itch.io

Thank you so much and yeah, Psychbomb's piece was awesome! I always feel like I'm selling this short when I'm like "oh yeah my violent porn game" because honestly, you got the important part. If anything the game isn't trying to give you a fetish, but using the audience's fetish against them. They relate to Bao and that makes her inevitable failure all the more painful. But if you can still appreciate and understand Bao, then that's just as good. I'm really glad I apparently wrote this well enough that the non-stabbing inclined can still get it and appreciate it. That said, like all fiction like this, it serves as an exaggeration to explore what for normal people are more.... reasonable brain worms. Thank you again, I love hearing from people outside the game's target audience!

On Bao: My concieve Bao out of the University as being "cool", but not actually cool. She dresses well (and a little edgy), in expensive clothing, has status because of her mother and can act aloof to protect herself from the fact that she's... not that good, socially. She puts up a facade to cover for that, and once she's dropped into a place with uniforms and where almost everyone comes from the same type of social class, all her usual defensive tools are gone. She'd never have many friends, but now she also feels beneath everyone. No wonder then she reaches for the one symbol of status she can find (though I imagine she was a knife freak outside of college). She needs another way to inflict herself onto others that isn't just superiority. Also funny how she finds herself attracted to one of the girls who doesn't inherently come from high society.

Also yeah. She seems like the type of girl who wears her emotions on her sleeve -- everyone knows when she's in a bad mood, after all... but no one REALLY knows how bloodthirsty the beast is.

On Jan: Thinking about pre-university Bao, I think Jan's effortless coolness would obviously seem so attractive to her. She does all things Bao wishes she could do. Out of college she probably gets most of her clothes from thrift stores but still looks cool in whatever she wears. In a school filled with the rich and privledged... it's not like none of them haven't had hardship -- If I write more, we'd see more on the abusive dynamic between Bao and her mother -- but not the type of real 'sleeping in an alley under a newspaper' hardship Jan has endured. The type of hardships that numb you to the indignities of a girl having her bloody hands embedded into your guts. Jan knows she must survive, and while this transgression may be new, she's been here before, at the edge of extreme human experiences.

Also HOLY shit lol that last part sounds like an AWESOME experience, I'm a little jealous!! Thank you so much!

Oh the mensur pull! Yeah me and Karami talked about that a good bit when we were developing the setting. Even calling it 'Academic Fencing' is a nod to that.

I wrote about this a bit in the design book.

The dueling culture of the University is designed to find strong willed people, desensitize them to fear, before desensitizing them to pain. The dream duels almost serve as Dune's Gomm Jabbar Test of Humanity, finding the humans among animals.

The waking Duel and it's slow style and strange rules is not only supposed to desensitize people, it's supposed to be a filter out people like Bao. The College Administration has no interest in finding 'The best sword fighter'. Sword fighting is being used as a test of character.

Interesting read about the ending too. I've been debating that, if I do more, what ending do I resume from. My natural inclination was the 'best' one (because in the worst one, obvious Jan sticks to her word), but I really agree with this case for the medium ending (though a friend had some weird dream based suggestions to make multiple endings 'true'). The "best" ending really just gives you NiceGuy Bao feeling bad without understanding why.

One thing that bothers me is Bao is inconsistently handed. The classic fighting game problem where it's hard to animate someone who positions their back to the camera. A common problem a lot of people have had to deal with BUT IT BUGS ME. I'd almost wanna say 'yeah she's left handed, but then she wears her sword on the wrong side 😭

Thank you, this was a fun comment to reply to covering a lot of stuff I haven't really gotten to talk much about!

LOL I was telling a friend "I think I did an okay job hiding the 3d, but anyone who knows what koikatsu uniforms look like is gonna peg it immediately". The low resolution was a lot less challenging that I thought it would be, outside of a glitch with the web compiler that eventually got fixed. The real challenge with doing low res in renpy is basically just that you kinda have to hand tweak every menu, but I'd have to do that in any other engine too, so it wasn't too bad. Also yeah, Doric killed it, especially with how she managed to escalate the uneasy emotions as we got deeper and deeper.

Anyways, disgust is definitely the perfect emotion and I'm glad people could buy into Bao's headspace rather than just finding her gross and annoying. Thank you for such kind words! 😭

That is a VERY raw comment but one that I think rings true for a lot of people raised as guys. The idea that other people and romance is just a puzzle box that if you can solve it, you'll get the reward. I think a lot of people have stories about coming to terms with the unreality of that fantasy.

