HTML A Life Lived [v0.7] [ZennyDarkstar]

[reidanota]

The grandfather quest does not have a next step. This is mostly a placeholder.. once that quest is more active it will got a revamp of the help guide.
Not sure what quest and step you mention with Julia.. (have you set the quest guide to easy as the default is hard)..

There are other ways.. have you tried selling your sisters underwear. There are some others aswell.... its not meant to be a visual novel.. its meant to be that the player has to solve some things themselves (however, that said, it isnt meant to be too difficult either.. there is a balance, which I have worked on)..

I do listen when things are mentioned..
thanks for your feedback

I'm nagging you again! Know you're not a fan of QSP but your game is exactly the kind of game QSP excells at: sandbox, lots of stuff to do, grind... character development , events and quests that can pop up as a surprise you when you're not expecting. Not nagging you to swap engines, though. Your game has come a long way and is looking good, you've ironed your engine out and got more time to put in content, that's great. There's enough to do, now, to break that grind routine. It's a fun game to unravel. Two cents, though:
- you still lose to qsp on the amount of clicking A few shortcuts would help a lot, maybe a navigation pane with the most used destinations, or just let you pop out to the map from anywhere in any building would be cool;
- there's too much content on the weekend, feels very unbalanced. Many overlap in time and it feels frustrating to have quests you know will be queueing in your log for weeks. Father's job takes up every weekend morning in full and if you want to pursue it, you need to postpone everything else - sexy workout, grandma/aunt, mother, etc... One time I was unable to proceed with Riley's, Bailey's and Fox's quests, had to pick and choose, but in all of them, by reading the text, you're supposed to be meeting "next weekend". It's a choice and I understand choices and priorities, but you still feel like you're leaving someone hanging, and then, next day at school, they're all cool as if nothing happened. Maybe some of those weekend meetings could be on weekdays instead? Studying with Riley and Bailey could stick to weekdays. Seems like you wanted to pace them by alternating week days and weekends, rather than rushing through new events every day, but using that as a general rule on most quests seems risky, since week days are 2.5x more abundant than weekends, quests tend to clog down on weekends.
- there's still no good reason to sleep when you can read books, use your PC and grind some skills all night long.

 

[ZennyDarkstar]

I'm nagging you again! Know you're not a fan of QSP but your game is exactly the kind of game QSP excells at: sandbox, lots of stuff to do, grind... character development , events and quests that can pop up as a surprise you when you're not expecting. Not nagging you to swap engines, though. Your game has come a long way and is looking good, you've ironed your engine out and got more time to put in content, that's great. There's enough to do, now, to break that grind routine. It's a fun game to unravel. Two cents, though:
- you still lose to qsp on the amount of clicking A few shortcuts would help a lot, maybe a navigation pane with the most used destinations, or just let you pop out to the map from anywhere in any building would be cool;
- there's too much content on the weekend, feels very unbalanced. Many overlap in time and it feels frustrating to have quests you know will be queueing in your log for weeks. Father's job takes up every weekend morning in full and if you want to pursue it, you need to postpone everything else - sexy workout, grandma/aunt, mother, etc... One time I was unable to proceed with Riley's, Bailey's and Fox's quests, had to pick and choose, but in all of them, by reading the text, you're supposed to be meeting "next weekend". It's a choice and I understand choices and priorities, but you still feel like you're leaving someone hanging, and then, next day at school, they're all cool as if nothing happened. Maybe some of those weekend meetings could be on weekdays instead? Studying with Riley and Bailey could stick to weekdays. Seems like you wanted to pace them by alternating week days and weekends, rather than rushing through new events every day, but using that as a general rule on most quests seems risky, since week days are 2.5x more abundant than weekends, quests tend to clog down on weekends.
- there's still no good reason to sleep when you can read books, use your PC and grind some skills all night long.

Ok so let me address these in no order.
Sleep... a reason to sleep... no you got me thinking.. other than possible dream sequences (repeating wet dreams maybe).. I am not sure of a good reason to sleep, like you say.. Only thing I could do, but might be unpopular is to introduce energy levels or attractiveness into the game, and by sleeping this will restore a dwindling stat.. would that be popular?? its more RPG style which I do like..
Interesting highlight on the weekend events... this is not something I had picked up on, I guess its hard for the MC to do too much on the weekday as much of their day (and other npcs) are spent working or in school..
I have got some more in school activities / quests coming, so this might help with that a little.. So of the stat building is also there..
I would argue there is no point that I lose out to qsp, because if there is a feature in qsp that I want, I could build that.. so where I lack, is the thought to implement something that is a common feature in a qsp game... so the main one you mention is the ability to jump to locations.. so I think what I might be doing shortly, is to add the map to your MC phone as an app.. so you could use that to jump to a location. This in most cases might not reduce clicks, but in some of the locations like if you are in the swimming pool, and want to get to your bedroom, then I think it would be less clicks..
Any method of fast travel would eliminate the random events you could trigger on the way (see that a good or bad thing i guess)..

