- Jun 7, 2017
- 203
- 145
Right... she's saying she has an image in her mind, and wants to see you actually do it. It's the pointer to the next thing to do.
Oh, okay. I get you now. I thought the other girl line was the clue, not that one. Makes more sense now.
- Sep 29, 2018
- 93
- 63
Not bad at all. Especially in its unfinished state. Everything could do with a bit of a polish, that's all.
Writing this post now I've had to sit and think on the game.
I do like it and enjoy replaying it trying different avenues of focus.
Going through some reviews; the story is there, the template of it. That story just needs to be fleshed out further and woven into the game.
Added to the watch list.
You don't have permission to view the spoiler content.
Log in or register now.
Writing this post now I've had to sit and think on the game.
I do like it and enjoy replaying it trying different avenues of focus.
Going through some reviews; the story is there, the template of it. That story just needs to be fleshed out further and woven into the game.
Added to the watch list.
- Jun 15, 2017
- 99
- 115
I like the new version; giving the different girls more individuality is a good direction to go in, I think. I notice that the code for preventing duplicate girls is not yet complete; some of the ways of getting girls (e.g. rocky hills) can offer you character classes you already have.
Played this quite a while ago but remember it rather well. One of the largest critiques I'd have is the addition of the scaling enemies. In previous builds prior to this scaling one could compensate by leveling past easy decimation from enemies. Now... you can be at a decent level, with say 20+ hp at the start of a fight, and have the character end up dead due to all four characters constantly missing while enemies easily tear through geared characters. Others also end up heavily wounded from the same encounter. Also, damage seems to rarely reflect increases in stats such as strength. That is a pretty heavy detraction from the 'dungeon' portion of the game. Along with combat being at the point of just spamming an attack key repeatedly as they constantly can't land a hit.
Yeah, RNG can be very punishing in this game, and the combat is already grindy. If this is supposed to be an anti-grind measure, I'm not sure if it's that successful.
Also this is just my preference, but I think the game would work better if there were less girls, but they each had a unique personality/storyline etc. Most of the girls you get are literally interchangeable, and even the NPC girls tend to blur a bit to me.
Also this is just my preference, but I think the game would work better if there were less girls, but they each had a unique personality/storyline etc. Most of the girls you get are literally interchangeable, and even the NPC girls tend to blur a bit to me.
- Jun 7, 2017
- 203
- 145
Not sure what you're talking about, but I'll look through the code and see what's leaking through. The code still supports *having* duplicate girls, so if there's a way players can get around it, I might leave it in, depending -- my intent in avoiding the duplicates was to give people the game experience most wanted, not to limit.
- Jun 7, 2017
- 203
- 145
Thank you for this feedback! I've gotten a few complaints about the scaling, and it's hard for me to know how to take them without knowing the play preferences of the people involved. With any of the games I've made, there are always people who think that *something* is "too hard," and this is partly because people want different things from games -- and in erotic games, some people just want to get to as many sex scenes as possible as fast as possible. In which case, if they are playing Damsels, they aren't going to be happy, and that's okay. But -- it's also very possible I over-did it, or that the scaling is not welcome at all. I've put a poll on my Patreon and hopefully subscribers will give me some clear feedback. I'll be happy to implement change; I just need a wider sample of opinion.
Maybe make scaling enemies optional? That way the ones who want a challenge can still get it, but the ones who just want to get to the next erotic scene, or just want to powergame, don't have to deal with it.
- Jun 15, 2017
- 99
- 115
I realize this isn't completely trivial, but personally I just take advantage of the fact that the game is in renpy, and the dev kindly doesn't even make me use unren, and edit the code to make whatever changes I want to the game's difficulty. Editing the daily update file so the girls get bonus xp based on what day it is with each daily update ensures they keep up with the scaling easily, and also lets girls acquired late catch up without going on adventures which scaling has made suicidally difficult for level 1 and 2s. Or I could have just found the scaling code and adjusted that, but the daily update code is easier to find and I like having the girls who are later additions be able to catch up a bit.
