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Author Topic: A few thoughts  (Read 3420 times)

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Offline DocClox

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A few thoughts
« on: June 20, 2015, 01:24:37 AM »
Well, I finally got around to playing this for more than 30 seconds. I thought I'd offer some feedback. It's based on a fairly short play and almost zero reading of the forums, so bear with me if I miss something obvious :)

First of all, nice work! The visual style works well, the screens are well laid out. All told it's fun to play. Good stuff.

The "meet girls" screen is fun. The game could almost work as a dating sim without the prostitution elements - not that I'm suggesting it should, you understand. I found myself leaving one girl in the Old Shack while I haunted the part trying to talk Nami into bed. 

The slave upkeep seems a little punitive. (I thought the game was just hard until I hired  Nami). I can understand wanting to reward the player for Doing The Right Thing, but if you're going to have slaves in the game they should probably be viable as money makers. That said, I've not played the game to any great extent so it may well change completely once my girls get get some experience. Still, trying a game with one or two slaves in the old shack seems like a sure-fire recipe for death by taxes at the moment.

The shortcut buttons at the top could use a bit ore attention drawn to them. It's easy to miss them altogether and when you do notice them, it's not always obvious what they do. It's all right if the screen has a status box but it took me a while to work out what they were for.  The Item Transfer button is particularly obscure. I bought a load of stuff and then couldn't work out how to give it to my girl. Hotkeys and tooltips would be nice. I appreciate this may be non-trivial with Ren'Py.

I find I miss the Sim Brothel approach of setting character points to raise stats. Not saying you should necessarily implement that, just that the stats are similar enough that I find myself looking for the button.

Other than those (fairly minor) points, I'm having a good time with this. The game seems to capture the best bits from WM , Sim Brothel and Otherworld which is no mean feat. Well done.

OK, that's about all I have. Hope it's helpful :)

Offline Xela

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Re: A few thoughts
« Reply #1 on: June 20, 2015, 06:07:03 AM »
Well, I finally got around to playing this for more than 30 seconds. I thought I'd offer some feedback. It's based on a fairly short play and almost zero reading of the forums, so bear with me if I miss something obvious :)

First of all, nice work! The visual style works well, the screens are well laid out. All told it's fun to play. Good stuff.

The "meet girls" screen is fun. The game could almost work as a dating sim without the prostitution elements - not that I'm suggesting it should, you understand. I found myself leaving one girl in the Old Shack while I haunted the part trying to talk Nami into bed. 

Thnx :)

The idea is to have an open world in the end, I am rewriting a lot of code atm to enable that in the future.

The slave upkeep seems a little punitive. (I thought the game was just hard until I hired  Nami). I can understand wanting to reward the player for Doing The Right Thing, but if you're going to have slaves in the game they should probably be viable as money makers. That said, I've not played the game to any great extent so it may well change completely once my girls get get some experience. Still, trying a game with one or two slaves in the old shack seems like a sure-fire recipe for death by taxes at the moment.

It depends on the character too much, slave/free doesn't play as big of a role. Easiest path to get a brothel going is prolly to get a slave, not with a free girl.

The shortcut buttons at the top could use a bit ore attention drawn to them. It's easy to miss them altogether and when you do notice them, it's not always obvious what they do. It's all right if the screen has a status box but it took me a while to work out what they were for.  The Item Transfer button is particularly obscure. I bought a load of stuff and then couldn't work out how to give it to my girl. Hotkeys and tooltips would be nice. I appreciate this may be non-trivial with Ren'Py.

We'll have a civ style encyclopedia at some point.

I find I miss the Sim Brothel approach of setting character points to raise stats. Not saying you should necessarily implement that, just that the stats are similar enough that I find myself looking for the button.

We started out with making a copy of SimBrothel, than a copy of WM, than a new game so Alpha was a bit of a mess stats-wise. It's a bit better now with the new base-traits system we're working on.

Other than those (fairly minor) points, I'm having a good time with this. The game seems to capture the best bits from WM , Sim Brothel and Otherworld which is no mean feat. Well done.

OK, that's about all I have. Hope it's helpful :)

Right now the task is to move it towards more coherent gameplay and to improve the code. We're taking it one step at a time.
Like what we're doing?

Offline DocClox

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Re: A few thoughts
« Reply #2 on: June 20, 2015, 07:18:26 AM »
Right now the task is to move it towards more coherent gameplay and to improve the code. We're taking it one step at a time.

Understood.  I just wanted to say "hi" and offer a little general encouragement :)

Offline Xela

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Re: A few thoughts
« Reply #3 on: June 20, 2015, 07:53:58 AM »
Always appreciated :)
Like what we're doing?