I have to admit it took me embarassingly long to think of Warhammer when reading this.
But, I failed to comment on it at the time, but I am very fond of you mentioning Galantyne Sauce.
I've tried it oncy after Tasting History. You even went as far as to remind people of the ingredients. ^^
I think one potential issue might be the repeatability and as of yet limited choice of night events.
If the only thing I can do at night is sleep with one of two succubus, and even repeating events I've already seen grants me the full amount of affection, I'll end up with a lot of affection for those characters, without really doing a lot for it.
I'm sure this will be alleviated in the future when there's more options with more characters, butmaybe it's also possible to halve the amount you get on repeat events?
Assuming there's no way to lower affection planned.
Also, I've found that, when gaining trust through adventure, there might be some rounding error.
I've never had this issue with flut numbers, but when a character had "2.0" Trust, in two of three cases, I couldn't actually click their Trust:2 events until I got another bit of trust, bringing me to 2.2. Edit: And then Celica has this: View attachment 3180088
I think I would very much like a bit more guidance on event unlocks, as I actually tried actively to pace myself - spread attention to all characters, grind a little bit, then went on when I assumed now it would make sense from a progression point of view.
If I was able to just assume everything will be fine, that would make the game more pleasant.
Though this is mostly relevant at the very beginning (thestep from strangers to friends) and near the end, in between it's probably a lot less noticable.
It's definitely possible to lower repeat T/A. It's funny, my initial goal was to make the game as not-grindy as possible, but I get more complaints about that than any grind that is there. Balance is hard.
The rounding error is actually Python floats being awful in every possible way, there's no real way to fix it aside from moving solely to integers, but I can mostly fix it by forcibly rounding displays to 1 decimal place. Fixed for next update.
Not sure how I feel about how having multiple channels increases the initial cost, but maybe I just like the idea of being op too much.
Maybe add a trait that slightly decreases the increase?
Channels are definitely getting revamped to be simpler, and will lose that scaling thing entirely. Been trying to work thru the details on discord/patreon, most of the way there, but will not be in the upcoming update cuz I'm gonna have to change a lot.
A small other thing before I eventually forget it:
I acknowledge the combat is far from done, so noting how some equipment has more or less abilities available to them might be moot.
But looking at the choices, there's a lot of them. And I've found that they are frequently not quite as mechanically different as they ought to be given the amount of choices.
Meaning, I'll generally pick a half dozen or so and stick with them.
Thing is, usually depending on the traits picked, this is an academic choice. I'll have some abilities that mesh well together, and then I'll just keep using them because there is no case where there'd be a different but similar ability that makes more sense.
This may of course organically happen once we command multiple schools of magic (if we go that route) and may have to circumnavigate resistances etc., but so far, I basically use 10 abilities, and the ability points slowly pile up because even if something else could be interesting, there's no time to use them.
Which brings me to the second point:
There's potentially a nice range of neat buffs, but unless we combine those with a strong disabler helped by traits, and our companion provides sufficient distraction for us (which we have no real control over), we'll never use more than 2 (non-instant)buff abilities at once. Which will probably always be the same buff abilities.
I don't have a great solution there, as this is at the core of many turn-based systems, but most of them don't offer this breadth of choice.
I doubt we'll get into a position to even seriously consider 90% of traits in a single playthrough, while at the same time, abilities are gated by a resource we have no control over: Turns.
Could you give some examples of weapons/elements that you think suffer worst from a lack of choice, and some that you think do a better job of it? I've been trying to improve that over time, compared the start of the game when everything just had 4 super basic attacks.
Ability points stacking up is an issue I'm just not sure how to fix; even if I make every single Greataxe ability good, that's still at most 10-12 AP, and then a greataxe main is just... done interacting with that system.
I personally think that the biggest design mistake I've made is increasing TP from every 5 levels to 3, and adding so many since then. Zero chance of people EVER getting more TP income.
I really enjoyed the story so far, even the gameplay and combat system weirdly enough, despite me usually just cheating my way through it, this time around despite the game providing me with cheats I opted out of it.
The one issue I had with the game so far is how verbose it tends to get.
I get why the author does it, I completely sympathize with them and even share their enthusiasm, during the temple part the author wanted to convey how grandiose and magnificent the events and actors were and how the MC was way out of his depth.
