Hi guys, Frenzin here again (writer). I finally have some free time on my hands (Sunday ftw!) so I wanted to drop in and answer some of the questions/comments here. But before getting to that, I wanted to ask all of you for a favor...
We're incredibly thankful to anyone who supports us, whether through Patreon pledges or PayPal donations, and we get that many of you are short on cash because you're students, or in between jobs, or hell you might even be unemployed (the past year has been especially shitty for everyone with the virus/lockdowns worldwide). So even if you can't afford to toss a few bucks our way, you can still do us a huge favor by letting people know about our game! If you had fun playing ToLLA and you think it has potential, please tell others about us and our project!
Many of you are active in various communities; you can talk to people in discords and forums and subreddits, share the download links on image boards, etc. Then those other people might play the game, and can tell their friends, and so on... This creates an exponential effect, and is the quickest way for us to grow and get additional support! And it all comes back to benefit you guys in the end, because more funds means we can hire additional devs to speed up the process and get more content into the game! We want to get to monthly releases, and do so without sacrificing content quantity or quality.
We also have plans to bring more artists and writers onboard, but we have to be able to pay them. And currently our biggest problem is getting anyone to know that something like ToLLA even exists! Because no amount of promo or advertising by us can ever match organic outreach from all of you put together. So please help us get the word out there - it would mean a lot to us!
Alright, with that outta the way...
Luis Nope
Ame
Animations are a luxury feature we'd like to include some time in the future. They're beyond the scale of our development for the time being, because we'd have to hire an additional animator. But if the game does well we'd definitely love to add them!
Turin
We have an entire design doc with the main story laid out. But yeah, we're building the game as a full narrative RPG, in addition to all the ero content.
Zittou
Thanks mate!
ToppNep
radohak
You'll gather a bunch of gold while playing the game and looting everything - gotta spend it somehow, right?
- ZAIKO -
raitex
Meliketoeat
Hovis1974
JustShiro
Drafox
Glad you like it! We're lucky to have Vixi (our artist) on the team.
Zanmaraxa
Fair enough! Keep the thread bookmarked, and check back every 7-8 weeks for a new build!
憂鬱の騎士
Thank you, we'll do our best not to disappoint!
ttsheng33
The game's a text-heavy narrative RPG - dialogue and narration are one of its main pillars. You can read just the first 1-2 sentences in any convo or description to get a feel for it, and left-click through the rest.
Drakan47
We've got some steampunk content in the plans for later areas, hence the mecha-dolls. Monster breeding is usually gonna happen out in the wilds once you leave the civilized intro areas.
Lerd0
Cheers mate!
nabaski
jep3
No no, ToLLA is an RPG, not a text game (tho I see why people would think that since we've only released the text-heavy intro so far). There's gonna be stuff like free-roam and combat as well.
Inept Monkey
Ysel is her name. And she's very haughty. Dragonkin play an important part in the game's story.
Nexal
Did you play it? How was it?
rKnight
BigBootyLover1234
Booty is the patrician choice!
Slaanesh Champion
We're developing the game in small chunks to make things more manageable. And it figures a depraved son of Fulgrim would be interested in pink-skinnned xenos! Filthy heretic!
vultron
Post your impressions if you've played through the intro, we appreciate all feedback.
SilentSevenStar
No no, you meant *NOICE*!
patatipatata
Darrel Caper
FlamesOfVengeance
spacecorpse337
Thanks, we're already hard at work on the next Build!
Mister_M
I get what you're saying... But it's really, really, *really* challenging to make everything fit together and still make sense regardless of the path the Player takes through the scene. The CYOA has to 'flow' correctly from beginning to end, which means we had to take into account all the sub-branches a Player could take (the pics had to have logical consistency between them, even through different branches, and the text had to bridge the gaps). Trust me, it was a lot more difficult to plan out and put together than it seems. As for the pics themselves, there's
60 unique lewds in there - it would've been great to put one pic for every page of text, but we only have a single artist on the team. We'll probably revisit and polish the intro at a later time. The mommy stuff is Meredith's personal kink, since she's like 60+ years older than the Captain - and she gets off on it!
