Holy shit this game is fantastic! Love the writing, love the pacing, love the corruption and domination theme (although I am more male dom than fem dom, hope we see more in that direction eventually!). Honestly I also kinda adore the shift to cartoon art for the "dev has to explain something" bits - helps separate the realism from the dev stuff, keeps it interesting, and provides some levity. Well done. The whole game feels like a fresh take on my fav genre, domination
I have a few comments/questions though.
Questions:
1) I am somewhat unclear on how your saving points mechanism operates - I saw I missed a submission check at one point with Mr. Irvin, despite at that point only having approx. one choice to make. I therefore assume that the points are saved across runs? When? How? Because I tried to start a new game a few times, each time picking up two submission points from the Mr. Irvin scene, then restarting to quickly add more submission points. However, this never got me to a sufficient level. Do I have to finish the game each time or some such? If I save right before the end and then push it into point collecting territory, can I then load up again and push it repeatedly? Will that save all my points over the entire run, or recent stuff, or ... basically I am intrigued by your system, but I don't quite grasp how it works and therefore how to progress with it. Please post an explainer on the main page so everyone can understand how to operate the system.
2) Will a player always be told if they failed a check, or will it just pass by without notice if they lack the stats?
3) If I want to try a new direction for a character with a new game start, will I struggle if I chose the other direction from previous runs? To rephrase, does taking submission lower domination and vice versa, or are they separate tags that add up over time and can be used in various runs separately?
4) Are relationship levels also persistent like sub and dom levels, or are relationship levels run specific?
Suggestions:
1) A way to check your character stats. It would be nice to know how much progress you have made towards whatever goal you want.
2) Rather than restarting the game each time (if that is in fact the mechanism to save persistent points) it would be nice if each scene could ALWAYS be replayed - a game run never has to "end," it just fills in chronological gaps that you can revisit at will. The game would basically be more like a gallery that you fill in as you progress, which dovetails nicely with your "events" based progression. You could have it so you see how far down the timeline each event is this way as well. Would also make it much easier to, say, build up the stats you want, or check out a scene you didn't pass the check on before, without have to restart the entire game. Even for good games that can be a bit obnoxious. (These chronologically ordered events could be where you list possible outcomes/routes in said event, so players can see if they missed content per suggestion 6 further down.)
3) As I alluded to in question 3, I think having sub points and dom points stack up independently, rather than competing, makes a tone of sense. Because they can be used differently over separate runs (if I understand the system correctly, which is unlikely lol), doing it this way would make it easier to test out certain paths you can't do on the other run.
Meta progression can be an excellent tool, but
grinding points can quickly become a problem with a lot of games.
4) Although I am glad you have an almost non-existent textbox, I would honestly prefer it literally not existing at all, and judging by other games I think this is something you could quickly and easily add to the choices in preferences and let players decide. Just a thought.
5) I saw at some point you said no to the 15 year old daughter being included but... pretty please with a cherry on top?!?!? Alternatively, this strikes me as the ideal kind of thing to offer to players through an optional menu in the beginning or alternatively make them download and apply a patch.
6) Even if you don't want to point out a guide or a cheat sheet, it might be nice to have a list of all possible paths so players don't miss out on, say, some kinky Maude action without even realizing it was an option. This is true for failed checks and for hidden path options. You don't have to tell players how to access some juicy option (although frankly I am very much on team "fapping games should be easy and basically play themselves" since, well, I am too "busy" to think much if they are good
), but knowing generally that there is a "Maude path that requires some assertiveness" can prevent players from missing content purely because they didn't even know to look for it, rather than choosing not to put in the time. For example, unless it is clear to me that there is a viable alternative path on a choice like "masturbate or don't masturbate," I will
always choose masturbate and could potentially miss content without ever knowing I did. I would like to avoid that as much as possible.
7) While almost all your characters are
excellent, Jurgen's model is immersion breaking level bad. I don't care too much if a character is ugly if that is what you intend, but Jurgen has a comically out of proportion nose and eyes. Honestly that character, and any scene with him, needs a total rework. Sorry, just thought you would want to know. (The content of the scene was great, just specifically his model really needs to be redone along with the few scenes he is in.)
I think that covers my initial questions/concerns, holy shit great game! I think you do an
excellent job making each scene, even in the same convo, slightly different. Often I find that devs take the easy road with their renders and just leave characters in the same position as much as possible to save time and effort, but telling the story really is in the little movements that don't even consciously register as a new render unless you are looking for them. Your story is great (but needed a male dom protag lol), your visuals are great, the way you are trying to experiment with time is pretty great too. I think you could use a little work with the user interface aspects of your new but clever system, to make it easier to work/figure out. Keep up the 5/5 star work! Will rate when you have a few more updates, but it's already top notch in my book. BTW I dunno if you handle the English since you said it isn't your first language, but whoever does is pretty damn good at it! Only a few places that looked like typos or forgotten words, rather than a fundamental English mistake. Shoutout to you or whoever does your final writing, they have a talent for making dialogue feel real which is often the hardest thing even for native speakers to get right.
