Honestly, at the rate you're adding companions, I'm worried that you might be going for breadth over depth. Personally, I'd prefer fewer companions with more detail, than many companions without much going on. Apart from that, loving this so far
I've done plenty of large-scale writing before but never in the framework of a game/harem. So I'll freely admit that there is a very real chance I'll fuck up along the way.
That said, so far existing characters have been getting scenes pretty regularly and I absolutely have a LOT more development planned for them. We'll see as we go into the future how new characters are handled, there are plenty you'll run into that won't join you but can still be lewded. Ex. Badon will have a brothel with a number of one-shot monstergirls to bang without them joining you, and the mountain areas will have some waifus, but some lewdable characters that are happy living there and won't leave.
Finding a good balance between those to portray the depth of the characters I want to develop, while still having a much wider variety of bangable girls to appeal to a wide variety of fetishes and preferences, is a tightrope I will have to walk while listening closely to feedback on to see if people feel a character is getting ignored or forgotten and try to balance things out.
So I decided to give this game a try, after being a bit hesitant for a while. Mostly just wasn't super impressed at the screenshots at first, but... the patch notes mentioning 'sex battle', made me interested, since there isn't a lot of English battlefuck.
I'll admit though, I had more fun then I expected, even if it took a while to find that content. With the lust bar in battle, I thought there might be more of it in normal battles, but it might just be a UI thing.
The writing took a bit for me to get used to, but I got that it's just how the 'canon' character Astaroth is meant to think, and is just different from what I'm used to.
There are certainly a lot of companions, and I was pretty pleasantly surprised that I find myself liking them all, more or less. Which does present an issue in thinking of how I want to use them all, but you only get a single partner at a time. It is not a bad problem to have, but it makes me wish I could bring more of them along! I can't even really say who is my 'favorite' yet, since they all seem fairly interesting and nicely designed.
About the only bit of the tutorial I find a bit... weird, is the actual sex battle. Mainly because its the least introduced, and just kind of arrives. While it has a fairly logical in-game reason to exist, its more just it seems weird the protagonist knows about it, and it never gets brought up. Following normal H-game logic, I just thought the option to say, ask for sex from the slime, was to just get an H-scene!
Speaking of that, she seems to be the only case of permamently missable content I've seen (beyond the tutorial's one-off scenes, as it mentions), since she doesn't seem to be interactable at the Camp and thus you can only do her sex battle once... unless it just shows up much later, as I only hit the third area.
Combat isn't bad, but this River Slimes can be super annoying as you can get stuck in very long healing spam circles. It may have been better if I played warrior or spellsword, not sure...
Screenshots are in desperate need of being completely redone, especially as art starts showing up. You're 100% right on that lol.
Glad you liked the characters, they're definitely intended to be the main draw.
MC did assume they were just going to fuck, Aspasia being a weirdo took that as 'oh it's sex battle time!' Sex battles are generally KNOWN in setting, but not really common in Hieroneiden since a lot of the more conservative/church elements view it as savagery barely above bestiality.
BTW, sex battles just got a major rework for the newest character (Maya), Aspasia's isn't repeatable yet since I wanted to get feedback on the new one before updating hers to be more varied.
That said, Aspasia will get a repeatable sex battle within a month almost for sure, so don't worry about permanently missable stuff like that. This 2-week update schedule has its strengths, but also leads to me having to prioritize things more harshly at times. The plan is to get her basic convos done next update and sex battle the next.
River Slimes are obnoxious little shits for sure. I'm not sure yet if that's a good thing or a bad one. I might remove the heal spell, the regen is perfect on them though.
---
Thank you both very much for the frank feedback, constructive criticism is incredibly helpful! I definitely appreciate concerns being brought up, it helps me see what I'm missing.