I last played on version 0.5.7, and the new faces feel off somehow, I can't quite place it. Something in the eyes, maybe? Or it might just be because I'm used to staring at the same face for the whole game.
Edit: on playing more, I can confirm it was a "I'm just not used to it" issue. That, and the new system of favor making the face look different was throwing me off.
Going to this game from seeing your other games in jams, and seeing what art was on the thumbnail, I didn't expect this to be so tame. Not a point against the game, to be clear. This game is actually pretty fun! It reminds me of flash games, with the simple-yet-hard-to-put-down main gameplay loop and the random subtle and not so subtle references. The gameplay mechanic of having to mash between two different keys to attack is surprisingly fun, and the UI is quite intuitive when it comes to guiding the player into what to do without a tutorial (you probably wouldn't even need the hint in the description if you made a spacebar with some sort of graphic effect behind it show up with the 3rd parry icon). The combination of fast-action mashing and suddenly having to refocus onto finding the new keys or onto pressing the parry at the right time really keeps you on your toes. It'd feel more tense if there was really much in terms of stakes, though. Being able to leave the dungeon at any time means you have no risk of dying, and going further in the dungeon is actually a bad thing, since going further just makes enemies tankier, while not giving you any more money to justify the increased effort. That's probably all just because this is your first game, but I want to comment on it in case it helps inform you about improving in game-making in the future.
On my computer and browser, the browser version is zoomed in so that you can't see the UI, I had to zoom the page out to see it.
The game isn't super hard, but I found the mechanic of towers getting fucked when they get defeated, and being un-redeployable for a while afterwards very interesting. It could create an fun and unique gameplay experience of constantly managing and repositioning your towers. However, there's not really a lot that causes this to actually happen. Once you get all your towers down, there's not a lot the enemies can actually do to you that would necessitate that. And once that happens, the game is pretty boring since you can't even place more towers. Some sort of occasional/temporary threat that could defeat towers without being too threatening to your actual base health might help with that. Maybe the enemies could shoot projectiles?
The game's UI is also a bit hard to look at. The constantly moving backgrounds and images on the tower buttons makes it hard to read the text on them. And I misread the text as "50P" instead of "5DP" for quite a while, and was confused why I could still place towers.
I think the towers need something more to distinguish them from each other besides their ranges. If there is something making them more different, it wasn't very clearly communicated in-game. That would let the player feel more strategic when choosing which towers to place where.
If you're still planning on finishing what you didn't get to during the jam, I'd definitely still be interested in playing it. Corrupting customers with desserts sounds exactly like an idea for a lewd game I've had rotating around in my brain for the past half-a-year on and off (well, except it was fast food, not desserts), so to say "it seems like my jam" is a little bit of an understatement.
I don't know if I'm just built different, but I actually felt like the timer worked well in this game. It got genuinely tough in the final day, trying to manage all the potions with all the customers coming in so quickly. I think I probably only managed to get it perfectly since I'd stocked up on spares of every potion in my downtime on previous days. But I think part of the reason I did well was that I didn't spend much time admiring the TFs and reading potion descriptions. I think the current timer works well for this if it was a non-lewd game, but seeing as there is lewds to admire, I think the timed gamemode could do with a tweak of some sort. The easiest thing to do would just be to rename the timed gamemode to "time trial" or something along those lines, so that people who actually want to take their time appreciating all the TFs wouldn't try it. Possibly going along with adding a new "normal" mode, with more lenient timers. You could also add some sort of sandboxy between-day segment where you can read up on the potions and see their transformations on you, but I imagine that would be more difficult to implement.
All in all, I really liked the game. The art was charming and the TFs were very varied and fun to see. And the gameplay of trying to memorize potions and their recipes on the fly was fun! I feel like the gameplay might get stale if this was to be made into a full game unless you added some more mechanics to spice things up, but I think it stands well on its own as-is.
Oh, yeah, making that a 3d object would definitely be overkill, especially since the characters the clothes are actually going to be on are 2d.
