Skimming over prior posts, it looks like most people are as, if not more, disgruntled about the EXP requirements. I'd like to be a bit constructive though:
Strictly speaking, the problem isn't necessarily the EXP rate or numbers, it's the lack of meaningful progress once you step up to the beach. I found it mildly annoying that I found a quest to hunt orca raiders, *after* I had already completed another quest for the same, and I could have been getting progress to both at the same time.
More to the point, there's a few ways you could approach the problem. Better gear options to help equalize the DPS gap between area shifts, more meaningful/longer lasting buffs, or tweaking the skills to be more adaptive and useful such as scaling with level more, or some skills/items that are high flat values for early game, that you'd ditch for percentage values mid/late game.
For a few examples:
-Maybe warn the player bosses are immune to stuns, *before* they get crushed by that fact? I walking into the wolf den boss fight with what had up to that point, been the most optimal fighting/farming gear: A ton of stun locking. I managed to use tactics to win on my 2nd or 3rd attempt, only to be greeted by a phase two. I remember thinking to myself that up to this point, the game had been pushing me towards the idea that bringing a bunch of units, and not being bothered by them going down as long as I win the fight, maybe meant that as long as I triggered the 2nd phase, maybe the boss would still be in it when I came back healed? Nope! Start over from phase 1 again like any other game.
Which in turn meant that with the scarcity of gear, skills that don't improve, and no other quests to do, the ONLY solution is to grind like a motherfucker until my unit's levels are equal to hers? That always is going to taste like shit to the player. Yes, grinding should always be an option, a nice safe fall back, but it should be the thing you resort to because you can't, or don't want to, use the more efficient methods. Such as learning the tactics and strategies the game wants to teach you, or exploring and taking advantage of all the resources available. It's the complete lack of alternate options that makes the current state of the wolf boss so abrasive to everyone I feel.
-I was very shocked to learn that it wasn't just in my head, as soon as I added my third unit, my EXP gains went from already slow, to even slower. I had not noticed the EXP from the reward screens was being split between units. I would say the fastest and easiest way you could address the current grind issue would be to stop splitting the exp. With just some quick math in my head without actually calculating it, the drastic difference it would make to not have the EXP divided in 3 would greatly improve the leveling pace to catch up to the wolf boss. As it is, you're basically punishing the player for bringing a full team, by making it virtually impossible to level all of them at any speed greater than a snails. Which in turn, means you want the player to sit down, take a single unit out and grind them to the needed level, then come back and swap...and do that again two more times. Either way, you're more-or-less tripling the grind time requirements...for no reason that I can tell? Prior to this, I'd have said the game was encouraging us to bring a full roster, because units getting knocked out has no penalty at all as long as you win the fight, and now I'm not sure if the way the cow's healing skill revives downed allies was intentional design or an accident.
If every unit in the team got the listed EXP value on the reward screen as shown, instead of divided in three, not only would the grinding pace improve, but catching up new units to your current levels would smooth out as well. As it is, the fastest option is to ditch two members and go back to the start, and slowly grind them up the same path your current units used, only this time you aren't getting any rewards from quests to speed it up. Sure, you can bring a set of bronze equipment and dropped weapons to help speed it up a smidge, but those equipment aren't worth much to start with and have no better upgrades available, so the loss in quest rewards is far greater, not to mention that by that point, the player likely has the rare deer leader enemy randomly showing up, which means that while trying to catch up a new unit, they could easily risk getting their face caved in. That doesn't come with much of a penalty, just some gold loss, but it sure does feel like yet more ass to add to the pile.
-Speaking of skills, I would like to point out a potential source of further frustration. Since you've tied the Growth Type to a skill, and possibly stat growth as well (although I haven't actually checked and tested whether that is true yet, correct me if I'm wrong), you've created a scenario where a new player, much like myself, may very well choose the same type for all the units, and never realize they're crippling their options. Furthermore, with how you've set up the re-spec for growth type, it's even more punishing, because it wasn't until I hit the wolf boss that I encountered a roadblock strong enough to make me question if I was doing something wrong. The flip side of this, is that you may well have designed the game in such a way as to make players have to take a growth type they really don't like just to be tactically viable. The "Image Select" is a nice enough stop-gap measure for this, but even when I tried to change out one my units for another growth type, I was very shocked to discover that you've set it so when you do that, not only does it cost a huge amount of gold, but you also lose all of the characters levels? Even though it seems like you refund that into EXP boost, that still means YET MORE GRINDING, which as things stand, sets up a scenario where a player tried changing a units growth type to obtain more tactical options to avoid grinding, only to be slapped in the face with a yet harder grind, because if they want that EXP boost to get back into the same unit, they have to then ditch the team members to avoid it splitting 3 ways, and solo grind that unit back to pace with the current members as if you got a new unit.
