- Oct 28, 2017
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Java Corrupted Saviors [Release 58] [CSDev]
- May 9, 2020
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I'm not sure if I'm missing some little detail, but I keep being routed at about 60 - 70% extermination and I have no idea what's happening. This is on my first go around after the tutorial, and there's nothing in the text that I can recognize as explaining why.
Keep your eyes on that line after filled part of extermination progress bar - it is showing how much damage girls expecting to do on their turn. If double (full) part of line goes to the very end - they will kill everyone and finish battle. And remember that once evacuation is complete, a girl getting out of surrounding/capture will get a free attack.
First thing that jumps to the eyes is that every added feature/mechanic which involves active gameplay adds a layer of complexity to the game, further requiring text/guides to ensure the player knows what does what, thus comes verbosity the first problem and two, intended vs actual feature texts.
the first one, verbosity, is extermely time consuming, but the reward of it will be fewer questions to answer and increasing the accessibility to new players. i doubt if i joined the train at version 35 i would have wanted to play this game, because games like cataclysm dark days ahead or ostraunauts have the same infuriating (my opinion) gimmick of dropping the player in the middle of a humongous amount of features, which are extremely customizable. These games are: figure shit out on your own via trials and errors. so whats good about those games? Immersion. kinda like project zomboid too. the point IS figuring shit out to simulate realism.
Your game, like CDDA, is unique in how the player interacts with not only npcs, but the program itself.
So, you lack the immersion of those games, the players lack any prior knowledge of similar games so they need to read the instructions first, and finally, the entire game is pointed toward optimisation by the player via pressure of time limit, timed event and limited ressources.
Therefore, it is important that the guides and such be short, compact, straight to the point.
If only your game had loading screens, you could just shove a whole lot of those tips in them, you already do it a bit, but maybe having a lil imp secretary whose purpose is to spew some more fact INSIDE the game and not in a file outside it COULD bring more immersion and less ikea instruction like mechanics to new players.
Another solution would be to hire volunteers or pay for people to make your texts compact and straight to the point, unless you wish to spend some time doing it, time you could want to spend adding more features/bugfixes.
which brings me to my second point, intended vs actual feature texts.
In your guide, there are a lot of things you added that the player can figure out by themselves, like the toggle off graphic violence or: "The main challenge of this game is identifying which strategies will work best against the set of personalities for the current playthrough[...]
You can make some guesses about what the target is vulnerable to depending on what sort of personality she seems to have."
I feel like you mixed-in tutorial and walktrough information in your guide. By answering every questions, people become despondant and stop searching for that one answer for their one question they had.
My advice for you would be to open up the game, and imagine like you know nothing about it. inspect and examine the options: Single play, campaign, load game, import, tutorial, options, customize, scenes, about.
Note what becomes obvious for the player, and then remove it from the guide.
The second advice would be for you to open up the guide after having removed the redundant feature, and think: what part of it is telling and what should be showing instead.
I could go in detail about the difference between showing and telling, but i'll use your in game text to speed up the process
Prophet is pushed onto her hands and knees and then pelted with garbage while the watching Thralls laugh and cheer. Several of the Thralls
Prophet just tries to stay calm and present a brave face.
First Time Reaching 1000 HATE
The Thralls have torn open Prophet's wife-beater so that she needs to devote one hand to keeping everything covered. She frowns with exertion and anger.
The most flagrant example is this one:
Prophet just tries to stay calm and present a brave face.
If we are meant to roleplay as the BBEG of the world, going back and forth between witnessing the effects of our actions and being told by EL mighty NARRATOR what is happening feels odd.
a more showy way to rewrite it all would be:
Prophet is pushed onto her hands and knees and then pelted with garbage while the watching Thralls laugh and cheer. Aroused by the situation, several of the Thralls hastily plunge their hands into their pants to stroke their aching needs. Prophet can only glare into the ground as she hears their lewd comments. Some others prefer to tickle her, greatly enjoying the way she fails to remain stoic, flinching and squirming under the assault.
Prophet tries to stay calm and present a brave face as she hopes for the abuse to come to an end shortly.
