooner. I got very busy with personal stuff)
As far as the leveling system goes, it just feels... well, it feels equal parts exploitable and obnoxious, I guess? Like, don't get me wrong, it's a creative idea to use items as a resource for leveling up, but I feel like giving Vacdes "trinkets" shouldn't be the ONLY means of leveling up.
Basically, I feel like the system is exploitable in the sense that someone with enough patience could just stick to the first few areas to collect trinkets (flowers, sea shells, etc.) to trade Vacdes and end up at a crazy-high level before they even complete the first real quest. On the other hand, I feel like the leveling system is obnoxious in the sense that combat has no real benefit to the player outside of getting sex scenes and grinding for a few types of trinkets to trade Vacdes; essentially, there isn't any huge incentive for the player to really pursue combat.
I think incorporating an experience points system into the mix could really improve these aspects. That isn't to say that I feel the current leveling system needs to be removed or anything; far from it! I think there's a way to combine these systems into something very unique and innovative!
Like, what if, to level up, a character needed to trade Vacdes enough "material" to reach the next level and a "catalyst" to actually execute the process? "Material" could be made up of experience points (earned by defeating enemies, completing quests, etc.) and/or trinkets, where a trinket with a trade value of 1 is equivalent to having an additional 10 experience points, and the "catalyst" could be any trinket(s) with a trade value of 1 or maybe even a trade value equal to the character's current level or something. For example, lets say a level 1 character needs to provide at least 150 experience points worth of material to reach level 2, not including the catalyst; in this example, the character needs to provide any combination of experience points and trinkets with a total value of at least 150 experience points (15 trade value) as material, so they could just defeat enemies and complete quests to collect the needed 150 experience points, collect trinkets with a total trade value of 15 or more, or some combination of the two to collect enough material to level up.
This is all just an example, by the way; I'm not saying that this is the only way to do this. All I'm really saying is that the leveling system should, in my opinion, be modified so that there's some incentive for the player to defeat enemies and complete quests, outside of hoarding trinkets and getting sex scenes.
Just food for thought; you do you with this game and take it where you want it to go. If you like this idea, feel free to nab it for the game, I don't mind; if you don't, well, there are plenty of other options for fine-tuning the leveling system, so just keep my critique in mind, I guess. This is your game, after all, and only you really know what your vision is for it's completion; all I want is to see this project reach the maximum potential I know it has! If you want clarification on anything I said here, all you gotta do is ask and I'll explain it as best I can!
(Don't worry about the late reply! I know as well as anyone that life just gets in the way sometimes. Not like you can spend all your time waiting for and replying to comments on itch.io, right?)
So my only counter argument to the exploitation issue is that pretty much any RPG is exploitable in the same way. You can spend 5 hours in Palette Town grinding pidgeys until your level 40 and continue on. There isn't going to be much I can do to prevent people from grinding in some way. Whether it's scavenging, combat or some other thing. Unless I do the Witcher III thing and have quests be the only way to gain XP but that seems harsh for a game that I'm intending to be a little casual.
I think the system probably feels a lot more problematic right now because things aren't balanced yet. The systems are really bare bones and I haven't balanced item values or the required cost to level up. It's all very theoretical at this point.
The main thing I'm trying to emulate with this system is Dark Souls 'souls' systems, because I love how they handled character progression. I could get really deep into why I love that system but the TL;DR version is that having all of your character progression hinge on a single resource (souls) instead of two (xp and gold) is something that I find brilliant. (I'm admittedly making it a little less clean because of the aesthetic and narrative choices.)
