Ah, honestly I've had enough issues with Subscribestar already that I don't have time to set up/maintain another payment processor. If you're interested in Discord access, contact me and maybe we can work something out?
For the first: Liz needs to take a breather in the park, sit on the bench near Madeline, spring into action, not swallow Maya, then try to swallow Brooke.
The second: Liz needs to irritate Molly into leaving (ask about the PS5 and press the issue). She'll be surprised later in the day.
In what circumstances? Stamina usually can't go below zero but there are some cards which reduce the opponent's Stamina (Tranquility, Unbalance, Chokehold, etc.) and can take it into the negatives. Should be a rare scenario though.
Which version are you using, and what platform? I need your Player.log file in order to help you - you can find it at C:/Users/(username)/AppData/LocalLow/Anunnaki Games/New Pred in Town/. The file is overwritten every time you start the game, so please send it in immediately after encountering the glitch and exiting the game. Be aware that the file does include your username, so if privacy is a concern you should do a find-and-replace first.
Double-prey scenes are intended to be significantly more difficult than single-prey! Liz probably shouldn't attempt them until she has a fairly solid deck.
One of the most effective strategies is to take a page out of Madeline's book, focus on Burp cards which quickly deplete preys' Oxygen - they're already taking a Stamina penalty, and will face terrible odds once the available Oxygen drops below 50%.
Not forever, no - unbirth is more or less an advanced form of sex, although there are various scenarios where it can end up being menacing (re-birthing poor Liz right down a predator's gullet!) or lifesaving (our car broke down in a winter storm, and we need to conserve heat somehow...).
I can certainly add a toggle to disable male prey in Endless Mode. In the story, Liz can simply choose not to eat guys. =P
As for the sexual dimorphism angle, here's a fun fact: there are actually species in our universe where only females can swallow other creatures whole! Granted, they're all anglerfish, which are like the example of radical dimorphism, but it does show how evolution can sometimes find paths that might look wacky to an outside observer.
On the Voreside (my name for NPiT's universe), hyperelastic tissues evolved to solve the most pressing problem of hominid reproduction - how do you have both a large head and the relatively narrow pelvis that's required to walk upright? So for hundreds of thousands of years, there's this metabolically expensive tissue that only exists in one sex because it's useless in the other. All the other anatomical changes that the hominid form is simultaneously going through? They're built atop that framework, and suddenly fail (resulting in embryonic death) when a mutation tries to violate it. This is the sort of thing that evolutionary biologists call a "frozen accident" - some structure that's difficult or impossible to evolve around because too much else depends on it.
As for the social angle:
A) Monogamy is far from the human norm - for most of history, successful males sired a disproportionate number of kids, whether through explicit culturally-sanctioned polygyny or by more underhanded means. Anthropology and statistical genetics both bear this out, with some male lineages spreading like wildfire and others dying out completely. You could argue that monogamy was a vital cultural technology which helped stabilize societies beyond the tribal/clan level, but it's not part of our deep evolutionary history.
B) Because one man can impregnate an effectively arbitrary number of women, male intrasexual competition focuses on differential access to women. When it results in violence, as it often does, that violence tends to be secondary to this primary goal - ie, my tribe kills your men in war, but carries away the young women as brides - and is usually pointed away from one's own society. Female intrasexual competition is very different. Since there's no easy way to increase the number of children one woman can carry, her genes are best able to displace others through what's been called "fertility suppression" - minimizing the number of children other women manage to raise. This is usually pointed inward at one's own society, and tends to involve the destruction of someone's reputation, resources, and access to mates. In our universe this is rarely violent, but women on the Voreside have both the biological strength and cultural sanction to adopt a hybrid strategy: a limited amount of inward-facing violence which both achieves fertility suppression of one's rivals, and (when properly safeguarded) also tends to weed out the society's troublemakers.
So the tl;dr version is: the anatomical structures evolved from precursors which were only useful to (and present in) women, and meshed well with strategies for female intrasexual competition.
...also, yes, the logos of the Voreside does fundamentally forbid the concept of male predators. But that one's on me. =P
In-universe, there's always a stage of digestion, shortly after the prey's death, where the outlines of bones are visible and obvious. How much attention the narration calls to this fact varies by scene (and of course whether the content filters are set to allow that).
Well, Liz can both unbirth and be unbirthed - but I don't know how literal your question is. Like the in-game Encyclopedia says, unbirth is the only type of vore that isn't dangerous to the prey. There's no, like, age regression or any of the wackiness you sometimes see associated with unbirth.
Most of the added content involves Lavender's two (separate) vore scenes and Jess's two vore scenes (one of which optionally follows the other). In timelines where none of these scenes occurs, there's an extensive discussion before the group breaks for dinner in the garden.
If you're not seeing those scenes, you likely saved after the To Be Continued screen popped up. Which I've fixed for future versions, but unfortunately existing saves made at those screens cannot be continued.
Hot damn, wish we got this kind of player feedback at my day job! =P
The load/save bug has been frustratingly elusive. You're not the first player to report it, but you're the first to give a player.log - so definitely thanks for that. Bad news is, I don't see any errors besides the original softlock (which is a known bug I've fixed in my development version - one of the reasons I'm prioritizing a stable public release in June). Did the issue occur in a scene that directly followed an anal scene? Have you encountered it in a session where you didn't run into the softlock bug?