Oregon1898
We'd like to transition to gamedev full time, and that means we have to make a product good enough for people to want to support us. So I think that's the best 'guarantee' I can give you that we'll keep working on the game.
grohotor
Sorry, can't be done (engine/plugin limitation). I wanted it as well, since I do all the writing and it would help me with debugging if I had dynamic text/size, but our scripter says it messes with other core UI features.
bigmacaroni
someremove
badnboujee
lostscot
I wish we could help you guys with Macs, I really do, but we bundled and released that as a bonus feature - none of us on the dev team have Macs, and we can't offer any additional support.
Saint Blackmoor
We're actually going for turn-based combat, but there will be plenty of text adventures where you'll get to use your stats and dice rolls. Something like the storybook events from
Pillars of Eternity, if you've played that game.
TheLegend1337
Thanks man! As for the text, the idea was to format it like an illustrated storybook, which is why the text is bunched up. It's like something you'd see in a novel (with paragraph indents, dialogue, and narration). Most of the text in the game will be like the intro dialogue with Meredith - storybooks are special events, and are relatively rare.
Dargondo
I know, right? If you're gonna self-insert, you may as well be a buff dude! Same reason why I always play swole Nords in Skyrim, lol.
xmilteach
Have fun!
DERAX12345
Everything is avoidable. It's one of our main design principles - we give you options, and let you play the way you want. That means you can avoid any fetish content you dislike. Same with companions - if you don't like furries/scalies, just don't recruit them.
bigguy_foryou
Ashenbones
Raidou24
Fetishes in ToLLA are supposed to be very diverse, because they're tied to the people and situations you'll encounter. I wrote about this on our Patreon, but it's a salient point so it bears repeating here - if you rescue a milk maid from goblins, you can expect lactation and breast content; a she-orc or drowess will abuse you physically; a giantess will probably smother and trample you; spoiled noblewomen will want you to choke and dominate them; etc. This is the exact opposite approach that Japanese games take, where they focus on a small number of core fetishes and then build the entire game around that. In ToLLA you'll be roaming through areas and across the World Map, so any people events and situations you run into will reflect in the sex content you'll encounter by interacting with them.
MarshmallowCasserole
wert01
It's not like we arbitrarily decided on RPGM. RenPy was out right away because ToLLA is designed with area free-roam and combat in mind. We tried Unity a while ago during pre-production, but it ran like crap on our test laptop (and we want even people with potatoes to be able to run the game). Unreal is even more resource-hungry, and is complete overkill for a top-down 2D RPG with hand-painted art. Godot is cumbersome (or so I've been told). We opted for RPGMV because our scripter was already familiar with it, and because it lets us build what we need for the game. You won't even recognize the damn thing once we're done skinning the UI and area maps. You're all expecting something like
Pokemon Blue, whereas
You must be registered to see the links
is a closer and better representation of what the game will look like.
rageaholic
Marusbir
JenMistress
KhaelDragon
hanhkhoa
Psyside
Guys, literally the first thing in the Readme file that comes with the game tells you to extract it to Desktop and rename it to 'ToLLA' if it has any weird letters in it. I'm not very tech-savvy so take this with a grain of salt, but it's possible whatever program you're using to extract the game is naming its folder the same as the archive, with all the funky symbols. When I extract it to my Desktop, I just get a folder named 'ToLLA', as it should be... and the game boots up without a problem.
