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I love this game, thank you for creating it! I enjoy personally roleplaying someone who is creating the AI for the purpose of having an artificial son/daughter/child, though I'm curious what the real reason will be (if there is one).

You probably already have thought about these things, but just in case you haven't:

It would be cool to see an ability to more properly interact with the AI, with how we treat/answer/interact with them being more involved with the AI Perks, although I don't know how it would interact with the ability to change perks (perhaps only a few choices between different 'acts' or every X number of AI perks, or perhaps it would be better to let people change it). For example, the third AI Perk could potentially be based on answering the AI's question of what we made it for: Selfish answers could be more tyrant-focused while selfless answers could be more protector-focused. It could add some roleplay to it (if you feel that would enhance the game's vision any).

On a separate note, it would be cool if the AI had two different axis of morality to add some further customizability to the AI. I'm not entirely sure of the balancing of that though, admittedly: My gut reaction says it would give more customizability to the AI and the player's choices, but it could also make players feel forced down one path if they want to get a certain ending. As it stands, if someone wanted to be, say, a protector, then they could still pick up tyrant/rational perks so long as they ultimately had more protector karma than any other. But if there were two axis, then they would likely have to put in more work and investment to make sure both of those axis were what they wanted. I feel like it would be cool to have another axis, personally, and it would definitely make replayability more interesting.

Regardless, I really enjoyed this, and I'm definitely buying it on Steam when it comes out!

Thanks for such detailed suggestions!

Like you said, I want to keep the ability to respec Perks, because I don’t want to punish players for making a choice they might not like later on. I also don’t want to force someone to replay the game just because they ended up disliking the build they created.

I’ve thought about adding dialogue options when interacting with the AI, but that would require writing a lot of short dialogue choices, and personally I feel like that would flatten the overall experience a bit. I like that right now everyone can kind of answer the AI’s questions in their own head however they want, or not answer them at all. Also, some players don’t read the story at all. I actually had to add an option to disable it completely after getting requests for it.

Maybe adding something like dialogue options during perk selection could actually be a good idea though. I’ll think about it and see if I can fit it in somehow.

As for the additional morality axis, I did think about making something like a triangle plot for the three morality types, but the more I thought about it, the more terrified I became of how much extra work and balancing that would require lol.

Honestly, I’m already a bit overwhelmed trying to balance three different paths at once. Initially, I never planned for the Karma and Perk system to become this expanded in the first place xD

It would definitely be a cool idea, but on one hand I don’t want to make the game overly complicated, because like I mentioned, it’s already pretty complex for a nodebuster-like game. And on the other hand, it would significantly increase development time, and unfortunately I just can’t afford that right now.