Outside of the temple, I believe the author overdid it with the explanations and how much information he gives to the readers, and I understand why they do that, they're perfectionists and they have a very vivid and specific story in mind that they wish to convey to us players in the right way, they wish for us to properly understand these characters the way they meant them to be, to ensure that we get the full and good experience, they're just being thorough, the problem with that I feel, is that they overdid it.
I have 4 things to say, first I invite you to go back and read some of the conversations the MC has with other characters and compare how much was said and done, and how much you the author explained to us, for every short line a character would say, or act they perform, we would get a lengthy paragraph following it, then another explaining the other character's feelings, actions and reactions.
This brings me to the second thing, be willing to take chances with allowing the reader to understand your intent with fewer words and consider using other mediums such as facial expressions and body language (sprites), and be willing to let some details get omitted especially if they're not important for us to know as we do not have to be omniscient.
And third, believe in your readers/players' ability to extrapolate meaning and interpret on their own, based on what they've read so far and what little cognitive abilities this band of coomers has.
Fourth, be willing to consider that sometimes, the audience misinterpreting or coming up with their own interpretations is a feature rather than a flaw, especially if they're small things that do not have a lot of bearing on the overall story.
Finally, this is still a gem of a game, that I look forward to seeing develop, I'm rooting for ya, and these thoughts are just my personal opinion. Good luck!
Better backgrounds and some (non-lewd) event CGs would help with some of the worst of that, I think. The late temple and Metatron's arrival is a good example of something that could seriously use a new background and proper CG with about 1000 less words.
I don't intend to cut out stuff like the MC thinking or characters considering how to respond. MC is very good at reading people and considering how they feel; his empathy is a big part of the character.
Is there a wiki for Divine Dawn?
Doesn't look like there is. I dunno, it's such a common feature these days it's a bit surprising and it might help some people who forget half the plot they went through so far after a long pause between updates.
Totally thinking of other people and not myself here.
There was for a bit. Then fandom banned all forms of NSFW wikis. I intend to add a section ingame dedicated to that, but I've been focused on other stuff.
Don't know if they're supposed to work like this but the talent that reduces the upkeep of all channels and the talent that reduces wind specific channels upkeep do not stack.
Going through the game, jolly good time, very comfy, all the girls are adorable.
Something I noticed, tho - last available convo with Sarah seems like it doesn't really match Nether training - apparently Ashley picked Sarahs brain for info like Qlippoth as general Nether magic system, but Sarah tells that she knows nothing of Nether magic systematization. I might be missing something there, but this kinda jumped at me.
Edit: another thing - maybe a bug - Flash Freeze sometimes removes all of the chill stacks without applying frozen ones. Not really sure what happens there, and it is not CC protection status - seems to happen quite often during morning spars.
I'll look into that, trying to keep track of all this stuff does lead to lapses in memory, but maybe I had something planned, I don't really remember until I look it up LOL.
If the enemy already has Resilience (elites like party members get it for longer), Flash Freeze doesn't bypass that.
Really enjoying this one. Great writing and nice collection of girls with varied themes and preferences. I really like a lot of the effort put into fleshing out some things that wasn't even required, like the element training dialogues. There's great world building here and it's got me engaged in the world and the characters more. The combat system seems pretty engaging too with a lot of growing options.
Seeing you being active, communicative and updating often made it an easy decision to pick it up on itch. Please keep up the good work!
I've gotten a lot of positive comments about the element trainings - it's super cool to know people actually like those! My first attempt at them was a lot shorter 'cuz I wasn't confident anyone would care. Glad you've been enjoying the game and thank you for the support!
Current Steam version, new game. Cant get this event to fire.
Also, Maya joint event should probably have martial art trust event as a requirement, not just a value.
Edit: its just a misleading hint self-referencing event, should be referencing the joint one as a requirement.
Also, Cryo armor spell and one of its upgrades (beta, I think?) seems somewhat obsolete since Aether armor baseline is equal to it.
Fixed the wording of the requirements, it was fine mechanically, just confusing as fuck to read. My bad.
Which aether spell are you referring to? Skin of Adamant is better overall, but has less raw defense. I'll look at all the channels when I update their mechanics and mana, try to catch anything that is too samey/one obviously being better than the other.
Very unlikely at this point. I wouldn't mind it in theory, but rewriting everything to make meaningful differences between genders in most scenes would be an enormous amount of work, and halfassing it would still add a lot of mutually-exclusive H content and effort.
I have to admit it took me embarassingly long to think of Warhammer when reading this.