I'm glad it could hit somewhere personal like that. I 100% know where you're coming from so it means a lot to see a comment like this.

Also thank you, the design book was a lot of fun!

Thank you so much, I'm so glad my awful awful girl was able to connect with people like that and just let people experience all this... awful failure in such a relatable way

Thank you so much, I really loved getting to nerd out with some of the imagery of one of my favorite animes!

Some girls are just born broken. Being of high birth does not protect one from being low in character. :)

Also thank you so much!

I mean, who hasn't wanted to be one at some point. 😌

Thank you so much!

LOOK I'll take an honorary vote for winner, that's more than enough for me. I'm glad being freakishly obsessed with stuff like having plausible swords paid off 😌

We love and respect pathetic, awful girls here , even when -- ESPECIALLY WHEN -- they can't escape their fate 😌

Thank you so much! 😭

I wanted to try and make sure even if the player didn't directly relate to Bao (despite how much I tried to put them in her head), they at least understood her and were forced to stand next to her as everything happened.

I love her too, unsurprisingly. She has enough of me in her for me to relate to her, but is uniquely shitty enough in her own ways that it's not TOO close to looking in the mirror. A fun, uncomfortable middle ground. I'm glad people end up loving her too.

Also thank you for noticing the whole time thing! It's a minor touch but I figure a sense of place is at its stronger when there is a sense of time to go with it. 😌

God the transitions were SO important. if I didn't get those to work idk what I would have done.

Thank you very much! I don't know if I could keep up the quality of a 10 part series, but I'll definitely think if there is any more I can do! I'm glad I could make you feel games and while they were confusing emotions, I hope they weren't entirely unpleasant.

Doric absolutely killed it with the shoudltrack

What a reaction!! 😭 Thank you so much. The strong emotional responses mean so much to me and exactly the type of thing I wanted to share with people.

Bao is awful, but she's a part of me as much a she seems to be a lot of people who enjoy this game 😭

Thank you so much, the music really brought it together! Also glad the ending scenes, even for people who aren't violence freaks.

I don't currently have any ideas about how I'd show more of the two but everyone seems so invested that it's hard not to consider it...

Thank you! I didn't have much access to games like this when I was younger, but I'm glad my respect for them and their aesthetic

It'd be fun watching Bao fuck up more, but given the scale of the game I feel like this is the ideal amount of time. I feel like to get more, there would need to be another perspective to switch away to...

Thank you so much! The DRONE (track title officially being 'Bao') is SO good aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa.

And thank you I felt like I was really being excessive and extravagant with all the little animations and unnecessary amount of backgrounds  and animations but that stuff is just so cool I had to do it and I'm glad my efforts are appreciated

Thank you so much!!! I'm really proud of the art, I didn't know I had it in me until I did it!

Better to leave them wanting and to leave them bored and sick of you  😌

It's feature complete and content complete. One of these upcoming versions will be 1.0 but it'll be making menus and stuff nicer, I wouldn't worry about it. As for play time, I don't know, I never timed it, but I'd say around an hour is probably right? Less if you skip forward a lot and read quick. More of a "Visual Novella" than a novel.

Thank you so much, for the kind words and the typo, which will be fixed whenever I push out the next release! I'm really proud of how I could bring everything together and how Doric was able to effortlessly match my vibe with the music.

I'VE REACHED PEAM LEVELS, THANK YOU!!!

Alas it is probably best to be left wanting. I feel like I've benefited a lot from how hyper focused it is. I HAVE all this lore and character detail, but I feel like extending stuff out would just weaken the whole thing. But GOSH do I love to see that response!! 😭 Also I LOVE the map so much it is so excessive and pointless but I want people to really feel like they're SOME PLACE, even if they can't explore on their own.

But yeah for all the violence, the 'psychological suffering' and mental aspect is the real horror.

As for the music, Doric has it up on youtube.

Extremely kind and thoughtful thing to leave me! I'm glad I based this off an AU RP setting, because alluding to bigger things helps make things seem juicier and bigger. As a creator my personal bugbear is to make sure people don't assume the world ends past where the screen shows.

Comments like this help me see that I'm on the right track with that, thank you.

ALSO LOL no that was an accident and I'll remove it later, but it'll probably feature in the design notes.

Music and ending bugs on the 9.0 and 9.1 release