Unity - Abandoned - Delivery Pilot Dreams and Debts [v0.8] [Acac]

So much clicking for nothing...just some harassment scene there and there, need to do the same action again and again and again to put less dress on the station or have some makeup...this game feel like working, if it was the intention, good job but not really enjoyable on the other hand. Did i talk about the clicking ?

Most of the other reviews have felt the same way, but their rating left me thinking that there was enough of a game to be enjoyed here anyway. There is not. It's a shame, because the game description made it seem like it could be interesting.

There's no real player engagement, no challenge, no satisfying game loops. Just clicking. I found myself not even looking at the rest of the screen, just focusing on how to efficiently move my mouse from where I click "Skip dialogue" (because the dialogue never changes) and "finish dialogue".
It's the kind of game you'd expect someone to make as a high school project; It's functional, but not enjoyable.

So, a longer commentary:

There's the seed of a really good game here, but unfortunately it's being dragged under by a lot of the design choices.

The dev has noted that he wants players to "feel the tedium". This is not a laudable goal, but it is achieved. The problem is that tedium is the exact opposite of excitement/arousal.

I should note that I really like the concept, and some of the scenes that happen are hot--the problem is that they're spaced out between a lot of drudgery that kills any sort of momentum or build.

The basic premise: You are a new ship captain who, as is traditional, has started with an amount of debt that might be considered unwise. Thankfully, your respectable lending institution loan shark is pretty chill, and will allow you two missed payments before repo'ing your ship and causing a gameover. Fairly standard debt mechanics there.

So, your standard gameplay loop:

1. Wake up in your ship.
2. Go to the officer's quarters. *
3. Introduce yourself to any you haven't yet. This step has no actual purpose, and is really annoying.
4. Ask them if they have jobs for you. *
5. Decide if you want to do any of those jobs.
6. If you decided you want to do a job, go to the cargo hold to make sure your cargo gets loaded. *
7. Fly to the destination.
8. Check to make sure your cargo gets unloaded. *
9. Go to the living quarters afterwards to do something to regain morale. *
10. Sleep.

* points note areas where you may get harassed.

Now, the interface for this is clunky to the point where it seems to be intentionally so. In fact, the Dev suggests a couple of times that this is in fact intentional. If so, this is a very bad decision by the dev. A couple of the key interface pain points:

1. You have to click 'next' through dialog until the end, but then you have to click 'finish' to get through it. If it's going to make me take 50 clicks to get through each day cycle (and a game is like 300 days long), it could at least have me able to click through them without having to click multiple places.

2. A ton of unnecessary 'stops' and false choices. After you land with cargo, you can wander a bunch of places--but you can't do anything in any of them except get reminded to go unload the cargo. The game would be much improved by having just a "mission sequence" that takes you through loading, flying to the next destination, and unloading. The game is based around a bunch of virtual 'locations', but each of these locations is single-purpose and basically used for little parts of the gameplay loop. Streamlining here would be incredibly useful.

3. A ton of unnecessary clicking. To get your work for the day you have to cycle through each officer present at the base (four), and go through the 'ask for work' sequence. In part this is so they can harass you, but it introduces a huge volume of clicking through and menus. This could easily be reworked to have it bring up their work options when you highlight them (and trigger any harassment at the same time), but that's not how it works now.

The graphics are decent. They won't necessarily wow you, but they're enough to convey things, and they don't detract.

Another major gameplay element is having to accept obligations in order to move up and get better deals, access to better officers, and so forth. There is no way around doing this, because otherwise you will just straight up lose in the face of the debt obligations.

Music and sound effect options are on/off. No volume controls. This should be fixed too.

Progression of the obligations (which is the source of the increasing kink content in the game) is a slow burn--agonizingly slow. In fact, only a fraction of the apparently planned obligations are in the game right now, but you can quite easily finish the game before hitting all of them in _any_ station.

Balancing is basically a tension between two factors--you need to make money, and you need to not run out of morale and decide that you'd rather space yourself or live in the woods growing turnips than continue your adventures as a starship captain/sexual harassment victim. This is actually pretty well balanced, overall. As you start to make more money you face the countervailing issue of having to do more stuff that stresses you out, requiring you to take more days off.

All in all, it's a really good concept and the acorn of a really good game. What really holds it back is all the inertia that impedes the actual gameplay.

If the dev doesn't fix that, someone should absolutely poach this concept to make a better version.

Delivery Pilot Dreams and Debts is a time management game in which you play as a delivery pilot seeking to pay off her cargo ship.

It's a cool game in theory. You basically interact with officers to pick up shipments and then take them to their locations. Not sexy on the cover, sure, but as you get to know the officers better you can make deals with them for better pay. These deals generally involve the protagonist losing clothes or allowing a little groping while she's at their station.

The art is good enough, but currently the game is both too repetitive and shallow to be worthwhile. Currently deliveries and time off are the only mechanics in the game, and both involve clicking rather than thinking. You generally just choose the largest number while playing to your traits.

That said, I actually like the core loop and I feel like the game is salvageable with further patches. Either the game needs to accelerate with fewer, larger payments and quicker corruption, or you need the option to spend your money for better quality of life while risking missing your debt deadline. For instance, the player could buy better ship amenities for passive morale gain or purchase a guild license at each port to make more money per delivery. I feel like more choices would improve the game.

Also, I'd personally like to see more of a corruption arc. The current game is really just a sexual harassment simulator rather than a sex game really. While the protagonist slowly loses clothes and allows some groping, she never enjoys it. While this makes perfect sense, it's not really sexy. I'd like to see the protagonist come to enjoy the harassment over time, changing her responses to be less repulsed and more aroused or at least unimpressed.

Anyway, while I generally enjoyed the game, Delivery Pilot Dreams and Debts is currently grindy and not very sexy at all. However, it's a very cool concept that could really end up fun if the patches push it in the right direction.

This game is kinda neat, nice idea with good execution, but there are some issues that prevents it from being enjoyable:
- grind, your goal is to get missions from higher ranked officers, for that you need to do 3 missions each for two of his underlings, the issue is that they are randomly spread across the stations and it would be completely fine if there were 5-6 of them, but there was 10 of them that I've found and who knows how many more on the map
- grind, you have to click 5-10 times to do anything and at least 50% of these clicks are just the dev oversight on not removing them, example: in the evening you go to the entertainment district, you can select the location inside it, but you can't avoid it so why not put the player already in that district? Going there manually every in-game day is tiring and there are many things like this.
- grind, after playing this game for quite some time the only events I've seen were groping and cat calls, the progression was minimal

The core idea and framework looks really good, but the issues I've mentioned ealier make the whole experience just tiring after some time. If the amount of clicks was fixed I would rate it 4/5, if it was fixed and the game was full of content I would rate it 5/5, but for now it is what it is.

Pro:
I enjoyed the art style and the game feels as though it is made by a professional programmer. This has a professional polish despite the genre.

Con:
The game quickly falls into repetitive mechanical action. The game does not have an antagonist, acts, or otherwise any plot points that are meaningful to the player. This may be intentional as part of the genre.

Overall 4/5. Version 0.6 game feels complete as it is and is one of the better games on the site in its current state.