itch.io

Pretty neat first draft / proof of concept. I like the slay the spire-esque routing and how branches need not diverge forever. The tutorial also shows a lot of promise and the art style is really neat and fun to look at. Can’t wait to see where this goes! :D

(Only real grumble is there’s no formal “end of current content” message; might be useful for playing blind!)

Not a bad lil tale! Good story and some charming characters; a little disappointing the ace character didn’t stay ace but that’s dealt with early enough on; it works out in the end.

I think in the last tuning pass some endgame stats were missed? The difficulty spike in the Fire Ogres leads me to think they may have had their elemental weakness missed or have their stats tuned to the endless floors (pre final boss)?? They were almost impossible to deal meaningful damage to without Kat’s bleeds, and then once the last tier of equipment is unlocked they’re just extremely annoying.

Rikki (lv209) and Edna (lv174) also needed a shield to be able to live any of the last boss’s skills despite their two-handed weapons; Rikki can equip one first before her final weapon and still keep the stat bonus but Edna can’t equip any of the end-game shields so after getting walled on the last boss I edited the stat bonus onto her sword so she wouldn’t crumple like paper every turn. Maybe there’s a combination of further levelling or accessories I’ve missed?

It’s not an issue (esp. with the Guardian Ring), until the final boss or anyone who spams multi-hit skills so idk.

The last boss themself was way too much of a slog. It feels like we’re supposed to inflict a -HP regen on them, but Kat was the only character I unlocked skills like that with. Changing elements every 3 turns and seeing at least 6 repeats was just slow and boring. :c

Other than endgame balance, I’ll second this game is somewhat held back by a way to reinforce to the player that the protagonist has physically changed. Say a mirror in Titania’s Glade in lieu of a non-chibi portrait for instance; it was difficult to follow their transformations. Such things feel like they’re only mentioned once in passing if it’s relevant to an interaction and in this medium I don’t feel it worked well.

tl;dr good game, slightly wonky endgame but great characterisations and a decent story.

This might not be in active development, but there’s enough here for me to want to leave some thoughts. Maybe you’ve already learned these for your other games? Maybe they’re addressed in the full version? Who knows!

• The workout minigame is interesting but wears a bit thin when it’s the only thing to do in the game and you’re bottlenecked by XP.

I’d love to see training still limited to once/day but maybe started also from the pool? That way you don’t have to loose a day’s progress just to catch someone’s unique conversation for a specific time of day.

Some minigame QoL ideas:

• In the last 2 seconds, no new targets spawned
• If more than X (let’s say 3) targets spawn in half a second, there’s half a second cooldown before the next ones spawn. It’s currently possible for 4 or more to spawn almost at once and it can take longer than a second to get to the latter ones.
• Some other kind of variety to keep each stage interesting; click and hold targets? Once to press repeatedly? Some other ideas you can swipe from the likes of Osu!! ?
• A clearer way to tell how the score converts to experience points. (If this is raised in the tutorial, I skipped it; generated voices really bother me - a way to show that tutorial without the voiceover would be great!)

Otherwise, maybe an option added to the preferences to change the art style without having to start a new save? From the pictures on the itio page, I thought there was some kind of reality warping going on at first, which is why there was both a drawn and realism art style of the same poses!

Dialog feedback:

• This is just my own opinion, however some of the writing is very… repetitively grandiose? Like the repeated uses of “they’re more than a X, they’re a Y”? You might wish to give the script another pass, especially if it’s been produced or edited in part by an LLM.

• More than a few inner monologues aren’t labelled. When there’s no image to give the player a point of reference, there’s a few cases it’s confusing. For instance at the start of chapter three, we go straight from Novastride’s Journaling to Orchid’s own thoughts about inferiority and her new suit, when my first reaction is “why is Novastride worried about feeling inferior?” XD

• Also quite a few cases where the first letter is missing from a passage. “ had entered the room”, “’ll add it to thei list.” “ had come here to gather some thoughts,” he radiation was a process we had perfect-” etc. Feels too consistent to be a typo; maybe some formatting gone awry?

Some good stuff here if you ever come back to it; and if not I hope you’re enjoying your other projects! :D

Out of interest, how large would the initial download be if a different compression format was used; like 7zip?