The reason I'm going for that is because I want to let people have options about how they play. If someone just doesn't like fighting things and wants to just forage and do fetch quests here and there then they can play like that. If someone wants to be really aggressive and fight everything that's okay too. And if someone wants to just be horny and flirt with every monster they see, then that's how they can play. I don't want any one play style to be exploitable and I don't want to encourage endless grinding, but I do want people to have options. That said in the future builds as I flesh out content I'll be readjusting item values to better reflect the challenge/reward relationship. Items gained through combat will generally have a higher value then items found through foraging. Stronger monsters will drop higher valued items, and items foraged from more challenging areas will have a slighter higher value then items foraged in easier areas. With that the required 'xp' will increase with each level in a exponential growth rate to force you to go to higher level areas lest you spend 30 hours grinding.
I do also intend to add a unique item(s) either missing pages or golden apples or something that have a base value of 0 but when traded with Vacdes specifically will have a much higher value. These will be used as rewards for beating bosses and completing major quests. This like most things at the moment having been added because I'm slow.
With that said I'm also going to be adding shops which you can also trade your items at for new weapons, armor and skills. To go back to the Dark Souls thing. In the same way you can improve your character by spending souls to level up your stats, buy and improve armor and weapons. You'll be able to do the same thing here only using 'loot' to trade for new weapons, armor or selling to Vacdes for stats.
I hope I understood what you were suggesting correctly and I hope this explained my thoughts and plans properly. It has been a long week and I'm running on fumes at this point. So if I just rambled incoherently I apologize. But I really do appreciate here your thoughts and I love having the opportunity to just ramble about my design choices and ideas!
Wow, never thought about the [using one currency to level up & trade] idea in LMaO came from dark souls! Now come to think of it, prisoners bearing a curse/collar that slowly taking away their humanity/libido, being casted away to a far asylum/prison island. In the end I suppose player gonna rekindle the first flame of lust? XD
And thanks for sharing such detailed thought behind making this game!
This game has so much potential! Seriously, even though it was pretty short, I really enjoyed it, the characters had cool and interesting designs and the gameplay itself has that really nice old RPG style to it. I really hope you're going to keep working on this game because I'd love to play it if it does come out.
Love the art style. This project reminds me of 'tavern of spear', their doing something similar and they get around the leveling being a slog issue by having fetch quest to supply a merchant in exchange for gold. While fetch quests aren't the most engaging it does give some motivation to grind a bit when necessary also the fact the merchant flirts a lot so getting on his good side's a bonus. link if you want to try their public build for some ideas or just to see how they're handling problems you mite come across: https://www.patreon.com/CaroZalt/overview
I like where this is heading. Love the artwork of the rat and goblin. Would love a dominant goblin, too. :) The inventory system and fight UI could use some work, e.g. showing the stats of the items before you equip them and more clearly show the results of your attacks. Otherwise the player needs to scan the scrolling text for the effects.
Thanks, I do wanna add some different dominant, submissive, and switch scenes eventually because I think options are fun and important.
I'm definitely gonna work on cleaning up the UI and as I go through with this, it's a little bare bones atm because I'm still not 100% sure if this is how I want to do combat or not. Currently your equipment give you different dice that increase your attack or defense. Then during combat when you attack you roll all of your attack dice and the enemy rolls their defense dice and they take the difference in damage.
This is fine at the moment, but I'm worried about expanding on it, because I really don't want to fall into the RPG trap of "Click A until thing dies. If you die go to other area and click A until you level up." Because even though gating and level gating can be important I don't want combat to be a slog.
Once I get that sorted out I'm going to try and add some little combat animations, nothing super fancy just sprite shakes and ideally have damage and status effects show up in the center of the scene, with the combat log in the corner as an "in case you missed it" kind of a thing.
Looking forward to seeing this developed more, the art is quite good the interface is rudimentary and its very short but maybe something will come out of it eh? At any rate, you could create a discord for communication with your fanbase (suggestions and bug fixes) as well as a patreon if you intend to go full tilt on this.
Thanks, I'm hoping something will come out of it. I don't think I wanna get a discord going just yet. This is still in prototyping phase and discord can be a lot to manage but in the future I might if there's a big demand for it. I do have a patreon though, I mostly use it for anyone wanting to support be doing whatever it is I'm doing, though I need to update it with details about this project.
