CREATE YOUR AI CUM SLUT ON CANDY.AI TRY FOR FREE
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Oct 4, 2020
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Is there a way to pay back the advance for Ark's $5k for Golden Leaf? I have the money but neither he nor Keiko seem to give the option. Nothing to do at the Bank, either.

EDIT: Ah, I see that it just means you don't make income for awhile. Fair enough.
 
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CboyC95

Engaged Member
Feb 22, 2019
3,007
3,087
Was this reported before? I have the game correctly unlocking CGs for the horny expression if you have the exhibitionist trait, but if it's something I fixed, it might be that old saves won't benefit from the change (basically, the way things are set now 1064-1065 are supposed to be the "sexy" ones).
I hadn't gotten the exhibitionist trait and she was supposed to be angry.
 
Oct 4, 2020
56
20
There seems to be a bug with the paper golem scene, the CG got stuck on screen after the scene completed and I had to quit the game.

EDIT: Attached a save file from right before starting the scene
 
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mdqp

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Game Developer
Aug 25, 2018
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I hadn't gotten the exhibitionist trait and she was supposed to be angry.
Did you unlock this before version 0.9.7a? Because in theory I fixed this, however if you unlocked the images before the fix, they will stay unlocked in that save.

There seems to be a bug with the paper golem scene, the CG got stuck on screen after the scene completed and I had to quit the game.

EDIT: Attached a save file from right before starting the scene
Oops, you are right. I didn't delete the images properly when players grab the golem. This is likely going to get fixed in version 0.9.10.
 
Oct 4, 2020
56
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I wanted to share some feedback on one of the (potentially) first lewd encounters of the game (drunk Fisherman in the Inn). Before I get into it, I want to caveat this by noting that I fully expect that a lot of what I have to say will not be new - quite possibly none of it. And I totally understand if my vision or expectations for the game don't line up with yours/reality. But hopefully there's still some value in my sharing my thoughts.

When the guy first harasses you, if you immediately beat him up, you get a one-time Willpower boost. I like this a lot, and I think it would be great if there were more similar opportunities in the game. Some of the nighttime fast travel encounters come to mind. Granted that it seems like willpower grinding is hidden enough that players are unlikely to figure out how to do it quickly, but I like the idea of it being more limited, and as a consequence more challenging, but still possible to raise willpower. As a player I can always choose at a meta level not to take advantage of certain game systems. But I prefer when the design of this type of game makes the main character feel more trapped, rather than having to choose to become corrupted b/c that's the end result I want (and to be clear, the willpower system does accomplish this at times by forcing certain actions!). Maybe this is something that could be in part addressed through different difficulty levels, where on higher difficulties the grinding is more limited, less effective, or flat-out unavailable. But if so it would probably require more one-time opportunities to make a pure/high willpower run at least possible.

If you let him get away with harassing you, you can go back to him repeatedly right away, and this can ultimately lead to a final choice of beating him up or having sex with him. I think this is very odd from a pacing perspective. I would have expected, at a minimum, to be unable to interact with him again (or to have the interaction be some kind of repeatable non-event taunt) until a day had passed. I would have also expected that high inhibition would block the option to have sex with him (particularly considering how many other less extreme things it blocks elsewhere). In fact, I'd have expected some kind of "I don't want to go near that guy" interrupt to prevent you from interacting with him at all until some combination of time passes or stats change.

The lack of intermediate CGs makes the pacing feel even more abrupt, I think. I realize that art is always expensive (in either time or money, if not both)*. And I can understand not making additional art for this scene a priority. But I do think that it would benefit a lot from having a CG for when he pulls you onto him, at least.

*Without having looked into it, it also seems like the art style has changed significantly over time, and some of the images and character portraits look a lot better than others. I don't know if that means there are plans to go back and redo older stuff or not, but if so that would obviously make it harder to add more images where they don't currently exist.

Finally, I think integrating this event into the Waitress job could be really cool. Having a (low) random chance that he's there and harasses you again could provide a more natural way to progress the chain than choosing to walk over to him again even though there's no reason to. And if you beat him up while you're working, that could have an effect on your job, so it's riskier at that point.

That all having been said, I hope I don't come across as overly critical. I'm really impressed with this game overall, and have really enjoyed playing it.
 

mdqp

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Game Developer
Aug 25, 2018
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It's fine to share your thoughts with me, and I generally try to consider what players tell me, although I generally prefer shorter, more focused feedback (simply for pragmatic reasons, as long messages take too much time to reply to).

The sailor sequence is one of the first ones I wrote for the game, so if it feels different from most of the other content, that might be the reason. As for the willpower system, if you have specific suggestions for existing scenes (like "this choice should raise/lower willpower" or "this scene should be affected by your willpower score") you can tell me about it.