While you work on shrinking the image CGs, is it possible to maybe release a version with just the text and have the images separate? T

I’m interested in trying this out, but 7Gigs of content to grab (let alone re-grab after each update) feels a bit daunting ^^;

(if this is a moot point by the time the conversion to webp is done / lowering the image res then by all means focus on that and disregard this comment :D)

There’s a few bits of missing formatting all throughout but that’s fine for something this young; although in passage 198 Yasmin’s words are using Luna’s text colour if I’m following correctly. (orange instead of green)

Also couldn’t get any of the arcade game menus to continue; the racing passage refers to a random, but rerolling ~20 times didn’t seem to change the text outcome, maybe the error with that menu is odd? Couldn’t figure out how to get debug mode going and it seemed more than a simple syntax error, so I’ll leave that with you!

Reading through the rest of the story in passages, was interesting to say the least! With Magilumere’s manga’s conclusion still fairly recent in mind it’ll be interesting to see how you write about the interactions between governance and independance! Keep it up! :D

No Dice! `Error: cannot find a closing tag for macro <<link>>

<<link “Luna jumps to your side” “175b1”>>…

Error: cannot find a closing tag for macro <<link>>

<<link>>…`

Took a bit of digging but it seems in passage 174b2 you’ve got <<link "Luna jumps to your side" "175b1">><<link>> with a missing / to close the link.

One of the joys of working with Twine; hope you didn’t mind me poking around your passage code!

Same; going back to the previous branch and dropping Luna’s hand instead of interlacing fingers didn’t have this happen.

Edit: restoring a save from choosing between river and ruins didn’t get it working again. how odd.

2.2.1a thoughts:

I Thought You Loved Me is a great card for countering hoarding Give a Dog a Bone curses while the player tries to whittle down their strength, but so far I’m really struggling finding a middle ground to compromise on, especially when dealing with the hidden effect of GaDaB in that the deck bloat makes it harder to draw useful cards.

• Banishing cards used for ITYLM effectively reduces them to 4% but is gaining six of them already bad enough when considering the impact of being unable to draw useful cards?
• While stances are in the works, perhaps one that offers a safer way to remove them for a suitable penalty? (eg “Play in the Fountain; heals daisy for each card played, but removes cost for Slobbered / GaDaB donation)
• Maybe just giving ITYLM a red delta of < 250 (or some other reasonable value); enough to give the comeback effect and make it just as strong as Slimeantha’s Infiltration stance?

Entangling Roots / Paw Press lowering draw power makes this especially hard (that’s the point, might need tuning), but even at smaller deltas when Daisy combos from Puppy Dog Eyes to Growing Excitement and you’re drawing curses not any of your damaging effects means you’re already struggling to play anything useful and have a good time loosing. (As an aside, would it be fair for a lust build to count lust dealt towards blocking Growing Excitement’s buffs?)

It’s an interesting mechanic but I’m looking forward to seeing the concept refined.

Otherwise:

• Ironically, even an excess of Slobbered can drown out any Dominance gain cards. I think this is fine but may need some tuning later.
• It might be nice to see what the “Card effects applied” are when playing opponent’s cards, especially when dealing with variable effects.
• Deck culling options when huge are a great addition, but it would be nice if there was some smol discard options as well.
• An option to skip to just the opponent introduction story would be useful too.
• Debug mode might benefit from a means to forcibly banish cards; currently Slobbered can be dealt with thanks to draw and buy power, but GaDaB makes testing what smol Daisy does very tricky if you don’t want your deck bloated with curses and then you go from planet-sized to less than a quark tall after a few turns of I Thought You Loved Me… (see my first point). Or maybe that’s just how Puppy Dog Eyes interacts with the starting conditions of Debug mode and how inefficient Massive Gains is versus a 40% GaDaB / bloat makes it impossible to draw anything else.
• (An easter egg in the card compendium to display Ava’s cards might be cool)
• It’d be super neat if either as a base feature or as a card unlock effect (similar to Equivalent Exchange), one could spend favour instead of other resources to trigger card effects. (Such as the cost for removing Slobbered, triggering Big Release etc)
• I’m kinda disappointed the collar-play and Bitch in Heat buck the trend of all of Daisy’s cards otherwise showing her fully clothed and eager to play - I just thought that was neat / a fun contrast against Slimeantha.

likewise; fun setting and elements, but needing to squint to adjust the lack of contrast of pink on yellow is really Not Fun.

