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well, thanks for the elaboration! i'm going to be honest, i still don't think i get it. punitive means, like, punishing, right? like, there should be a punishment involved? i'm not sure i see the relation.

i will say, your description of the difficulty is definitely something i will keep in mind. i do not experience the game as being nearly this precise or luck-based. it is valuable to have heard your experience. (personally, i actually really like how the game controls! it feels pretty smooth to me.)

if the tutorial area is still too difficult i would love more details on that. i have a hard time failing a single jump in this area so i am entirely blind to any issues that might remain. no pressure of course, you've written a lot about my game already, but nobody has really given me any specific feedback on this (besides you and a couple other folks about the purple level, that got nerfed) so i'm sure it would be useful.

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Nah, don't worry, I get the struggle of finding hard stuff that is obvious to you.
I restarted and took playtest notes, hope that helps:
Screen 2, slippery, I most often than not ended on the tip or past the platforms. They're very short and do not allow leniency while you're still figuring out the slip and air control.
Screen 3, I realized that if I don't stop air control right before I land, left-right direction will be applied on landing and I will slip. Especially frustrating on the even smaller platforms while still trying to figure out where I need to stop applying directionality (direction buffers on landing are a good way to mitigate that by allowing floor grip to negate directionality for one or two frames).
Screen 4, didn't struggle but I think it's because I try-harded on it on the alpha.
Screen 5, a drop jump in tutorial is CRAZY. It's a movement that requires in-depth control and understanding of mechanics, it's absolutely not something you should throw at players this early in the game. I was never trained for it in previous screens (no platforms with similar level design but without the drop, allowing me to get used to the timing without being punished*). *By punished here I mean "failing not because of my own lack of skills, but because I don't know how it works yet" as in it's almost impossible to succeed on the first try. If it was not a playtest, I would have dropped here. I love platformers but the challenge curve is ludicrous and if I'm playing this I came for the horny, so would probably drop since no such content lured me into thinking the effort is worthwhile. Seeing a  breedable poney just above that insane jump could do the trick tbh. I detested the purple right before the challenge and died twice on it by slipping. I wanted to die because of the drop jump if I had to.
Screen 6, easy enough, with this time a timing that feels both rewarding and challenging (getting to the core content gave me a motivation boost). I had trouble understing that the gate was a platform: the shape didn't afford it.
Screen 7, the grunt I let out when the platform didn't keep moving after coming back... It moves away way too fast, comes back too fast, and with the slipping barely starting to be under control I'm unhappy with the amount of tries it took me. There are no indicators for the amount of thrusts that it takes to start it and I only fucked one poney before so the number was elusive at best. I went for spamming the controls to get it over with then jumping as soon as I could to catch the platform before it moved back. Then the up-down platform came. While what I had to do was obvious, I still slipped and missed what I anticipated to be a very easy moment, and thus realize there was also some slip on the floor, or the platform, or something else I had not understood. I made it at the second try, and was almost had by the quick move back (again, no warning, but I came to expect the worst that could happen and surely enough, it does). At this point the thrusting mechanic was not motivating anymore and I just kept going out of curiosity and playtest necessity.
Screen 8, seeing the UI change was a nice reward. I enjoyed the little piece of dialogue but was a bit disappointed that the breeding with an actual poney was shorter than with the statues. The insemination anim was so quick I barely had time to see it, and at this point I wonder whether you just made an edging game.
Screen 9, easy pass with a nice use of purple areas to guide jumps. I wished I had had something similar at the start instead of the drop fall or the moving platforms of hell.
Screen 10, hard but fun. I was starting to get a hang of the slip and chose to skip platforms 1 and 3 to have more air control. Took me 5 tries but was actually fun since I was making an active choice to go against level design while being afforded that possibility. Then I slipped from the purple mare when jumping up left and fell in the pit, and had to do it over again with much frustration, since vertical air drift is something I always struggle with (and is a very advanced skill to expect your players to have: most platformers focus on horizontal drift challenges). I went back to the purple, first rty as I knew the timing now, only to realiza that in addition to the vertical drift the platforms were not pass-through (their hitboxes apply when coming from below). I was very very close to rage quiting as it was again info I had to learn not through affordance, design or logic, but through blindly bumping against obstacles. I had lost timing at this point, failed green twice, then purple thrice (passthrough bump and fall to pit twice, slipping while trying to attempt the first platform from the left and fall to pit). Honestly, just a platform extended to the left and one less green paltform would make this so much more enjoyable.
I didn't see or find the skip tooltip, so I stopped there as my hands were starting to cramp up. For reference, they don't do that on platformers, they do that on Souls, which gave me a chuckle given your previous commentary on punitive games.

So yeah, a punitive experience through the following aspects: lack of affordance and anticipation, lack of control (especially through air and landing drift), hard to extreme challenges in quick succession with little to no breathing room between them, poor die and retry (the core of a proper die and retry is that you warn the player that something will be hard or they can deduct it by themselves in order to brace before facing the actual challenge and the death that follows; "gotcha" challenges are fun to develop but much less to play unless you know that the game is ragebait, which isn't the case here), little to no reward to foster engagement and desire to go further.

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ok, that is extremely helpful!

some thoughts:

3. i think i see what you're saying here. i could honestly probably change the ground deceleration to be almost instantaneous in all cases. i do like a little bit of slipperiness in the movement but maybe it is too much.

5. oh wow. i never thought about this level this way. thank you! i might tweak it to just extend all the platforms out so there's no need to "drop" into the jump, instead it would just be straight up.

6. gotcha. note that the platforms are shaped to resemble a clitoris. i can see how this could be a readability issue. i think a general rework to the level would make sense here, it was designed rather early and never really tweaked.

7. good point about the number of thrusts. perhaps i should rework this one so both statues are on the platforms. tbh, spamming through them is the intended gameplay, so i'm not sure if there's much to be done about that.

8. the breeding with the real mares is never shorter than the statues. in fact, they force you to actually take your time (0.18 seconds between thrusts). the impreg animation is kept short so as not to impede the real gameplay too much.

it is funny to hear you say edging simulator. i would actually go one step further: i do not see this game as really being a porn game at all. it is a horny game, but that is it. to me, the reward of playing the game is the gameplay itself. the sex is incidental. you will notice it is not possible to perform the sex/thrusts with a single hand. this is on purpose.

i do wonder if having the tutorial not be horny is too much of a turn-off (in whatever sense) for the average player. but i also just don't feel the story of my game can abide the tutorial level being horny. i think just making it easier overall could help ease people in better.

10. this is very helpful to know. i definitely think those purple statues could use a rework, they are a bit annoying.

11. you didn't mention this one but i think it perhaps needs a nerf too. :)

i'm ngl, this is unbelievably helpful feedback. i honestly might do a rework pass on the tutorial level after the jam is done to address most of these issues, and it's only possible thanks to you. i'm not sure if there's much i can do about the later levels; i feel like they do need to become actually difficult at some point, as that really is my goal with the game. i also feel like the initial sex levels (the ones right after night 1) are themselves not really that hard. maybe i'm mistaken.

i'm not sure what you mean by "die and retry." i will say, i tend to like platforming games where i sometimes have to die a few times to understand the level design and the intended route. maybe that's not appreciated here though.

but yeah, i gotta say again, thank you a lot for this. i think it is quite possible i can make a much more polished version of the tutorial now.

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Good luck with it and happy to have been helpful :>
Edit: the entire thing is giving transgirl dev (sorry if I'm wrong) and I think you should always be supported in whatever it is you do