Making the characters be instantly available seems sensible, at least for the first few. Although I feel like there'd be more of a sense of progression if eventually there were "more difficult" customers that you'd unlock. Maybe via the special extra voodoo items like we were discussing before in the other game's comments. If all the characters were available right away, then you'd see each individual one pretty infrequently, so it would be harder to gauge your own progress, and once you had enough needles/touch power/whatever you do to make climaxes easier to get one of them to "max level" (getting them nude, seeing all the facial expressions, getting their clothes fully wet, whatever the metric might be so that there's nothing new to see after it's done), then you'd have enough to see that for all of them, and the game would essentially be over. Plus, any system you make would let you eventually add in the shop owner as the highest stage in the progression.
I had thought of two ways new people could show up after the initial first batch: either it's via getting new voodoo items that fit their personal tastes, like I said before. Theoretically, these people would have maybe visited the shop before and decided not to participate because a specific desire of theirs wasn't catered to by their current "stock". I feel like this is a good idea, considering that would naturally make it so that you didn't have to add a ton of variations for each customer for each new voodoo item you got. The second idea is a bit simpler: New customers just get recommended to the shop by a previous customer once they reach a specific level of satisfaction. Maybe a combination of both (for some customers), and if you fulfilled the recommendation requirement but not the correct type of voodoo equipment, the shopkeeper would give you a message like "there was a lady who came in today asking if we had ____ available in our services."
If you wanted, you could send me some of those customer sketches over discord, and I could tell you which I liked and that sort of thing. Might help you to feel more inspired about one of them, or I could suggest something entirely new. Plus I'm kinda curious about it too, lol.
But yeah, that's all for later once those other projects are done and you're working on this some more. I'm definitely going to be keeping an eye out for those when they come out.
Honestly, that's fair. Still, I'm a sucker for alien bug RTSes.
For that gameplay feedback I promised... first, a few bugs I noticed: You can start the process of gestating a new unit the moment the "gestation" meter for the old one disappears, meaning you can start making a new unit while you're actively in the process of birthing the last one. Also, if you're shooting with a wall above you, the bullet hits the wall the moment you fire it.
I think the gameplay of this controls pretty well, although a shortcut for something like "select all of X type of spawn" or even just "select all spawn" would be nice for ease of commanding. As it is, it's a bit annoying to try and select all my units at once. Also, I think an option to zoom out the camera would be nice, so you can command units to go into rooms ahead of you more easily.
As you mentioned, the balance in what you have here isn't the most difficult. There's nothing pushing you to not just spam out a bunch of spawns, and honestly, using spawn in the first place seems a bit unnecessary, you could probably do things fine without them. A lot of the game is running between rooms of enemies, so there's not a lot of time where you're not going to be hindered by the movement-speed decrease and eventual total immobility from hatching new units, so it sorta disincentivizes you from actually engaging in that mechanic. Something like having a second "front" to defend from encroaching enemies while you attacked on the first would give a very good reason to need them.
I feel like you did well with the visuals of the game, the enemy destruction effects were quite satisfying, the environments look nice, and the birthing menu UI was very nice to look at (even if you're not in that menu for very long most of the time). And I have no problem with the movement. The command buttons were a bit unintuitive, I often found myself trying to leftclick where I wanted units to go rather than rightclicking, but if the game was longer, I probably would have gotten used to them.
Hope this feedback helps, even if you don't continue this game.
Edit: In the last level, I noticed that the 2nd unit type was a bit finicky with when and who it would attack after an attack command was given. It seemed kinda like once they killed one unit, they'd get stuck and not attack other units. Also, when I had a lot (like, 8-10 or something like that) of units, the game crashed when I gave all of them an attack order, then switched them back to defense to cancel it, probably something to do with too many commands going at once for the pathfinding system.
I get what you mean with the phone call, it does kinda... detract from the separation/anonymity angle that makes the voodoo hot. Maybe instead of that... you'd buy some sort of mini-mannequin that you could set up before each day with mini-clothes? Lore-wise, it'd be that putting specific clothes on that mini-mannequin would mentally influence her into wanting to pick that outfit, but only subtly, so it can't be something she wouldn't otherwise consider doing (or something along those lines, you get the idea), which would explain why you couldn't just strip everyone you meet right away. And it would explain why you still have to buy the clothes for them, and not just buy mini versions of the clothes for the mannequin.
I don't think it even needs to be said, but I'm definitely looking forward to the next update of this where you can get some of these features in. Not all of them, I wouldn't expect that right away.
Any ideas on who the next customer is going to be? And how you're going to unlock her? (or are all the customers just going to be randomly pulled-from for the intimate item pool?)
