Post by Verroverro in Life as an Innocent Waitress 0.2.2 (+18 NSFW) comments - itch.io

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Verroverro122 days ago (3 edits)

Very nice game! Will definitely buy it once it comes out.

One thing: the game has promising mechanics and gameplay challenge, but (as often in this genre) it’s mostly tied to the pure route, which offers zero rewards. Meanwhile, all the content is in the slut route, which offers zero challenge. To me, that kinda beats the point of a lewd game. If you don’t need to solve the challenge to get the reward, why is the challenge there in the first place? Might as well make a clicker or a regular VN out of it then.

A few suggestions (that may or may not already in the road map) to deal with that:

- Maybe there could be love interest (or more) for the player to win over if they complete the pure route, with a few nice scenes as bonus. Could also be an opportunity to add in some NTR (although I don’t care for that myself).

- Maybe the love interest could visit the bar every so often, requiring you to suddenly change your behaviour and tactics towards the other customers when they're there.

- Maybe there could even be a third route: an option where you convince a (female?) friend/love interest to go along with some shenanigans in the bar, corrupting them as well – but only if you play it right and don’t scare them off too quickly.

- Maybe you could tie Angels behavior options in the bar closer to her stress level/exhibitionism. After all, if you’re stressed out, it’s more difficult to do things that go against your nature. So, when her exhibitionism rate is low and her stress is high, she can’t be cute or even normal to customers, will automatically try to avoid groping, and refuse to sit down with customers. And if she becomes too stressed out, she might even leave work early. That would add in some challenge for the slut route, namely managing her stats so that she feels relaxed enough to let go a bit at work.

(Right now, it's kinda strange that she can be totally flirty from the very first day. A mechanic like this would solve that too.)

Another thing: I feel that narratively, the dystopian intro is a bit at odds with the story so far. In a world where there’s only one female for every ten males, a woman like Angel probably wouldn’t be living the rather mundane life she does now. Either men would be fighting for her attention all the time, or there would be some kind of weird system in place to make sure she’d be married off to the most influential man/serve as a breeder to society/some other creepy thing.

Maybe you could tie something like that into the main storyline – e.g. Angel could know/learn at some point that she has to find an influential partner to have a stable future or risk being sent off to the pens. Otherwise, toning down the intro a bit would make sense to me.

Gingerscape122 days ago(+1)

I don't necessarily agree with some of what you say here, but different people have different opinions, and that's fine. I just don't want to leave it unsaid that there's a lot of people, probably the majority, honestly, that have little to no interest in balanced difficulty or gameplay in their lewd games. You are entitled to your opinion, I am simply providing some counterpoints.

Yes, most of the difficulty is tied to the pure route, and the slut route has all the content but little to no challenge, but that ties in with the narrative. That's literally something the game itself points out several times, "Oh, geez, I can make so much more money so much easier if I just let the patrons do what they want" and whatnot. Yes, it removes the challenge, but honestly that's just what a lot of people prefer, they don't want to have to actually play the game well to get the lewd scenes, that actively takes away from the enjoyment for some people. When it's difficult to get lewd scenes in lewd games, most people don't tend to play them. Not to say that it can't be done well, or that nobody likes it, but there is a definite cause-effect between "lewd scenes are harder to get" and "fewer overall players".

And as for the stress levels, the game explained how it works pretty definitively. If your stress is high, Angel will agree to do things she otherwise wouldn't in order to avoid confrontation. As you yourself said, "if you're stressed out, it's more difficult to do things that go against your nature", and it really seems like being confrontational and/or rude is against her nature, thus she folds under pressure when she's stressed out. This is a very real reaction people have to high-stress situations, her being willing to get publicly groped to avoid making a scene when she's super stressed is one of the more realistic things about this game.

It's heavily implied that Angel has lead a very sheltered life. That's really all the reason there is or really needs to be for the innocent girl stuff, she's been sheltered by her father from all the potentially dystopic shit going on in the outside world. I never read anything that implied that the dystopian setting was so dystopic that they had like breeding pens or all women are slaves or something like that. Just a country that recently got out of a war where the majority of their female population died, and women have less rights in retaliation from the previously oppressed men. Other than that, it's kinda just business as usual, but maybe that will change in future updates, I dunno. Either way, seems a little extreme given the info we have from the intro and what we see in-game. This isn't the Hunger Games, it's an otherwise normal post-war city where the government probably has bigger problems than making sure every female in existence is a breeding sow with no rights.

If I said anything that came across as rude or offended you, I apologize. That is all, thank you for coming to my ted talk.

Verroverro111 days ago (1 edit)

No worries, to each their own, as you said. Thanks for your elaborate reply.

I know there's quite some people that don't like to spend effort in order to view the lewd in a game like this. It's something I never really understood, though. After all, there's so much lewd content out there that's easily accessible, in VN's, comics, regular pr0n, and whatnot. If that's what you're after, why bother playing a game in the first place? Isn't the whole point of a game that you're challenging yourself in some way or form?

My guess is that part of the answer to this conundrum lies in the fact that the majority of lewd developers cater to this particular crowd. After all, the vast majority of lewd "games'" suck *** from a gameplay perspective and simply require the user to do a bunch of mindless and repetitive menial tasks in exchange for lewd. So if you delve into the lewd game genre, this is what you come to expect.

Which means that people like me, who enjoy a lewd game with decent gameplay, interesting options are few and far between. That's a shame, because the success of games like Karryn's Prison show that there's definitely a market for it.

Now here, we have a developer who actually built an interesting and promising gameplay loop. Which is commendable in and by itself, because most other devs don't manage that (or even bother trying). I feel it would be a wasted opportunity to leave this gameplay only for the pure route. Why not also tie it into the route that contains the majority of the content? That would make the game really stand out among its peers.

For people that prefer an easier experience, the dev could always add some shortcuts at the beginning, a story mode that ignores difficult choices, or simply the option to unlock the gallery (although it remains beyond me why anyone would want that :) ).