In general, while I do use willpower to sometimes reduce options, I have also been trying to not use it too much, as it interferes with players' ability to play as they want. This isn't a hard rule, since thematically it might make sense to affect players if they haven't been diligent with their willpower stat, but generally I try to place willpower checks down the line, so players already had their chance to refuse before, so to speak. It's a balancing act. I also ended up including too many mechanics in the game, so their usage might be uneven (again, suggestions for more will/int/inh checks in existing content are generally welcome).

I didn't design Caliross with multiple difficulty levels in mind, so at this point it might be too difficult balance. It's also worth noting that giving more or less willpower/intelligence depending on difficulty kind of implies that a "pure path" is the best path/ending, but it's not (in fact, I tried my best to write the game so that being a bit of a slut should be more advantageous and fun, with only one exception). It's also why inhibitions can only go down, and they act just as an obstacle to getting scenes, for the most part.

The sailor scene might feel better with one extra intermediate step and an inhibition check, sure. I didn't want the inhibition check because you do need some amount of content that lowers inhibitions without needing a check, as otherwise you can never get started. I also felt like the player (and so, the protagonist) had their chances, meaning that they are deliberately pursuing the sailor after he got his hands on Erica more than once, so it didn't seem necessary (just like I don't have inhibition checks for most "romantic" paths). Maybe I can add a little inner dialogue from Erica when she gets closer after the first time, as she debates what she wants to do and have her inhibitions change the words a bit, with the inability to go if it's really high and lowering inhibitions if they fantasize about what happened. I am not sure how an intermediate scene might look, however.

The sailor is always available because 1) Early on I didn't want to turn it into a grind, especially since content was scarce and 2) I didn't feel like the sailor would ever stop unless he got his comeuppance. I think it's better to have at least some easy to access content, so I'd need a good reason to change this.

Art is the biggest expense. Originally, I had no budget at all, so I was planning to only ever get art for some of the major scenes. Up until a while ago, I was still catching up to that. Currently, almost all scenes have art (but do let me know if a scene is still missing some). The artstyle changed because I had to change artists (my previous one wanted to focus more on his own projects) so there is art from a few more people (when I was trying to figure out who to work with) and my current artist also changed his style over time (as we were trying to figure out what works best and is "close enough" to the original style, although I since gave up on trying to have him adjust his style to fit the previous artist).

I'll think about having some art for him pulling you on his lap.

If you got to the point of having sex with the sailor, and then work as a maid at the inn, there is a chance for him to be in the room you have to clean, and you two will have some fun, so there is that.
 

gf199

Member
Feb 19, 2019
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46
Actually I'm interested about changing those night encounters a bit (if you don't mind, I know it's been fairly long since it was first implemented and touching old stuff might break things).

For example my Erica has maxed out willpower, and even though her inhibitions are tad low we still can't control whether or not we want to engage in some night activities. It's kinda sad that willpower makes no difference there.

She wasn't exactly a prude when I was doing tasks to become a noble, but I was still able to tell Lord Kairos to piss off with his offer because my willpower/int was high enough. If we can reject a noble it's kinda silly that we can't reject some random drunkard at night (or even that succubus if you don't want to interact with her).

So wouldn't it be a better option that if our willpower is high and inhibitions low that we can pick if we want to do it with him or not? Also, if you have a trait like exhibitionist and low inhibitions you can for example set willpower check to be higher. It's always nice to have more choices after all.
 

mdqp

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Game Developer
Aug 25, 2018
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Actually I'm interested about changing those night encounters a bit (if you don't mind, I know it's been fairly long since it was first implemented and touching old stuff might break things).

For example my Erica has maxed out willpower, and even though her inhibitions are tad low we still can't control whether or not we want to engage in some night activities. It's kinda sad that willpower makes no difference there.

She wasn't exactly a prude when I was doing tasks to become a noble, but I was still able to tell Lord Kairos to piss off with his offer because my willpower/int was high enough. If we can reject a noble it's kinda silly that we can't reject some random drunkard at night (or even that succubus if you don't want to interact with her).

So wouldn't it be a better option that if our willpower is high and inhibitions low that we can pick if we want to do it with him or not? Also, if you have a trait like exhibitionist and low inhibitions you can for example set willpower check to be higher. It's always nice to have more choices after all.
The encounter with the drunkard should be refusable, I agree. For now, I'll set the willpower requirement to 71 or higher for exhibitionists (since non-exhibitionists were already capable of refusing). We'll see if the value needs tweaking, but it will do at the moment.
 
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Oct 4, 2020
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Wow, thank you for the detailed response!

I might quibble with some of the things you said, but at the end of the day, it's your game and your call, I'm glad (though not surprised) that you're thinking very carefully about this stuff.

