Java Corrupted Saviors [Release 58] [CSDev]

[quiboune]

I really quite like this, my biggest problem with era games is that since they're originally made in japanase I can only really play the few working translated ones. Having an era style game made by an English speaker from the ground up is great and I like that you get to play as the bad demon villain force. It actually forces me to participate in the gameplay itself to get to the lewd scenes and isn't just a bland boring porn "game" where you stand next to an enemy and let it defeat you because that's the only way to get to the porn part.

My only actual problem is that I suck at the game. Day 40 I have a bunch of upgrades and the heroes have a bunch of Angst but I still haven't actually managed to break a single vulnerability and all they do is watch movies together. If I try really, really hard I might get them to have 2000+ something disgust per battle but that's about the limit of what I can do. Some sort of beginner easy mode where the game itself points out the best option to take during a fight or how to approach the battles would be appreciated.

There's a guide in the game folder that might be able to help you with the basics and whatnot, but I always follow a formula that seems to work fine:
Slime until 1 Opening > Surround and Pummel(then Humiliate and Grind if you still have enough turns) > Attack Until 2 Opening > Surround and Pummel and Humiliate(then Grind and Caress if you still have enough turns)
At this point the other Chosen should have shown up, so repeat these on them while attacking the first one when needed. If you have enough turns with the Chosen surrounded their traumas will grow up without you needing to do anything and the combat will only end because Extermination rises passively, even without them doing anything.
If you want to break them quickly I recommend using a specialized Commander, focusing on their Core Vulnerabilities at first, since they have different scenes and do the most damage.

 

[invalidcharacter]

CSdev Yeah told you this place would get traffic, glad you decided to make an account.

I've been meaning to ask, is there any chance you'll make this open source for modding purposes? I've contributed to a similar-ish project before (just some visual tweaks to the night games mod) and there's a few things I'd love to poke at, specifically when it comes to syntax highlighting. I would absolutely kill for a way to tell flavor text from mechanical text at a glance; the way everything is just the same regardless of function actually gives me some weird kind of blindness where my eyes just glaze over after a short while. Was thinking that following the formula of something like Free Cities for highlighting would be fantastic here.

 

[05841035411]

My only actual problem is that I suck at the game. Day 40 I have a bunch of upgrades and the heroes have a bunch of Angst but I still haven't actually managed to break a single vulnerability and all they do is watch movies together. If I try really, really hard I might get them to have 2000+ something disgust per battle but that's about the limit of what I can do. Some sort of beginner easy mode where the game itself points out the best option to take during a fight or how to approach the battles would be appreciated.

Here's what I do:

First, target the Chosen weak to exposure. Get her to Opening 2 by targeting Disgust and Pain, then Humiliate her. If no one else has shown up yet, feel free to add another attack for the second round. Either way, she should have reached Exposure level 1.

Next, target whomever you're looking to corrupt first; ideally, she should have a weakness in either Fear or Pain. For her, target Disgust, Pain, and Shame. With the bonus from Exposure, it should only take 4 rounds total. With Opening Level 3, Pummel and Grind to get Hate and Injury. Do not Caress yet; you don't want to raise her Pleasure early, because Trauma penalizes Circumstances growth. This should be enough to reach Hate and Injury level 1, even if they're resistant, for a combined x8 multiplier.

While your target is still surrounded, take an opportunistic shot at the remaining Chosen to get her to Opening Level 1; whatever she's weakest to. You're not actually going to do anything to her; just Surround her, so that you can take advantage of Fear on the one you're actually going after. With Fear and Disgust level 1, if you have Augmented Polymorph (I think that's the name, might be mistaken), that's enough for another round; otherwise, the trauma from Surrounding her may have given her a second level of Fear or Pain if she's weak to them, or at least taken them within striking distance.

