Airell So, I've been playing through this for a bit, and it's pretty good so far. In terms of look & feel, as well as narrative, it's got those good Fenoxo vibes reminiscent of CoC and TiTS. The inventory system is decent, if a bit rough, and the fledgling system you've got for fully interactive sex scenes (kind of like what's in Accidental Woman) looks promising. The fact that it appears alongside more traditional, scripted scene options offers some nice potential for variety.
The fact that there's a pregnancy system is a huge plus for me (and the whole reason I even started playing at all), so I hope to see continued development on that front. If you ever implement player pregnancy, I hope you add the option for a futa player character so that players can engage both parts of the pregnancy system in one playthrough. The more the merrier, after all.
With all that said, let me get to the main reason I'm leaving this message, and really one of my biggest issues with the game: The writing during sex scenes suffers immensely from what I feel is best summed up as "RP style" writing. Namely, the actual dialogue in the sex scenes is completely cluttered with action descriptions. Now, this would be distracting and unpleasant enough on its own, but the fact that the dialogue is surrounded by actual, proper narration and scene descriptions makes in the in-dialogue stuff all the more unforgivable.
To be clear, I'm talking about stuff like
"Then... *Thrust* Again... *Thrust* Inside... *Penetrate* Hahhhh..."
and
" Ohhh! Ahhh... Deeper... Take me like this... CUMMING! *Cum pumping inside* "
Everything that's contained within those asterisks? It needs to be removed entirely.
Describing what's happening in the scene is the job of the narration, not the dialogue. You can have characters comment on what's happening, and you can have character dialogue imply events in the scene, but if you have any sort of narration at all (which, in this game, you do) then
that's where you need to put the descriptions.
And it's not like you
haven't been describing actions in the narration. Honestly, that kind of makes it worse in a way, since not only are the in-dialogue descriptions jarring and distracting, they're also already redundant.
Let's take the second piece of dialogue I mentioned, for example:
" Ohhh! Ahhh... Deeper... Take me like this... CUMMING! *Cum pumping inside* "
The "*Cum pumping inside*" you have in that line is awkward and uncomfortable to read, since it makes it seem like Ghorza is in a role-play on some chatroom instead of, y'know, actually being creampied. Luckily, her dialogue is preceded by this handy little sentence:
She watches you break the kiss and moan as the hot jets of cum pour out, bringing her to orgasm and completing the spell.
That single line of narration already explains to the reader/player exactly what's happening: The PC is cumming inside of Ghorza.
The sex scenes in the game are all absolutely chock-full of these kinds of dialogue inserts, and it pretty much ruins them. I've been managing to force my way through them by basically skipping over all of the dialogue and only paying attention to the narration surrounding it, but that's very much not what you want a reader to be doing.
If you were to go into all of the sex scenes (and I do mean
all of them) and fix this single writing issue, you'd see a
massive improvement in the quality of the scenes.
Pretty much anywhere that you see asterisks inside of quotation marks, you should remove the asterisks along with anything they contain. Even something as simple as a "*sigh*" would be better handle by putting a "...she sighed" or something like "Sighing, she..." into the narration.
Please Note: I am currently playing on an older version of the game (I think it's something like 0.1.11), so if the dialogue issue I've been talking about has already been addressed and resolved in a newer version, then please ignore my critique about it. Furthermore, if this is the case, then I apologize for harping on something that was already fixed.
Anyways, outside of the dialogue issue, the other qualms I have are relatively minor. Mostly just quality of life stuff or general roughness, both of which are pretty forgivable given how early in development things are and how large the planned scope of the game looks to be. I won't be going into much detail about that stuff here because a) this post is long enough as is, and b) it's minor enough that I've mostly forgotten the specifics in the process of creating this long-ass post.
So to address the minor issues I
do remember:
It'd be nice to have some sort of way to pass time outside of moving around a bunch on the map or traveling all the way to a bed to sleep. Maybe some sort of "wait" option you can select to pass a set amount of time, or even one that gives the option for multiple different periods of time (e.g. 30m, 1h, 4h, etc.) Edit: Nvm, I see that this is implemented in 0.2
- It'd be nice to have some way to heal up outside of battle without downing a fuckton of potions. Possibly could combine this with the above QoL change and add a "rest" option that acts like a scaled-down version of sleeping in an inn/bedroom.
- It'd be nice to have more ways to manage lust, especially on-the-go, outside of just sex-scenes or battle. If nothing else, it'd be nice to have a way to raise lust other than fantasizing during battle or using the Tainted Potions. Honestly, just making the potions more widely available or introducing some other lust-increasing item would do the trick.
- This one is less necessary than the rest, but some sort of fast-travel system would be nice to have. That, or some form of shortcuts between frequently visited locations (e.g. between Ingmery and the tribe, or between Ingmery and the world map, or between Skystone and the world map, etc.). It's not too terrible at the moment, but I've definitely noticed that moving between key locations starts to feel like a bit of a slog once the eastern exit of Ingmery opens up. Again, it's not that bad right now, but it might be better to address this before the world size grows much larger. Edit: Note: This is especially an issue in Skystone castle. You have a lot of empty space in that castle, and while it's good to have some empty space to give a sense of scale and leave room for later expansion to that part of the game, it's still a lot of ground to traverse when going from place to place, and the layout (what with all the different floors) gets a bit confusing because of it.
Anyway, that's all from me for now. Originally, I just wanted to leave a message about the dialogue problem, but I realized that it'd probably come off a bit rude to comment (something I rarely do to begin with) solely for the purpose of slamming your writing. Because I really do like this game, despite how bad the dialogue issue is.