I finally got around to trying this, and I saw the dev posts here, so I figure this was a good place to drop some praise. Really impressive project, can't overstate how intriguing I find the overall concept and execution. It’s the magical monstergirl battle fuck hypnotic corruption BDSM hermaphrodite polycule fantasy that anyone with taste can’t help but appreciate. I love the characters, I love the concept, and I can hardly wait to see more.
I had some notes, but then I took a look through the code (really appreciate leaving it open source) and it seems you are already working on most of the things that I wanted to bring up. I’ll list them out anyway, though, in case I misread something.
The sex scenes need a way to make the extras in an orgy more active when the ‘lead’ system limits continuing actions to one character at a time, and a way to more easily initiate 3p or get extras involved in CA with partners when they don’t have the lead. I stumbled into an orgy with every candidate participating and was amused to see most of them standing around frotting for most of it because lead kept changing before penetration could get underway. Pretty hilarious, frankly. Characters who are ignored in a threesome gaining enmity is also a truly amusing touch, well done with that, and the ability to invite them to extra mount seems a simple solution if denial isn’t your goal/kink.
The merchants showing up randomly is a pain, at least give an option to sacrifice a resource like energy to go and find them at the end of the day, or pay a fee to have them show up the next day, something that isn’t just RNG. Even if they just show up on a regular and predictable schedule, that'd be an improvement. More ways to make money would also be appreciated, such as bets on your or other’s fights, cash payout from losers in lieu of merit, modeling bondage gear to satisfy the merchant’s kink, offering a submissive contract in exchange for cash/merit points, tutoring fees, there should be plenty of options. Once there are more ways to get money, more ways to spend it would also be nice, such as resource restoration consumables or extra lessons, etc.
Bondage gear expiring after 5 days seems over-balanced, especially since removal by rematch is a thing. I get that having everyone walking around like leather mummies would break the game, but there should be some narratively integrated justification for escape more satisfying than the temple’s inconsistent efforts to level the competition field. Having to do something sneaky like break into another candidate’s room to search for the key (or toss the place after sex), or convince a stronger candidate to challenge your binder for release would be a lot more engaging. Even a last resort option of the temple intervening (comparable to high infamy punishments) with some kind of associated disadvantage for needing that kind of help would also be a major improvement over an arbitrary time limit.
Supposed adults needing to consult a manual to determine how their genitals fit together perhaps makes some sense in a world without the internet, but some content gated behind scrolls is just actively ludicrous. I will concede that oral and anal sex might not be intuitively obvious in a culture without high exposure to pornography, but ‘extra mount’ being in a separate unlock is just absurd. ‘Ho hum, these empty holes of this consenting beautiful person are waving around right in front of me, but she’s already nailing that other babe, so I’ll just sit over here and wank.’ Just comedy cold, the very definition of video game logic.
I struggle to see the point of altered states as they are currently implemented. In my limited testing, simply spamming an action that best leverages your stats consistently outperforms tracking altered states and attacking currently sensitive bodyparts. This is a shame as the greatest weakness of both the sex system and the combat system is a lack of incentive to carefully track the ongoing activities and alter the commands you are entering. Especially in dominant or submissive sessions where the lead will not change, the game effectively incentivizes you to setup your preferred actions and then rush the scene to the end (at least once one is done exploring the currently available content).
A system with clear diminishing returns for repeated stimuli or very large bonuses for setting up sensitivity and then following up on that groundwork would help to gamify the sex scenes instead of leaving them as a novelty to eventually be skipped over on one’s way to the relationship points reward at the end. For that, I would say altered states shouldn’t be temporary with semi-randomized magnitude and duration, but something you can spend rounds stacking up with foreplay to later payoff with a full sex act, not expiring until orgasm. Perhaps an orgasm brought through one line of sex acts could setup a multiplier for a different one and a malus to repeating the previous one, incentivizing actually staying engaged with the sex scenes and strategizing to melt your partner. The extra damage caused by teasing chastity gear near orgasm and needing to time orgasm denial are already placing one fool on this path, so I'm sure you already get the idea. The danger here, of course, would be putting a tedious amount of extra clicking into sex scenes, which is already trouble in their current state with the cumbersome radio button and dropdown menu user interface.