As I said, from previous builds I delved into prior to the scaling (around the time you also started and closed Strange Gift) the issue of early decimation could be written off as green recruits having their ass handed to them and be compensated for via leveling. If anything, the scaling brings the necessity of balancing the combat elements from what I've played of the 1.3 build. I suspect it was a minor issue until the scaling came into effect. It merely made what could be ignored or dismissed (via something of an understanding of n00b adventurers) into a far more visible situation.
As for want... well I tend to be a person that prefers a greater degree of balance for such things. Hopefully that helps.
If play style during combat will help, thus far I have performed a rotation of the Valk, Rogue, Enchanter/Priestess alternation, and Sorc for the party. Often I'm left with the Valk single attack. Alternation between Poison and the increased damage from setting up a stealth attack for the rogue. Enchanter is constantly charming or the Priestess only using the wand and healing as necessary. Large groups AOE'd to weaken opponents and quest upgraded fire for more precise shots. Granted, the last runs into mana issues if used too much, so conservation is used to try and keep a reserve. So hammering 1 for all with the entire encounter isn't done.
On another front I will say the scripting of characters is a nice change of pace. Previously when I did support I grew a bit bored with Damsels. Thus the addition of some meat in terms of extra story is a welcome change in between the main activity.
Hey Amarine -
Getting error with selecting the alternate to "facial" (swallow and the other which I forget...maybe cum inside?). Have to rollback and chose facial.
Getting error with selecting the alternate to "facial" (swallow and the other which I forget...maybe cum inside?). Have to rollback and chose facial.
- Apr 21, 2018
- 474
- 530
Scaling in RPG games are, imo, the worse game mechanic since reducing your carry weight limit then add more skills to increase it. And I'll write here the reasons why I think it is:
1. it defeats the point of a leveling systems, and robs the satisfaction of progression away from players.
2. it does not result in more interesting interactions, just longer and more repetitive ones.
3. it's actually harder to make it balanced.
Why? Because:
A. a leveling system exists because it's supposed to represent, in a RPG system, characters getting better at what they do. So I ask you, what do you a compare character's abilities to for references? Numbers on a screen or how they perform in the game? In older RPGs if a character was level 1 and gets killed by a level 10 Orc Marauder, you know why. If the same character got to level 15 you should be reasonably sure that that character now has the means it needs to beat that level 10 Orc.
With scaling, a level 1 player is only marginally better than a level 10 player because the mob it's up against is scaled to its level.
B. A natural result of A: the higher leveled the player character is, the higher the enemies' levels must be, is that it is actually worse for the players to have higher level characters. On higher levels, a player might have more tools, but the game most also account for those new tools. Oh you got this ability to do 10 damage to all enemies and has a 3 turn CD? I guess I'll just have to multiply the enemy hp by 3 to compensate -- well I guess but it also makes that ability pointless, odds are at that point straight up attacks are better. Nothing new happens, just the same old thing, but now, you gotta deal 3x the damage.
C. A natural deduction from B is that, balancing a game is more than just playing with scalars. This is especially true when a game has, say, 18 classes each with different abilities. I've seen no game doing it right -- not even witcher where shit got annoying beyond lv.50 and only one or two builds are viable anymore because some monsters can now one-two shot Geralt whereas they couldn't before.
Solutions? Why, it's never easier:
Just add new, stronger enemy types with new abilities into encounters according player party level.
I. It solves A because it does not entirely remove low level grunts, something higher level character can probably defeat easily, and it makes leveling up low level characters possible without them dying to high level enemies late-game.