I'll be doing my best to make sure there's something for everyone. I am a guy and gay so my gay woman and straight content might not be totally on point. But I will do my best.
It wold be great if you could turn it off or on depending on what you wanted. The one thing I hate about some of these games is being forced in to M/F stuff when I'm only here for the M/M stuff. I wold imagen Straight people may want to avoid Gay content.
I'm not going to add a hard toggle for it but I'm definitely going to avoid having forced sex scenes for a lot of reasons. First of all it's a porn game, half the reward is the sex scenes so getting sex scenes by losing seems counter intuitive. Second as a gay dude getting forced into M/F scenes feels shitty and finally consent is important, not to be super preachy or pretentious about it but I really think consent is something that's under represented in these games. Not that scenes aren't written with all parties consenting but the player doesn't get a lot of choice which feels weird to me especially in a game where choice is the point. I could get really into it but bottom line is I'm going to make sure that players always have the option to engage or not and that NPCs when engaged are consenting participants.
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I played through the game a bit and it's not bad, so far! There is definitely a long way to go, but for where this game is at, it's a great start!
I can't say I'm a huge fan of the current saving and leveling system at the moment, but I understand that, given the fact the game is still in very early development, both these and most other current aspects of the game are subject to change in future builds, so I won't go too in-depth right now unless you want me to.
I also could't help but notice some similar this project is to Lustful Desires. I don't know whether you've seen/heard of it, but it's the same type of game as this; they do a really good job with combat and character advancement, so I really recommend it! Here are the links to the game's itch.io page and the dev's Patreon if you're interested.
I have seen and played Lustful Desires quite a bit. It was actually one of several games that kind inspired this. Combat is one of the things I kind of have an issue with in Lustful and most turn-based RPGs in this style. They pretty frequently end up being just 'mash attack until you win. If you don't, grind in an easier area until you're strong' Lustful fixes that to a degree with it's potions and item interactions but it can still be a little grindy.
I'd love for you to go in depth about what you don't like about the leveling system honestly. It's early access because I want to know what people think and how they play. It'll be a lot easier for me to make changes to the core systems now rather then later when I have a bunch of content.
(Sorry for not replying sooner. I got very busy with personal stuff)
As far as the leveling system goes, it just feels... well, it feels equal parts exploitable and obnoxious, I guess? Like, don't get me wrong, it's a creative idea to use items as a resource for leveling up, but I feel like giving Vacdes "trinkets" shouldn't be the ONLY means of leveling up.
Basically, I feel like the system is exploitable in the sense that someone with enough patience could just stick to the first few areas to collect trinkets (flowers, sea shells, etc.) to trade Vacdes and end up at a crazy-high level before they even complete the first real quest. On the other hand, I feel like the leveling system is obnoxious in the sense that combat has no real benefit to the player outside of getting sex scenes and grinding for a few types of trinkets to trade Vacdes; essentially, there isn't any huge incentive for the player to really pursue combat.
I think incorporating an experience points system into the mix could really improve these aspects. That isn't to say that I feel the current leveling system needs to be removed or anything; far from it! I think there's a way to combine these systems into something very unique and innovative!
Like, what if, to level up, a character needed to trade Vacdes enough "material" to reach the next level and a "catalyst" to actually execute the process? "Material" could be made up of experience points (earned by defeating enemies, completing quests, etc.) and/or trinkets, where a trinket with a trade value of 1 is equivalent to having an additional 10 experience points, and the "catalyst" could be any trinket(s) with a trade value of 1 or maybe even a trade value equal to the character's current level or something. For example, lets say a level 1 character needs to provide at least 150 experience points worth of material to reach level 2, not including the catalyst; in this example, the character needs to provide any combination of experience points and trinkets with a total value of at least 150 experience points (15 trade value) as material, so they could just defeat enemies and complete quests to collect the needed 150 experience points, collect trinkets with a total trade value of 15 or more, or some combination of the two to collect enough material to level up.
