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Skeltom

Engaged Member
Oct 9, 2017
2,631
3,164
How many episodes this is going to be? I use the incest mod and after I edited out most of the exclamation points I brought up earlier this is right up there in my top three, I just want to know what I have to look forward to.
 

Benares

Member
May 12, 2017
204
275
How many episodes this is going to be? I use the incest mod and after I edited out most of the exclamation points I brought up earlier this is right up there in my top three, I just want to know what I have to look forward to.
the devs stated some time ago that there will be 25ish episodes, plus, maybe, a kind of stand-alone harem finale not directly connected to the game
 
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Ghostboy031

Active Member
Jan 2, 2019
574
904
the devs stated some time ago that there will be 25ish episodes, plus, maybe, a kind of stand-alone harem finale not directly connected to the game
Watch him drop a NTR ending where you got your ass kicked at the party and have been in a coma this whole time while the other guy has been the one getting all the girls haha
 

acewinz

Developer of "The Call of Darkness"
Game Developer
Oct 15, 2018
2,586
7,584
Nope he will put at next month starting giving excuses for patrons for continuation of funding, he has done this multiple times most developers do.
You must have us confused with someone else. Unlike most devs, we would either release in two parts or pause our patreon charges if life got in the way of our promises to deliver. That unfortunately has happened a few times in the several years of production put into this game. Now that this is cleared up, I'm going to go back to work on EP20.
 
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WhiteyG

Active Member
Sep 30, 2020
702
2,169
He did get face-palmed for it, seems quite likely that's how he got most of his 'likes'.
hahhaha...(here, just to get another face-palm from you, i kinda collect it, and im counting it as well).
what a dumb&dumber collection could be seen here nowadays.
I was just trying to fuck with Abhai but he didn't take the bait, and I have very few facepalms so go for it if you want. It was a terrible joke but I regret nothing.

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sandstorm1872

Member
Sep 6, 2018
227
394
I had to get this off my chest. Firstly, I've been a long term fan and player of the game, so it's not that I turned up from hibernation to unload my negativity. I do read the theories and the responses from the devs about the game but 2 years and 19 episodes in an adult VN, there are some glaring issues I couldn't miss.

  • Story -- Let's start with the elephant in the room itself, the story. It started with a great yet simple premise of an MC trying to find his footing with his surrogate family, with which sparks that began a while ago start to rekindle with the intensity of a bonfire. Over time, we were introduced to a larger, supporting cast and importantly, a mystery person who may or may not have been seen by a barista as the computer from which the email was sent was in the cafe. While this was interesting when it appeared when the episodes were in single digits, for me at least, it has lost all the suspense to the point that I hardly care. The key of a great suspense plot is to constantly feed the viewer/reader/player into it and all the characters would have a minor plot to play in the big picture. Even till end of Ep19, we're nowhere near to any solid leads but we go from one bombshell in one update to a cluster of them in another, with the main plot getting convoluted.

    This is reflected in the dev's delays as the technical backend of so many characters and so many choices leads to a plethora of combinations, that it becomes intractable and infeasible. I believe this was because of lack of vision of what the end should have been for this game. It has got to the point that no matter how you "win", as a player who played 20+ episodes, you won't be satisfied as the devs seem to show a fatigue of plot progression.

  • Choices -- Stemming from the point above, too many choices for anyone's liking and as a player, hard to determine the impact of a choice because in my view, the more choices you have per character interaction, the impact of that choice diminishes like a temperature cooling Newton curve. Why not have more choices with OG characters/characters that influence the main plot rather than every random character that pops up every 2-3 update? Wouldn't that make the dev's workload manageable and keep long-lasting players like me happy?


  • Considerations -- The above critique may sound harsh but if I remember correctly, Cheeky became a father, there were couple of instances the staff was reduced and Covid hit. These are beyond anyone's realm of control and because the team have kept the lines of communications wide open like a German Autobahn, players like me have been loyal. Even with these considerations, I believe some oversight and end point of a game with multiple endings is the very least loyal players like us deserve. With that I think the team have got their work cut out. I've deliberately avoided mentioning any character names, as I'm sure I'll be pounced on by hardcore character fans for being biased.

    I hope acewinz and CheekyGimp take my points in the right spirit and address it to some extent. Looking fwd for Ep20. Cheers!
 
