This was so nice! The sense of growing tension was well built by the gameplay, with modifiers that act as softeners to defeat conditions on both sides. The system is witty and straightforward, very fun to play with a small but meaningful number of strategies. Balancing is superb.
The text was good if sometimes a bit long (especially the first parts where you're waiting to get to the fight), and the sex scene was rewarding. Nice touches on the picture shifting as they get more and more aroused, it was cute.
Viewing post in Sexual Competition Arena (Jam Prototype) jam comments
My main goal with the combat was to make a sense of struggle. I really liked the idea of the characters getting gradually more tired as it goes on. I'm very glad to see that it resonated with you.
I really don't know how to feel about the story, the last two days of the jam was spent on that. I've been writing for a while, but it was mostly just dialogue (I'd go into a unique word counter, and characters names and 'said' are ALWAYS the most used words).
Before this game the characters existed, but didn't even really have designs, just vague descriptors on top of a personality. So this was pretty much my first time actually forcing myself to describe stuff. I definitely wasted a bunch of words describing stuff that really didn't need to be described.
If you went from mostly dialogue to descriptive, this is an IMPRESSIVE first piece of work. Pacing could benefit from scene cuts to either interactive or visual moments (picking your gender, picking your fighter nickname, picking your outfit, looking at the fighter sheet of your future opponent, appreciating your fit, etc. still art works well in the case of a game jam, even if it's just a screen of another moment in the game or a splashed text), and you could pace scenes (especially the post fight sex, which is imo the best piece of writing) by cutting it into more screens and having IF-like moments (not necessarily branching, but with having the player click on main intaraction moments to feel engaged with what's happening). I'm a writer but do take this with a grain of salt as I've got AuDHD (easily distracted) and am partial to interactive fiction (the game I submitted is interactive fiction, don't hesitate to give it a look - I should have paced the initial disclaimer better but the rest is decent).
One thing that definitely sets apart the larger interactive fiction type games is the ability for character customization. It feels like all the 'big' interactive fiction games I see have super in depth character customization, but they also rely entirely on static bust art for the other characters, and maybe something simple for yourself (IE: Fenoxo games allowing custom image uploads for your character or BDCC having the animated puppet you can color and style), I'm not sure how I can accomplish that visually with my more art-heavy combat without making you a lame silhouette or drawing absurd amounts of sprites. You mention picking titles, like deciding your own fighters theme, but I feel like it would force me into a mess of ambiguity in writing.
I do already have a level of ambiguity in my writing due to weird sexuality reasons, I ban myself from writing numbers to describe things for hard to explain reasons (How tall is Max? Taller than Shade. You get no more info than that). And for some reason I decided to not give Shade any direct speaking lines, instead just going for indirect descriptions about the type of thing Shade asked. But trying to scope that up to a whole ambiguous character is not something I'm confident about doing.
However, Shade as a character has been written as multiple genders, and I do like the idea of a fem PC with some alt scenes. I basically just need to decide if I want a separate character design for that or not, I did try to design Shade as fairly androgynous for that reason, not sure how well it comes off though.
Shade was made the protagonist of this game because I had absolutely no idea how to make them work in my writing. All the characters are based on a different fetish, and Shade's supposed to be based around Humiliation. But with all the characters being sex workers who get paid to participate, can they even be realistically humiliated? But even with that, I kept wanting to write Shade, I just love the character. Quite a few of my characters were initially created to be a rival for Shade (Including Max, though now he has a separate rival in the lore). The whole win scene is basically just Shade turning Max's whole petplay dom identity against him.
The idea of breaking scenes into smaller pieces is incredible though. Looking through my scenes, every single break is just when you leave a room to go to another one, definitely should consider other places I can break on.
I will definitely be checking out your game tomorrow. Thanks so much for your comment.
And thank you for in-depth reply! On a more personal note I loved Shade, being non-binary myself.
By titles I just meant your sub-title (as in Shade, the Cat Burglar, could also be the Freaky Feline, the Night Master, the Drool Lurker, the Kabedon Enthousiast, etc. giving a sense of agency to the player while not having to produce extra visual assets or change your writing). I err on the side of small features with little to no extra assets haha