But, I failed to comment on it at the time, but I am very fond of you mentioning Galantyne Sauce.
I've tried it oncy after Tasting History. You even went as far as to remind people of the ingredients. ^^
Researching galantyne sauce was an interesting rabbit trail, trying to make it something more setting-appropriate than hamburgers and McDonalds. Felt like it could be a good 'grounding' scene after all the high-fantasy stuff in the temple.
And I try not to be too on-the-nose about Warhammer references, but there are a few similarities.
If I understand what Resilience is correctly (red arrow down icon), than that's not it. See attached screenshots. It might be glancing hits or odd stacks of chills, as somehow thise two seem to happen at the same time for me.
Which aether spell are you referring to? Skin of Adamant is better overall, but has less raw defense. I'll look at all the channels when I update their mechanics and mana, try to catch anything that is too samey/one obviously being better than the other.
If I understand what Resilience is correctly (red arrow down icon), than that's not it. See attached screenshots. It might be glancing hits or odd stacks of chills, as somehow thise two seem to happen at the same time for me.
Yeah, thats the one. Its base is equal to Frozen Armor alpha. See screenshots.
Edit: are there plans to add MC parents sprites or descriptions?
Oh, okay. Glancing Hits negate statuses. I can see how that would be confusing from the perspective of the 'converting' wording, but it's ultimately just a normal Freeze infliction whose duration scales with Chill, and follows the same rules as others. I could maybe tack on a bunch of accuracy to the spell so it's very difficult/impossible to evade? Think that would make sense?
On the parents... actually, probably, yeah. At some point I'll likely cave in and give the MC a canon appearance, and at that point my reason to not give the parents art will be gone. No promises on when.
Oh, okay. Glancing Hits negate statuses. I can see how that would be confusing from the perspective of the 'converting' wording, but it's ultimately just a normal Freeze infliction whose duration scales with Chill, and follows the same rules as others. I could maybe tack on a bunch of accuracy to the spell so it's very difficult/impossible to evade? Think that would make sense?
Dunno. On one hand, the way it is now, loosing all the chill stacks after committing to getting them high enough to turn the enemy into a piñata for the rest of the fight feels like shit (during Chernobog bossfight I managed to freeze him for 15-ish turns iirc without accounting for shatter freeze extension - absolutely disgusting and rather enjoyable).
On the other hand, making Flash Freeze effectively perfectly accurate would make it a hard counter for any evasive enemy since we can already stack chills with perfect accuracy with channel.
Maybe make it so it consumes only a percentage (30%? 50%?) of accumulated stacks on glancing hit with it being stated in the description?
As for parents - the reason I found it strange is that less important (I think) characters in date events got descriptions, while parents are left out.
Ability points stacking up is an issue I'm just not sure how to fix; even if I make every single Greataxe ability good, that's still at most 10-12 AP, and then a greataxe main is just... done interacting with that system.
Challenging. A lot of Fantasy RPG systems tend to have different rates of abilities for different foci, or have spells as a seperate system.
It might be an option to just allow spending extra ability points on minor improvements - or to allow schools of magic learned to grant extra AP.
But, the more challenging part will me even making them good. It's a turn based game with a rather 1-dimensional battlespace, so most players will have no need of anything else than 3 varieties of "punch things really hard". Hence I hope for more reason and opportunity to utilize buffs and debuffs. Having a party of 2, with control over only half of it, admittedly doesn't give us a lot of choice there. Every ability we have will ultimately have to contend with direct damage.
I'd have to take a deeper dive again for any feedback on individual skills. Though if possible, it'd be nice to have some sort of marker, pictogram, or the works for specific types of skills, say, "single attribute offense" or "AoE Debuff", for players to make sense of the jungle.
I personally think that the biggest design mistake I've made is increasing TP from every 5 levels to 3, and adding so many since then. Zero chance of people EVER getting more TP income.
That's also fine. Really the irritating part is having so many to chose from (half of which being relatively pointless, to boot), and then having few options to actually get one. If there were less traits, and only the really meaningful ones remained, that'd feel more satisfying.
Dunno. On one hand, the way it is now, loosing all the chill stacks after committing to getting them high enough to turn the enemy into a piñata for the rest of the fight feels like shit (during Chernobog bossfight I managed to freeze him for 15-ish turns iirc without accounting for shatter freeze extension - absolutely disgusting and rather enjoyable).