Aug 7, 2018
102
168
Choices -- Stemming from the point above, too many choices for anyone's liking and as a player, hard to determine the impact of a choice because in my view, the more choices you have per character interaction, the impact of that choice diminishes like a temperature cooling Newton curve.
Personally I like lots of choices, especially in this game - lots of fun answers to chose from.
 
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acewinz

Developer of "The Call of Darkness"
Game Developer
Oct 15, 2018
2,586
7,584
I had to get this off my chest. Firstly, I've been a long term fan and player of the game, so it's not that I turned up from hibernation to unload my negativity. I do read the theories and the responses from the devs about the game but 2 years and 19 episodes in an adult VN, there are some glaring issues I couldn't miss.

  • Story -- Let's start with the elephant in the room itself, the story. It started with a great yet simple premise of an MC trying to find his footing with his surrogate family, with which sparks that began a while ago start to rekindle with the intensity of a bonfire. Over time, we were introduced to a larger, supporting cast and importantly, a mystery person who may or may not have been seen by a barista as the computer from which the email was sent was in the cafe. While this was interesting when it appeared when the episodes were in single digits, for me at least, it has lost all the suspense to the point that I hardly care. The key of a great suspense plot is to constantly feed the viewer/reader/player into it and all the characters would have a minor plot to play in the big picture. Even till end of Ep19, we're nowhere near to any solid leads but we go from one bombshell in one update to a cluster of them in another, with the main plot getting convoluted.

    This is reflected in the dev's delays as the technical backend of so many characters and so many choices leads to a plethora of combinations, that it becomes intractable and infeasible. I believe this was because of lack of vision of what the end should have been for this game. It has got to the point that no matter how you "win", as a player who played 20+ episodes, you won't be satisfied as the devs seem to show a fatigue of plot progression.

  • Choices -- Stemming from the point above, too many choices for anyone's liking and as a player, hard to determine the impact of a choice because in my view, the more choices you have per character interaction, the impact of that choice diminishes like a temperature cooling Newton curve. Why not have more choices with OG characters/characters that influence the main plot rather than every random character that pops up every 2-3 update? Wouldn't that make the dev's workload manageable and keep long-lasting players like me happy?


  • Considerations -- The above critique may sound harsh but if I remember correctly, Cheeky became a father, there were couple of instances the staff was reduced and Covid hit. These are beyond anyone's realm of control and because the team have kept the lines of communications wide open like a German Autobahn, players like me have been loyal. Even with these considerations, I believe some oversight and end point of a game with multiple endings is the very least loyal players like us deserve. With that I think the team have got their work cut out. I've deliberately avoided mentioning any character names, as I'm sure I'll be pounced on by hardcore character fans for being biased.

    I hope acewinz and CheekyGimp take my points in the right spirit and address it to some extent. Looking fwd for Ep20. Cheers!
No offense taken. We have always listened to critique and it goes a long way to helping us make the game better. You also have plenty of validity to your points. We too are worried about story fatigue as it were.

All I can say from my pov is that first there has never been any doubt where the story is going. Cheeky had it laid out before he even started, we are making up the details as we go, but the main story is set in stone.

Second this update will see a major story development so hopefully that will go a ways to keeping people on board the main plot driver.

Third which ties somewhat into your choices bullet... I think the greatest failing, but also the greatest strength of WTHI which separates it from most others is the actual impact of your choices. It's one thing to have multiple "paths" that determine interactions between the main character and another on an individual basis, but Cheeky went the extra 100 yards to make all our relationships interconnected with each other character in their respective grouping and to some degree overall, and they react to it. We don't keep a huge ongoing variable list for nothing, people who have tried to do walkthroughs for our game generally go mad, and I can pretty much guarantee that unless you keep a journal of your choices, no two games are going to play out exactly the same even if you dated the same girls.

The weakness of all this is an exponential amount of overhead which slows us down some. As Cheeky mentioned in one of his last post, the morning after with the girls at the beach house was several thousands lines of dialog and code, but most people won't even see a third of that in a single playthrough because of all the different variations based on choices. As you say this is a pita for us, but we are committed and don't plan to cut back on that aspect before we finish this game (next game may be a different story). The good news is that the beach house was probably our hardest scene to deal with from that perspective, with it's wrap up this EP some of the worst divergences of pathing have been wrangled, and also some arcs that are not central to the story will finish up soon enough and you won't see much more from them till the endings. We also have no plans to introduce any new characters. Even Mabel's intro was sort of a fluke because Cheeky thought that EP was too milfy (I agreed reluctantly).