This is all just an example, by the way; I'm not saying that this is the only way to do this. All I'm really saying is that the leveling system should, in my opinion, be modified so that there's some incentive for the player to defeat enemies and complete quests, outside of hoarding trinkets and getting sex scenes.
Just food for thought; you do you with this game and take it where you want it to go. If you like this idea, feel free to nab it for the game, I don't mind; if you don't, well, there are plenty of other options for fine-tuning the leveling system, so just keep my critique in mind, I guess. This is your game, after all, and only you really know what your vision is for it's completion; all I want is to see this project reach the maximum potential I know it has! If you want clarification on anything I said here, all you gotta do is ask and I'll explain it as best I can!
(Don't worry about the late reply! I know as well as anyone that life just gets in the way sometimes. Not like you can spend all your time waiting for and replying to comments on itch.io, right?)
So my only counter argument to the exploitation issue is that pretty much any RPG is exploitable in the same way. You can spend 5 hours in Palette Town grinding pidgeys until your level 40 and continue on. There isn't going to be much I can do to prevent people from grinding in some way. Whether it's scavenging, combat or some other thing. Unless I do the Witcher III thing and have quests be the only way to gain XP but that seems harsh for a game that I'm intending to be a little casual.
I think the system probably feels a lot more problematic right now because things aren't balanced yet. The systems are really bare bones and I haven't balanced item values or the required cost to level up. It's all very theoretical at this point.
The main thing I'm trying to emulate with this system is Dark Souls 'souls' systems, because I love how they handled character progression. I could get really deep into why I love that system but the TL;DR version is that having all of your character progression hinge on a single resource (souls) instead of two (xp and gold) is something that I find brilliant. (I'm admittedly making it a little less clean because of the aesthetic and narrative choices.)
The reason I'm going for that is because I want to let people have options about how they play. If someone just doesn't like fighting things and wants to just forage and do fetch quests here and there then they can play like that. If someone wants to be really aggressive and fight everything that's okay too. And if someone wants to just be horny and flirt with every monster they see, then that's how they can play. I don't want any one play style to be exploitable and I don't want to encourage endless grinding, but I do want people to have options. That said in the future builds as I flesh out content I'll be readjusting item values to better reflect the challenge/reward relationship. Items gained through combat will generally have a higher value then items found through foraging. Stronger monsters will drop higher valued items, and items foraged from more challenging areas will have a slighter higher value then items foraged in easier areas. With that the required 'xp' will increase with each level in a exponential growth rate to force you to go to higher level areas lest you spend 30 hours grinding.
I do also intend to add a unique item(s) either missing pages or golden apples or something that have a base value of 0 but when traded with Vacdes specifically will have a much higher value. These will be used as rewards for beating bosses and completing major quests. This like most things at the moment having been added because I'm slow.
With that said I'm also going to be adding shops which you can also trade your items at for new weapons, armor and skills. To go back to the Dark Souls thing. In the same way you can improve your character by spending souls to level up your stats, buy and improve armor and weapons. You'll be able to do the same thing here only using 'loot' to trade for new weapons, armor or selling to Vacdes for stats.
I hope I understood what you were suggesting correctly and I hope this explained my thoughts and plans properly. It has been a long week and I'm running on fumes at this point. So if I just rambled incoherently I apologize. But I really do appreciate here your thoughts and I love having the opportunity to just ramble about my design choices and ideas!
Wow, never thought about the [using one currency to level up & trade] idea in LMaO came from dark souls! Now come to think of it, prisoners bearing a curse/collar that slowly taking away their humanity/libido, being casted away to a far asylum/prison island. In the end I suppose player gonna rekindle the first flame of lust? XD
And thanks for sharing such detailed thought behind making this game!