Once you're Surrounding her for a second time, continue to Pummel and Grind her to the second level of Hate and Injury, as well as starting on whatever Circumstance is associated with the Vulnerability you're targeting. Don't worry about starting from 0; your modifiers should be high enough to hit it early into a third Surrounding at worst. For the first level of Vulnerability, you have to use the two attacks associated with the Vulnerability you're targeting; the game itself tells you which those are, with a tooltip when you hover over the attack. Properly speaking, you should also consider the relationships of the character in question - either drive her towards friendships with the other Chosen by avoiding her core vulnerability, or towards rivalry by avoiding her minor. In practice, for the very first vulnerability, it's usually more trouble than it's worth; it's true you'll miss out on a bit of early flavor if you unlock the wrong one, but there's still plenty of time to mess with their relationships with the second and third levels of trauma, which you have much more reliable control over.

Oh, and at some point, Exposure Girl is going to start Regenerating the damage you've done to their outfit; if you have Augmented Polymorph, take a moment to Surround them again and add more damage to their uniform, so long as it doesn't interfere with your plans for your actual target. You may need to add a level of Fear first, depending on her Trauma levels. If you don't have Polymorph, it's probably unrealistic to surround them a second time, unfortunately.

Anyways, once she has a few thousand points of Circumstance damage and the appropriate attack is being used, you'll crack her first-level Vulnerability. You might be pushing your time limit depending on how early in the game you try this, but this will get you there reliably.

Mind you, this guide also assumes no availabilities. If you have a Commander with at least 4 Duration and Ambush, things become a lot simpler. With her, you don't have to bother with Openings on your target at all, saving a lot of rounds - still make sure you target Exposure Girl first, but just Capture the Chosen you're going after instead. If you have extra rounds of capture, go ahead and use them on Exposure Girl as well; it'll build Hate and Injury to drive Exposure higher, and means you won't burn the initial opening from Pain, making it easier to Surround her again later.

If you're unlucky (by which I mean you're targeting Red instead of Green, since there's no actual luck involved), you'll also notice that one of the Chosen is giving you a -30% penalty with Distract. Without a commander, the time limits involved means you just have to accept that - but now, you can also take a bit of time to deal with that problem. If you have a third Capture, go ahead and use it once you've started the second Surrounding on your actual target. Otherwise, target her Fear, Disgust and Shame when you have a free moment.

Incidentally, you'll notice that I'm recommending the use of the basic commander here. This is because she can target all three vulnerabilities we care about, even if she does less damage overall; this is often more practical. Using a Hate/Injury hybrid is the other option, but costs 5 more energy, and complicates your Exposure at the start.

"What if I am targeting Exposure Girl", you ask? Well, I don't recommend them for your first Chosen, to begin with. Exposure levels are really useful, and you have a lot fewer options at the start; no commanders, and no Angst damage bonuses. But you do have to go after her eventually. For her, you have two options depending on the state of the game. First, you can just start with the character with the next highest susceptibility to stripping; early on, this is the most straightforward option. At worst, you just need to add a third level of Opening when starting to achieve similar results. Second, you can just start the battle as normal, then for the second Chosen, strip them instead of the usual routine, then turn your attention back to Exposure Girl, treating her as the the target as per the rest of the advice. If you opened by Capturing Exposure Girl, this is probably the better option; she'll have a good amount of Hate and Injury built up already, and should be decently primed for further Surroundings.

And as for your Second and Third vulnerabilities... Honestly, the same basic model works for all of them. Just treat them the same way, adding more and more Surroundings as the battle allows; drive Injury and Hate as high as is practical, make sure someone has Exposure, focus on the Circumstance relevant to the battle, and only add Pleasure as an afterthought. Well, the role of Pleasure does change somewhat; it's bad early on, but once you're starting to think about Surrounding them a third time, the Trauma levels that are a pain in raising Circumstance become really useful in adding extra rounds. That said, I can't really recommend adding Pleasure until you reach your third level of Circumstances.

Well, that's all the advice I can think of. I hope that all helps!

 

[Seamonkey]

Took a couple of trial runs to start getting a hang of the mechanics of this one. It's influence from era games is displayed openly and it wears it well, taking obvious influences from games like eraTentaclepalace and eraGvT it plays somewhere between a turn based rpg and a puzzle game as you attempt to leverage your upgrades and abilities to corrupt the chosen while trying to juggle your attention between them.

There is still a gap in the market for a good Magical girl corruption game and this game seems to be shaping up to fulfil that niche.