On the other hand, making Flash Freeze effectively perfectly accurate would make it a hard counter for any evasive enemy since we can already stack chills with perfect accuracy with channel.
Maybe make it so it consumes only a percentage (30%? 50%?) of accumulated stacks on glancing hit with it being stated in the description?
As for parents - the reason I found it strange is that less important (I think) characters in date events got descriptions, while parents are left out.
Hard CC of any type is always one of the hardest things to balance in RPGs... most just make bosses immune to it, which feels bad, but being able to lock down an epic boss for 15 turns also feels weird LOL. I'd rather err on the side of letting people have fun than perfect balance, but it's mostly just important that the rules are clear, in my opinion.
Challenging. A lot of Fantasy RPG systems tend to have different rates of abilities for different foci, or have spells as a seperate system.
It might be an option to just allow spending extra ability points on minor improvements - or to allow schools of magic learned to grant extra AP.
But, the more challenging part will me even making them good. It's a turn based game with a rather 1-dimensional battlespace, so most players will have no need of anything else than 3 varieties of "punch things really hard". Hence I hope for more reason and opportunity to utilize buffs and debuffs. Having a party of 2, with control over only half of it, admittedly doesn't give us a lot of choice there. Every ability we have will ultimately have to contend with direct damage.
I'd have to take a deeper dive again for any feedback on individual skills. Though if possible, it'd be nice to have some sort of marker, pictogram, or the works for specific types of skills, say, "single attribute offense" or "AoE Debuff", for players to make sense of the jungle.
That's also fine. Really the irritating part is having so many to chose from (half of which being relatively pointless, to boot), and then having few options to actually get one. If there were less traits, and only the really meaningful ones remained, that'd feel more satisfying.
"Redo the entire battle system" isn't really feasible for this game. Making DD 1 has given me plenty of inspiration for any future games I might make, though.
I'm going to worry about finishing Divine Dawn before I make any real decisions. I don't want an incomplete/abandoned game on my resume. Too many of those floating around.
Longer term, I'd certainly like to. I have ideas for a sequel to DD, an unrelated horny side-game, and maybe non-NSFW or normal+NSFW patch games in the future. This has been a fantastic learning experience on what works and what... doesn't; if nothing else, I can go into a future game with a better idea of what I'm doing.
That was my initial goal, along with more customization back when I thought it would be a text game forever. Nowadays, that decision mostly just gets in the way of CGs; lots of poses and views I can't use because it shows more of the guy.
I'm going to worry about finishing Divine Dawn before I make any real decisions. I don't want an incomplete/abandoned game on my resume. Too many of those floating around.
I see thats good, i am enjoying this game pretty much it would be infuriating if it is axed all sudden.
BTW i have a suggestion, why not make subsequent sex scene after their first time using the same CG as many other games do or just not use cg and make text based sex scene then later add cg's. Many other games follow this pattern they make one text based sex scenes and later add cg's. Also u could also make dynamic sex scene where dialogues changes according to stats( like affection or love) or how many time the same event occurs for example dialogues changes after 5th and then the 10th u could utilize the same cg with minor change or just as it is.
Hard CC of any type is always one of the hardest things to balance in RPGs... most just make bosses immune to it, which feels bad, but being able to lock down an epic boss for 15 turns also feels weird LOL. I'd rather err on the side of letting people have fun than perfect balance, but it's mostly just important that the rules are clear, in my opinion.
Oh, it was more than that - as I've said, it was not accounting for freeze extension from Shatter. And, in this case time and resources (mana on the pricey channel and weapon choice for supporting mana expenditure) spent on locking down said boss are spent on committing to that approach - if I was focused on direct damage, for example, I would have burned him down much quicker, I think.
On a related note - Shatter flavor text change with mastery is nice - any plans on making more of that - unique text for abilities with masteries, maybe for critical or glancing hits? Current Glacial hammer text kinda feels over the top for normal hit, imo.
Edit: church convo about Gaia does not mention Svyatibor outright telling us that he spoke with Gaia. Considering the amount of small reactive elements in random convos mentioning other events, and the existing reactive bit about Siofra in this particular conversation, you might want to do something there. Also, it seems there is a they in reference to Sam in the Temple affection conversation with Celica.
The talk about getting too close to one of the demons at the start... that was fluff right? I don't wanna explode bc I spent too much time with my Succubus girls lol.
