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Sexual Competition Arena (Jam Prototype)'s itch.io pageResults
| Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
| Horny | #18 | 3.696 | 3.696 |
| Novelty | #18 | 3.565 | 3.565 |
| Kink | #19 | 3.652 | 3.652 |
| Play | #22 | 3.391 | 3.391 |
| Narrative | #24 | 3.261 | 3.261 |
| Stealth | #30 | 2.565 | 2.565 |
| Ambition | #30 | 3.304 | 3.304 |
| Overall | #32 | 3.061 | 3.061 |
| Harmony | #33 | 3.261 | 3.261 |
| Aesthetic | #50 | 2.783 | 2.783 |
| Sound | #56 | 1.130 | 1.130 |
Ranked from 23 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
Stuff you didn't do during the jam
Game world & characters are based off smut I've been writing privately for a while. First time drawing & publishing them. All text scenes were written specifically for the game though.
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Comments
This was great. Pretty complex combat system, didn’t quite get the hang of it so didn’t beat the Packmaster but defeat was a great experience too. Loved the writing and pixel art, especially the player portrait.
Losing is definitely a mechanic I want to have. I've always enjoyed the loss scenes in these types of games more.
I'm hoping to have a sort of rivalry budding with these scenes. Characters progressively going further in the loss scenes as you lose more. The inverse of this is having characters get more competitive with stat buffs/different AI as you beat them (Also to make sure you can't just steamroll the same fight multiple times with the exact same moves since the AI is not random)
Writing was nice and the combat was pretty interesting. I can't say I care for the 2D tile, advance/retreat style in combat games, although that may be a Me issue. Overall a good prototype!
Neat! The combat system has a lot of moving parts, but I felt that they all worked harmoniously together. I had fun experimenting with them, and I definitely think this has the potential to be developed into a full game. I like the suggestion that the various enemies will all have their special moves.
I've been writing SCA stories privately for a long time and there's a TON of characters, though most of them are fairly one note, or too 'hardcore' for the tone I want in the game version.
Each character's going to be themed around a different kink, all with different personalities I hope to show in the battles. So each character's gonna have a completely unique moveset. For the ones I have planned out, some focus on full violence to wear you down, some are more into seduction, I even have plans for a sub who spends the whole fight just running and doesn't even bother to fight back, just tire you out slowly.
It's a lot of fun trying to show these personalities through the fight. Max is honestly fairly flat, he copies the player moveset aside from the bonus petplay attacks. I'm hoping the second fighter will feel wholly unique once I eventually get to adding them
Didn't really understand the combat system but the writing was nice and i liked the ideas of the setting.
The combat system has some interesting complexity and seems to support different strategies and approaches! The menu is clear and navigable, it immediately gives an idea of what's happening and is great at providing all of the necessary tooltips. I like the writing, I think it can be paired with the battle sprites or portraits to some extent to unify the two modes a bit more. Definitely a game you can try expanding after the jam if you've got the energy to do more with it, the battle mechanics are solid and I still wanted to mess around with them after winning a match!
Thank you! I've been spending the past few days planning out the future of the game, I just dropped a devlog focused around my ideas to refine the combat with the Jam feedback and adding the features I had to cut for time. It also details some of my bigger plans for further in development.
It's a world I've been developing in private for years, and finally putting it out to the world was definitely scary. Seeing the response has been a little overwhelming, but I've decided I want to keep going with this idea. Still gotta work on reviewing the other games here first before I go into full gear. I've been slacking since Slay the Spire came out.
There’s a really in depth combat system here! The fact you can get different moves via pinning is great, and I liked the implied strategy that comes from choosing what way to end your turn. The evolving icons for both players as they got more and more turned on was great.
Agree with the other comments that the text passages were a touch too long when you’re here for the combat, that the lack of feedback made it difficult to tell what was effective and what wasn’t, and it would of been nice to have some feedback on the enemy’s turn to make it more tangible.
The back and forth strategy of the stances brought some good meat to the systems. I enjoyed it.
I have a thing for competitive sex so I really enjoyed this one. Combat could be easier to understand if you added a few more visual indicators to whatever is happening (especially to your enemy's actions). The stability/pinning system is a very fun way of establishing a power dynamic during combat. I do wish the text segments were a little shorter because they have a pretty different vibe from the actual gameplay and I think they're clashing a little bit. But overall just a really solid prototype imo.
