Sharing/swinging is a type of NTR it is just called NTS. Thank you for making it avoidable at least i hope it's 100% avoidable lol because i put this on watch list and will give it a try when i clear out some backlog and make space.GL
Be forewarned, there are some female characters that were/are/will be in sexual relationships with other women independent of the MC. No one is (successfully) coming to steal your girl, but the MC (and the player) won't always have any kind of pre-warning that the girl they're about to fuck is already getting her guts rearranged by a lady.
Generally speaking, I'm going to do my best to make the consequences of any sex focused decision as obvious as possible. Not counting threesomes with the MC and two ladies (or one lady and a robot) there's one sharing scene in the game, and I *believe* I managed to communicate that the woman went along with it out of her desire to please the MC, much more so than her wanting to fuck someone other than him. Again, if I missed the mark, let me know.
... so I started playing this almost a year ago, then stopped for a while, played to the end of Ch.1, then some time later noticed the update for Ch.2 and played that too. So this hardly is some deep commentary, given that it was a very disjointed experience and I obviously did not remember all the details (a lot "who is this character again").
I thought the "going off the rails" towards the end of Ch.1 was too extreme. It didn't feel like believable development anymore, but more just porn logic "here's porn content now".
I also felt the "confusion" during Ch.2 was too disjointed for too long. The scenes being confusing makes sense. Not being able to tell reality from fiction makes sense. But everything just jumping around all the time, and then jumping around again, and again, and again, and again ... and then there's another scene of that and another and another. There came I point where I was sorely tempted to just press CTRL and skip until we were done with that because, yeah, once you get the point of mindfuckery-confusion across it felt a bit irrelevant to me to keep going with it.
And then just personally; the "bimbo" versions of character are my personal nightmare fodder. The mother in particular, eurgh ^^#
Plus, the antagonistic story - at least in my opinion, and after all the character can express that he feels that way about events too - makes me a bit worried about how enjoyable it's going to be going forward. I worry that it'll clash a lot of with the porn-game-vibes. "You are horrible monsters to do this ... but I guess I'll fuck everyone anyway". ^^
But however this sounds I thought it was pretty fun. It looks nice, there's something going on, there's different characters that do actually have different personalities, and the writing is solid. It'll be interesting to see how it'll ultimately all turn out.
I think this is a very fair reaction. I've mentioned before that there's a different version of this game (possibly a better version) that started out as a slow-burn before the big rug-pull at the transition from Act 1 to Act 2. I'm probably already doing a very good job of alienating players every time the narrative changes course, but I think if I stretched Act 1 out all the players who enjoyed it but hated the beginning of Act 2 would've felt betrayed/cheated. There's probably already a fair number of players who feel that way.
I would hesitate to use the term 'traditional', because I'm still me (a pretentious asshole), but I'd love to hear back from you in an update or two. The narrative/game-flow will look a lot closer to a traditional AVN for the majority of what's left. I'll still pull some weird shit, and I humbly like to believe that, irrespective of quality, I'm at least doing something different with the story here, but things are going to slow down* and become more straightforward.
*Narratively speaking, there will still be a lot of opportunities for weird sex. I facetiously promised someone on Discord that the MC will get fisted next update, which may or may not actually become an option.
I've made two big decisions that'll keep this game on the smaller side. The first decision happened before the initial release, which was to fly through Act 1 instead of setting things up as a slow burn. The second was when 0.4 came out and I started losing (or at least, not growing) my audience. My original plans for this game were to treat it as a fundraiser/resume builder/freshman outing, and if things went well enough, I would go on to make bigger and better games. I'm sure you're all aware of everything going on with Steam/itch/Collective Shout/Visa/Mastercard. I'm not going to knee-jerk to anything right now, I'm just going to stay the course until everything shakes out, but there is a decent chance I'll entirely lose the ability to monetize this game. I think it's kind of obvious that I'm not really chasing those big-time AVN-dev bucks with this game, but if things work out so that I can't raise any money off of it, then I might need to reconsider my plans.
THIS IS NOT ME SUGGESTING THAT I WOULD ABANDON THE GAME. I'm way too stubborn and too attached to the story to do that. But, I would love to get some better music, contract out someone to give the game a sexy UI, hire an animator, shit like that to really polish up this turd. If SubStar follows Steam/itch/Patreon, then I won't really have any place to fundraise. If that happens I might consider treating this game as more of a passion project, which means I'd need something else as my fundraiser/resume builder.
But that's a bummer to think about, and we'll burn that bridge when we get there.
Here's a render semi-inspired by something I saw a stripper do one time!