Black outline perhaps? A solid colour? Just something to help the eyes when reading is one of the most important parts would be great.

heya, probably should’ve added here that I did send you through that save file not long after I saw your reply ehe. Did that ever come through?

No replies yet, unclear if they dev got my e-mail with the problem save or had any luck replicating the issue. It is what it is /shurg

Getting this error when I try to leave the next stage in v1.01. Anywhere I can shoot you the save file where this happens?

Either losing to the boss or leaving via the door triggers it.

• “You earned 54 gold.”
• “Many monsters were defeated! Received 1 favor”
• X: Crash (Something to do with monster upgrades? Is it trying to upgrade a monster at maximum rank??)

Very charming little game; the strategy of choosing which order to take things on to maximise rewards is neat. That you get a stat buff after every dungeon keeps the stakes nice and low.

One thing I’d tweak - Victory% should factor in player’s max/min damage against current health and if they’re going first. It’s possible to loose 100% win matches and win 0% matches if the first to move can defeat the other in a single hit.

Reached the end of current content (hopefully we’ll have a side quest break soon; there hasn’t been one since the start of Chapter 5 I don’t think…); if I feel like trying again I’ll see if I can replicate it.

Good to hear! No worries; maybe sub-chapter skips in line with the headings in the walk-through? This game is a deliciously slow burn but that also means it takes - time - to get to certain content you may wish to try differently.

I’d removed the dodgy files and saves not long after I posted; if something like this happens again I’ll let you know~

It took an embarrassing amount of time to understand why my own application of the hint was incorrect, especially as it fit with most of the in-game hints.

As extra clues:

Hey repoke, while it's still early in development what are your plans for bringing something of your own to the game?

There seems to be some potential with the training mechanic, but if you're using both "passage generation AI tools" and genn'd art then all that's left is the game design. Twine games are capable of a lot, and I see you've got something in the training mechanic that could be built on but as it currently is, that's not enough to make me feel like this wasn't a waste of my own time to play.

I must recommend in the strongest of terms you don't publish text given to you from a generated story writer as is. The quality is frankly atrocious and reflects poorly on the game overall and you. If you are absolutely lost for ideas and wish to use those passages as a starting point for your own writing then by all means! If you choose to rely on a generator to give you a rough outline or even simple bullet points and then you write a story on your own from that; that's actually slightly better!

If English isn't your first language or something you're confident in, a project like this is the perfect opportunity to practise your writing. All those games you've listed as your favourites, I understand they're all original writing, so please take inspiration from their writing / development styles too! Partner up with someone else if you want! Just, while it's still early, - please - reconsider how you approach this.

Else to be blunt: If you can't be bothered to write the game yourself, I cannot be bothered to read it.

One other thing I wanted to check; is there a status / situation where you can't target an ally with a heal / buff skill when previously you could?

Especially around the Chapter 3-2 battles (but not only), there were a few times where I went to use a heal skill and found I was locked to only one target. Haven't noticed it in recent chapters, might be something to do with lower tier'd classes??

Minor issue with the patch files; updating to 0.14.2 from 0.14.1; I couldn't trigger the scene in chapter 6 where after completing one of the four switch puzzles the effect of the switch would be triggered.
In the end I realised I'd done a goof, rolled back a save, tried again, then re-downloaded 0.14.2 from here and that worked.

(To cite the part in the walk-through: (ch6 p109 "Continuing the Story")

- After the first area, you’ll get a short scene about needing to return to the main area. 

-> doable

- Once you do, you’ll be automatically placed into a scene that’ll bring back [spoiler] and open up a [spoiler] to explore and finish.

-> doesn't trigger if manually patching from 0.14.1)

As of v7 1/2, I'm loving the QoL improvements; thanks for listening and adding feedback so readily! (Small wonder I couldn't get the grilled cheese to work before, it turns out it needed the furnace!)

