Java Lilith's Throne [v0.4.9.9] [Innoxia]

[Asia Argento]

You should start working on a porn game. Then you can work a few hours a week, and take months off, all while lying to your customers without any repercussions. It's a fool proof plan.

I have thought about that in my spare time... but I dont think thats for me... Who knows though.

 

[antediluvian]

And for his neutral special, he wields a gun!

I wanted peoples opinion on what they like about this game (or rather, what this game aims to be, it's not exactly in the best state and the direction/rate of development is just tragic) in case someone else were to make a similar game. Specifically i'm interested peoples opinion on content such as furry/scalie/animal morph, sandbox, character customization, fantasy RPG elements, handwritten/plot characters, slave/companion management and story. How much do these things mean to you. If there is anything i left out that appeals to you don't be afraid to mention that too. Also I hope i'm not derailing this thread by doing this.

Sims-style interactions with NPCs bolstering their affection for you, and the ability to choose-your-own-sex-scene, are the big ones for me. The freedom to engage in whatever kink floats your fancy is another big one, although its Patreonizing gives it a huge mixed moral message -- the line is drawn at an oddly arbitrary point where horsecocks and weird animal parts are okay, but feralmorphs have to be "taurs" rather than full sentient beasts or else it's red-flag territory; it's strangely more restrictive than CoC in that regard, which had quadrupedal and non-humanoid partners as well and didn't suffer for it. It's funny that having something like presenting yourself to Battle Cat is categorized in the same level of extreme fetish as guro or pedophilia.

The appearance fluff/character customization is largely just fluff and matters less to me, especially because it rarely gets involved in the actual gameplay. Waltzing around with G cups versus AA does nothing except change weeaboo "paizuri" to "naizuri". (Is it really so hard to call it a "titjob" or "frottage"? Yeesh.)

I really, really love LT's respect for the player's agency. For instance, TiTS has this horribly written encounter with a bunch of fanwank OC characters where they blow out your airlock and then force you into this long, complicated multi-scene encounter on rails, and I just want to strangle the writer every time it happens. LT very often gives you the chance to say no or to say, sorry, not into dicks/vadges/both, or, sorry, I'm just not that into you. By comparison, everybody in TiTS starts out at mid-to-high-level sexual harassment. I don't come to adult games looking for soapboxing about pansexuality, I come looking for titillation when my real life relationships aren't satisfying me enough.

LT's agency is schizophrenic, too; it goes to great lengths to ensure that you are in control, yet is trapped in a run-or-rape atmosphere like just about every other text-based life simulator or CoC clone, and that bugs me to no end. Degrees of Lewdity similarly infuriates me that they went and spoiled a perfectly good "find a way to earn your rent, on your back if need be" life simulator with all of the rapists running about. LT even goes to great lengths to justify the rape results in-universe with an explanation that the player induces lust in those around them so it can't be modded away or head-canon'ed (DoL does the same in a slightly different way).

When the non-con game option is enabled, the non-con scenes are so mind-numbingly boring -- just you or them spamming resist actions -- that I can't imagine anyone who even likes that sort of thing can schlick themselves to it. The forced TF stuff also bugs me.

I adore that this isn't a futanari playground out of the box where at least half of the female population is packing sausage unless you voluntarily configure it that way (there's only one prominent named futa character and she doesn't do anything until you complete a side quest and show vulnerability). However, the furry stuff is a mixed bag. I'm not opposed to furry content, but the distinction between "minor", "lesser", and "greater" isn't obvious. The difference between a furry/scaly and non-furry partner is unclear; your partners have very little description for their fur or body coverings, and aside from excruciating detail on the genital anatomy, the rest of the anatomy only comes up when you hover over their race icon or actually click on it to read their character description.

The furry is purely cosmetic until the game suddenly forces a tail penetration on you.