II. It solves B because now there are new and fresh things in an encounter. For example, in a specific encounter in say, a orcoid-infested forest, instead of having a 50% chance to face 3 lv.3 goblins and 1 lv.5 goblin chief at party level 4-15, or whatever, there is now a 33.3% chance for a group of 2 lv.3 goblin, 2 lv.10 Orcs at party level 24 (with the other one also 1/3 chances of happening). Say at party lv.60, you have a small chance of facing 2 lv.10 Orcs, 1 lv.20 Orc Shaman and 1 lv.25 Orc Warchief. Look, it's almost as if you are fighting a mini-boss battle in a random encounter now.
III. Now there are no scalars to worry about. Sure it's not a sure thing. But you can be reasonably sure that every single enemy is exactly how you want them to be regardless of player character levels. It may seem more work, but it's actually less to deal with because things don't have a million different states due to changes in the scalars.
This is the method most old RPG games used. And to this day, games like Dark Souls (NG) and Darkest Dungeons still use it. Because it's deceptively simple to balance. And it really just takes 1 or maybe 2 new behaviors for a stronger version of an enemy type to make it work, the rest is just static numbers tweaking.
What duh? Sounds like headaches:
Not really. A table is often enough for this sort of thing.
[[type_1_mobs_1, type_1_mobs_2, type_1_mobs_3, ...],
[type_2_mob_1, type_2_mob_2, type_2_mob_3, ...],
[type_3_mob_1, ...],
...]
And just have a switch statement to random.choice a group from a row on the table based on party levels.
There's also what I know as the "Yahtzee method". Basically have a list of enemies for a biome/dungeon/room/etc.. Mod the party level by a constant, say 5, so it will take 5 whole levels for encounters to change. Select from the range [party_level //5 + 3] so only enemies from index 1 to index 4 are encountered for a given level. You loss old enemy encounters later on but as long as you pad the list out with duplicates properly (to avoid out of bound errors, you'll also need a hard level cap) you void having to populate a mess of a table.
Holy shit, that's a shit load. But I just gotta say I don't hate balance in games, I just really, really hate enemy scaling as a mechanic. It seems like a magical band-aid, but it really isn't. It's at best a plaster to cover up the underlying ugliness of the inherent disconnect between leveling mechanics and challenge in games.
1. it defeats the point of a leveling systems, and robs the satisfaction of progression away from players.
2. it does not result in more interesting interactions, just longer and more repetitive ones.
3. it's actually harder to make it balanced.
Why? Because:
A. a leveling system exists because it's supposed to represent, in a RPG system, characters getting better at what they do. So I ask you, what do you a compare character's abilities to for references? Numbers on a screen or how they perform in the game? In older RPGs if a character was level 1 and gets killed by a level 10 Orc Marauder, you know why. If the same character got to level 15 you should be reasonably sure that that character now has the means it needs to beat that level 10 Orc.
With scaling, a level 1 player is only marginally better than a level 10 player because the mob it's up against is scaled to its level.
B. A natural result of A: the higher leveled the player character is, the higher the enemies' levels must be, is that it is actually worse for the players to have higher level characters. On higher levels, a player might have more tools, but the game most also account for those new tools. Oh you got this ability to do 10 damage to all enemies and has a 3 turn CD? I guess I'll just have to multiply the enemy hp by 3 to compensate -- well I guess but it also makes that ability pointless, odds are at that point straight up attacks are better. Nothing new happens, just the same old thing, but now, you gotta deal 3x the damage.
C. A natural deduction from B is that, balancing a game is more than just playing with scalars. This is especially true when a game has, say, 18 classes each with different abilities. I've seen no game doing it right -- not even witcher where shit got annoying beyond lv.50 and only one or two builds are viable anymore because some monsters can now one-two shot Geralt whereas they couldn't before.
Solutions? Why, it's never easier:
Just add new, stronger enemy types with new abilities into encounters according player party level.
I. It solves A because it does not entirely remove low level grunts, something higher level character can probably defeat easily, and it makes leveling up low level characters possible without them dying to high level enemies late-game.