First impressions, I love the characters and the lore. Especially the detail about the Interpreters. I was confused about that name at first, but when it was explained it made perfect sense. Of course that would be an important role in a MASSIVE galactic hivemind like that. Top notch worldbuilding there. Will give gameplay opinions later, but just based on this, I'd be interested in seeing some sort of expansion of this world, be it an update to this game or another game with the same species in it.
When buying farm animals, I'm able to buy animals without having enough money to buy them. And any time I buy animals while having more than 1, a message of "I already have enough" of that animal shows up, but I can still buy more.
Also, I can't seem to ever get well water, or eat any food items. And planting wheat doesn't seem to take stamina either. I don't know where I could view my stamina, but it seems like it's bugged somehow. Also, I can't collect the daily 100g from the table (fortunately, I can make money without it via harvesting herbs, flowers, and/or slime until I get my first lettuce).
Interesting game, but there's a lot of bugs that make it awkward to play.
Yooo, I'm in the credits! Feels a bit surreal, lol. I like what I'm seeing of it so far. The doll rotation system is a little bit unintuitive, but it's not something you really need to use or worry about (from what I've seen so far, of course), so it's not a big deal. And the physics on the dolls are fun, if not actually realistic.
In other notes, the title of the page is misspelled. And the connection item is "flock of hair" instead of "lock of hair" like I assume it's supposed to be? Will give more feedback later once I play some more. Also, you mentioned in the description, but I am getting a consistent bug on the text after a "day" where the (I assume) exclamation point is replaced with some weird, unknown character.
Edit: After having played through all the currently available content, I definitely like what we have so far! I definitely like how that "personal items get more and more intimate" idea that we discussed came out in practice. None of the complaints I can think of are even really complaints, and more just things that I think could be done to make things even better. Obvious things aside, like "more characters" and "more voodoo items", I feel like some sort of visual and particle effect for burning the item in the bowl before each level would be a nice bonus sort of thing.
I also feel like some way to have her wear the clothes again after stripping them would be good. Maybe one of the personal items you get given is "A piece of paper with a phone number on it" and there'd be some sort of phone UI where you could "call" her once you got that and tell her whether you'd prefer her to be naked or clothed. Maybe you could even spend your spare cash on a new skimpy outfit or something like that. It would give you something to spend it on beside just more basic pins, but I get the feeling that that'll be solved with some new pin-type items, new characters, and new dolls to use for said characters. But having more options of what to spend money on is never a bad thing! Only issue is if you think you can do the art for it.
In terms of gameplay progression, this will probably end up getting fixed once multiple customers are added, but I feel like the nudity might come a bit too quick. When multiple characters get added, try to pace things so that the player is incentivized to go back and forth between characters when doing new stuff, rather than "do the giraffe lady until she's done, then move onto the next customer until she's done" and so on. It makes the lewds feel less stale, and the gameplay feel more interesting. You could do this just via the thresholds for "new things" happening between characters being larger (new things being, like, unlocking the next personal item, or getting the girl to strip, or getting her to a unique visual stage of arousal (like the milk-squirting wetness threshold)), or you could do this via some sort of "desensitization" system, with customers becoming less sensitive if you play with them more than 1 or 2 days in a row.
I also noticed as I was playing that the player's touching seemed to be a lot less impactful (relatively speaking) as you got into higher numbers of pins purchased, so something like a "magic glove upgrade" to make your touches more potent would be fun. And another thing to spend your money on!
Another random minor thing I noticed while I was playing: the girl's face is pretty small compared to the rest of her body, and I wouldn't be able to see it if I zoomed into another part of her body. Some sort of persistent zoomed-in mini-camera on the girl's face feels would be a good feature for me specifically, but I'm not sure how it would actually look in practice, or how other people might like it. Just another idea I'm throwing out there.
I get that, yeah. The dream thing is the only way I could think of to make the scene both make sense with him not being corrupted, and still feel "rewarding" for doing such a hard challenge. And yeah, it's a lot of speculation for an update that could very well just not happen.
In other news, I'll finally have some free time tomorrow, and I plan to use at least some of it to play Voodoo Shop. You don't know how much I've been looking forward to it, lol.