Given that the Magical girls are generated with personalities and so have more of a defined 'voice' than other randomly generated characters I feel it would serve the game well to not only add additional events but to add greater variations in those events for different character personalities to be more thoroughly displayed especially as it would allow for a more in depth look at how the characters are being affected by the corruption they are being subjected to which I feel is one of the fundamental joys of games of this genre.

I look foreword to seeing how this game develops in the future.

 

[cdcdcd171]

This is the part I can't get right. The male always ends up meek and the female stoic/cool. It's hard to get the futa wrong but still

I try a few times myself, and its not as easy to get what you asked for as I thought. Might be the automatic team balancing doesn´t like to put all the bad stuff on the futa and dumped a it on the others at random or some other process in the background.

My best try lead to an male idealist, an unapproachable girl and a proud futa. After some corruption they might end up as you want them to.

 

[Mister XxX]

I try a few times myself, and its not as easy to get what you asked for as I thought. Might be the automatic team balancing doesn´t like to put all the bad stuff on the futa and dumped a it on the others at random or some other process in the background.

My best try lead to an male idealist, an unapproachable girl and a proud futa. After some corruption they might end up as you want them to.

Your team name intrigue me. Is it possible to make male and female chosen to be in a romantic relationship ?

 

[King Melodias]

This game is fantastic so far but I read alot about this Era Girl vs Tentacle and tentacle palace.
So far, I think I found those games but they are in Japanese.. Anyone there with a hint to the English one?

Furthermore on this game: I tried 2 runs now [ending on day 30].
First run went better then second.

In my second run I tried to Ignore commanders till I could get the upgrade to target both exp and pain but... the Angst was raised to slow so in the end it seems that using the basic commander early is a nice boon to your playthrough.

 

[Mokoshakar]

This game is fantastic so far but I read alot about this Era Girl vs Tentacle and tentacle palace.
So far, I think I found those games but they are in Japanese.. Anyone there with a hint to the English one?

gitgud era-games

 

[quiboune]

Your team name intrigue me. Is it possible to make male and female chosen to be in a romantic relationship ?

I haven't managed to get them in a relationship so far. The Dev, CSdev, I think, should be able to answer the question with certainty.

 

[cdcdcd171]

Ditto, the highest Relationship I have seen is Solid Friends. The Team Name is only what I guessed quiboune would make them do.

A traditional romantic relationship is not possible because to get closer they have to be broken and comfort each other. But if they are broken they start to fuvk their fans and friends.

 

[tb85]

Question, does anyone know if minor vulnerabilities that generate broken automatically push the Chosen to friendship? Also has anyone mapped out the psychological tests to see what question influences what vulnerability?

 

[CSdev]

Damn this game seriously rocks, kudos to you for the absurd variety and granularity of scenes and flavor text for each personality type. Did three full playthroughs over the past few days, which has left me with a question/request. Is it possible for the ability to choose the team's initial personalities to be implemented? I got a couple of the same personalities on all 3 of my runs and it just made me kinda sad that there's no way to guarantee that I know I'm seeing all the content (especially because you really need to play a few battles if you wanna reload and try to get different personalities to actually see them all- and even then as far as I can tell there's a number of more granular differences even within certain personality backgrounds?).
Your writing rocks and I sorta just want the ability to experience more of it without be discouraged by going over treaded ground.

The Customize option on the main menu should give you what you're looking for.

The save created at day 15 says New Game+ even though it really isn't, are you considering adding in an actual NG+ maybe where the defeated heroines are powerless/turned into breeders that give you more powerful minions to take on a new group of Chosen?

This is pretty much the plan. You'll be able to convert defeated heroines to your side so they'll fight for you, and the ones who aren't fighting might be able to provide other boosts like acting as breeders or something.

Locations. Currently, you always "ambush a neighborhood on [name's] patrol route"; this is fine as-is, but there's more potential here, isn't there? After all, you're the one setting the terms of the engagement; why not use it to your advantage? The genre has a long history of the villains drawing the heroine into traps, and I think it would be nice to lay some of our own.

Yeah, this is on my list of "things that could deepen the game once the basic 50-day loop is established." I am torn on whether it should be something you pay energy to use, or whether you just know their patrol locations ahead of time and have to tailor your strategy around them.