One thing I do want to clarify is that I didn't mean to imply pure route should be the best route, merely the most challenging (in keeping with the lore of the game, I think?). And I guess by pure, I mean having your stats go down, not necessarily having no sexual encounters at all. There's nothing impure about pursuing a romance, and I think your comment about inhibition checks reflects that.

If I have more feedback I'll try to keep it briefer, I will admit that my post kind of spiraled away from its initial focus on a particular scene into more general comments about the game systems.

Oh, regarding willpower lockouts reducing player choice - yeah, that is a tension with the kind of corruption design that I enjoy in these kind of games. I guess my answer to that would be that the player choice has hopefully already occurred, plus I think it's okay to have an indicator that "hey, you probably could have done something about this" for a game that encourages multiple playthroughs. But it may be that most players want to always have the choice. I personally feel kind of silly having the MC choose something that's some combination of foolish or out of character, which is why I'm okay with being railroaded in this kind of game, provided that it makes sense in context. It's also why, relatedly, I like for there to be events that can plausibly catch the MC off-guard (the Zanti job is a good example of this).
 

mdqp

Well-Known Member
Game Developer
Aug 25, 2018
1,380
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Wow, thank you for the detailed response!

I might quibble with some of the things you said, but at the end of the day, it's your game and your call, I'm glad (though not surprised) that you're thinking very carefully about this stuff.

One thing I do want to clarify is that I didn't mean to imply pure route should be the best route, merely the most challenging (in keeping with the lore of the game, I think?). And I guess by pure, I mean having your stats go down, not necessarily having no sexual encounters at all. There's nothing impure about pursuing a romance, and I think your comment about inhibition checks reflects that.

If I have more feedback I'll try to keep it briefer, I will admit that my post kind of spiraled away from its initial focus on a particular scene into more general comments about the game systems.

Oh, regarding willpower lockouts reducing player choice - yeah, that is a tension with the kind of corruption design that I enjoy in these kind of games. I guess my answer to that would be that the player choice has hopefully already occurred, plus I think it's okay to have an indicator that "hey, you probably could have done something about this" for a game that encourages multiple playthroughs. But it may be that most players want to always have the choice. I personally feel kind of silly having the MC choose something that's some combination of foolish or out of character, which is why I'm okay with being railroaded in this kind of game, provided that it makes sense in context. It's also why, relatedly, I like for there to be events that can plausibly catch the MC off-guard (the Zanti job is a good example of this).
I try my best to improve the game if possible. It's a passion project, even if I am making a living out of it. I have made plenty of mistakes in its design over time (it didn't help that this was the first RPG Maker game for me, and the structure was also something I hadn't tried before), but at the end of the day, I also need to move forward. Time is the most finite resource as a solo dev.

No problem, I just prefer to be upfront about this stuff, because answering messages can quickly suck up a chunk of my time. I don't mind long discussions from time to time, but of course any time I spend doing that, is time I can't spend working on the game. I do reply outside of "working hours" as well, but I'd rather not think about the game 24/7, or I could burn out.

You can't please everyone. For choices to be meaningful, there must be consequences, and that means low willpower should come with a cost (we can debate if I should have had a willpower mechanic to begin with, but once it's part of the game, it has to have at least some effects). The entire game tries its best to have meaningful cause/effect scenarios, but it's bound to throw some people off, and in general there will be some hits and misses.

where do you get the Climb, Check, Come Back quest?
In the mage guild, available starting from chapter 2. There should be an old man there that can give you the quest.
 

zero987

Member
Apr 13, 2019
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121
since i cant find it in the walkthrough. How can i get the dance lessons and party in rahib with Sole and luna?
 

mdqp

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Aug 25, 2018
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since i cant find it in the walkthrough. How can i get the dance lessons and party in rahib with Sole and luna?
For the lessons, you must dance perfectly (0 mistakes) at the Red Dune at least 4 times. You'll have to do more perfect dances if you previously did really poorly, as that harms your reputation. Anyway, if you reputation reaches 4, you should get a cutscene at the end of your shift, with Sole and Luna approaching you. From that point onward, you'll get the option to have lessons with them when you talk with Edward (the bardtender). It should be easy to follow the path from there.
 
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mdqp

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Game Developer
Aug 25, 2018
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A new update just dropped*! You too can indulge in your darkest fantasies** while playing Caliross, TODAY! Just Download the game or at . Check the changelog , if you can't remember why you are even playing this thing, and don't forget to have fun! ^_^


*Thankfully, the fall didn't cause any damage.
**Cheating at scrabble.

Direct link:
 
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JaszMan

Well-Known Member
Aug 13, 2018
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How many Paths are there?. Can the MC become a succubus?. What other Supernatural beings can the MC turn into?.
 
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