II. It solves B because now there are new and fresh things in an encounter. For example, in a specific encounter in say, a orcoid-infested forest, instead of having a 50% chance to face 3 lv.3 goblins and 1 lv.5 goblin chief at party level 4-15, or whatever, there is now a 33.3% chance for a group of 2 lv.3 goblin, 2 lv.10 Orcs at party level 24 (with the other one also 1/3 chances of happening). Say at party lv.60, you have a small chance of facing 2 lv.10 Orcs, 1 lv.20 Orc Shaman and 1 lv.25 Orc Warchief. Look, it's almost as if you are fighting a mini-boss battle in a random encounter now.
III. Now there are no scalars to worry about. Sure it's not a sure thing. But you can be reasonably sure that every single enemy is exactly how you want them to be regardless of player character levels. It may seem more work, but it's actually less to deal with because things don't have a million different states due to changes in the scalars.
This is the method most old RPG games used. And to this day, games like Dark Souls (NG) and Darkest Dungeons still use it. Because it's deceptively simple to balance. And it really just takes 1 or maybe 2 new behaviors for a stronger version of an enemy type to make it work, the rest is just static numbers tweaking.
What duh? Sounds like headaches:
Not really. A table is often enough for this sort of thing.
[[type_1_mobs_1, type_1_mobs_2, type_1_mobs_3, ...],
[type_2_mob_1, type_2_mob_2, type_2_mob_3, ...],
[type_3_mob_1, ...],
...]
And just have a switch statement to random.choice a group from a row on the table based on party levels.
There's also what I know as the "Yahtzee method". Basically have a list of enemies for a biome/dungeon/room/etc.. Mod the party level by a constant, say 5, so it will take 5 whole levels for encounters to change. Select from the range [party_level //5 + 3] so only enemies from index 1 to index 4 are encountered for a given level. You loss old enemy encounters later on but as long as you pad the list out with duplicates properly (to avoid out of bound errors, you'll also need a hard level cap) you void having to populate a mess of a table.
Holy shit, that's a shit load. But I just gotta say I don't hate balance in games, I just really, really hate enemy scaling as a mechanic. It seems like a magical band-aid, but it really isn't. It's at best a plaster to cover up the underlying ugliness of the inherent disconnect between leveling mechanics and challenge in games.
Last edited:
Just installed the game for my Android. It said to choose 4 girl i did that. Now it shows me a castle map on which no matter where i clock or tap nothing happens can someone tell me how should i play the game?
- Jun 7, 2017
- 203
- 145
@deviantfiend999
I agree with you. I hate the way scaling is done in most games, and the way it makes leveling pointless. The idea that at level 5 I fight an orc, and then at level 15 I fight the same orc and it's exactly as hard, drives me nuts. Back in classic WoW, I used to really enjoy stopping by Morbent Fel and killing him (once I was 60) just because I was passing through, because that mob killed me sooooo many times leveling up. Leveling should mean something.
And so, I don't even like the idea of having different tables by level -- the names of the monsters might be changed, but the effect is the same, right? You got to be higher level, the monsters are harder as a result, and you got no where, except to get different names for the monsters.
But, in any case, this is based on a misconception about scaling in Damsels. The monsters don't get tougher in response to party level -- they get tougher in response to turns played -- and not as fast as your first characters do. The good news there is that progress is real -- and necessary. The bad news is that if you want to start a whole new group of adventurers on day 120, the game is a lot tougher for them than it was when you started out. They also don't get infinitely tougher forever -- most, if not all of the scaling, tops out, so you can catch up again.
TLDR; Yes, scaling by level sucks and robs the satisfaction of progression. But that's not what happens in Damsels.
- Jun 7, 2017
- 203
- 145
- Jun 7, 2017
- 203
- 145
Normally the best opening move is to click on "Adventure" but it sounds like you've tried that. I don't release an official Android version, so if there's something wrong with the Android version, I can't help you.