I think there is something wrong with the path separators on Linux, IE I think somewhere there is a hard-coded backslash. I don't know too much else but I ran it from the directory below the jar and afterwards there is a file called 'Corrupted_Saviors_R10b\saves.sav' in that directory.

On a more opinionated note, I think that styling your Swing stuff would be relatively straightforward and might add a lot to the appearance of the game. I know it isn't necessarily your priority at this point, but for a relatively small amount of work it could be very nice, especially since I feel that some of the colored buttons (especially the bright yellows) look a little weird and could be confusing (when I first played the tutorial I thought that the commander button was maybe supposed to be disabled).

Overall I thought the game was great and I'm looking forward to where it goes.

You're right about the hard-coded backslashes. I tried to fix it, but it ended up breaking things somehow. I'm currently reading up on java.io.File.separator to make sure I understand what I'm doing. I'll be trying to fix it again for this release. I'm also interested in better Swing styling, but I'm not quite sure where to start.

Can someone help with this? Maybe send the export file if that's not too much to ask. I want a female-futa-male team. I'd like the female to be wholesome, popular and unsure of herself. The futa should be self-assured, brute and a jerk. I want the male to be stoic, objective. The scenario I want to see is the male and the female becoming friends, and then lovers if possible, while the futa becomes their rival. I guess it's easy to know where that's headed.

It's a bit depressing how the broken Chosen want to die and nothing else, trying every day to kill themselves. While I usually have nothing against violence and darker themes I feel like it would be better if they just started feeling like they deserve the pain, without desperately looking for a way out. Someone attempting suicide is probably numb to everything else you can throw at them.

Also, it seems like the Vengeful Reconstitution skill is not working, can someone check?

The issue with the team you're trying to create (and the reason that I used a questionnaire instead of a simple "pick-who-has-what-vulnerabilities" option) is that the game actually has to be pretty restrictive in how the vulnerabilities are distributed. Each character needs to have at least one core vulnerability, one significant vulnerability, and one minor vulnerability. This is both for game balance reasons and also to ensure that each character gets at least one major break scene (which always happens between the major and the minor) with each other character.

If you want more details on how the questionnaire works, you can find it below. I've also made my own attempt at fulfilling your request, featuring a male Mirage, a female Prayer, and a futanari Calamity. Mirage's pre-broken Innocence vulnerability should ensure that he and Prayer grow close.
Major vulns: Morality and Innocence on Prayer, Confidence on Calamity, Dignity on Mirage.
Minor vulns: Morality and Dignity on Calamity, Innocence on Mirage, Confidence on Prayer.

Regarding the suicidal Chosen, it is pretty dark, but it won't last forever. The last stage of corruption will involve them finding some sort of peace with their circumstances, for better or worse.

Naive question, so pardon me.

There's an endgame state? After toying a bit with two saves (one got nuked due to bugs, the other I cheated a little to get a faster start) I can reliably dump untold amount of numbers, but after day 30 I don't get extra events.

Just askin'

It's not implemented yet, but it'll involve turning the heroines to the side of evil. It's not too much further off.

CSdev I enjoyed playing this and have a few suggestions

Different means of attack.
Currently your only means of attack is to ambush one of the girls in the street. While corruption is the name of the game, capturing breeding stock is also something you should be doing (in concept). While coding in resource management would be a pain, you could try adding in a couple of alternate scenarios where you have a few turns to, Capture slaves, damage early warning systems, destroy evacuation centers, which will give temp bonuses for the next few missions, before a random Girl shows up

Corrupted Savior NG+
Currently, I don't know what happens if you fully corrupt a girl. In the source materials though, a Corrupted champion of Justice normally becomes the Villain and wishes to corrupt more girls. A cool idea for NG+ will be to replace the Commander with one or more of the Chosen you corrupted in the previous games. This could be a lot of work though, you'd probably have to remake all the unlocks and skills around this idea.

Cheat Tab
I unlocked it and now its there when I start a new game. This is mildly annoying, a option somewhere to enable/disable the cheat menu would be nice. The Temptation is too strong.

Anyway, I'm lookin forward to seeing more from this game
EraGames are pretty cool but its annoying as shit when its all in japanese/MTL

Your speculation for NG+ is spot-on. As for the cheat tab refusing to go away, that's due to a bug. Sorry.