I should also say, your not nagging, you are giving good feedback... and also I am a fan of QSP games (except there are some minor tweaks it could improve), actually its html game I generally dont like.. I am less a fan of games where there is a massive page of text, with a link at the bottom to the next step.. or anything that means I got to scroll about looking for menus or like.. the more that is on a single page the more I like it.

100% wont be moving to a prebuilt engine for this game. Part of what keeps my passion for developing the game is the enjoyment of the coding.. And I would worry that if I lost that, I might stop wanting to continue building the game..

In time the engine will advance less and less each update, and there will be more content updates only.. but its a nice break being able to swap between features and content..

Thanks again for the comments

 

[reidanota]

Thanks again for the comments

NP! Once I tried to tweak your engine change colours around a bit, not very successful - but, then you added themes, talk about good timing. If I may suggest one theme, somthing like "minimalistic obsidian" where you don't see the different "boxes" - all black background, content all tidy in its place, you just don't see the borders.

The sleep issue: glad you like the rpg aspects as well, good sign for where you're taking your game. I do tend to add "needs mods" to my rpg games when I have them. Mostly because it feels like having a daily routine help immerse yourself in the game - I don't play hardcore "survival-mode", just add enough to require daily sleep and some food intake, which I can combine in a simple evening/morning routine.

A game like yours could do with a simple decay system, not necessarily as sophisticated as Girl Life or other games (damn, GL has the most complicated looks system I've ever seen, it's all calculated from stats and body mass using a formula, took them a lot of tweaking and I'm not sure it has that much of an impact). Could be fun if you tried to have a single stat that could function as energy/stamina, encouraging you to sleep every night. Or to keep it simple, sleeping less than 6 hours would leave you sleep deprived, with cumulative negative impact on your stats proportional to the number of hours of sleep deprivation, with, say, 12 hours, or 2 full sleepless nights, being the cap. You could choose not to sleep, but you'd be playing with max penalty to your stats overall. Or, to make it fun, being sleep deprived would make you proportionally more prone to get bullying events, and, numbing your reflexes, grey out the ability to fight back, as well as reduce your chance of running away successfully.

And since you didn't discourage me from giving you feedback... I keep thinking you should be forced to attend at least 45min of class in order to get the stat increase. Maybe make the option to attend class available only at o'clock and +15min. Attending class would randomly trigger and event with any of the other students present, or teacher, giving you a friendship boost with them, with a good probability, to compensate for not being able to talk twice more - it would mean a slower relationship grind overall, but also add some randomness to it, I think it would feel more relaxed than having to worry about whom to talk to during class, running around the classrooms to find the girls with pending quests. if you're feeling radical, you could make it so that you need to attend at least 4 classes every day, with each one less than the minimum counting towards absenteeism. High absenteeism could lead to being called to the principal's office and being issued punishment, which would reset your absenteeism.

 

[ZennyDarkstar]

NP! Once I tried to tweak your engine change colours around a bit, not very successful - but, then you added themes, talk about good timing. If I may suggest one theme, somthing like "minimalistic obsidian" where you don't see the different "boxes" - all black background, content all tidy in its place, you just don't see the borders.

Ok.. I want to add more personalization like that.. I have posted something on the patreon that goes into some of that for up and coming updates.

The sleep issue: glad you like the rpg aspects as well, good sign for where you're taking your game. I do tend to add "needs mods" to my rpg games when I have them. Mostly because it feels like having a daily routine help immerse yourself in the game - I don't play hardcore "survival-mode", just add enough to require daily sleep and some food intake, which I can combine in a simple evening/morning routine.

I am liking the sounds of lack of sleep having an effect on things like your charisma or strength.. or maybe something like a 6 hours of sleep gives you 100%xStat, while for each hour less gives you 10% decrease to stat.. so if you want to do a quest and it requires 50 charisma and you got 50 but only slept the night before for 4 hours. you just lost 20%.. This would fit well into the 0.85 update I am looking at already (0.75 and 0.8 will come before that)

A game like yours could do with a simple decay system, not necessarily as sophisticated as Girl Life or other games (damn, GL has the most complicated looks system I've ever seen, it's all calculated from stats and body mass using a formula, took them a lot of tweaking and I'm not sure it has that much of an impact). Could be fun if you tried to have a single stat that could function as energy/stamina, encouraging you to sleep every night. Or to keep it simple, sleeping less than 6 hours would leave you sleep deprived, with cumulative negative impact on your stats proportional to the number of hours of sleep deprivation, with, say, 12 hours, or 2 full sleepless nights, being the cap. You could choose not to sleep, but you'd be playing with max penalty to your stats overall. Or, to make it fun, being sleep deprived would make you proportionally more prone to get bullying events, and, numbing your reflexes, grey out the ability to fight back, as well as reduce your chance of running away successfully.

