Holy shit, a personally communicative game dev. Makes the hours I spent writing that essay feel justified, somehow.
Don't worry, spending time on gaming when you could theoretically be spending that time more productively is only a +1 EE sin.
Is that the accepted translation for Mahou Shoujo ni Akogarete? If so, I'm also a fan. I've been reading it basically since the start. I agree that with the comment that the Negotiation Distortion is probably the closest to what you see there. Coincidentally, the vignette that Kalloi commissioned for the next release is also on that path.
I hadn't planned on them corresponding to the seven deadly sins, but now that I see how close the numbers are, I almost want to try to make it fit somehow. Might need to put Gluttony behind another fetish toggle, though.
Thank you for the kind words! The game's design is original, roughly inspired by eragames (especially eraMaou) but with less of an emphasis on simulation and more on abstract tactics. I originally worked in the gaming industry, but the field is in a pretty sad state these days. Design roles are handed out based on office politics and nepotism, and innovation only happens as a rare accident. I'm happy and a little surprised that the game has managed to get this much of a playerbase despite my complete lack of skill in pretty much every other aspect of creating a video game.
I think that the number of distinct mechanics is large enough that any outside mechanical guide is going to be too cumbersome to reliably find what you're looking for. There are pretty much always players in this thread asking questions which have clear answers right in the main guide.txt (and I don't blame them - it's a big file and it's hard to internalize it all). The solution that I'm currently working on is the in-game guide goal system which encourages the player to "learn by doing," basically guiding you through the motions so that you can learn to recognize what a successful run looks like. I'm interested in hearing more feedback about that feature and what it should include.
In the final version, there will probably be a "play without time limits" option front-and-center. But while the game is still under development, it's very helpful for me to hear impressions from players who have gone through the game normally at least once.
Short of anything else, simply un-hiding the cheat menu / posting how to activate it directly into the packed-in guide.txt (even making the simple recommendation, in some future updated tutorial, to try easy mode in options) would go miles to make the first-time player experience more friendly. The first 10-15 days can feel punishing when you haven't a clue what EE purchases are worthwhile or how big a commander needs to be to do anything. The commander build analysis (amazing piece of code, that) and guide goal to build a 5 EE commander are SO CLOSE to being enough to teach this, but when the very next guide goal tip is to break a minor vulnerability on one chosen immediately when the guide.txt goes into great detail about how you shouldn't do that, those tips can seem untrustworthy. Perhaps I'm overfocused on easing players into the game, I just wouldn't want anyone to miss out on this amazing piece of game design because the initial brick wall of impenetrable mechanics scares them off.
This is pretty much just a consquence of the monthly development schedule. Each month, I want to complete a distinct 'feature' to entertain the people who are following along with development and give them an interesting excuse to do another playthrough. Sometimes, the feature itself is simple and gives me plenty of time to write lots of flavor variations. Sometimes, it's complicated and I can only manage a few flavor variations for each possible combination of factors. (On top of that, some months occupy more of my time with non-Corrupted-Saviors-related work.) Hopefully, once the game is feature complete, I'll be able to come back and flesh out some of the areas that turned out a bit bland. But until then, I think people will be happier if I keep working on completely new stuff.
I'm mainly just worried that the modding tools wouldn't get used. It's hard to judge how many people in the playerbase actually have the commitment to write content for the game. Focusing on writing content myself at least guarantees that players will get something out of an update.
A modding tool is definitely a low priority, but I can't help but think that if the game reaches a completed state someday where you are ready to let go of coding more of it, it could represent a way to truly let this little button-clicker transcend to the phenomenon level. Much like you attribute inspiration to the era games, that base engine has a whole community dedicated to creating entirely new experiences based on the core of 'train mode' / 'base mode.' I really think you have the basis for an English language era-engine here. Like, after playing for only five hours, I wanted to decompile the code and learn enough Java to see how the strings were assembled to gauge how much effort it would take to homebrew my own content. The answer was, WAAAAAAY more time than I have. Something about a text based game makes a writer think they're a game dev, but its not the same skill set. It's one of the reasons I'm so impressed that this game is both addictive in terms of game design and filled with high-quality original pornography.
You aren't the first to feel this way. A better middle-ground option is in the works, although there are other features planned first.