Which is basically pegging. Not going to kink-shame the people who are into that sort of thing, of course, just that I'm not one of them, and there's no way to tell an NPC that it's a boundary that is a deal-breaker that they're not allowed to cross. Real life partners can be told that there are certain things they're not allowed to do, and they might bark up that tree now and again but still know that they'll blow the relationship if they try to coerce it or force it. By comparison, characters in this genre are practically clasping their hands together in glee with their plans for violating you, even those people who are head over heels in love with you.

The slave stuff is an entirely separate game within LT, and feels fundamentally off; it's like it throws you into this gigantic mansion and offers the possibility of being a slaver, but then buries it laterally. It's hard to describe, but I think it comes down to the lack of strategic depth on training a slave. Unlike SlaveMaker where you are managing numerous statistics to make "good" slaves, you just manage obedience and affection, which is far too little depth, and it fails to capture Free Cities' "fear" versus "loathing" nuance. You literally just hire a slave, tweak their room and duties until they gain affection every day, and then go off and faff around while they gain obedience and affection on their own. You don't interact with your slaves. Your companions and houseguests don't even interact with your slaves beyond telling you "oh, yeah, I talked to X" when you ask them if they've interacted with your slaves (and anytime IRL I've heard someone say "oh, yeah, I did" is a huge red flag that they haven't actually done it at all, though that might just be real-life subordinates and co-workers poisoning my interpretation).

[edit] Sweet Enola Gay, that was longer than I thought it would be.

Anyway, one final thing I remembered was my very first impression on the game during the museum visit was that it was a game about witchcraft in modern London, with the vast majority of people as humans and a deep underbelly in a Buffy-esque underworld, which I thought was utterly brilliant. Then (avoiding spoilers) it sent the player into an alternate universe and turned into just another CoC. I deflated like a balloon with a pinhole in the knot as I found out it was just bog standard after all.

Same thing could be said about accepting player suggestions: too much and you'll be doing nothing else. At that point, you're basically being paid to to work for them rather than making your own game. It can also create disparities in the quality. Last, but not least, be honest with your community!

If you haven't already dug through the suggestions.txt file in the src/com/lilithsthrone/res/doc folder, that file is a play-by-play of everything wrong with accepting player suggestions without a content filter. It's literally just a copy-paste job of people dumping random nonsense (presumably from the Discord), rather than being curated and organized in any way.

I hesitate at saying that player suggestions should be rejected outright, but they should always be assigned a priority and moved higher or lower, and it should be the developer writing something down with a couple minutes' design work on it. Adding something to The List is definitely something that needs more effort than Ctrl, C, and V.

 

[IvoryOwl]

I hesitate at saying that player suggestions should be rejected outright,

Depends. For a moddable game like Lilith's Throne, I do think it's a bit redundant to worry about player suggestions to the degree Inno does it. Let the community worry about the details and depth of the game and focus on delivering good, lasting foundations so they have something to work with and add upon. I mean, she doesn't want to hire help yet is still eager to accept (free) player contributions. Might as well make things easier for the community so the community can make things easier for her.

 

[buttfart]

The furry is purely cosmetic until the game suddenly forces a tail penetration on you.

i thought you could disable tail penetrations in options? or does that setting not work?

also, i think theres a piece of equipment like the "no vaginal" slip you can paste, but for your butt, i think theres also some ass chastity belts as well. i don't feel like looking for them for a ss tho

 

[NoStepOnSnek]

i thought you could disable tail penetrations in options? or does that setting not work? View attachment 1196325

also, i think theres a piece of equipment like the "no vaginal" slip you can paste, but for your butt, i think theres also some ass chastity belts as well. i don't feel like looking for them for a ss tho

No, that's specifically furry/fluffy tails, nekkid demon tails or snek tails will still work.
If you're the typical straight guy, your easiest option would be setting your anal receiving fetish to dislike or hate, otherwise there's no precise way to deal with it and yes, the AI can be a bit 'tail happy' if they're low on options for 'real' sex.

 

[anubis1970]

If you discover your child, then use the prompted 'remove from game' option after fighting them, that'll properly remove them. But yeah, any other method keeps them around.