It seems to be decreasing now, though very slowly. I wonder if closing and reopening the game had anything to do with it.
Also View attachment 858664
The numbers are all over the place, mainly with Calamity. Any idea why? And do you know if it's possible to make it go down faster?

What's actually happening there is that they're losing millions of trauma, but they have billions in total, so it isn't enough to even change one digit. Normally they'd be moving on to the next tier of downtime action, but it hasn't been implemented yet.

Regarding the odd numbers, it's because they're doing a group action, so the resolved trauma gets multipliers for their relationship with the other two Chosen. Because the multipliers are decimal values, they can end up looking a bit unnatural.

I really quite like this, my biggest problem with era games is that since they're originally made in japanase I can only really play the few working translated ones. Having an era style game made by an English speaker from the ground up is great and I like that you get to play as the bad demon villain force. It actually forces me to participate in the gameplay itself to get to the lewd scenes and isn't just a bland boring porn "game" where you stand next to an enemy and let it defeat you because that's the only way to get to the porn part.

My only actual problem is that I suck at the game. Day 40 I have a bunch of upgrades and the heroes have a bunch of Angst but I still haven't actually managed to break a single vulnerability and all they do is watch movies together. If I try really, really hard I might get them to have 2000+ something disgust per battle but that's about the limit of what I can do. Some sort of beginner easy mode where the game itself points out the best option to take during a fight or how to approach the battles would be appreciated.

If all else fails, you can always cheat yourself some energy and try using powerful commanders. There's no shame in experimenting to see just how powerful a commander you need in order to achieve a given result.

CSdev Yeah told you this place would get traffic, glad you decided to make an account.

I've been meaning to ask, is there any chance you'll make this open source for modding purposes? I've contributed to a similar-ish project before (just some visual tweaks to the night games mod) and there's a few things I'd love to poke at, specifically when it comes to syntax highlighting. I would absolutely kill for a way to tell flavor text from mechanical text at a glance; the way everything is just the same regardless of function actually gives me some weird kind of blindness where my eyes just glaze over after a short while. Was thinking that following the formula of something like Free Cities for highlighting would be fantastic here.

I do plan on making it open source eventually. I'd just like to finish my own vision of the game first. I've seen too many cases where collaborative projects get mired down due to interpersonal differences. Doing some sort of highlighting to sort the flavor from the mechanics is a good idea, though. I might try implementing it myself before I'm done.

Took a couple of trial runs to start getting a hang of the mechanics of this one. It's influence from era games is displayed openly and it wears it well, taking obvious influences from games like eraTentaclepalace and eraGvT it plays somewhere between a turn based rpg and a puzzle game as you attempt to leverage your upgrades and abilities to corrupt the chosen while trying to juggle your attention between them.

There is still a gap in the market for a good Magical girl corruption game and this game seems to be shaping up to fulfil that niche.

Given that the Magical girls are generated with personalities and so have more of a defined 'voice' than other randomly generated characters I feel it would serve the game well to not only add additional events but to add greater variations in those events for different character personalities to be more thoroughly displayed especially as it would allow for a more in depth look at how the characters are being affected by the corruption they are being subjected to which I feel is one of the fundamental joys of games of this genre.

I look foreword to seeing how this game develops in the future.

The eventual plan is to add daily "vignettes" which occur at random and expand on the elements described in the characters' profiles. For example, if a girl's profile says "She's started casually sleeping around with her friends," one of the possible events at the end of the day would be a scene where she does just that. I do think it could make the corruption feel a lot more "real," but I want to finish the main 50-day sequence first.

I haven't managed to get them in a relationship so far. The Dev, CSdev, I think, should be able to answer the question with certainty.

Actual monogamous relationships don't happen, since the girls remain chaste until morality break, and they sleep around freely afterwards. My initial plans involved relationships acting as a sort of buffer between those two extremes (with equivalents for the other vulnerability types), but I wasn't able to get it to work with the rest of the game. It's still something I'm thinking about.

My other relevant plan is to introduce Chosen who enter the game already in a relationship with an offscreen husband or wife. In this case, their morality break would be due to forced infidelity rather than virginity loss.

