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Shall2

6
Posts
A member registered Feb 19, 2023

Recent community posts

There's always some degree of playing along with it to hypnosis.  It's not mind control, and even while hypnotized, you can reject suggestions or break out of the trance entirely whenever you want.

From your comment, you probably were hypnotized to some degree.  You can prove it to yourself either way by basically skipping the induction (zip through the very short induction quickly while consciously refusing to cooperate) to ensure that you're not hypnotized, then play along with the suggestions after the induction is over and see how it feels.  Play through again with the long induction while trying to be cooperate with the induction and see how the rest of the session after that feels.  If they feel about the same, then it didn't work.  If they feel wildly different, then the difference is because you were hypnotized.

I tried to see if Hypno-chan could hypnotize me with the game muted, so that there were no finger snaps.  The answer was "yes", but not as deeply.  Audibly affirming some of her suggestions (e..g, "yes, I am very relaxed") seemed to help.

But Hypno-chan's finger snaps are so NSFW that of course I want them in there.  They're not nudity, but relaxing in a deep trance at work instead of doing your job is absolutely a firing offense.

I'm not sure why the finger snaps are so effective.  I tried running the audio files from Windows Explorer and felt nothing.  Similarly for the snaps in-game when in the options menu to adjust the volume.  But if Hypno-chan is standing there for a session, it's "snap snap snap" and then I'm in a deep trance and ready to obey.  And this is the case even though during her sessions, I'm usually in such a deep trance and focused on her words as to not even notice that she's standing there unless she tells me to notice.

I did a safety check to see if I could read all the text, hear the finger snaps, and just decide not to go into a trance.  The answer was yes, and easily so.  Similarly, even once in a deep trance, I could easily decide to just wake up and end it.  That's how hypnosis is supposed to work, of course, but it's nice to see that it does.

Now that I have a way to be hypnotized, I'm looking into modding the game to see what else Hypno-chan could hypnotize me to do.  I've gotten some things working, but looking at your source code makes me suspect that you have more experience with hypnosis than computer programming.

My big complaint is your heavy use of jump statements rather than call.  A professional programmer, or even just a student who has taken a few good classes, just wouldn't do that.  This is my first experience with Ren'Py code, and I have very little with Python, but this is a general programming principle.

Way back when C was the state of the art, programmers figured out that subroutines ("call") are very strongly preferable to goto statements ("jump").  For a very small program, it doesn't particularly matter, but as the size scales up, being able to jump around arbitrarily in the code makes it very difficult to understand the control flow.  If you're trying to track down a weird bug, use of subroutines lets you easily disregard broad swaths of your code base as obviously not the problem because they're part of a subroutine that isn't being called when you trigger the bug.  Use of goto statements doesn't let you do that.

There are several reasons why I believe that I'm very difficult to hypnotize.  It's not just about audio, though that is the hardest one to work around.  There are some that I'm unwilling to explain for privacy reasons.

But there are also some that I will explain.  I'm a very cautious person, and if you had only shipped the .rpyc files without the .rpy source code, I'd have been very scared of what Hypno-chan would hypnotize me to do.  I probably wouldn't have been able to drop into a trance even if I wanted to.

Another is that I'm very prone to fixate on throwaway lines that seem "wrong".  For example, a lot of inductions say "twice as deep" or "ten times deeper" or some such, which asks me to quantify trance depth.  That would completely ruin it for me.

These are things that a professional hypnotist could easily work around, of course.  But a recording made by someone who wasn't customizing it for me likely wouldn't.  It's kind of a fluke that Hypno-chan didn't try any of the things that would wreck it for me.

You likely don't realize what you've accomplished with this game.

I have been a hypno-enthusiast for many years.  For me, however, it was only fictional.  Nothing that was supposed to hypnotize me seemed like it had any effect.  Maybe I couldn't be hypnotized.  Maybe being hypnotized just felt exactly the same as if nothing happened at all.

So I downloaded the game and unpacked the archive.rpa file.  I read over the suggestions and decided that they all seemed acceptable.  Well, almost all:  I used your in-game option to disable standing, as jumping jacks would be a problem.