I feel like either changing the growth type shouldn't reset the level if you're keeping the current grind-focused game pace, or the re-leveling aspect should be WAY easier than it is now, because if the player is doing it to rebalance the team for mechanical reasons instead of to see more art, it feels like shooting yourself in the foot to spite your face. You may or may not have actually helped yourself and have no way to know for certain until you've done a shit-load more of the very thing you were trying to avoid, and can test it against the boss when you've recovered what you sacrificed. Plus, since there's no where in the game that tells you what skill the growth types grant you unless you have them to see, it never even occurred to me that the second skill slot could be anything other than what it was for my entire playthrough until I hit the wolf boss.
If it's going to be such a major production to change growth types, then it needs to be more rewarding and transparent I would think. Tell the player at the start of the game, and again when choosing a re-spec what skills or scaling the growth type has an effect on. Since it's the skill the unit's growth grants, it should SCALE with that growth and become stronger, not just as a percentage of this or that, but the effect should expand or grant additional effects at each or certain growth stages, instead of a fixed single percentage. This would not only be more mechanically useful to the player, but it would be thematically appropriate to the games story as well, since the characters frequently point out that the mana fueled growth makes them stronger.
-Currently, there isn't any real trade-off between the ease of fighting weak enemies, and the challenge of fighting stronger ones. Usually, games would be designed to reward the player in some way for fighting stronger enemies. However, with the current mechanics of the game interacting with each other, the player is actually punished for this. To fight the stronger enemies that give more EXP, you have to bring more units and let them get knocked out to win even a single fight...only to have that higher EXP get divided by the number of units. In other words, if you weren't already packing a unit strong enough to solo the fight, trying to get that solo strength will be penalized and slowed down. This in turn means its more efficient to ditch as many units as you can, while still fighting the strongest unit you can defeat in 1-2 shots. Furthermore, because of how the EXP boost system works, this is even more efficient because it can quickly empty out the boost pool into a single unit, instead of diluting it through the 3-way split. However, this then loops back to the problem that only one unit is getting EXP, which means you need to then take this ENTIRE tedious process, and repeat it fully 2 or more times for each unit you have.
-On at least one layer, you could easily help relieve some of this burden by adding repeatable quests. Not only would this add more rewards for doing a tedious set of uninteresting fights you've already completed for the sake of grind, but you could use it to encourage the player to take those more challenging fights and engage with the tactics of your systems by having much higher scaling repeat quest rewards for set of stronger enemies. If I may though, I remember getting a quest towards the end of the game that only counted 2 out of the 3 sea raider types. Since the player has no influence over what enemy they fight, this is absurdly annoying and adds yet more tedium, especially since as far as I could tell, the escape button is useless against anything as strong as, or stronger than you. In other words, its useless against the #1 thing a player would want to use the escape button for. Please always have quests for an area accept all enemy types from that area. It's fine if it doesn't count the rare spawn enemy types, but all of the common types should always count towards quests.
That more or less sums up my best suggestions for taking the edge off the grind that more or less completely halts player progress at around level 30, when you get a third unit, run out of quests, and don't have anymore equipment or items you can obtain to improve.
My more nitpicky ideas:
-Please improve the mechanic for feeding the shark lady on the beach, Maris? Having to slowly drag a single fish at a time wasn't great. Off the top of my head, if the idea is to prevent using a fish the player didnt want to give away on accident, set it up so you click a fish, and then a 'feed' button pops up next to it. Then, when you click it, the fish just animates over to her instead. Or double clicking. Not sure which of those is easier to set up in the games engine, given its originally a VN system.
-I would personally like being able to switch between the AI and Drawn art on the fly, instead of through a series of menus. It's fine if it doesn't immediately update in most places, but especially during level ups, it would be great if I could toggle it to see both sides. This would also be a good opportunity to explicitly point out to the player that a given growth stage doesn't have a Drawn image yet. That would be good in general.
-Perhaps set up the Image Select system in the team management menu, to have a fully visible slider bar with nodes on it for each growth stage that exists? Then, only allow the slider to go up as high as the player has unlocked. It would provide a quick and easy location for players to see how many more growth stages they have left, and whether they have art yet or not. For instance, you could have a D above a node, and an A under it, each representing what art, if any, a growth stage has currently. If I remember what I read while skimming correctly, currently the stages are every 5 levels, and then slow to every 10 at some point? In the event you later decide to add more 5-increment art, it would provide an easy to see and review location for players that either already have that level, or for players who stopped developing one of the characters growth stages to quickly notice that new art was added for a particular path. It would also help for when there's a gap between Drawn art for stages, that only have AI art currently.