I agree that it's not up to genre standards. Part of the reason is that a lot of the recent work has been focused on human-on-human interactions. I'll be on the lookout for more excuses to involve tentacles in every plausible situation.
There are a few scattered references, but since it's basically a toggle within a toggle to even have a chance to see them, it hasn't been much of a focus for development time.
Fun fact: Lewd crests were actually the original plan for Total Innocence Break. But I ended up deciding that because the focus of the corruption was mental, capstoning it with a physical change wouldn't feel right. As a result, they didn't show up anywhere. I have some vague plans for lewd crests being a thing that some Forsaken can inflict on Chosen, but I'm not quite settled on it yet.
Thanks for the suggestions. I'll see how feasible these are.
The logic for T1 breaks is getting reworked in this release, so I'll consider this. But the Core/Minor matchups encouraging you to tackle the Chosen in a particular order is something I sort of like.
Thanks for the detailed feedback, and I hope you continue to enjoy the game!
If I were to add some sort of indicator, I'd just be tied to the Psychic Reading upgrade just like the Examine info is. I'm interested in doing so, but I worry about making that screen even more cluttered and ugly than it already can get once you have a bunch of multipliers in effect.
A quickload button is planned. We'll see if it makes it into the next release.
I'll add this to the list of improvements to implement.
I worry that this might cause more frustration than it solves, but I suppose it might work well if I also added a better summary of what happened over the course of the entire battle.
It looks like this also ended up being fixed alongside the final battle Rampage bug.
Currently, if the trainer has more expertise in all the relevant fields than the trainee, the trainee gets more expertise from the training session. This is sort of a placeholder feature until I figure out a better way to give each trainer their own personal touch.
There have been attempts to make a visual representation, but the upgrade tree doesn't really have the distinct "branches" that you'd expect from most games, so it ends up looking really tangled.
I'm not sure what you mean regarding how it's presented in step 7 of the guide, since the tip is already there too (albeit not in exactly the same words). But I am also planning on having the guide goal system show the player how relationships work too, so that should hopefully make it more clear.
Thanks for these suggestions. I plan to do some major reworking of those screens.
It's a detail of the setting that people assume that Demon Lords are male, but your Forsaken will realize that you're female and refer to you as such if you use a female (or futanari) body to meet with them.
Are you sure that you're selecting Stigma there? The flavor text indicates that she's being hit by Grind.
If you do a little bit of HATE training, that will grant some expertise which can then be transferred to the other types.
The fact that this is a magical girl abuse simulator and demons simply aren't involved in any interactive part of the experience outside of single-line descriptions of basic attacks and (the admitedly extremely well-done) commanders seems mind-boggling to me. The internal lore explaining that surround only works because chosen are hesitant to harm the thralls they are supposed to be rescuing, doesn't seem to hold up when the demons themselves are obviously so disposable and the expanded lore from the sin collection events and vingetts imply that tentacle vorebeasts are absofuckingloutlely everywhere. The gangbang content is two-thumbs up, well done and appreciated, but magical girl corruption without tentacles is like TSF without the transformed male's willpower and masculine pride crumbling in mere seconds to the 'more intense female sexual sensations.' In other words, a foundational cliche that defines the genre. At the moment, this is more like sentai heroine / western superheroine corruption than magical girl corruption, at least in battle mode when special commanders aren't involved. Even just substituting purpose-made tentacles/demons for the sex toys thralls are inexplicably able to produce on demand would go a long way to remedy that deficiency.
Yeah the linked nature of the vulnerabilities is definitely an extra tactical layer, and as I have played more, I realize the game is balanced to make using only two surround actions at a time a viable way to progress as long as you plan carefully and compensate for whichever circumstances aren't being pumped. Logically that had to be true or else distortions as a mechanic wouldn't work at all. It's still a stone bitch to see the chosen use the sinful defense of a minor vulnerability which isn't being attacked before the one from the corresponding core vulnerability that you are actually trying to raise. I guess the chosen are taking the opportunity to fuck us back, or something.
The 'relative' wholesomeness of the tempt distortion definitely washed out the bad taste of the confidence total corruption, even if it is perplexing how little interest tempt forsaken have in training. Like, they were inviting thralls over for orgies and feeding themselves to tentacle vorebeasts just the other day, recreationally, but now they don't want to service the thralls anymore or indulge in decadent kink without being forced? Amusing.
