Ok so on to my major point 2 - and just for clarity I love the game - the other thing I have trouble with is pleasing the women. I know this has already been called out in your development notes. So let me also point out I strongly support your principles, which as I understand it are, no free lunch (haha!), tough choices, you can't just automatically have them all in your harem with maxxed affection. I totally agree with that. That's sound game design, 'tough but fair', the kind of decision that leads to a stronger game. I also agree with the principle that the women have different likes and dislikes that you need to discover, are differentially easy vs hard to get. And I like the fact that none of this is openly telegraphed or spoon fed, you have or figure it out yourself, eg by failure.
But so having said that - and this is early days for me, I haven't run through the whole game and I've only really done one run - I think there's a frustrating randomness to the process. I don't mean literally random. I mean that the game doesn't give enough information for the player to be able to plan sexual encounter / sexual training investment decisions, or even learn much from failure of those, in ways that they can effectively adapt to. Now partly you could say, rightly, that this enhances the realism/immersion of the slave captive scenario. Slave captives don't get advance warning of what their captors want and they don't get to say "ah couldn't we do something else?", let alone "No". So ok that's probably generally right, but it would help greatly if there was a way to obtain hints about the preferences and desires of the women, in advance of them actually doing it to you and you fucking up because you weren't prepared. And I do also agree with you that failure is instructive and failure needs to be part of the experience. But it equally needs to feel like the player has some chance to influence it or try to plan for it and it's not just like it was pure RNG. Consider that the player has to make a pretty big investment of say 2SP - 2 levels of grinding - into a skill just to play their hunch of what might work with 1-2 of the women. So TBH the only specifics I would change apart from a way to get more hints, ahead of time, about their preferences, is
- when their preferences are revealed, probably through a 'failed' session, keep those preferences more consistent. I get the impression, and I might be wrong, that what they want is more than 50% likely to change from one session to the next. Rewarding player effort with serial failure and a feeling of no possible influence on the outcome is probably not a good dynamic, even in a game targeted at masochists! :-D
- needs to be clearer whether you take an affection penalty after these failures? I know you discuss this, but to the player (me) the distinction you make between casual dialog and dialog choices isn't clear. Penalty after a first time failure is ok, but I think it's harsh when the woman has increased her requirements for a repeat session of the same act that satisfied her first time, and you still get a penalty because she now wants more. (Maybe this doesn't happen but it feels like it does.) That should be a zero, neutral, unhappy maybe but not a penalty, not a minus, I think. The minus is very demoralising because you got one shot to get it right and now you have gone backwards. It leads to a strategy of, don't approach a woman unless you are now +1 better in what pleased her last time, and even then be prepared for her to want something totally different that you're shit at.
Thing is, in real life women are generally creatures of habit and what pleases a woman one day will usually please the same woman the next day. Not always but usually. Not a different woman, for sure, but the same one, usually. Particular if (like a captor) she has no reason to fake it. And of course there are exceptions and different people and yadda. But it's a reasonable expectation. In this case bearing in mind these Drow girls are starved of cock and quite into sex, and are well aware they have a limited pool to fish in. So I think it would be reasonable for the game to hint information pretty strongly, when what satisfied a captor today was going to be inadequate for her, next time. That's very easy to convey in dialog and gives the player a fighting chance. Then you can have some women (Druuna, Eloara maybe) who are fine with the same thing each time. Others who escalate up to more severe acts - that's pretty normal in life and BDSM. And maybe a few who crave greater intensity on the same act each time. That's cool when it's part of the variety and uncertainty but it's kind of frustrating when it's the standard behaviour. In general I would like to see the women (via dialog, or some mechanic - Talk about others, or Observe) provide hints about what they might want next time. Without making it too obvious or mechanical of course.
In short, after I grind levels in the Zelda Sex-mines I want the chance of me getting it on with my captor to be more than just a crap shoot. Not too much to ask of a game surely? (I mean this shit is frustrating enough in real life right?)