Checking back in and happy to find that I can now start off with martial arts. My current build feels a bit like a meme since I've left the growth button on insight activated while taking absolutely nothing for crits or magic related shenanigans. I'm not sure how much extra information I'm actually getting from maxed out Insight, but I choose to believe I'm getting payouts in flavor text. Also looking forward to masteries for those new abilities, since I assume them being new means they still have that in the oven. Even without masteries they're still serving me quite well, now I just have to figure out where to get all the other martial arts. Metatron is still my favorite after all this time.
Well, decided to give this a look over the weekend. I've had this on my Watch list for a while after seeing it recommended in some other places, and figured now is the time to get some impressions.
Said impressions are mixed, but that's pretty normal for "in progress" games most of the time, especially complex ones like this one.
First of all, the biggest... disappointment? I guess? Is the fact that the Corruption thing is basically not implemented at all right now as of 0.28, and based on the change-logs I read on itch, it's not implemented even in 0.30 either. Given that the corruption thing is advertised as one of the game's biggest features... and somehow not even the beginning stages of it have been implemented until now... which makes it difficult to decide on how interested I should be about it all. It's supposed to decide the endings and the flow of the story and more... but right now it does nothing and I find that concerning, if only because the more content there is in place, the more difficult it'll be to account for it when it's implemented later.
What I mean by that is that it doesn't take much effort, currently, to cap Corruption for Nether and Aether, especially if you choose to play with any kind of magic and learn one or both of them, which means that the first stage should be easy to jump over early on. As a result, there's a lot of potential early interactions with various characters that may or may not be affected by the change(s).
It sounds like a lot of work when just after the intro you already have 5 girls around to have events of various kinds with... and that's before you get into whatever impact it might have on the main story.
As is, the complexity of the interactions rears its ugly head at times because there's clearly a lot of stuff to keep track of and/or account for. Like the fact that training in Nether magic with Ashley mentions the Qlippoth and that she heard about it from Sarah, but then one of Sarah's latter trust events mentions that she has no idea if Nether magic works like an opposite of Aether and she doesn't know if there's an opposite of the Sefirot. Or the fact that you can train with Sarah first in Aether disciplines, and then with Metatron, and both talk as if you did it in the opposite order. There's probably a lot of examples, both big and small that can be dug up... but I seriously think that this sort of problem is going to get WAY worse the more the Corruption system is left unaddressed.
I'm no expert on game development, obviously, but if the corruption system is meant to be a fundamental part of the game, I figure it should also be part of the game's backbone in terms of development.
Then there's also the fact that trying to account for all possible permutations of what a player might do and which order they take things in might be pure madness... So there's that to consider too I guess. >.>"
Moving on.
I'm not gonna comment on the story, mainly because I didn't dive too deep in it. I mostly focused on grinding affection and trust with the "starter girls" to look at their events and pick up Nether Magic and Aether Magic, as well as experiment a bit with both of those things. Dunno if I'll keep playing right now or if I'll put this in the "check again in another year or two and/or when I have money to throw at it" folder.
I will comment a bit on the magic system though.
At first, looking at it, I wasn't sure what to think about the fact that all the elements have very similar spells in terms of damage output and that there's some overlaps between certain spells of various elements. Like Ice Armor and Adamant Skin, or that one spell from Cryomancy that inflicts bleed and a spell from Nether that does the same thing... But then, I stopped to actually think about it.
First of all, the fact of the matter is that there's no guarantee that a player will pick up more than one element, or which elemental combinations they'll pick at all. As such, there's no guarantee that they'll run into any real overlaps. Then, even if they do, there's the fact that there's still distinctions between them, like Aether and Nether having options to help deal with Evasion, while Ice/Water has exactly nada for that particular problem, at least by default, but I'm not sure about all the Masteries. Plus, while early on this doesn't seem to be a thing, the possibility of having enemies that are more resistant to one element while not resisting, or even being weaker to others, would also help with the potential problem of overlaps. Then there's the fact that right now, the magic system is still at Initiate level, which means that we haven't seen anything about what will be present in the higher tier for each element or for elemental combinations or whatnot.
On a brief side-note, being able to see Masteries before picking up a base ability would be extremely useful.
In any case, the point is that it's probably too soon to worry about "samey options" in magic when the game is far off from offering the full possibilities of permutations. That's probably a worry for when the next levels come in.
For now though, I'll leave it at this. I'll decide later if I want to keep messing around or not, and if I want to comment more.