There is another way to remove them. If you enslave them and then sell them it removes them too, and you make a few flames.

 

[tehlemon]

There is another way to remove them. If you enslave them and then sell them it removes them too, and you make a few flames.

Yeah, but with how pointless money is in the game, usually I just want to get rid of them immediately. When I can easily set it up so that I'm rolling over the 2b credit cap every week, getting an extra 10k per slave sold is pretty pointless. Plus there's not really any reason to spend money if you've already bought all the normal early game stuff.

 

[anon707]

the line is drawn at an oddly arbitrary point where horsecocks and weird animal parts are okay, but feralmorphs have to be "taurs" rather than full sentient beasts or else it's red-flag territory; it's strangely more restrictive than CoC in that regard, which had quadrupedal and non-humanoid partners as well and didn't suffer for it. It's funny that having something like presenting yourself to Battle Cat is categorized in the same level of extreme fetish as guro or pedophilia.

full ferals are "technically" in the game now. all of the structure is there, but you need mods to make use of any of it. There are mods that put ferals into the spawn pools, a feral transformation potion, etc. idk if they're not fully in because of some kind of policy (she's not on patreon anymore but idk if substar has anything similar) or if she just havent gotton around to creating actual content for any of it (which wouldnt be a shock).

 

[IvoryOwl]

Ferals were meant to be added at some point during the Fields' expansion. I don't think the plan has changed, but at this point nobody can predict WHEN it will happen either. The framework is already there but no actual content to go with it. A few months ago Inno added a bunch of frameworks that were meant for future use, and feral stuff was one of them.

 

[BaloneyAmone]

In the to-do list that was posted in this thread a while back there will be a way to enable feral transformations by encountering a wolf pack who give you access to an artifact that can turn willing people into ferals, though there aren't potions or what-not that do this (which would otherwise let you forcibly TF others). This can be used to transform the centaur carts into feral horses.

full ferals are "technically" in the game now. all of the structure is there, but you need mods to make use of any of it. There are mods that put ferals into the spawn pools, a feral transformation potion, etc. idk if they're not fully in because of some kind of policy (she's not on patreon anymore but idk if substar has anything similar) or if she just havent gotton around to creating actual content for any of it (which wouldnt be a shock).

There isn't any policy with SubscribeStar that says you can't do ferals, and in fact there isn't a great deal of nanny moderation of NSFW works on SubscribeStar to begin with (which is probably why she uses it over Patreon). It's simply a matter of a lack of specialized content for ferals.

 

[anon707]

In the to-do list that was posted in this thread a while back there will be a way to enable feral transformations by encountering a wolf pack who give you access to an artifact that can turn willing people into ferals, though there aren't potions or what-not that do this (which would otherwise let you forcibly TF others). This can be used to transform the centaur carts into feral horses.


There isn't any policy with SubscribeStar that says you can't do ferals, and in fact there isn't a great deal of nanny moderation of NSFW works on SubscribeStar to begin with (which is probably why she uses it over Patreon). It's simply a matter of a lack of specialized content for ferals.

Thats what I thought, but yea, thats all it is. She's even still adding framwork to the feral too, this update added feral spawning of children. So until all of that is actually in the game the only way to utilize any of it is mods.

 

[Deleted member 3086194]

Thanks for the detailed and very well written answer.

For instance, TiTS has this horribly written encounter with a bunch of fanwank OC characters where they blow out your airlock and then force you into this long, complicated multi-scene encounter on rails, and I just want to strangle the writer every time it happens.

I think I know the exact scene you are talking about lol. Yeah the ratio between text and game mechanics in TiTS is not great, something that LT deserves credit for.

although its Patreonizing gives it a huge mixed moral message

In other words, you find it strange how arbitrary the cutoff point on the more extreme content is? It's funny now that I think about, how this game has animal morphs, incest (with inbreeding), slavery and extreme body proportions, but full feral and descriptions of penises like cut/uncut is a nono. I'm sure part of it is due to funding and dumb legalities but it seems to me the "moral line" has long since been crossed.