Will definitely look into the wording/mechanics of the cards you mentioned. You're not the only one bothered by the Apex Hug/Apex Tummy Rub asymmetry, haha - at the time I added Apex cards, there were fewer sources of Grip than there are now, but that might warrant a change.
Finding more and more reasons to finally bite the bullet and build that combat log, haha. It'll delay the bugfix update a bit but feels like a good long-term play, in terms of finding more bugs to squash.
Regarding story mode balancing - once Liz has earned the trust of other characters, she can train with them to gain/upgrade certain cards. Basically, investing in relationships rather than rampantly eating people is still a valid strategy - it won't entirely keep up with the power curve of a Liz who leans into predation, but it's close enough to eke out victories when she needs them. Same applies on the prey side. And yeah, most situations can be avoided by a clever word or a humiliating yield, but there will also be timelines that are gated by a particularly difficult fight.
Regarding card balance... Endless Mode is basically my testbed for that, haha. As applies to the deckbuilder genre in general, the goal is to give the player a lot of little pieces that come together to form powerful combos - while managing the risk that you might not draw the card you need on a particular turn. I'm glad it seems to be coming together, even partially, at this point in development!
I agree that Burps in general seem underpowered. Been experimenting with allowing Grip to affect their Oxygen loss, as well as simply cranking down the added vulnerability, or capping the amount of excess Nausea it can cause. Similarly, I'll play around with capping the total amount of Focus that Controlled Panic can generate - so that it'll eventually be worn down and degrade into Panic unless the character has another source of Focus.
Really interesting analysis of the Lyons Cubs' decks, and I agree with most of it. Curious to see how it'll be affected by the devbuild's library scenes - shoot me a DM on Discord (anunnakigames) and I'll add you to the server, your bug reports are worth way more than a $5 SubscribeStar payment. =P
Buff UI overflow, that's been a thorn in my side for a while - think I can roll that into the Combat Log update. Regarding preds marked as "dangerous" - the real issue there is that Liz's starting deck is pretty weak, so even though Molly is a marginal member of that group, she can definitely still nip a run in the bud. Might deal with this by moving Molly back to neutral, reserve "dangerous" for Sydney and Sophie and so on, and add a third category of "starter opponents."
You hit the Lavender nail on the head there, haha. Her natural lack of confidence (despite her natural competence) is only amplified by her... unusual circumstances. No spoilers in case you haven't played her story scenes! And yeah, I definitely did my best to make characters' decks match their personalities - both at the start, and over the eventual course of their character arcs. Like all the Lyons Cubs, Lavender can become terrifying by the end of the year, haha!
Thanks for the bug reports, these were really helpful - a couple of Retain bugs have already been fixed in the dev build, which argues that I should probably move up the next public release so they don't keep hitting users.
I definitely appreciate your diligence in tracking down the tripling issue, which is very real and still present in the dev build. The simple explanation is that I forgot to include a conditional statement so when a character's AI is evaluating playing a Super Strike/Struggle/Squeeze/Massage card, it'll actually trigger that effect. Boneheaded mistake on my part, haha.
Still trying to figure out the miscellaneous calculations - would take some effort to add a "Combat Log" feature showing the nitty-gritty details of how everything was calculated, but as the game grows more complex it might be worthwhile.
It appears you're encountering an issue with string localization that can happen when your system's locale is set to Turkey. This is a bug with the underlying Naninovel library that I've manually fixed in the development version (which you can access by joining my SubscribeStar). The fix will be present in the next public update if you want to wait; otherwise, a workaround involves changing your system locale.
Right now I'm guessing the next public update will be out in early June. If you'd like access to more frequent development builds, you can sign up for my SubscribeStar.
I can't help you without a Player.log. You can find it at C:/Users/(username)/AppData/LocalLow/Anunnaki Games/New Pred in Town/. The file is overwritten every time you start the game, so please send it in immediately after encountering the glitch and exiting the game. Be aware that the file does include your username, so if privacy is a concern you should do a find-and-replace first.
Interesting, are you using an unusual monitor resolution? There's been a few tweaks to canvas scaling in the development version, so hopefully the next public release will fix your issues - but I'd like to know ahead of time, so please let me know if your hardware's got some quirk.
The double-vore thing is intentional, characters view it in-universe as a very difficult stunt to pull off.
There are definitely more public builds coming! I'd like to finish the next major chunk of content (all the vore scenes in the library, plus the first half of the writing group) before going public. If you'd like early access to dev builds (including the new hand-drawn art for scenes) you can join my SubscribeStar!
1) Good catch, I'll try to replicate that edge case
2) Are you certain this is what's going on, or are buffs just stacking to give the appearance of tripling? If it happens again please submit your Player.log so I can track it down.
Yeah, Endless Mode still needs a general balancing pass - writing's still the primary focus of development for now, but by the time the next public version rolls around I'll find time to work on that plus the long-awaited AI revamp.
Lavender's definitely scarier than she looks - or even than the poor girl's willing to give herself credit for. =P
Update v0.0.3j is available for my SubscribeStar.adult subscribers! This update adds not only the Jess/Liz vore scene in the library, but five commissioned comics depicting the game's vore scenes (Helen, Noriko, Molly, Madeline, Brooke). The next public release is still a few versions off, so subscribing is the quickest way to catch up on new content.