I like the idea of an incremental lewd game with this premise, but the gameplay itself is way too tedious for what it is. Having to wait until the ball is completely done rolling to shoot it again is annoying, and each run takes too long for what little improvement you can get after a run. Also, there's very little incentive to go to further screens. As far as I've seen, asteroid health directly scales with asteroid value, so getting tougher asteroids doesn't actually improve your health-to-stardust ratio or your speed of breaking asteroids. And not breaking an asteroid you damaged, something that's more common on farther levels) is a waste of health
There's a lot of ways this could be improved upon, if you put some time into redesigning how things worked to be faster and snappier, so you can actually feel yourself improving in power as you play.
Yeah, having now seen the "good" ending, I think a no-corruption ending might be a bit hard to design, but there's definitely some ways you could do it. You could have the character getting out of their pod and being exposed in their partially-ripped suit and embarrassed. You could have the character maybe dreaming/fantasizing about what could've happened if they'd gotten caught by the slime some more (and as a plus, since they didn't actually experience what it's like, their imagination would have a lot more creative liberties it could take. Like, what if the slime had tentacles? or maybe he's imagining what it'd be like if it morphed into a slime girl/futa?)
Making the current ending be the uncorrupted ending feels a bit off, especially considering the whole "sensitivity increasing" aspect of the slime as of the lore you had for it. But I imagine you're not all too stuck on the specifics of that. But it is shown in-game via the fact that the character only gets hard after being partially slimed. So it does make sense in my mind for the uncorrupted ending to be less hardcore. Hardcore isn't quite the right word, but you know what I mean.
I'd love to play this, but unfortunately there's an issue with the minigame: Since you can only control the minigame via arrow keys, you end up moving the webpage up and down whenever you try to navigate with that. It makes it kinda unplayable.
You could fix that by making the navigation be via WASD too, giving us a full-screen option, making the screen lock in place when clicked (I've seen other games do it, but I don't know if that engine specifically has that capability), or making a downloadable non-browser version that doesn't have to worry about that whatsoever. Hopefully you can get that fixed (or, let me know if there's some way I can get around this as the game is now)
The gameplay seems fun, and the plot and characters are interesting so far. Hope you continue development on this.
Oh, and PS: If possible, I'd like there to be a feature so that clicking/pressing space or enter while a text box is typing makes the current text box instantly finish typing the full message. I read quicker than the text moves on its own, and the scrolling feature is too imprecise (at least, with my hardware) to let me go forward one message at a time.
Oh, I see! I'll have to try that out then.
I feel like, if you want to expand on the endings more and make a no-damange ending, it'd make sense for there to be an ending with partial corruption for being partially but not fully suited, and an uncorrupted one for if you just got your clothes damaged, but not damaged enough for any slime to get on your body, and that second one could be the "no damage" ending, and have it still be a bit more achievable for people who don't want to miss out on the scenes. And then you could make a slight alteration of that for the damageless ending with a congrats message so people who no-hit it could feel special. I don't know if that'd be too much work, but to me, adding an ending with unique art just for the very difficult no-hit (that you yourself admit the game isn't designed around, no less) seems unfair to those who would want to see your art but don't want to take on that massive challenge.
I have the same sort of tendency as you to get really into a discontinued or barebones game, and despair at it being so empty. And the same tendency to write long game reviews in the comments about games I find interesting (I say interesting and not good specifically because my last "review" was a perhaps-excessive rant at an absolutely baffling disregard of game design.)
It's less about the fail state actually happening, and moreso just the fact that it exists that makes me anxious. It's a constant pressure to do everything perfectly, and I can't just let it go when I don't feel like it's worth the effort, like I can in some spots of Incregnation. In Incregnation, I'm secure in the thought that every runthrough makes progress, and if I'm not perfectly efficient, it's fine since I'm not losing out on anything because of it. In this game, there's always a ticking clock hanging over me, and it feels like every move I make has to be perfect to make the best use of the limited resources I have. And if I mess up, I potentially lose a lot of progress to for literally no benefit, depending on how far back I have to go. Admittedly, I didn't ever go long enough to reach that possibility, but it's still there, stressing me out, which made me not want to play more. It doesn't help either that the Qi regeneration system is so wishy-washy on what's the perfect time to stop regenning and get to the sex, since the more Qi you have before sex, the more you can get out of it. But, the sex also has hard barriers in the form of the orgasm thresholds. And the more you let your Qi build up, the slower it regenerates, so there has to be some perfect midpoint but it's impossible to look at it and be able to tell.