The same basic problem applies to combat, where there is practically no reason to pay any attention at all to what your opponent is doing. As far as I can tell, one simply has to keep buffs applied while spamming your best stat-based attack. You may win or lose that way, but switching to sex acts, even with the opponent at zero control, never stops being a risk with minimal upside considering their terrible accuracy. Pouncing would be the exception here, but I will come back to that. As for buffs, having to refresh them over and over is a pain as well as archaic game design, just make them a toggle that works continuously but comes with a downside, such as tanking certain stats while increasing others, increasing your vulnerability to a certain damage type, or having a large lump resource cost to activate. Debuffs having a limited duration is fine, but there should also be a way to purge them or extra synergies for combining them.
The pouncing system seems to have been fundamentally underutilized, although it is so close to perfection, it just barely misses the mark by being optional and risky. As I said before, you can win the battles without ever doing anything sexual at all to your opponent, and with certain stat spreads, that might even be your meta strategy for fights. That’s fine, but it does kind of take the ‘fuck’ out of battle fuck. What’s the point of setting a fantasy world where people are magically compelled to settle their differences with sexual submission wrestling when you can also just settle a fight by kicking, clubbing, or burning someone into ‘aether disruption’?
I really think orgasm via actual sex act should be the only victory condition for the combat system (with the possible exception of combat against monsters as they are currently implemented). Attacks that reduce control / non-lust resources shouldn’t cause lust damage, or at least they should all wait to do so until the primary resource they reduce is zeroed and overflows to lust (sort of a masochism switch being flipped, I suppose). The exclusive goal of combat should be to disrupt your opponent and pounce on them, or the equivalent magical or mental effect of eliciting sexual peak, as an unavoidable mechanic rather than an alternate option with substantial risks. Kicking someone into submission and then dragging them off to ‘rape’ them in the aftermath is fine and all, but it doesn’t seem to adhere to the theme this project has been building.
Out of pure symmetry, it really seems like there should be a way to spend social drive to reduce the opponent’s control and social drive, although short of a ‘vicious mockery’ type spell I couldn’t really suggest how to achieve that.
Struggling in an ordinary clench shouldn’t throw the opponent off and drop their control, it should just change who is on top. Alternately, I propose a ‘counter’ option alongside struggle to achieve that effect. Rolling around in a tangle of genitals is more interesting than taking turns jumping on top of each other.
Any particular reason combat doesn’t provide training exp? Even just calculating how much resources were spent and getting a flat / inefficient bonus to related stat training would offset the opportunity cost of fighting challenges vs. building stats. It also makes narrative sense that live sparring would be an excellent form of training/exercise. I presume it’s just annoying to code or balance, which is a perfectly valid excuse.
I can’t help but feel that there should be more interactivity as a submissive character / a social focused character. The hypnosis content line is delightful, I wouldn’t trade it out and hope to see it develop much more, but there should be other options for getting an edge as someone unlikely to win a contest of physical/magical might and thus unlikely to be the sexual aggressor. Creating a mood in a conversation that gets someone to agree to something they usually wouldn't is a pretty barebones advantage for what is one of the three major stat builds currently viable. ‘Topping from the bottom’ with some combination of actions and debuffs should give one a fighting chance at out damaging someone that has pounced on you. Simply making charisma a damage factor of ‘push back’ damage for those being topped seems like a low-effort way to simulate this (i.e. the sub coquettishly attempting to please the top). For sex scenes where you are being topped, targeting the dominant’s fetish / altered states should give you something to do other than passively pushing back, with the potential to render them infatuated with you or obsessed with pleasure as much as dominance and suggestible to your negotiations. This would be the moe succubus approach rather than the dominatrix succubus approach.
Lastly, while I do enjoy your world building, characterizations, and storytelling, I feel like the strongest element brewing in this game is the emergent storytelling made possible by the character AI/desires and the player’s ability to influence it through seduction and combat. While there’s a sharp limit on how many ‘paths’ and ‘endings’ you can write into something like this formally, RNG can create an enormous amount of engaging content just through the day-to-day interactions of the candidates. Alliances forming between lovers and collapsing through NTR, collecting a harem of submissives, only to have one grow jealous of the others and turn on you, submitting to a bull futa while biding time to slip a cage on her and turn the tables—those are stories that write themselves as the accumulation of points and random numbers play out. Ironically, the plot of the game actually gets in the way of enjoying that emergent storytelling experience by forcing you into the framework of the formal narrative. So, I would recommend, once you get the story sorted out to your satisfaction, adding a bonus ‘battle royale’ mode on some kind of arena map without any story breaks and with the narrative-essential balancing elements such as bondage and servitude relief removed. Let the character’s personalities be randomized (or customized), scatter resources across the map, allow the setting of bondage traps or ambushes, have monsters roam the map as wildcards, I think it would have a ton of potential as an alternative game mode.
