Feedback Loop - part 1

Wow, has it been a week already?  Time flies.  I'm glad to see so many positive comments, means I'm on the right track.  Then again, the simple fact that y'all are here means you like porn games, so there may be some bias in my favor.  hahaha. 

Anyway, what I want to focus on today is the criticisms.  So far they've all been good stuff that I can work with, keep them coming!  Let's start with the easy stuff:

Crawling.  I put this in on purpose to both change the pace & the setting a bit.  Let's face it, my rooms all look & play about the same, so crawling was added to alter the flavor some.  Makes the room 'feel' smaller (imo), and also changes the pace.  Unfortunately, slow doesn't necessarily mean fun.  I'm getting that message loud & clear.  I'll tweak this some.  I think there's a compromise here that will still keep the atmosphere I want without making people dread another crawling room.  I also think I overdid the crawling on the bunny burrows, so I'll simply yank some of that as well.

Exploring the bunny town becomes boring/frustrating.   Okay, this is a gigantic "uh-oh" from me.  The game is supposed to be about exploration, fighting, & fucking.  It sounds like somehow I went wrong with that formula.  What I find interesting is that I noticed the same thing when I was building the game.  I ended up turning monsters off after a while.  At the time, I just figured it was because I was busy testing shit & just wanted to run around.  I think the problem is that the monsters are so prevalent that they're seen as more of a nuisance than something interesting. 

I think simply yanking them from the 'travel' zones will help tremendously.  Or at the minimum, they shouldn't respawn in the overworld zones.  This could potentially cause problems, as you need the gear monsters drop to get past the wards, and you probably don't have enough backpack slots until late into Act 2.  I may need to force additional spawn in other areas, but I think that's a smaller problem that can be managed.

The other part of this might be that the dunecrawler requires 3 parts, but there's absolutely no hint to where they are.  *Spoiler Warning*  The first one always spawns in the elf camp (outside or in tents), the second is always in the Southeast corner of the village (lower left), and the third is always in the Northwest. .  If the guy in the dunecrawler gave simple direction to the next piece, would it have helped the 'fun' of the game?  Example: he says something like "A bunch of Elves stole the regulator I need, I think they ran down that big road to the East."  

That reminds me, the village is set-up so that you're walking North-South, and if you take the road you go East-West.  If he's giving directions, would it be easier if I flipped those?

Slime Boss Fight.  Okay, this was supposed to be an order of magnitude harder than everything else.  To be blunt, I want to give y'all some sex scenes, and an easy way to get there is to force the occasional loss.  This is why the game has multiple continues, and I have no qualms designing monsters to take them away.  ;P  (That's a topic by itself, I'll try adress it more in a later post).

I'm hearing the right number of people saying it's hard, so I think I got 'hard' just fine.  Again, the problem is that hard doesn't mean fun.  In my opinion, the root of the problem is that the fight can only play out in 2 ways.  Either he manages to grab you, in which case you get to watch yourself be locked into a slow grab  --> clothestear+poison loop, which ultimately kills you with minimal sex.  The other option is this run away & attack dance pattern, which, while amusing enough the first few times, gets old around long before he's dead.

So I have some ideas on how to fix this.  I think simply reducing his health some while drastically increasing the damage he does to armor would really help liven up the fight.  Now instead of a series of armor saves, you'd get to actually struggle in the grapples a bit.  He is a boss, so I'm totally down with him completely dominating the hero if he gets his 'tricks' to work.  But it needs to be more involving than it is now.

Okay, that's already a long post, and I have plenty more to discuss.  I'll try to put my thoughts together a bit better & touch on some more points next week. 

DirtyC101

When will the game be posted?

Right now!  Check the sidebar, version 0.50 is out.  It's incomplete in places, and some of the art is just wireframes, but it is very playable.  There's a lot to say, so let me try to be brief.

Re-read the instructions at the start menu.  A lot has changed.

R activates run mode, and down arrow activates blocking.  While running, your defense is greatly reduced. Vice versa when blocking.  Not 100% sure I even want blocking in this game, but given how hard some of the monsters are, it's almost a necessity.  (Feedback here would be good)

If you are dominating a 1-on-1 grapple, extra monsters will not be able double team you.
None of the new monsters have double-team grapples (yet). 
Just pointing both of these out to try & avoid some confusion.

As always, please feel free to mirror this game on other sites.  I have no idea what my limitations are on bandwidth & all, so having the game distributed to multiple locations is probably a good idea.



Lastly, I wanted to point out that now would be a really good time to send me a donation.  I think y'all know I've been having computer problems, and the machine I had been using to make this game is now kaput.  So, I'm going to be building a new computer for the sole reason of making games.  Some folks have already come forward with money (thanks again!), and I figure now's as good a time as any to beg a bit.  To be perfectly clear though: I do not NEED money.  I'll be buying a new machine with or without donations, so please don't think that you must donate for any reason.  Donations would be very appreciated though, so if you enjoy my games, well... now would be a fantastic time to show it.  =)

Thanks Everyone!
DirtyC101





Known bugs:
If multiple monsters drop items simultaneously, only one will hit the ground.

If you are grabbed while using a Staff special attack, the power up sound will continue for a while

Being re-grabbed immediately as the first grab is ending will often cause the grapple bar to remain hidden for that grapple

Large items in the foreground can look funny.  Their tops will be hidden when in dark rooms, and they will often clip the interface bar at the top of the screen.

The code "TowardTheHorde" says it doesn't work when entered.  It actually does, and it works better than it's supposed to (it unlocks both Act 1 & 2 monsters, instead of just Act 1).  Since it's a 'good' bug, I'm going to leave it for now.  Enjoy.  ;)

November Update

Some of you may remember I took a LONG break this spring due to unforseen computer problems.  Well those same problems are back.  I managed to recover the source file, so the good news is I haven't lost a thing.  The bad news is I think that computer is out of extra lives.  Time to build the raft & the bonfire & send it to the great afterlife.  Much of it is 9 years old, so I really can't bitch.  That's like living to 300 in human years.  haha.

For the time being I've re-purposed my gaming rig.  So yes, work will be progressing again shortly, and I still plan to have something out by the end of the year.  Hopefully before 11:59 on New Years' Eve, but it wouldn't surprise me if I'm working up to the wire.

On better & brighter notes, I'm finally working on the sex animations.  Some of them are pretty hot, imo, while others are still off a bit.  For example there's a 69 position which doesn't quite line up right.  The girls are roughly the same height, but the perspective on one of them is always wrong because they're both drawn from the same angle.  Despite being primarily a profile view, there's a slight angle to the view as well.   When you flip one of them over, her perspective is now backwards.  I can kinda work through that by positioning the girl on top as if she's at a different angle, but it's not perfect.  In short, it looks funny.  Still hot, but funny.  ;)

Hahah, I guess it looks even stranger with her still clothed.  But I'm sure y'all know how to fix that by now.  Actually, now that I look closely, it looks like K's armor is partially clipping that humans' boob.  Need to fix that too.

That's all for now.  Fair warning, posts for this month may be scarce.  I plan on doubling down on the game to try & get as much done as I can, which means less time for talking about it.  :P
DirtyC101