To be honest, I think some portion of this from "about half" to "all of it" is just a me thing, and my perfectionism being the way it is. Games like this and Comet seem like I'd like them, but the satisfaction of progress in the game doesn't balance out the stress of the timer ticking down, making me question each of my decisions on whether they were the "right" way of doing things or not.
For the record, I played Comet more than this game because it was more interesting. The discounts and unlocking of new, unique actions felt more intriguing than increasing the Talent stat and unlocking new but mechanically identical girls in this game. That's why I put emphasis on the personality thing. If the girls had personalities, or even a body type to fantasize about, it'd give the player more incentive to try and unlock them. A curiosity to see and learn more. And obviously, mechanical differences would also help with that.
In summary, the combination of lack of anything interesting to unlock motivating me to continue, plus the hovering threat of losing with no benefits, made me not want to keep playing One Truth.
As a normal game, it's passable, but as a nsfw game, it feels like it misses the mark, since there's barely anything actually arousing about the game itself. Just numbers with labels that suggest lewdness.
When I first started playing, I assumed there'd be a "continue on as your decendant" mechanic like in Incregnation, especially with all the talk of "your bloodline" in the description. I don't think adding that as a mechanic would make the game feel too much like Incregnation, but it definitely could. But if you did add it, it would fix a lot of my issues with the game (not all of them, there would still be a lack of forward-guiding curiosity/motivation). But again, I think they might just be my issues, and this style of game just isn't really my thing.
Sorry all that was a bit of a massive ramble, I tried to keep it organized near the beginning, but it devolved a bit in terms of structure near the end. Just wanted to get all my thoughts onto "paper", as it were. Hope that helps!
Hmm, I see. Personally, it seems weird that you'd get bonus trust for curing conditions, something that's mandatory to do to cure a patient. Making them rewards for fulfilling requests makes a lot of sense, though!
Also, I don't know if this is actually a bug, but after buying the clothed chest grope, I never had it show up as a request or condition treatment a single time. Might've just gotten unlucky, though. And speaking of conditions, I feel like it would make sense if each condition had a unique action to cure it. So, bleed would always be cured with thigh rub, for example. That would give you more of a gameplay incentive to unlock the different actions, and make the nsfw feel more tied into the gameplay itself.
(to preface all this, Dev, if you're reading this, don't take the following dissection and/or roast of your game with any offense if this was a sincere attempt at making a good game. If that's the case, I'd happily help you get better at game design, and give you some tips.)
This is... a surreal experience, this feels like a game I'd end up playing in a dream and only half remember when I wake up.
The premise is interesting and has a lot of promise, but the gameplay in execution isn't ending up very interesting. You start out with a large chunk of money, making like half of the low-cost crops totally useless, and the rest of the crops become useless soon after, when you can just plant and harvest the eggplants exclusively. You can mate with a 3-star crop, so you don't even have to rotate between the two best crops for breeding purposes, you can just keep one of any other crop type around for the other ones to breed with.
There's even less nuance besides "plant eggplant until you win", since all crops have the same grow speed (at least, as it's listed in-game. "one video long" is a very weird and totally uninformative way of listing the grow times. Why even bother to mention it if it doesn't tell you anything?). And the breeding mechanic, while it seems like it could be an interesting mechanic if executed better, it essentially functions as a "press this to make your crops worth more" button.
Also, what even is the point of the market button when you get to the same exact interface via clicking a crop plot? Why can I scroll to the right and see a blank spot where it looks like a crop plot should be, but there's just nothing there, no option to expand your farm or anything? Why does a "+money" text pop up when harvesting a crop despite the fact that I don't actually get money, and the crop just goes to my crop pile?
In summary, this is an interesting premise, but filled with a total disregard for balancing, giving the player a sense of achievement, or any other form of gameplay, that basically boils the game down to a repetitive grind-fest with the sole prize being seeing an AI-animated gif of a woman stripping. I don't know why I even bothered to type all this out, but something about this game just... bugged me in just the wrong way to make me have to dissect this high-school frog corpse of a case study into what not to do when making a game.
Dev, if you're reading this, I'm sure you can make something a bit more thought-out or interesting, even if you're dedicated to using ai in 100% of the game's code. And I'm sorry for roasting your game like this, I'm just a bit obsessed about game design and I can't just not say anything.