As for our problems expanding the team reliably, that is just par for the course really. These types of games are more labors of love than a real source of income honestly save for a lucky few. Sort of makes the incentive for newcomers underwhelming.

As for the future of the game, we just keep on trucking. We are coming up to the top of the roller-coaster now and I hope that all the updates going forward will be to some degree plot driven until the end, but no promises as usual. Thanks for all the fish and praise though. It's why we keep at it.
 

WhiteyG

Active Member
Sep 30, 2020
702
2,169
I had to get this off my chest. Firstly, I've been a long term fan and player of the game, so it's not that I turned up from hibernation to unload my negativity. I do read the theories and the responses from the devs about the game but 2 years and 19 episodes in an adult VN, there are some glaring issues I couldn't miss.

  • Story -- Let's start with the elephant in the room itself, the story. It started with a great yet simple premise of an MC trying to find his footing with his surrogate family, with which sparks that began a while ago start to rekindle with the intensity of a bonfire. Over time, we were introduced to a larger, supporting cast and importantly, a mystery person who may or may not have been seen by a barista as the computer from which the email was sent was in the cafe. While this was interesting when it appeared when the episodes were in single digits, for me at least, it has lost all the suspense to the point that I hardly care. The key of a great suspense plot is to constantly feed the viewer/reader/player into it and all the characters would have a minor plot to play in the big picture. Even till end of Ep19, we're nowhere near to any solid leads but we go from one bombshell in one update to a cluster of them in another, with the main plot getting convoluted.

    This is reflected in the dev's delays as the technical backend of so many characters and so many choices leads to a plethora of combinations, that it becomes intractable and infeasible. I believe this was because of lack of vision of what the end should have been for this game. It has got to the point that no matter how you "win", as a player who played 20+ episodes, you won't be satisfied as the devs seem to show a fatigue of plot progression.

  • Choices -- Stemming from the point above, too many choices for anyone's liking and as a player, hard to determine the impact of a choice because in my view, the more choices you have per character interaction, the impact of that choice diminishes like a temperature cooling Newton curve. Why not have more choices with OG characters/characters that influence the main plot rather than every random character that pops up every 2-3 update? Wouldn't that make the dev's workload manageable and keep long-lasting players like me happy?


  • Considerations -- The above critique may sound harsh but if I remember correctly, Cheeky became a father, there were couple of instances the staff was reduced and Covid hit. These are beyond anyone's realm of control and because the team have kept the lines of communications wide open like a German Autobahn, players like me have been loyal. Even with these considerations, I believe some oversight and end point of a game with multiple endings is the very least loyal players like us deserve. With that I think the team have got their work cut out. I've deliberately avoided mentioning any character names, as I'm sure I'll be pounced on by hardcore character fans for being biased.

    I hope acewinz and CheekyGimp take my points in the right spirit and address it to some extent. Looking fwd for Ep20. Cheers!
I'll just start out by saying I have to disagree with a lot of your points. I think the devs have had the ending mapped out from the very beginning. You couldn't do a game like this without knowing what direction you are going to go. It can be frustrating with all the choices related to different characters when you don't know who to trust, but to me that is part of what I like about this game. I love the mystery element to this game, and trying to solve it before the devs just drop it in your lap. I have plenty of theories based on clues the devs have put in the game, and I think they do a good job of giving you a little something in each episode to help you along without giving it away. I look forward to getting another piece of the puzzle in each episode and seeing if it fits in with what I was already thinking. As far as the cast goes while they won't all tie into the mystery surrounding the will, I think they all bring something to the game. I mean I can't see any way in which Debbie and Lily tie into the will but come on how could anyone not love Debbie and Lily.
 

MrFriendly

Officially Dead Inside
Donor
Feb 23, 2020
5,875
14,449
All I’ll say is that I can neither confirm nor deny that a certain grump has actually become bored of the over abundance of lewdness (yes I said it) and not enough advancement of the main mystery. I’m looking forward to seeing something happen that doesn’t involve a dick entering a hole repeatedly.

Yes, I am weird.
 
4.40 star(s) 331 Votes