First Time Reaching 1000 HATE
Prophet always tought of the greater good, finding in it the strenght and resolve necessary to fight you and your thralls. Her blind devotion to do what she has been told was good shielded her from acknowledging that evil lies within everyone, yet her struggle against you has got her wondering. Could it be that some people aren't worth saving? Isn't it unfair how she has to make the most sacrifice while everyone else reap the benefits?
She shakes those toughts out of her head, as she heads back into the fray... but they aren't going anywhere.
So now comes the advice: what part of it is telling and what should be showing instead.
obviously, it is hard to SHOW anything in a GUIDE. but maybe... that's just it. If you feel like a part of your guide would work great in a showy manner, maybe find a way to add it into the game instead.
So there you go, I hope you find something interesting in this post.
- Oct 28, 2017
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One thing I want to point out is that few good games have no Tutorial. But most good games do have tutorials that integrate seamlessly into the gameplay. Take Mario's World 1-1 from Super Mario - You're not given any explicit onscreen instructions nor a level that's clearly and obviously about teaching you to do things, but it does go through the basic features with you in a way that meshes with the rest of the game.
Something that may be worth putting proper thought towards is figuring out what your "first goomba" is. In Mario that first goomba is a check to make sure you know how to jump. There's no way to get past it without pressing the A button. And because of how Mario works dying to the goomba even repeatedly isn't a terrible loss, because you just respawn at the start of World 1-1 regardless. So the game teaches you how to jump (and with block placement, teaches you about the question blocks too) without the need for an explicit tutorial.
I think for a game as complicated as CS you need a tutorial, but keeping it in a text file - the manual, basically - is probably not the optimal way to handle that. Tricking the player into wanting to go where you want them to go is the best way to do it. Maybe make the first enemy of the campaign a lone meguca who's really weak, paint the campaign button purple to draw the player's eye to it. Then you can tweak the opening meguca to sort of imply a proper, beginner strategy for corruption, without needing to explicitly write out tutorial text. The Manual is really a place for lore dumps, not tutorials.
Something that may be worth putting proper thought towards is figuring out what your "first goomba" is. In Mario that first goomba is a check to make sure you know how to jump. There's no way to get past it without pressing the A button. And because of how Mario works dying to the goomba even repeatedly isn't a terrible loss, because you just respawn at the start of World 1-1 regardless. So the game teaches you how to jump (and with block placement, teaches you about the question blocks too) without the need for an explicit tutorial.
I think for a game as complicated as CS you need a tutorial, but keeping it in a text file - the manual, basically - is probably not the optimal way to handle that. Tricking the player into wanting to go where you want them to go is the best way to do it. Maybe make the first enemy of the campaign a lone meguca who's really weak, paint the campaign button purple to draw the player's eye to it. Then you can tweak the opening meguca to sort of imply a proper, beginner strategy for corruption, without needing to explicitly write out tutorial text. The Manual is really a place for lore dumps, not tutorials.
- May 9, 2020
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This in particular is what I think this game needs. The thing I'm struggling with the most after 50-some-odd failed runs (30+ days, trauma in the 10K's, and no broken vulnerabilities at all in any of them
) is figuring out what to look for to formulate a strategy. What are the "tells" that I need to be on guard for, what are the ones that are particularly weak, etc. What team combos would be more effective for a Injury, Hatred, or Exposure first strategy? What kind of things do I need to do to push my damage into the 10k's and beyond? What upgrades are safe to ignore early/mid/late game? How do I get more than 14 turns in a battle because that's the best I can manage even using the strategy of someone else on this board.You don't have permission to view the spoiler content.
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Uh, this became more like a rant, but ultimately I just want to say I want this game/tutorial to show me how to do the homework, not to resort to just copying someone else's homework.
I disagree, the purpose of the guide is explicite, it is a guide.
SURE, a standalone Annals of Evil Deeds or something COULD be great, but this is not a fnaf/hello neighboor type of games. You don't hide clues of what is going on outside or too deep for the people to figure it all out.
As of now, imo, the game is a dark power fantasy, without the pejorative undertone, MIXED with a puzzle optimisation structure.
I feel a great way to add more lore to the game would be via gameplay elements.
the problem being, what disadvantages is there to maximise everything and break every characters T4 at day 40? i know there are some content where the chosen can escape and then you attack them with some you've captured on another loop.
but is that the only disadvantage there is to maximising, losing content? there's already so many incentive to optimize, there are no incentive other than content to slow down.