And since you didn't discourage me from giving you feedback... I keep thinking you should be forced to attend at least 45min of class in order to get the stat increase. Maybe make the option to attend class available only at o'clock and +15min. Attending class would randomly trigger and event with any of the other students present, or teacher, giving you a friendship boost with them, with a good probability, to compensate for not being able to talk twice more - it would mean a slower relationship grind overall, but also add some randomness to it, I think it would feel more relaxed than having to worry about whom to talk to during class, running around the classrooms to find the girls with pending quests. if you're feeling radical, you could make it so that you need to attend at least 4 classes every day, with each one less than the minimum counting towards absenteeism. High absenteeism could lead to being called to the principal's office and being issued punishment, which would reset your absenteeism.


Forced attendance of a min number of classes a day or having to go to a detention or Saturday club or head teacher meeting.. I do like that.. I want to be careful about how that would play out as I dont want to annoy gamers who would not want that either.. maybe a weekly count would give a bit more flexibility while still needing a level of attendance.. this could easily lead into a non attendance quest also..

 

[neodtst]

I really like this open world game but things are getting abit really urm bloated horizontally I would say? First of all i need to express that I am not those irritating whiners who go into a tantrum that dev can only do their fetishes and anything else is wasting time. In fact I like the amt of different genre/characters in this game. It really feel non linear.
But in some chain quests , there are multiple routes to complete it , the routes are both deep and exclusive , meaning 1 quest can have 3-4 ways of chain deep completions. While this increase replayability , I'm kinda concerned how can the developer balance quests/characters/genre with such horizontal and depth expansion with game progression.

 

[ZennyDarkstar]

I really like this open world game but things are getting abit really urm bloated horizontally I would say? First of all i need to express that I am not those irritating whiners who go into a tantrum that dev can only do their fetishes and anything else is wasting time. In fact I like the amt of different genre/characters in this game. It really feel non linear.
But in some chain quests , there are multiple routes to complete it , the routes are both deep and exclusive , meaning 1 quest can have 3-4 ways of chain deep completions. While this increase replayability , I'm kinda concerned how can the developer balance quests/characters/genre with such horizontal and depth expansion with game progression.

thanks for your comments and glad you like it. in short to answer your question. the dev is a mad man, with lots of bits of paper.
i am slighty concerned there are too many on going quests, which something i want to address in the next 5 or 6 updates.
there is an udate on patreon due this week, on here a little after, where a part of quest will differ depending on prev quest choice. and in next update after this there will be a new quest that will have two versions, straight and gay. so im looking forward to getting my mind round that.

 

[ZennyDarkstar]

*********************************
Update.. The version 0.75 is being released on patreon now (well when my slow internet manages to upload it).
The content of this new update was voted for by the patreon supporters.
The changelog is on there now.
I'm going to be offline for a few days, I will release the public version when I am back.
To those who are able to support me on patreon that is amazing, to those who support me here.. a big thanks to you also

Hope you all like it when you get to play it

TheZMan

 

[omnifill]

I really like this open world game but things are getting abit really urm bloated horizontally I would say? First of all i need to express that I am not those irritating whiners who go into a tantrum that dev can only do their fetishes and anything else is wasting time. In fact I like the amt of different genre/characters in this game. It really feel non linear.
But in some chain quests , there are multiple routes to complete it , the routes are both deep and exclusive , meaning 1 quest can have 3-4 ways of chain deep completions. While this increase replayability , I'm kinda concerned how can the developer balance quests/characters/genre with such horizontal and depth expansion with game progression.

Don’t worry about that not all quest will be completely exclusive to how they’re currently gotten. Some will be re unlocked later. There will be some but as of right now to my understanding not one is a complete dead end as of yet.

Best example you’re going to get all the phone hacks and the quest for foxy. While the grandmavsgrandma multi quest chain just led to a different scene but same ending (mostly). Their set up and quest would be different but outcome relitivly the same.

Now of course some branches will be locked off later but you won’t lock off a character. We’re still in intro quest territory after all so the truly big locks have yet to happen. Plus a lot of these quest/cherictors are supposed to merge for larger storyline's