The other thing you mention is the shallowness of the rich customization, which others have also echoed. What is nice though is although the game doesn't make use of these parameters, its easy to expand and add content for later on once the framework is already in place.

I adore that this isn't a futanari playground out of the box where at least half of the female population is packing sausage

Yeah its funny how almost every other game in this category is like that. I guess its the "best of both worlds" solution that caters to the widest demographic.

The slave framework does feel disconnected with the RPGness of the rest of the game for sure, and it's in a super shallow state at the moment. But the idea is very nice, although (to me atleast) it wouldn't matter whether companions or slaves, the ability to manage npcs makes for really fun and rich "built your own world" type of gameplay.

it goes to great lengths to ensure that you are in control

Likely my biggest complaint of this game as fixing this is a low hanging fruit (number tweaking). The game has atrocious balancing, to the point where it damages the game loop. You never have to put thought to your decision making because there is never any actual "loss". It literally babies you from the very start.

One thing that was pleasantly surprising is people liking the "build your own sex scene" mechanics. I thought with all the VN's that top the popularity ratings on this site that people only wanted hand written static scenes so that's cool.

If you haven't already dug through the suggestions.txt file in the src/com/lilithsthrone/res/doc folder, that file is a play-by-play of everything wrong with accepting player suggestions without a content filter.

For sure, developer seems to be pretty big on the whole biting off more than they can chew and taking on unreasonable workloads (assigned by themselves or suggested by others).

 

[Golden_Buddy]

in fact there isn't a great deal of nanny moderation of NSFW works on SubscribeStar to begin with (which is probably why she uses it over Patreon).

they know why they are chosen over other sites

 

[antediluvian]

One thing that was pleasantly surprising is people liking the "build your own sex scene" mechanics. I thought with all the VN's that top the popularity ratings on this site that people only wanted hand written static scenes so that's cool.

A well-written VN scene will top a random-generated scene any day of the week. The problem, of course, is that out of the dozen or so adult VNs I've tried so far, I can consider maybe only one or two of them to have exceptional writing. A few more are average. Most, however, are much much worse than any other media. They try to make up for it with graphics, and to an extent that works, but the grammatical errors and spelling really stick out to me most of the time. (Perhaps they presume people will have too little bloodflow to the brain to notice.)

LT's random scenes are more consistently average to good; the player just needs to bring a little bit of imagination along for the journey. I think text-based smut uniquely captures that in a way that VNs can't; it lets the player conjure up their own visual imagery in their mind, just like if they're reading a book, rather than relying on someone else's interpretation of lighting, scene, appearance, etc. The few graphics and/or expository lines that are there, are more like "helpers" to guide the player's thinking.

 

[tehlemon]

A well-written VN scene will top a random-generated scene any day of the week. The problem, of course, is that out of the dozen or so adult VNs I've tried so far, I can consider maybe only one or two of them to have exceptional writing. A few more are average. Most, however, are much much worse than any other media. They try to make up for it with graphics, and to an extent that works, but the grammatical errors and spelling really stick out to me most of the time. (Perhaps they presume people will have too little bloodflow to the brain to notice.)

LT's random scenes are more consistently average to good; the player just needs to bring a little bit of imagination along for the journey. I think text-based smut uniquely captures that in a way that VNs can't; it lets the player conjure up their own visual imagery in their mind, just like if they're reading a book, rather than relying on someone else's interpretation of lighting, scene, appearance, etc. The few graphics and/or expository lines that are there, are more like "helpers" to guide the player's thinking.

This is more or less how I feel about it as well.

If the writing is done well, nothing can beat a fully written scene. If the writing is done badly, nothing is worse.

By not writing the scenes at all you can easily avoid having bad scenes, but you also won't ever match the really well done ones.