- Oct 28, 2017
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Not trying to say not to put lore in the game. Lore should always be part of the game.
What I'm saying is, the manual is the place to put lore dumps about stuff that doesn't come up in the game. In the Halo booklets they had little snippets of the UNSC's impressions on Unggoy society, or the lore explaination for why plasma weapons couldn't be reloaded. That stuff would be heavyhanded to work directly into the game, but it's fine as a manual. With Might and Magic, the manual was actually a full size lore book which was really cool and actually fun to read.
The kind of game really doesn't matter here. Unless you're doing some indie arthouse stuff, your game has lore and it has mechanics. How much is in the manual and how much is in the game depends on specifics for that particular game. But a tutorial definitely doesn't belong in something a new player isn't going to read until they're already frustrated.
- Mar 4, 2021
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- Mar 4, 2021
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I get that im supposed to get their weaknesses up and waht not but I can never get them high enough to actually start like breaking them. Do I start with significant or core? How do I get there efficiently? how do i make them fight each other/hate each other etc
The way I do it is:
At the start make a quick surround on some other girl for 1 level of EXPO.
Use commander/Surround target to rise a level of HATE and INJU.
After that I usually have enough multipliers to get bigger numbers. And of course it helps to have some ANGST, especially for core vulnerabilities. Though later on it is really easy to accidentally get a break in something you did not meant to.
Its going to differ for different chosen and different teams of chosen, but I generally think its best to break significant vulnerabilities first. Generally when you surround a chosen you want to inflict hate (better multipliers to circumstance damage and more trauma, making it easier to surround them more in the future), pleasure (more trauma, making it easier to surround them more in the future) and injury (better circumstance multipliers). The last time you surround a chosen it is better to focus on hate and injury. Because of this I find it easiest to break chosen who take more circumstance damage of those three types, especially hate and injury.
- Oct 28, 2017
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Like others have pointed out, focus on weaknesses and focus on EXPO, HATE, and INJU/TICK first where you can. EXPO helps you bring down the other girls while HATE and INJU give stacking multipliers on the girl who's downed.
You can spend a couple turns building up a longer surround if you want, but don't let it go too long. Optimally - and impossibly - you want the whole team downed for 98% of the fight. More realistically, your first down is going to be 4 turns or less, even with all the upgrades in the world.
Remember also that ANGST has a small multiplicative effect on the regular, non-surround damage types too. Early game you can't spike those high enough to make a real noticable difference, but it is a thing once you can get some cascading surrounds going. EXPO is helpful but mostly meaningless for the girl the surround is on, so it's better focused on a girl you don't care about - if you're aiming for a specific meguca you can start the fight on a *different* girl and load her up with EXPO as a strategy.
HATE is, as far as I can tell, almost unilaterally better than INJU by a smidge, but they do work in conjunction so get both if you're not going for Temptation. Spike them hard if you can.
PLEA is a weird duck in that it multiplies the regular damage types. Doesn't seem that useful on the surface but it does help with landing much longer surrounds. I usually go for it last, but it can be very valuable in the right situations, so don't discount it.
You can spend a couple turns building up a longer surround if you want, but don't let it go too long. Optimally - and impossibly - you want the whole team downed for 98% of the fight. More realistically, your first down is going to be 4 turns or less, even with all the upgrades in the world.
Remember also that ANGST has a small multiplicative effect on the regular, non-surround damage types too. Early game you can't spike those high enough to make a real noticable difference, but it is a thing once you can get some cascading surrounds going. EXPO is helpful but mostly meaningless for the girl the surround is on, so it's better focused on a girl you don't care about - if you're aiming for a specific meguca you can start the fight on a *different* girl and load her up with EXPO as a strategy.
HATE is, as far as I can tell, almost unilaterally better than INJU by a smidge, but they do work in conjunction so get both if you're not going for Temptation. Spike them hard if you can.
PLEA is a weird duck in that it multiplies the regular damage types. Doesn't seem that useful on the surface but it does help with landing much longer surrounds. I usually go for it last, but it can be very valuable in the right situations, so don't discount it.
- Mar 4, 2021
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whole team downed for 98% of the fight? sheesh i can only ever down one. Should I focus on one of them or all of them and alternate? should i focus on expo, hate, inju/tick