All together, I like most of the game, but the lack of options to progress besides some of the worst EXP grinding I've ever experienced, has rather brought my interest to a halt.
Note that I also say that as someone who loves a slow burn, both for stories and art shifts, and is still to this day quietly grinding away at the first Disgaea game's item worlds. I am by no means opposed to grinding...but I would prefer it to actually be fun while I'm doing it, y'know?
darkwatcher1001
Recent community posts
This is a fantastic set up, very fun to play out. No serious flaws stood out while playing, so just some quality of life suggestions:
-With its current state, the food mixing system could benefit from any combination you've performed before being marked in some way. The most simple version of this would be duplicating the "you've tried this already" message that comes from trying to re-mix a successful new food you already have, and just extending that to all combinations. The more ideal form would be when you select the first food, it visually marks all foods you already tried with it, or just prevents you from performing the exact same mix a second time by graying out options already used so you can't click them.
-A thought I had about the food system: Currently, once you've found your current surrogate(s) ideal food, the rest of the foods and mixing become pointless. If there's plans to expand the foods, an idea I had about them is that since they not only have a food they like best, but foods that would actually make them mad, you could expand on the idea by having each ingredient provide a benefit of some kind, such as needing to provide different surrogates with different balances of nutrition, and their ideal food doesn't necessarily provide all of it. Then, mixing and foods that aren't ideal, become more important because finding mixes of an ingredient they don't like that becomes a new food they will also like and provides the buff/nutrition they need/the player wants.
-Alternatively, Based on the menus, since there's potentially up to six surrogates being managed at once, with upwards of four more mechanics being added, I would say that unless there's plans to add more depth to the effects of food, you could refine its current state a few ways. I don't know/didn't test if there's a benefit to having them exercise every single day, or if it's only relevant for the small mood boost, (that you no longer need once you have ideal food), and for the debuff that you fix with it if you don't exercise them every few days.
Food on the other hand, as best as I understood the tutorial, is to be done every day (which makes sense), so streamlining it would be the ideal, because the player is going to be repeating it ad-nauseum.
Refining each food with a marker, like the mood smiley faces already used from the main screen, after you feed them it that indicates how much they liked/didn't like it, so it's easily seen at a glance not only what you've already tried, but what has worked best so far.
-If the food system is as robust as you want it in its current form, then I would recommend moving the button from inside Activities, to the main bar in the bottom left, for faster access since its done every day. Also, maybe adding the option once the player has experimented and found the best food, to mark a tick-box to always use that food, and then as long as it's checked, you just click the Feed button and it automatically feeds the current surrogate that ideal food. Dealer's Choice on whether it animates in the food cafe like usual, but streamlining the menu navigation on something that needs to be done every time seems good to me.
-I really liked the different chats the characters had for each exercise, and stage of exercise, and there were of course favorites I really liked. Once I had and was juggling all three characters though, constantly toggling away from each character made a few of the stages that have more subtle visual differences harder to notice when they've moved up a stage/tier/etc. While it doesn't necessarily need to be a part of the UI, a number or something similar somewhere that indicates what level they're currently at would be good, bonus effect if when you've reached the current maximum they can handle without a new upgrade, that number changes colors or gets a little " ! " on it to help keep the player aware they've hit a cap.
-Speaking of the caps, I think I may have min-maxed a bit too hard and completely broken them. I base that exclusively off the assumption that the 3rd cap upgrade is visually used at a certain size for Bess' exercise scene. I did notice that at higher medical upgrade levels they seemed to progress to larger sizes faster, so maybe that's tied to the expected child count? Either way, it would certainly add more 'umph' to the cap upgrades if the surrogates visually capped as well, possibly even the maximum child and therefore credit payout as well, really drive home that you're not developing any further without them.
That's all I could think of while playing, but I absolutely loved running through the game, and if I had to pick a gripe with a gun to my head, I'd say that I was a little sad when I realized I'd been wasting my time trying to find all the food combos, once I'd already had all 3 characters best foods, because every other food choice was then rather pointless.
That was very short, and very sweet, which is just perfect. I am sad to say I didn't realize why the character art was so familiar till the credits, HappyHeiferCafe is also a cute and fun game.
Great work making this! I wish a few more people that want to make games knew that they don't need to make massive sprawling environments, that you don't actually do anything with.
You made a fantastically visually clear map, and had prompts to redirect the player away from the instinct to probe every corner and explore, which helped me catch on much faster than I usually would that this was more story than gameplay focused. Well done all around!
Oh please for the love of all that is good in the world, yes, this! I'm playing on PC and one way or another I'm constantly fumbling because of the lack of precision in the mini-game.
