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(2 edits)

Sad to have missed the Steam demo, looking forward to the full release!

Regarding this Itch.io version, I have to say that while I enjoy it a lot overall, a big gripe for me is the fact that sending older characters to events seems to have an extremely high chance of killing them immediately after. This happens even with House Krankhaus, where I regularly see AI Krankhaus characters in their 90s or 100s, my Krankhauses start dropping dead in their 50s or 60s because they attended a wedding, or something. Often this includes their own courtship events too - on more than one occasion I've had a widowed 50+ year old successfully woo someone with a title into the family, only for them to immediately drop dead once the courtship ends, before the wedding can happen.

No clue if that's working as intended, but I find it leads to a very frustrating doom loop where an older character drops dead after an event, others get roped into grieving their death automatically, and then they in turn drop dead after that event. There comes a very frustrating point in the early game where, if you didn't manage to have a ton of kids and grandkids within the first two generations, suddenly half of your family tree is dying and the other half is kept busy for years just grieving them, then inheriting their titles, and you basically get paralysed for a significant stretch of time.

It also means that in practice characters are only fully usable for the 34 year stretch between age 16 when they mature and age 50, when they reach the "anything I do could give me a heart attack and take the rest of you down with me" age. Except that 34 year stretch also coincides with the period where you would most want them NOT doing anything like hunts or visits, because you want them making babies instead, so you're just kinda stuck between a rock and a hard place.

Really the only time Ive managed to escape this trap across multiple games is as the Sapwoods, since they alone manage to breed fast enough to outrun this issue, but even there it still feels like a bit too much of a constraint.

I realize this version probably isn't the main one being worked on anyway now that you have the Patreon going, but from the videos I've seen on Youtube of people playing the alpha, it seems like this spontaneous post-event dying still happens pretty often in that version as well, so I figured it was worth mentioning.

Thanks for the thorough feedback.

You are right that this version will not get further fixes.

What you're observing, characters dying after events (unless they died in the event), is not because they were in the event, but because a timespan of however many years has passed in which they would have died anyway.

We can't let characters die of old age during events without breaking the game. So obviously, they have to die after that. There was a version where this was not done, with the consequence that if you kept your characters occupied enough (and random death outcomes didn't get them), they could essentially live forever.

So there is no doom loop; it's not spontaneous death. Use the character, don't use them, they will be dead by year x either way. How long they actually survive is based on their health stat. And the AI Krankhaus characters are kept close to their original genes, meaning many of them have high health (and those who don't, you won't notice, because they're dead). If you play them yourself, it's easy to lose the health genes, since you pair them off with other houses that don't have them. If you don't specifically select for high health (or get unlucky), the lifespan will diminish within a few generations.