I launched the game, planning on following along, but not expecting anything to happen.  As the induction proceeded, it was clear that it was very high quality.  Telling the reader to click is a clever way to get the reader used to obeying the hypnotist when you absolutely have to click in order to proceed.  Having a dark overlay with ever increasing alpha as the induction proceeded was a clever way to make it look like everything else but Hypno-chan and her words were fading away.

As I finished the countdown, I felt relaxed, but didn't expect anything to happen.  I'd seen many countdowns before, after all.

Then Hypno-chan snapped her fingers.  My eyes involuntarily slammed shut, then slowly drifted back open so that I could continue to read.  Well that was a surprise.  I had never anything remotely like that happen at any point in my life.  A few seconds later, she snapped her fingers again, and again, my eyes slammed shut.  Then she did it again.  And again.

Soon, I was meowing like a cat, getting my arm stuck in the air, and verbally agreeing with whatever Hypno-chan said.  I was playing along to some degree, as I had certainly intended to try obeying all of her commands.  But I didn't expect it to feel so automatic to obey whatever she said without thinking about it.

I wasn't sure if I had been hypnotized for real or not.  It was certainly very different from anything I had ever experienced before.  But the session only takes about five minutes, so I decided to try again.

Within a few sessions, Hypno-chan had trained me well enough to drop for her finger snaps that even the very short induction quickly took me into a deep trance.  I would go on to obey everything she asked without thinking about it.  Well, almost everything:  no matter how loud she wanted me to talk, I only ever whispered.

Hypno-chan succeeded where all others had failed.  Nothing else had even managed to get me into even a light trance.  So basically, she is the world's greatest hypnotist.  I say that only half in jest.

So why did Hypno-chan succeed where nothing else did?  I think that part of the problem is that audio fundamentally doesn't work for me.  I'm not deaf:  my hearing is actually pretty good as measured by whether I can tell if quiet sounds are present.  But I just don't process audio well.  If I listen to some audio recording, the effect is always the same:  boredom, annoyance, and "why do I have to listen to this stupid thing?"  I can listen if I have to, but it's mentally strenuous to do so, which is not compatible with the relaxation necessary for hypnosis.

I didn't say an audio *hypnosis* recording.  The effect is the same whether it is a podcast, music, an academic lecture, or anything else.  Videos that rely heavily on listening to people talk have a similar effect on me, and that includes most movies and television shows.  Most hypnosis is either purely audio or at least relies heavily on listening to the hypnotist's voice.  If that doesn't work for me in any other context in life, then it shouldn't be surprising that it doesn't work as a way to be hypnotized.

There are other text hypnosis scripts online, of course.  Most of them are written with the intent that the hypnotist will read them aloud, often with stage directions to the hypnotist that are not intended to be literally read aloud.  Scripts that are designed for the reader to be hypnotized directly by reading a wall of text also don't work for me, as I just process the information in an academic way and don't relax at all.

There are also programs designed to hypnotize you by having text appear at various times.  But if it's set intervals, that's not going to work, either.  Go too fast and I'll miss some suggestions.  Too slow and my mind will wander off as I think about lunch or sports scores or some political scandal or whatever.

This game allows me to click ahead to get the next suggestion on my own timing.  That way, Hypno-chan always gives me the suggestion exactly when I'm ready for it, not too soon and not too late.  That seems obvious, but I'm not aware of any other games that go that route.

So basically, you made it possible for people like me who fundamentally think in terms of text rather than audio to experience hypnosis.  I haven't tried this, but I would bet pretty heavily that most professional hypnotists would be unable to do that if they didn't already know of your solution.  At minimum, no one else actually had.  And that's really impressive.

Hypno-chan repeatedly hypnotized me to leave a nice comment about the game.  You go deeper into a trance if you obey everything that the hypnotist asks, so here it is.