I'm sure with a touch-screen it's effortlessly intuitive to play, but between the distance from the place I need to click, and the bars I need to watch carefully, I'm constantly either missing the target entirely, or accidently dragging to one side or the other while holding down the click, which plays the animation like it's milking, but then the bar starts sinking fast and panicked fumbling ensues. (btw the bars themselves are very well programmed, very responsive, never felt like they were out of sync or delayed in any way with the clicking!) I don't feel like the balance of the game is off in any way, at least for my reflexes, it's just that I can't watch what I'm doing and the bars at the same time.
Alternatively to hot-key inputs, two ideas that I had were since you lock out the right click during the mini-game anyway, remap it to be left click/right click for each side, or if that's something that is janky because of the V.N. structure the game's built on, the most direct and easy idea would be just make the entire left and right halves of the screen two inputs. Basically bump the hit-box size to the entire screen and the only need is for the mouse to be on either side of a dividing line.
I've found that by following the directory listed in these errors, you can usually either directly find the file it's looking for and correct its name so the game can properly identify it, usually while the game is still running and then hit Retry button,
or, if the file it's looking for either isn't there or you can't tell which one is mis-named, just grab something of a similar size and create a copy then give it the name it's looking for to let it move on.
From what I can tell, it looks like they may be hand-naming and coding and occasionally forget a capital or lowercase. I can remember fixing a few pictures this way in previous versions, I don't think I've ever seen an audio file have this problem though. Neat.
Is there any way to change the characters titles after a game is already well started? I rolled with the defaults, and was just ignoring it up to this point, but by now the jank of them is bugging me more and more, and I'd like to go in and change them around, but I couldn't figure it out poking around the files. The save files can't be read by a simple notepad program so my one and only tool failed me.
Since you've announced the game as complete, I went ahead and re-downloaded and threw some money your way, before I've even booted it up. I wish I could spare more but I have to budget around minimum wage, it makes it feel like I've given an insultingly small amount for how much I enjoyed this.
Please, against all the screaming idiots, consider it a feather in your cap that you've decided to wrap up a project with an ending. Nothing salts my wounds more than remembering that the book series Terry Goodkind wrote, he considered done and tried to start a new series. It went poorly and people kept crying for more of the previous. Eventually, he started giving them what they wanted, but now, a few years back, he passed away before he could complete the expanded storyline. Now there's just a hardstop bundle of loose-ends and open plot points we'll never have closed.
By all accounts, Henry Ford like most CEO's was an ass to know personally, but he did make a good point: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have told me a faster horse." People can't know what the next greatest thing is if they don't branch out and try new things.
Personally, enjoying this bundle of fun you made was a nice incentive to start cleaning out the content I consume, and raise my standards. I'm going to HAVE my happy endings dammit, and if I can't get it, or I have to eat horrors with it on the same plate, I'm going to just start walking away and looking somewhere else. I don't need to accept horrible things to have the kinks I like, I can have my happy endings, I just need to look harder.
Edit: Also! Handler hazing is super fun and I like that as well! I hadn't realized you made it as well.
Just. Wow. I hadn't realized it till I played this, but I had been missing being able to just genuinely enjoy a story with erotica content without reservations. I realize not many would sing the praises of the narrative here, but I couldn't leave it unmentioned. Mostly it's because I sit in a weird limbo of loving expansion content, but not really being invested in the extreme sizes that result, even though those are often the best expansions that I enjoy the most.
So I tend to end up consuming a lot of corruption and manipulation story content. As someone who really likes happy endings and pointlessly cruel people getting their consequences, this story was super refreshing. I hadn't completely realized how invested I was in the reading until it got to the part where Lucy got called out for her hostility, when it really sank in. That was a fantastic and fresh experience, the MC actually throwing out someone in the middle of the process for a completely sound reason, and not having some deus-ex-machina process allow the fetish content to power through via plot hole.
You've essentially re-created the psychology experiment of leaving people in a room with a button that buzzes them; Showing that a long enough, but often quite short, amount of time will have them so bored they start buzzing themselves, just to have something to do, and it was shocking them. Here, people are at risk of starving to death trapped in a isolated box, and the solution is not only pleasant, but being properly controlled and studied. It also hits reasonable snags in the process, with sane people managing the solutions. Your team has somehow managed to not only have the cake, but eat it too. Neither the story nor the erotica are isolated from each other, and I wish more stories or games could do that, hard as it is.
In addition, I don't think I've ever played a match game that took the power scaling approach used here. I was hyper skeptical about how long or effective the time limit always being 30 seconds could be, but I've fully consumed all the content and never once thought the game mechanics overstayed their welcome, even failing off and on. That's a great accomplishment, you've built a very sound gameplay loop for your purposes here. I'm a big fan of the approach that any games fail state should have the absolute fewest inputs needed between a fail and a retry, and that's very much the case here.
All around, absolutely well done.