Had this come up when crafting the ultimate sandwich, using a tectonic press placed in the release version; destroying and replacing the press fixed the issue:

############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of  Step Event0
for object obj_structure_tectonic_press:
Push :: Execution Error - Variable Index [7] out of range [7] - -1.structure_recipes_result(100721,7)
at gml_Object_obj_structure_tectonic_press_Step_0
############################################################################################
gml_Object_obj_structure_tectonic_press_Step_0 (line -1)

Clicking randomly around the recipe book in the lower left of a recipe will sometimes give this error:

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Mouse Event for Left Pressed
for object obj_item_book:
Push :: Execution Error - Variable Index [0] out of range [0] - -9.made_into(100971,0)
at gml_Object_obj_item_book_Mouse_4
############################################################################################
gml_Object_obj_item_book_Mouse_4 (line -1)

Otherwise I finally had time to make at least one of everything; next time I'm looking forward to starting new where ores are much closer to the goddess!

The concept is there but some of the automation is really rough to get your head around.

If you get the chance, some QoL features would do this game wonders:

• Let funnels / logistics buildings snap to others (fiddling with near pixels is painful at best)
• Let us toggle the transparency of large buildings so we can work behind them / connect things to their north edge
• Give Miners a footprint larger than their ore source, so you can connect to them from more than two sides
• A short tutorial that explains the basic progression / what unlocks what. How to use Funnels and belts would be excellent!
• Optional Dash / let the engineer be moved by conveyors
• Dialog boxes that persist, rather than having to right click the NPC each time and then navigate on to the next answer.
• Let logistics buildings ignore collision with items (on conveyor belts) when being placed, let gates face up/down
• Remember the style of building (/ length of conveyor) last placed if you set down / run out of placeable items

Only had two bugs with the game:

• Placing a display board with a Sterling engine as a source would crash the game
• The recipe for Grilled Cheese Sandwich may be missing a toggle for it's up / down arrows. I couldn't make it with two puffy bread, thicc butter and soft cheese, but I also see that sturdy paste can be made into it so that seems like something off.

Overall this has clearly been made with a lot of love. The modifier + mouse click scheme took a while to get used to but it works well enough, especially once you learn that space+click can remove buildings.

WG game devs are honestly something else... amazing.

Happened again after recruiting Sonia. "Failed to load img/pictures/Angel_5.png".

Copied angel_3.rpgmvp as angel_5.rpgvmp and it worked again.

Also during her introduction scene at the Mansion, it kept complaining that it failed to load People3_6.png, but only blocked the game afterwards.

A copy of Sonia_1.rpgmvp to People3_6.png fixed that.

Edit: ...which is quite funny since it seems that was supposed to be the head butler. Hahahaaha....

Edit2: Visiting upstairs, same problem now with "Maid_1.png" and then "Maid_5.png"

Here's a few of the more broken ones I noticed; great game so far!

• Game threw an error saying something like 'couldn't load "seeds-of-destiny-win\SoD\www\img\faces\ Blacksmith Husband.png" when I tried to access crafting for the first time.
  • Workaround: Copy "Blacksmith Husband.rpgmvp" to "$Blacksmith Husband.rpgmvp"
• After ~215 power, Leah doesn't have the birth option again. Nor does Valorie seem to after her trials.
  • Workaround: If Power exceeds ~215, visit the Demon Nursery to reset
  • Additionally, Purification abilities are inconsistently applied for Valorie and Sanu.
    • For instance, only Leah can purify Succubi at the Demon Nursery, while they both can purify Ghosts under the Mansion.
    • I believe if one warps to the fairy forest, all three party members can purify Corrupted Fae, this being before Sanu has met the Goddess.
• In the Pharoh Queen's mines, scrap planks have no collision and may be stepped into. However you then cannot leave the tile.
  • Workaround: Load an earlier save, or use a save-editor manually edit the x and y positions of your party if you haven't saved in a very long time. >_>
  • I was caught around (8,48) and edited the save to put the party at (9,49), but it seems common to other similar tiles too.
  • This is for the second spirit gate puzzle.
• It's possible to soft-lock the Bastet fight by each character using 'Summon Neko Spirits' on the same turn.

If I'm seeing such Collision bugs, I'm going to guess I'm nearing the end of the current content? So far it's been a very high quality experience and I'm looking forward to seeing how the story winds up!