Question, does anyone know if minor vulnerabilities that generate broken automatically push the Chosen to friendship? Also has anyone mapped out the psychological tests to see what question influences what vulnerability?

Pre-broken vulnerabilities can currently make it so that two Chosen are guaranteed to become friends. However, this is only because the fourth level of vulnerabilities hasn't been implemented yet. Because only the first two vulnerability levels can generate pre-broken, breaking the last two cores before the corresponding minors will still result in them becoming enemies.
Regarding customization options, I'll paste a short guide I wrote awhile back:

The questions go through each combination of two vulnerabilities (of which there are six) four times: once to increase both, once each to increase one and decrease the other, and once to decrease both. They're ordered like this:

1: +Morality, +Innocence
2: +Morality, +Confidence
3: +Morality, +Dignity
4: +Innocence, +Confidence
5: +Innocence, +Dignity
6: +Confidence, +Dignity
7: +Morality, -Innocence
8: +Morality, -Confidence
9: +Morality, -Dignity
10: +Innocence, -Confidence
11: +Innocence, -Dignity
12: +Confidence, -Dignity
13: -Morality, +Innocence
14: -Morality, +Confidence
15: -Morality, +Dignity
16: -Innocence, +Confidence
17: -Innocence, +Dignity
18: -Confidence, +Dignity
19: -Morality, -Innocence
20: -Morality, -Confidence
21: -Morality, -Dignity
22: -Innocence, -Confidence
23: -Innocence, -Dignity
24: -Confidence, -Dignity

 

[Seamonkey]

I must say that when I made my initial comments regarding this game being a resource management and puzzle game I feel I may not have adequately understood the strategic depth present in the game even now. The game has done something many others attempt but fail miserably at; getting the various systems to interact in intuitive matters that create interesting gameplay.

For example throughout the game you need to focus on how you are corrupting the chosen so as to achieve your goals but you must also consider the order in which you are corrupting them as the chosen becoming rivals gives greater benefits both in the battles themselves if they are subject to to the same finishers when surrounded. The process of becoming rivals also results in greater amounts of evil energy when the break events occur giving you more energy to play with for upgrades and commanders but this must be weighed against the fact that targeting minor vulnerabilities can be a quick and easy way of getting the chosen more corrupt and therefore getting the better end turn events which generate more energy quicker.

This helps to create a good short term versus long term gain conflict in strategy, while I don't doubt that if the game is around long enough someone will figure out an 'optimal' or 'right' answer to the problem the simple fact that the game has such varied strategies shows a far greater degree of strategic depth than most porn games and bodes well for the games potential.

 

[Seamonkey]

Yeah, this is on my list of "things that could deepen the game once the basic 50-day loop is established." I am torn on whether it should be something you pay energy to use, or whether you just know their patrol locations ahead of time and have to tailor your strategy around them.


The eventual plan is to add daily "vignettes" which occur at random and expand on the elements described in the characters' profiles. For example, if a girl's profile says "She's started casually sleeping around with her friends," one of the possible events at the end of the day would be a scene where she does just that. I do think it could make the corruption feel a lot more "real," but I want to finish the main 50-day sequence first.

First of all thank you for the prompt reply, it is good to hear that you intend to further expand the system with these vignettes as I feel that in corruption games like this one anything to expand upon the effects of the corruption can be beneficial so long as they don't damage gameplay.

On the idea by 05841035411 on patrol route ambushes I feel like I have some thoughts on how this could be implemented so as to enhance the strategic depth of the game as well as provide flavour. The fundamental thing I feel here is to ensure that the environment has a variety of effects/modifiers on how the battle plays out such as crowded streets taking long to evacuate and increasing humiliation while say an abandoned factory could have bonuses to increasing pain and injury, a way to integrate this into the upgrade system would be to have all chosen have a patrol route of several locations picked each day and initially when you attack a chosen you are completely unaware of there route and so just fight them at a random location amongst the ones they picked. With upgrades you could then have the player be aware of what potential locations the chosen will be at and then with further upgrades have them choose where on the route the ambush takes place to better exploit the environment. This could even culminate in 'trap' upgrades where they can be installed in specific locations in a manner similar to commander upgrades but give specific bonuses when fighting in that particular location.

