"WHAT IS THE MOST APPEALING PART OF OUR WORK, TO YOU?"
THE ARTWORK: CG Sets, Webcomics, etc.
THE WRITING: Storytelling, Lore, etc.
THE VISUALS: Graphics, Sprites, etc.
THE MECHANICS: UI Systems, Gameplay, etc.
THE MUSIC: Background Music, Sound Effects, etc.
Don't really know how to vote on this since I'm not a patron, but I'll give you some wordvomit here:
The
artwork definitely drew me in at first, I saw you had some variety in the fetishes (and mainly for me BDSM). Then, what kept me playing was the
visuals though, definitely. Not exactly what you described, but once I noticed how big and full of stuff the rpgmaker maps were and how almost all the doors are explorable right from the start, how every NPC has a couple of voice lines (even though sometimes really useless ones, sometimes they're really funny/cool), and the amount of content to explore... I mean, you literally have multiple cities with their outskirts and stuff. It's pretty cool.
Now I have also gathered some constructive criticism during my playthrough of part 0.18.3 / part 0.18.4: I feel like a lot of the quests, encounters, and dialogues in the game resolve to a binary outcome.
What do I mean by that? Example: "The Herbalist's Secret" in the Fallwater Heights forest at the start. Once I went down and saw the pigboss, I only had two choices to choose from, both in the dialogue with Gilly when I came back up. It was either "good choice" or "game over". I don't know if that was caused by me having too low defiance/intrigue, but I thought I had levelled it pretty much to the max at that point.
Another one is the slave scene in Valos during the Priceless Book quest, when you try to strong-arm the guard. I grinded until I had 6 intrigue before, so I don't have to pay the 500g. But then I just get put in slavery by Lawrence. Sure. Fine. I can escape, I have over 15 defiance. Well, no, I couldn't even try actually, even after 5 days of choosing the defiant option! It just repeated 'till I gave in. While I don't think it's necessarily bad to have a really hopeless, dead-end situation (it's kinda good actually for the submissive kink), I feel like it's a bit much when it goes from no warning to slavery without any chance to catch it, even with high intr/defi values.
In both those scenes I got into something I didn't want to happen to my character because it's not how I wanted to play her, because I didn't know the potential outcome beforehand (before going down/before choosing not to pay 500g).
But there were some scenes which handle this in a completely different way:
Example here: The Call Of The Deep quest from The Gypsy Elder. Here, you just get told straight up: 15 intrigue to look in the hole in the wall, 20 defiance to keep sane. I also didn't feel like way to do it, it breaks the immersion you worked so hard to build with your dialogue and mapping.
Finally, what do I think is the right way? I had a really good experience with the Urchin "hole in the wall trick" scene. You can already guess as a player that there is something fishy going on through the dialogue at the start, and just leave by yourself. Which I did, after which I later unlocked a new, third dialogue option, to confront them with my intrigue. So if the slave scene allowed you to choose a defiance outcome (need 10/15 amount of defi maybe?) after refusing to be a good slave three times in a row, I would have thought that as much more interactive. Or if you had a moment to just run away without the book when Lawrence suggests a date as payment, and then you have to come up with a different plan, something like that.
Anyway, all in all. I think despite those little flaws the game still managed to make a combatless game interesting and fun to me, who usually despises those kinds of games (because the lack of combat creates this problem of being outcome-binary). But since I loved the work you put in so far, I am actually considering becoming a patron in the future, amazing work!