Yeah, I'm already planning out a combat rework that does exactly those things. The action log was a hasty last minute add entirely so you have some way of telling what the enemy did during combat, it was really the best I could do in the time of the jam. The first update will focus entirely on combat clarity.
I definitely went too hard on the writing here. It's a world I've been developing for a long time, and I wanted to try to fit as much of it as possible. I can see how the vibes clash, but that's honestly the part I enjoy most. The idea is supposed to be sex workers playing up rivalries and fighting for a ravenous crowd (that I had to cut due to time constraints), and I also want to have a separation between the how the characters act on and off stage. Definitely a deviation with what's common in similar settings. I do need to find a better balance of length in the text scenes, especially that intro. But I don't think I'd be making significant changes to the vibe of the text.
man this is a pretty interesting combat system. it does feel like a rough draft but i think you've got some solid ideas here, like, i was legit excited that i got a different moveset while pinning someone haha
it looks like you've been thinking about it these last couple days so i hope you keep iterating on it, could definitely be really cool
one of the trickiest parts might be making the effects of the opponent's turn more tangible, but probably just playing out some tiny animations (even little numbers and status effects coming off of the player sprite sort of thing) would help a lot there
I did actually like the battle system but similar to Lupanar I did find it hard to tell how effective or ineffective something might be most particularly because of health/damage. I didnt have a bar for it but also it didn't seem to matter? After a point, I assumed it was just combined with the horny meter and took hits in stride. I do also agree with Underwhelmers that the flow of the battle 100% helped enforce the eroticism but also the desperation of the later combat? I thought it was a very good touch that over the course of the battle *neither* me or the opponent cared about stability as energy became scarce and were just beating on each other to try and win, that was very effective.
I also agree with plastic grass that the text was good but a bit long. Especially for a game like this where the real meat is in the combat system. I do like a lot of the place setting though, lots of interesting visuals to chew on! Would love some art in any kind of future build even if it's just like splash illustrations in the back.
Yeah the battle system is definitely a mess. Damage and lust are the same bar, but that's only really alluded to in one of the skippable Sen questions during the intro so it wasn't exactly clearly explained. Then I decided give them different tooltip descriptions as if they were separate damage types, hadn't considered that could lead to confusion.
I'm considering future improvements to the battles, and was thinking of making the 'pain' damage a delayed increase to lust. Like it adds a status to the opponent that waits until the end of their turn to apply any of the lust? And I could also add some sort of 'reeling' debuff if you take a bunch of pain in one turn to encourage big combos. But that might be adding too many layers to an already complex system.
The enemy AI is something I'm proud of, and I'm very glad to see it enforces the feeling of desperation. With full focus, Max is completely offensive, using charged every few turns and trying to wear you down. Once he loses the first stack of focus, he'll start playing defensively, dedicating turns to stability if it's broken, attacking if it isn't. Minimum focus he just uses random tease actions, won't even try to pin you unless you're already against the wall.
Text length is certainly an issue. It's a world I've been developing privately for a few years, and I kept feeling the need to incorporate X lore bit in there. I care a lot about the 'context' in my smut, and all that fluff does serve to enforce that, but it's definitely unnecessary outside of my own brain fuzzies. (I more than doubled the length of the loss scene after editing it -_-)
For the art. My plan for that would be the photos that were described in the win loss scenes. Each fighter would have a character photo with just them used as an introduction for the character, and match photos for each win/loss scene (The photos looking like polaroids). I did try to make the character photo for Shade, but my amateur pixel art couldn't handle the pose I wanted for it. I ultimately gave up and just wrote the match photos into the final scene. But a future expansion would attempt to capture that idea with actual art.
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.
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
Ohhhhh that makes way more sense, I totally misinterpreted you. I guess most of my titles are fairly descriptive (The next fighter would just be 'The Alchemist'), I should look into other types of titles for the more conceptual characters. I don't really have good title ideas for. Great idea
I like the spin in the turn battle.
There was a nice inclusion of the erotism in the narrative of the actions taken and the flow was favorable to interpret the encounter as some lether covered folks getting frisky.
Glad to see someone else enjoys text-based adventures. Not gonna lie, I found the combat a bit too complicated. It was hard to determine how effective an attacking move or a status effect was, and it was really difficult to raise the opponent's lust bar. In the end I got pinned to the wall and pegged, so I guess it wasn't that bad :p