Not super likely, I'm not really intending to do multiple builds outside of Mac and PC
This game has so much potential! Seriously, even though it was pretty short, I really enjoyed it, the characters had cool and interesting designs and the gameplay itself has that really nice old RPG style to it. I really hope you're going to keep working on this game because I'd love to play it if it does come out.
Thanks very much. I've been working as much as I can on it, holidays and such slowed me down but I'm getting back into the swing of things now.
Love the art style. This project reminds me of 'tavern of spear', their doing something similar and they get around the leveling being a slog issue by having fetch quest to supply a merchant in exchange for gold. While fetch quests aren't the most engaging it does give some motivation to grind a bit when necessary also the fact the merchant flirts a lot so getting on his good side's a bonus. link if you want to try their public build for some ideas or just to see how they're handling problems you mite come across: https://www.patreon.com/CaroZalt/overview
Oh I've seen screenshots of this around. I'm going to give it a download now and check it out. Thanks for the link! =D
I like where this is heading. Love the artwork of the rat and goblin. Would love a dominant goblin, too. :)
The inventory system and fight UI could use some work, e.g. showing the stats of the items before you equip them and more clearly show the results of your attacks. Otherwise the player needs to scan the scrolling text for the effects.
Thanks, I do wanna add some different dominant, submissive, and switch scenes eventually because I think options are fun and important.
I'm definitely gonna work on cleaning up the UI and as I go through with this, it's a little bare bones atm because I'm still not 100% sure if this is how I want to do combat or not. Currently your equipment give you different dice that increase your attack or defense. Then during combat when you attack you roll all of your attack dice and the enemy rolls their defense dice and they take the difference in damage.
This is fine at the moment, but I'm worried about expanding on it, because I really don't want to fall into the RPG trap of "Click A until thing dies. If you die go to other area and click A until you level up." Because even though gating and level gating can be important I don't want combat to be a slog.
Once I get that sorted out I'm going to try and add some little combat animations, nothing super fancy just sprite shakes and ideally have damage and status effects show up in the center of the scene, with the combat log in the corner as an "in case you missed it" kind of a thing.
Looking forward to seeing this developed more, the art is quite good the interface is rudimentary and its very short but maybe something will come out of it eh?
At any rate, you could create a discord for communication with your fanbase (suggestions and bug fixes) as well as a patreon if you intend to go full tilt on this.
Thanks, I'm hoping something will come out of it. I don't think I wanna get a discord going just yet. This is still in prototyping phase and discord can be a lot to manage but in the future I might if there's a big demand for it. I do have a patreon though, I mostly use it for anyone wanting to support be doing whatever it is I'm doing, though I need to update it with details about this project.
seems bare for rn but it is a good start that can be built upon
Will the content be exclusively LGBT or will it be "do what you want" kind of thing, in the vein of Trials and Tainted Space?
I'll be doing my best to make sure there's something for everyone. I am a guy and gay so my gay woman and straight content might not be totally on point. But I will do my best.
That's cool. Do your best!
It wold be great if you could turn it off or on depending on what you wanted. The one thing I hate about some of these games is being forced in to M/F stuff when I'm only here for the M/M stuff. I wold imagen Straight people may want to avoid Gay content.
I'm not going to add a hard toggle for it but I'm definitely going to avoid having forced sex scenes for a lot of reasons. First of all it's a porn game, half the reward is the sex scenes so getting sex scenes by losing seems counter intuitive. Second as a gay dude getting forced into M/F scenes feels shitty and finally consent is important, not to be super preachy or pretentious about it but I really think consent is something that's under represented in these games. Not that scenes aren't written with all parties consenting but the player doesn't get a lot of choice which feels weird to me especially in a game where choice is the point. I could get really into it but bottom line is I'm going to make sure that players always have the option to engage or not and that NPCs when engaged are consenting participants.
sounds grate can't wait to see it.
Getting, "No Compatible uploads were found for this title," when hitting windows download.
That's very weird. It seems to work fine on my end, what OS are you using?
Do it through a web browser not itch.