That said, I think LT also demonstrates that the scene setup is almost just as important as the sex scene itself. Because if there's a lot of real garbage writing going into a sex scene, it pretty quickly pulls you right out of it. I'll keep saying it until modders can completely re-write it, but this is why Nyan's rework is so incredibly bad. It could hit on my every fetish and kink, and it'd still read like Inno pawned off the writing to a shitty fanfiction author who's never done game writing before.

I'd go so far as to compare the second half of Nyan's rework to that really shitty 12 page long, super railroaded scene in TiTS that everyone was talking about earlier. Both completely destroy player agency in favor of having a very narrow story that the author forces you to follow.

 

[mmmonsterkill]

im confused whats the difference between a horsegirl and a centaur? i dont think either describe a horse body

 

[anubis1970]

im confused whats the difference between a horsegirl and a centaur? i dont think either describe a horse body

A horsegirl is anthropomorphic, ie. two arms and two legs. A centaur has a four-legged horse lower body and human shaped torso, arms and head.

 

[anon707]

A well-written VN scene will top a random-generated scene any day of the week. The problem, of course, is that out of the dozen or so adult VNs I've tried so far, I can consider maybe only one or two of them to have exceptional writing. A few more are average. Most, however, are much much worse than any other media. They try to make up for it with graphics, and to an extent that works, but the grammatical errors and spelling really stick out to me most of the time. (Perhaps they presume people will have too little bloodflow to the brain to notice.)

LT's random scenes are more consistently average to good; the player just needs to bring a little bit of imagination along for the journey. I think text-based smut uniquely captures that in a way that VNs can't; it lets the player conjure up their own visual imagery in their mind, just like if they're reading a book, rather than relying on someone else's interpretation of lighting, scene, appearance, etc. The few graphics and/or expository lines that are there, are more like "helpers" to guide the player's thinking.

I half agree. While VNs with quality writing are great on their own, rereading the same scene over and over with no variation will eventually get stale. But with LT you can take a character and go "Hm... what do I want to do to you today? Maybe I'll grab a companion and gangbang you, or take my slave and throw them to the imps, or i'll take a group of slaves in one room and impregnate all of them, or let my slaves rape each other". Sure, even some of those scenes can be samey, but the fact that you can do all of them at anytime with slight variations and with customized characters, there's something to be said about that and thats not something VNs can do.

 

[tehlemon]

I half agree. While VNs with quality writing are great on their own, rereading the same scene over and over with no variation will eventually get stale. But with LT you can take a character and go "Hm... what do I want to do to you today? Maybe I'll grab a companion and gangbang you, or take my slave and throw them to the imps, or i'll take a group of slaves in one room and impregnate all of them, or let my slaves rape each other". Sure, even some of those scenes can be samey, but the fact that you can do all of them at anytime with slight variations and with customized characters, there's something to be said about that and thats not something VNs can do.

The problem with your examples is that most of them have already been formally cut from the game, and the rest are incredibly samey between each other. Like, I seriously can't think of any new variation in slave content having been added in ages.

Like, yes, they might be different activities, but there hasn't been much depth added between those activities. After like two years of minimal fresh, quality content, that stuff has all gotten super stale as well. There's only so many variations of the same stuff you can do with the same in game descriptions and dialog, even if they are *technically* different. This is the downside of the dynamic sex system, if variation isn't added then even if the activity is "different", all the dialog is the exact same. And if you've already seen that dialog 2000 times, then it makes the new activity feel the same as the previous 2000 iterations of the same thing.

And honestly, my favorite, well written smut scenes tend to be enjoyable longer. The problem is that its a lot harder to find that content.

Edit: I'm starting to think I'm talking myself out of liking this sex system. It seems to work best when the main fun or game play loop is the non-sex content.

 

[mmmonsterkill]

A horsegirl is anthropomorphic, ie. two arms and two legs. A centaur has a four-legged horse lower body and human shaped torso, arms and head.

aight thanks, btw what artist should i go with?