I do have one quibble about the game, though.  Audible finger snapping is a major part of the induction.  Hypno-chan trained me that every time she snaps her fingers, my eyes slam shut, I go deeper into a trance, and then my eyes drift back open so that I can continue reading.  I'm aware that the intent was for that to only happen if she said "sleep" in addition to snapping her fingers.  But the way that I process it is that I hear the snap, then my eyes slam shut and I go deeper into a trance, and then my eyes drift open and I can see what she said.  The effect is the same whether or not she said "sleep" because I can't see what she said until after I've already gone deeper into a trance.

In most of the script, that works pretty well, and may even be beneficial.  Having that happen at the very end of the wake sequence is sub-optimal, however.  Maybe Hypno-chan just wants me to stay in a trance and hang around for another session.

If the update breaks saved game files, then please allow people to decline the update and complete games in progress.  One way to do this on Steam is to make the old version into a "beta" version of the game that players can optionally opt into, and then you can leave an update message explaining how to do so and letting players switch to the new version when they're ready.  Having a surprise update kill all saved games in a single-player game is a rather nasty thing to do to your players.

I have a bunch of bugs to report.  Different difficulties seem to be stored as different games, though mostly copy/pasted from one to another.  If it makes any difference, I play the Steam version and mostly on the hard difficulty.

1.  A lot of Samona's transformations are broken in various ways.  For example, the orc transformation shares her main level rather than having a separate level.  Samona's skeleton transformation is unable to attack without a necromancer in the party, unlike other characters' skeleton transformations.  Some of her transformations improperly leave spell attack as the default action.  This makes her the only cheerleader able to attack, for example.

2.  If you turn a mega slime into a relic, then restore the character to her original body, it only restores one character and not the other slimes merged in.  This causes the other characters to vanish from your party.  I've seen that you added a way to restore other characters that vanish, but this is at least one way that they vanish.

3.  The "(faceless) copies her master" text counts as an attack that targets the golem for the Kepiat fight.  This is true even if the action is something that does not actually target the golem, such as sneak, guard, or heal.  As this triggers massive retaliation, it makes the Kepiat fight basically unbeatable if you have a masked and a faceless in your main party.

4.  Winning the Lady Lyra fights grants experience to a mega slime, which normally does not gain experience.  This is probably due to the battle having a different experience granting mechanism from most, as it restores defeated party members and then grants everyone experience.  This can be exploited to level up a mega slime to much higher than the number of merged party members.

5.  A slime's bounce attack will not attack more than twice.  As I read the text, it looks like it supposed to be a 75% chance to repeat indefinitely, akin to colossus (which is 60%) or funeral march.  Instead, it only makes one or two attacks, making it basically a weaker version of glob.

6.  Ripvannibala's instant kill attack can target and kill a relic.  I haven't seen anything else in the game that can target relics at all, at least apart from Luxatep claiming them, which is obviously intentional.  City of Mists is weird enough that I'm not entirely certain that this is a bug, but I'm reporting it anyway.  This is likely intentional, but Ripvannibala is unable to kill skeletons.

7.  When a faceless tries to copy a masked Jyla's steal attack, she sometimes copies a different party member's action instead.  I'm not sure exactly what causes it, as it doesn't always happen.  One thing that will reliably trigger it is that if a party has a masked Nuan use double strike, a masked Jyla use steal, and a faceless commoner, then the commoner will double strike twice (four attacks in total) but not steal at all.

8.  When the mindmill is defeated by an instant attack such as dart or instant strike, it doesn't immediately die the way that other enemies do.  Rather, it allows you to continue targeting it, then dies before any characters take their normal turn once the round starts.  This allows it to consume additional instant attacks.

9.  A cheerleader's Cheer IV skill heals a lot more health than the text shows.  The text shows 10% of max health, which is the same as basic Cheer.  The skill actually heals a lot more than that, and is clearly scaling with something (maybe passion?) that doesn't get reflected in the displayed numbers, so the text is wrong.

10.  The max health values for many bosses in the journal are wrong.  For example, the Sea Market councilors are listed as 700 HP, but actually have 2100.  I suspect that what happened is that they were right originally, then you changed boss health values, but didn't update the journal.  The slick way to do it is to have the journal read the boss health values directly, but I don't know if RPG Maker makes that awkward to do.  The enemy journal is a cool feature, but it's made less useful when it's wrong.