I must also praise the wisdom of your desire to sort out and finish the basic gameplay loop before expanding the mechanics to much. To many games collapse under early feature bloat. All my suggestions are obviously intended for after you have that sorted.

 

[invalidcharacter]

CSdev I 100% get that you don't want people submitting pull requests, I am of the same mindset in my own projects; I was suggesting it purely for modding purposes, not for contributions to the master branch. It's your project, let us know if/when it goes open source!

 

[05841035411]

CSdev

So, I feel a bit awkward adding another idea after both you and a commenter talked about finishing the main gameplay loop before branching out, but... Well, I never did have any self-control when it came to new ideas, and I just finished reading a (non-hentai) manga about breaking magical girls that gave me one.

What do you think about "Strengthening" a vulnerability in addition to "breaking" them? The core idea would be that under certain circumstances, the Chosen respond to trauma by doubling down on their ethos. For Dignity, it could entail becoming a defiant symbol of hope even when half their body is crushed; for Confidence, taking full advantage of their inhuman bodies to transcend their physical limits; for Morality, a transcendent love that can break Thralldom. In short, becoming truly more than human.

Of course, that doesn't mean anything's necessarily better for them. Because becoming more than human is alienating in its own way, and something that most humans would steadily become more uneasy with - it might help with their trauma on the battlefield, but it's not something they can let go of once they're off the field, limiting their ability to deal with said trauma.

As for how I imagine it working in actual mechanical terms...

For the unlock conditions, I'd tie it to having a character's Significant Vulnerabilities being broken before their Core Vulnerabilities; of losing something deeply important to them without being completely broken by it. Or it could be the other way around, in trying to reclaim some meaning after having one's core broken. Or perhaps by having a second-level Vulnerability broken before their first-level Core vulnerability is broken? I think there's several options here that make sense.

Next, the actual "strengthening" event should require several days before it occurs; an opening event on the day of the unlock, involving the Chosen's search for a new resolve, and a second where she finds it. I think five days would be a good number for this.

As for the actual effects, it should reduce both Trauma and Circumstance damage within its category... By shunting it into another. Someone with Strengthened Confidence becomes a berserker who turns her Pain and Injury into Fear for those she's protecting and Hate for those who would do them harm; someone with Strengthened Morality becomes a martyr who turns her Fear and Hate into Shame for failing the thralls, and Exposure as she refuses to harm them despite the obvious danger she's in.

Or that's one idea, at least. It could also just reduce their damage, while granting them additional attacks with added drawbacks. It just sounds like an interesting defensive mechanism, to turn one form of trauma into another that you have an easier time accepting.

In either case, though, it should limit their post-battle stress relief; unlike how Chosen normally get more effective forms of stress relief as they grow more corrupted, a Strengthened Chosen ends up with completely ineffective ones - a Chosen who Strengthened their Morality, for instance, ends up spending her days magically healing casualties from the battle at the hospital, or feeding the hungry at soup kitchens. It helps heal her Angst, but doesn't do a thing to affect the underlying trauma that's building up at an alarming rate.

As for how her Vulnerability should work afterwards... Well, I have a couple ideas for that. The first is that she just keeps on doubling down over multiple stages until it's completely obvious that she's lost it, in a sort of "reverse track" for Breaking. For example, a Chosen obsessed with her dignity starts out just being a bit larger than life at the first stage - but as the rest of her life falls apart around her, she throws herself completely into the idea of being a hero, spending every waking moment desperately trying to help others with her powers, and eventually forgetting her civilian identity completely. The rest of the world starts out admiring her, but eventually come to find it creepy how she seemingly lacks any individual identity.

The second is to make it a setup for a "bigger" break - that it's treated as her second-level vulnerability to begin with, and if you succeed in traumatizing her sufficiently despite her newfound defenses, that she breaks down in a spectacular scene afterwards, possibly with lasting penalties for having taken the hard route.

And the third, simplest idea is just to leave it as-is. Let a hero be a hero, and let her scar tissue do its job in protecting her.

