About 4 days ago, Heurmystic wrote:<A lot of stuff that I somehow overlooked>
I am so sorry I missed this chunk of feedback
I was looking back through the thread and noticed that I hadn't said anything in response to this, which is unfortunate since you put a lot of thought into it.
Well, no better time to do it than now.
Heurmystic wrote:Thank you for making this! There aren't enough games like this and most of the existing ones are no longer being developed. There are some really good ideas in this as well like the multiple orgasms and lust system.
MasterBedwomb wrote:While not RNG-heavy, the current system might be a little unfair though, as touched upon above, so one of my main focuses for continued development immediately after V0.0.1 releases will be optimizing the behavior of your unbirther to be more fair and enjoyable.
This seems to be one of the points a lot of games like this struggle with. On one hand too high of difficulty and or too much RNG can be very frustrating. On the other I think for a decent amount of the people playing a large part of the appeal is in being dominated, struggling and failing. If the game is too easy or even not hard it loses some appeal for those people and without RNG if you know what you're doing things become deterministic. I've imposed restrictions on myself or edited the code of some of the previous games like this to make them harder but not every player is willing to do that to make a game fun for themself. You might be able to add a difficulty selection but depending on how you have the game set up that might not be as simple as it sounds. Stats increasing like in Shrinking Fun can be another solution, and you already have it in the game, however the the stat increases can eventually make most girls trivial to escape from and thus not very... uh... fun. That's one of the reasons I really like the idea of the lust stat. Having something that makes the game harder over time is great for keeping things interesting as the player progresses. That said I'm not sure that just increasing the difficulty of getting a girl to orgasm really has enough impact on difficulty. With high enough stats you can fairly easily escape without making the girl orgasm and the player also has two seperate stats that can be increased to make it easier to pleasure the girl. You've already got a 'goal' system for both the character and the girl, what if lust or another stat effected what 'goals' the girl could have and thus her potential actions?
I haven't talked about this much since it's not really a relevant development point in the game's current state, but future characters will also have a stat called Friendliness. Friendliness and Lust primarily serve to carry forward a character's developing relationship with you, both in and out of the womb. In theory, these stats can combine to make a variety of behaviors that allow a character to not be as single-minded as Allison currently is.
In regard to providing a variety in difficulty, the range of strength in girls I have drafted ideas for is rather large, which can provide difficulty to the player even when weaker characters no longer are interesting (as long as I'm careful about it). Additionally, with the exception of a few mandatory encounters that direct the story (such as Allison's first interaction with you), the vast majority of scenes are going to be actively sought out by the player.
Regarding the tutorial, Heurmystic wrote:Having the Tutorial be missable or even just delayed feels off to me. You could have the player hit the Tutorial immediately after the first encounter by having the scientist walk in on it or you could remove the player having the option to attempt escape prior to the getting her attention bit to avoid the player needing to rest instead. You could also make the first encounter more scripted/a forced loss to prevent the player from spending a lot of time on it while not knowing what they're doing.
if you've been continuing to follow along with the thread, you should already be aware that I'm planning to rework this in the very near future. As I've mentioned in previous posts, I think presenting the tutorial after you've been thrown into the soup is an interesting idea that was, in hindsight, executed poorly.
Regarding visuals, Heurmystic wrote:Honestly even just going text only would be fine imo if you keep putting out content this good. It'd be better with dedicated assets but without the skills and tools to make them you'd need an artist which can be expensive and time intensive as good art takes time to make. Imo you should keep making the game with free assets, open a patreon after an update or two so that people know you're serious, and then put some of the money from that towards commissioning assets or buying the tools you need to make them yourself. The issue here is that the Shrinking Fun assets are available IF you're not profiting from them. You need money to make/buy assets but the assets you're using prevent you from making that money. I dislike patreon generally because I feel that it insidiously motivates creators to drag projects out(I'd much rather pay for a complete product) but when you need money for a project you need money for a project. I know you've said you don't intend to try to profit off this but if one of the bottlenecks for you is money donations are a solution.
While you make a valid point, I think exclusively using text in this game style can get dull pretty fast, no matter how good of a writer I might appear to be. I could probably do that in regard to implementing new characters and develop assets later, but I feel like I would be missing out on a lot of potential if I went down that path long-term. I've still got a lot of short-term developments to make with how the actual encounters work though, so that's ultimately not something that I really need to think about too hard for a while.
While I don't have it in the plans to allow monetary support for this anytime soon (as you mentioned), an idea I've had in regard to monetizing is to sell the game's engine as a separate resource so other people interested in developing in this style have something to help get them on their feet. I'm currently planning on rebuilding the engine from the ground up as a JS Plugin anyway (As opposed to continuing to use RPG Maker's event editor), so once it becomes refined enough that I'm satisfied, it may be among my options for an increased development budget.
Regarding Uncommon Vore Types, Heurmystic wrote:If you do end up including any of these, or even types that are common but simply not the main type of the game please make them obvious beforehand and avoidable. Encounters in this kind of game can last a decent length of time and if you happened to not save recently being trapped into an encounter you are not into can be very unpleasant.
My current plan for encounters involving any time of vore other than Unbirth is that they will likely be few and far between, and in most cases won't be available unless the player actively seeks them out. For Oral Vore, as an example, you'll either have to really piss a character off in order to make them seriously start thinking about eating you, or you'll have to get them to love you so much that they're willing to try it because you've persuaded them to.
Heurmystic wrote:What're your intentions for how you encounter the girls? Allison seems to currently be moving along a set track for instance. In Shrinking Fun I recall that aside from the maid and a few encounters on opening doors/entering rooms most encounters were essentially opted into by the player. In Shrunken Life the needs system kind of compelled the character to go out and take risks to get items and the encounters where generally harder to avoid(in some cases being too annoyingly so imo, but that's more due to the encounter itself not being interesting to me). In Tiny Misadventures and Shrink EXP you need to escape in specific places from specific girls to find some girls.
Allison moving along a set track is primarily to properly get the underlying story moving forward so the player doesn't miss the full context of their situation before going out to explore the rest of the world. Most other characters will need to be sought out by the player, and can be found in various locations in the world over the course of an in-game week.
More rarely, character(s) I plan to add MUCH later in development can be found by engaging with another girl enough that access to the other character(s) becomes unlocked. Hopefully that makes some semblance of sense, since it's a little vague, but you'll just have to see what I mean once I introduce them
