Post by ijedi1234 in Darling Duality comments

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I remember seeing a LP of this a year ago. I wanted to play something while waiting for the Chaos;Head patch, so I gave this a go.

So spoilers and such:

I did choices how I would do things - play along until I could stab Castoria in the back and get her arrested. I feel it would be pretty easy too - I would claim that she and I need to go to the police station so she could get a state ID (since she doesn't legally exist), and then immediately tell the receptionist to separate me from her first chance I get. Bonus points if she has a major overreaction at my betrayal so I can get her for assault as well. She gets dragged to jail kicking and screaming while I get to walk free.

I didn't realize that I saw a condensed version of the Good Ending from the LP I watched - the full Good Ending still feels a bit short compared to the Bad one regardless. Oh well. I was hoping for an opportunity to betray her.

Bad Ending is a blast. I'm amazed the MC survived all that. Dude totally would have died of circulatory shock, but I guess Castoria would never let that happen.

I kinda wish the MC would actually try to fight back when he still could in the bathroom in the Bad Ending. And it could still lead into the next scene - IIRC, she has actual combat experience from her time in the game world, while the MC has basically nothing (that I know of). It wouldn't surprise me if the MC whiffs his first punch and then gets counterattacked hard. It would be like an average joe trying to fight a XCOM rookie in a fist fight.

It makes me wonder where Cana is going to fit into this. The only way she would see the Bad Ending MC is if she somehow got into his home without getting spotted. Good Ending MC has a chance of getting outside to see Cana, but probably only if MC is onboard with my plan to betray Castoria. An MC actually wanting to be with Castoria would not stand a chance of getting out.

I'm not a fan of the backlog background. It can get hard to read text located in the middle of the screen since contrast isn't too good there. Rest of the UI looks alright.

Melancholy Marionette1 year ago(+1)

Ahh, but DD isn't set in the same reality that we live in, so things wouldn't necessarily have panned out the way you might hope x3 For example, who is to say that state ID is even a thing? :P I mean, it actually isn't a thing where I'm from, but that doesn't matter because it's a whole other world anyways. I'm not even gonna get into that though because it would mean far too many spoilers x3

Don't worry about the length of those endings currently available anyways because they're not technically endings. They were just suitable endpoints for the purposes of the game jam it was made for. I only had one month to make it while learning how to use the new engine at the same time, so I had to pick some sort of cut-off point that still kinda worked as endings but where I could easily pick up from in the future :3 Think of them as more like the end of the first day or chapter rather than final endings.

In fact, I plan for each character to have 4 different final endings reached by a mixture of choices. And some bad endings along the way too, of course :D

No promises on MC fighting back in the bathroom, but MC will definitely be getting more choices in general, including the ability to fight back more :3 There will be different choices too. I don't know if you've already seen one of the videos I posted earlier this year about some of the new types of choices, but basically, some will simply be to act cruelly or kindly to a character (following the black and white/sinister x sweet theme of the project), some will be more detailed so that you have more control over the way MC acts or what MC says, and some will be timed, where electing not to pick a choice within the time also kinda counts as a choice in itself. Sometimes it might actually be better to do nothing!

Cana fits in a few different ways :3 Once Cana's actually added to the game, you'll have the opportunity to spend time with them before even beginning Castor/ia's route. Or you can try to play a bit of both, though, it's obviously gonna result in drama x3 Technically though, it would be possible to play with just Cana. I'm hoping to have all future characters playable solo depending on MC's choices at the beginning of the game. Some will only be reachable after doing certain other things, discovering stuff while playing other routes, or by refusing to pick any of the activities on the first night that lead to the solo routes of the first bunch of characters. But it will also be possible to encounter a second character while already playing with a first. Again though, I probably shouldn't say too much cos I don't wanna spoil stuff, haha.

As for the backlog background, honestly, it's been so long that I can't even remember what it looks like or if I've already changed it >.< I've been sitting on stuff for a long time now, unfortunately. A whole bunch of new content is written, some of which is coded in already, but I currently have no idea where I stand with the original VAs, which has largely killed my motivation to work on this particular project because it means either having the rest of Castor/ia's lines unvoiced while all the new characters get voice actors or recasting Castor/ia and getting the new VAs to re-record all the old lines >.< Neither of those are things I wanted to do, so I've been holding out, hoping to hear something back from the original cast members and working on other stuff in the meantime. There's gonna come a point though where I just have to put up a poll or something and see which option everyone would prefer and then go from there because I can't wait forever on it :(

It's partly why I plan to release a mini-update very soon. It won't have Cana in it, nor will it contain the continuation of Castor/ia's story, but it will have the new choices within Castor/ia's existing story content so I can at least try to show how the project will play going forward + some of the new UI I made a while ago.

I'll be sure to look into the backlog though and see if I already made changes or not, and if not, I'll see what I can do to make it easier to read the text :3

Thanks for supporting the project and taking the time to leave a comment ^-^

ijedi12341 year ago(+1)

Were it up to me, I'd release the unvoiced version first and then provide voices in a patch later, if VAs are getting hard to find.

There's one Neptunia fangame I follow which did something like that. The guy released the full game with some of the audio out, and then a second version with the audio in. I think he did that because the audio was being weird with compression, but w/e.

There's also a RWBY fangame I've taken an interest in (JPDE) which got the main script of the game done, and then they gradually added voices character by character. That way a VA can do all their lines in one go, and their future willingness to do more lines isn't too important. I think those devs are focusing on specific characters for each update now.

There's also the Falcom way of voicing games, where there's so many voice lines, only the important scenes are voiced.

Of course, I favor the unvoiced first/voice later option, since that means I still get a full game in my hands even if the original VAs never show up.

Oh, and since I live in the US, a State ID exists if you can't get a Driver's License for whatever reason. Since a fantasy character isekai'd to our world wouldn't know the rules of the road, a State ID would be their next best option to present their identity. And of course I would exaggerate a bit that the cops are authorized to grant those. ;D

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