That said, I do wish there was a way to tie this into the Friend/Rival system, because I can easily imagine someone like this being a huge jerk to someone who doesn't live up to their trauma-inspired ideals...

Anyways, that's my latest idea; I hope you find it useful once you have the rest of the game together !

 

[quiboune]

My other relevant plan is to introduce Chosen who enter the game already in a relationship with an offscreen husband or wife. In this case, their morality break would be due to forced infidelity rather than virginity loss.

You could have Chosen that are in a relationship with an offscreen boyfriend or girlfriend, making their relationship a wholesome, chaste one, much like usual Magical Girls.
And because of this kind of setting, I beg you, allow us to interact with the chosen/other people out of battle. Being able to infiltrate their lives (the "new friend that is actually a villain" trope) to corrupt them from behind the scenes, corrupt those around them or simply go networking (perhaps making use of those human allies upgrade we can get) would make this game much more enjoyable. Networking could be used to get temporary upgrades that constantly use Evil Energy (fighting alone, no passive evacuation, this kind of thing) and, of course, have some events.
Also, please add more cheats. I like to buy all upgrades and only use Evil Energy I make, so a +10 Evil Energy cheat (or an easier way to do that) would be great, even better when you add more uses for EE.

 

[Wolvel]

its a solid game as is, cant wait to see how it develops.

 

[SqueeNoEvil]

I took a peek at the (decompiled) source for this, and I'd like to say CSdev, I admire your dedication! The way you manage personality types seems onerous to have to write, but you definitely get a lot of granularity for specific descriptions.

For everyone else: the base personalities of the girls aren't based on static archetypes. Their base personality is really 4 (kind of) hidden values: Morality, Innocence, Confidence, and Dignity. These appear to be numbers between 1 - 100 set at character generation, and correspond with how the FEAR/HATE, DISG/PLEA, PAIN/INJU, and SHAM/EXPO sliders are set. Basically all of the descriptive text is decided based on some combination of those values (often multiple at once!), usually based on if a stat is high, low, or in the middle. There's also sometimes differences between starting with a broken vulnerability, or getting one during game-play. So for the people asking earlier about trying to see all of the personalities, basically every meaningfully distinct set of character stats will give you a somewhat different personality.

Some suggestions though:

You might consider adding an optional 4th Chosen member to a playthrough. Right now team-members seem to restrict each other's personality types a lot to make sure there is always one Core/Minor vulnerability of each type. With 3 members, you always end up with one character having two Cores, and one character with 2 Minors. With 4 members, you could also do 1 Core/Minor each. If you wanted to keep combat balance the same, you could have only 3 of the chosen show up to any fight (the other is taking the night off, or their patrol route is to far away). I think some of your integer indices might get messed up from this though.

An optional Body Shift where males and futanari are rendered permanently flaccid. This would probably be from confidence break, with the character internalizing their submissiveness/powerlessness/impotence, and the psychic energy makes this physically true as well. The checks to keep them from being able to penetrate other Chosen wouldn't be that bad, but making variant text for all other mentions of character erections could be tedious.

Easier than above, an optional Body Shift to have futanari become female. Not sure if this would trigger on Inseminate like with males, or somewhere else. The work necessary should be comparable to the male Body Shift, but you'd probably want to include a check in the Fantasize code to make sure that ex-futanari don't just grow it back and get stuck in a loop switching between genders.

 

[quiboune]

An optional Body Shift where males and futanari are rendered permanently flaccid. This would probably be from confidence break, with the character internalizing their submissiveness/powerlessness/impotence, and the psychic energy makes this physically true as well. The checks to keep them from being able to penetrate other Chosen wouldn't be that bad, but making variant text for all other mentions of character erections could be tedious.

This, please. Having them shift into futas/females is too much, this "middle ground" would be perfect.

The whole body shift thing should, in my opinion, be locked behind some kind of manual input that, should the player choose to avoid with a certain Chosen, wouldn't lock their progression. Giving this ability to the special commanders is a nice idea.
The Pleasure commander, with its many tentacles and corrupting substances, could have a "Grow Dick" interaction available after certain conditions are met. Hate, some kind of feral demon, being able to permanently scar a Chosen into doubting their sexuality so much that they are never able to get it up again is fitting.