Frosty2000
The old iso-RPGs like BG2 and IWD are pure magic. As for the femdom, Meredith isn't super-hardcore (like some of the orc and drow ladies you'll run into later). But I agree 100% that all the endings are somewhat maledom-y; it would've been tonally jarring to put in a pure femdom end, because everything (start-mid-end) has to flow well with everything before and after it, regardless of path. Though now that you mention it I guess adding a dedicated ending for femdom fans would be nice... You know what, I'll put a note in our shared design doc! We have to revisit the intro again later on to put in a Morrowind-esque chargen, so I guess that's a good time to add 4-5 extra pics for a femdom end! (I'll also add a foot massage scene with Meredith in the next Build - I think Vixi has a few pics lying around that we could use for that!)
KingRocket
I was really careful not to include any fetish tags that aren't actually present in-game.
0beron
Your comment gave me a good chuckle, lol. As an in-game fetish, poverty is more like you abusing impoverished women to have your way with them...
if that's the kind of Captain you want to role-play.
Belphegor22
Glad you liked it! Call her 'mommy orc' to her face, and see what happens!
Hhhhhhshshsnz
I've put a note in our shared design doc for a femdom ending, we'll add it a bit later after we get some of the more core functionality and scenes into the game. The main reason for 2-month release windows is due to all three of us on the team having to work 9-5 jobs, but we're planning to hire more devs as soon as funds allow. Save game functionality isn't enabled because there's nothing
to save - you can replay the CYOA with just a few clicks after the
NEW GAME option on the menu menu. But saving will be present in the next build, yes.
JAZZWAVE
I won't disparage anyone else's projects, but I agree with you on one thing - we worked our asses off, yes. A lot of people underestimate how demanding game dev is, just from the amount of hours it requires to build assets, tie everything together, and debug until it's all playable.
GuyInDogSuit
Nice gif! I'll show it to our artist next time she starts lecturing me on the importance of good plot development!
Ut6t%Tyh^*NxC3$6
It's easy to get them mixed up. Most people do.
empatheticapathy
I'm now imagining a smug monster-girl forcing you to simp for her by donating the party's gold. Hilarity and drama ensue.
desmosome
We didn't reuse any text whatsoever - every single picture/path/branch has completely unique text. Some are tonally similar, I'll give you that, but unless our scripter accidentally screwed up and added the same text block somewhee there shouldn't be any text repeat (apart from the CONTINUE/END choices that let you move on or quit the CYOA). You're 100% correct about Meredith's relationship to the Captain - her main focus is pleasing you (this is even mentioned in the opening 1st page of the CYOA). So it's less a matter of her being your sub or dom, and more of wanting to please you by acting in whichever manner you want her to. A lot of people seem to miss this, but you hit the nail on the head! You're also correct about the MC's personality (Soldier, Warlord, Lecher, etc.) - unlike in Japanese games, Western ones usually let you control what the character says and does almost to a 1:1 (I broke this rule for the intro dialogue in the cabin, and had the Captain speaking without Player input, but it was an exception to set the scene and explain their backgrounds/situation). But you don't have to worry about any of this - the game will track your decisions (how good/evil/kind/cruel you are), and NPCs will react to it accordingly. Some waifus will even refuse to let you romance them if you're too far along the good/evil meter. The only exception is, again, Meredith, because she's so madly in love with the Captain that you'll always be able to romance her, regardless of how much of a saint/demon you are in-game.
skyah69
As the project writer, thank you so much for that. People aren't usually all that focused on the writing in these games.
csnmbgq
More stuff is coming in the next Build. The first one was just the appetizer.
It Was I DIO
That's... a really good description of what we're trying to do! Damn, I'm gonna steal that!
madchef
It's 2021, get with the times! But on a serious note, all that stuff tends to be considered vanilla in the ero game community. We had people on 4chan calling ToLLA surprisingly vanilla, despite the game having scenes where the MC is choking Meredith with his cock... or where she's pissing in his mouth. So... I dunno.
White
T H I C K !
boogiepop
Hi anon, how you doing? I wish I had more time to shitpost with you lads on 4chinz, but work keeps me away. I do lurk sometimes during my lunch breaks, lol.