itch.io

First of all. I'd like to say thanks for putting the time and effort to make your game.

Game development's pretty thankless and as a fellow dev, I just wanted to let you feel seen and appreciated. OK. I'll just get right into the impressions then. First I'll talk about the game on a technical level.

Technical

It was a happy surprise seeing the game made in Unity. Usually games adopt a lot of underlying stylistic decisions that come from their engines. RPGMaker games for instance have a very business like relationship with how players interact with their games, usually  focusing on numbers because of the engine's gluttony of database related features. RenPy games suffer in the User Interface and visual design decisions because of its text-based focus.

General Purpose tools like Unity, Unreal and Gamemaker always make me happy, because they force developers to think through each and every decision they make, and I could really feel that with Destination: Delirium. The design decisions were very purposeful and sensible.

Loading was snappy and quick, and navigating menus was direct and straightforward.

I only have two criticisms here. 

• I  wish I could use my keyboard+ a key to navigate menus on top of the navigation already in place. Since most of the story is spent reading, moving the mouse and clicking is  surprisingly annoying for every decision. It'd be much easier and relaxing just press one button to continue conversations or press buttons to select an option to then continue conversations. Maybe WSAD + E to enter. All on one hand. Easy  to navigate.
• The mouse scroll wheel does not scroll up text for reading the log of text.

Technical details are the ones where things are pretty objective, but I still managed to sneak in some of subjective opinions lol. Well these are my impressions after all. Next I'll go on to Game Feel which is every thing else. I'll go into the praise and aspects I didn't like.

Game Feel

Thanks for including music.

Seriously.

I don't know why that's so hard to do for other text-based games, but those guys were completely sleeping on the power of their medium as games. Music can help set the tone and atmosphere, and if used well can help immerse the player. You guys used it well. So  well,  it was the first thing I wanted to mention and it's all praise.

I really liked the UI design. A big box to the right for  images, and a big box to the left for text. You're not stealing from Visual Novel standards, and you're not just trying to ape Fenoxo but making decisions that would fit your game in particular.

My favorite part of the UI was how text appeared in paragraphs. Slowly over time. The reason Japanese Visual Novels have text boxes be so small (in comparison) and unassuming most of the time is so that they don't overwhelm the player in text. Players tend to tune out big blocks of text if it hits them in the face all at once. You solved that issue with how the text appears on screen. Not entirely though.  Some scenes still have huge blocks as part of them which took me out a bit, but it  was a nice change of pace from other text-based games so this was a great decision.

I love the use of color to denote the person speaking  as well.

Hope the settings Menu gets a bit of UI facelift in the future :)

I only have two issues with the UI. 

• At the start when the player is taken out of the scientist's room and enters their first open space into the clinic it wasn't clear that the player could click and drag  to see more of the screen. There were no directions or anything. I kind of figured it out by accident when I clicked around, and held the click for too long. 
• Player Choices don't feel visually distinct enough. It took me a few seconds to realize what I was reading was choices the first time one popped up. Using Color to denote choices is not a good decision, because you're already using them stylistically to fit the characters. Personally, I'd just  draw a simple box around choices to separate them from the rest of the text, and clearly demarcate them as  something else.

I'm a bit worried about combat and other forms of gameplay as I didn't really see any RPG stats or any way to check the player's physical state even though transformation is a core part of the game sexually and narratively.

Writing

The writing so far has been pretty good. The premise of the story is pretty crazy, but I fell into it pretty quickly. The characters all felt like distinct people conversationally.

Art

It's great.  Worryingly so.

Hmmm... I should clarify. I don't mean to scare... These are just my impressions.

Art is not easy, and is an investment. Seeing so much of it has me a bit worried as to the amount of sexual content the game will have if they're limited by art, and as to the type of content.

You see. You made a decision that your protagonist can change shape and body. Be feminine or masculine. The art so far doesn't really have androgynous hands. But beefy ones. Or maybe that's just what I saw because of my decision? If it is, then the amount of permutations you "may need" is pretty high. If you need art for every scene, as well, then that means you'll be limited in what scenes you can draw. It'll also feel like a huge waste to some people like me when an artist is paid and spends a considerable amount of time drawing a scene I'd have no interest in.

It doesn't feel as much of a waste when a writer sits for an hour writing out their sexual  fantasy about  a specific scene, that I'll most  likely avoid,  but  it does feel like a waste when an artist sits for 4 to 5 hours drawing a scene, that exists in the game, that doesn't cater to me sexually.

Which I know will happen because of the open nature of the transformation in the game.

Looking at this from a consumer standpoint just has me concerned for the actual amount of content the game will have. The big benefit to text-based games is quantity after all. They're games where you can sink hundreds of hours digging in and trying to experience every nook and cranny. 

For the Future

Maybe I'm an idiot but I couldn't figure out how to save? I hope that feature is in the works. 

It seems to me like you might still have some foundational design decisions to think through coming into the future. Or not XD. I could just be overthinking some things or just not have enough insight for my impressions to actually reflect anything.

I found two bugs though.

• Some Debug code was left in the scene where the player gets his room. The text g_playergetroom or something like that, appeared as the last line, before the scene transitioned into me going into my room.
• When I talked to the cybernetic man at the front door to the clinic, one of the lines said MC: Oh OK or something like that. You asked for the player's name at the beginning. I don't know why you wouldn't use it.

...

I'll just get a little personal, so if you don't continue hearing from me, you don't take it personally or anything. I definitely think you're working on a quality product if all of my praise  before was worth anything!!!

I haven't really been too pleased with most text-based games.

I'm a cisgender and fully hetero male.

Depending on the writing interests of the people  behind the games that usually means about... half or more of the game's content is not for me. Since I'm cis,  I wouldn't play a girl and actively court men into fucking as that's not my gender experience and I don't enjoy that feeling.  I  wouldn't play as a guy and court men either. That's what I meant by half or more.

I'm also not really into male assertive sexual content. Just like how some guys don't like feet, or some guys are bisexual, I can't control the feeling that is my sexuality. I don't have a preference towards sexual content, where the a guy shoves a girl to the bed and pounds her ass while slapping it.

I prefer female assertive sexual content. Like... a girl shoving a guy onto a bed and riding his dick till he creams her a few times in a row.

As you can see that's pretty narrow. The games I enjoy are the ones that are generally selfish in their form of sexual expression. The reason I like MGDs is because it's 100% heterosexual with a male-only protagonist. The split in sexual content is between male assertive and female assertive so for that game 50% of the game targets  me, while the other 50% doesn't turn me off, but doesn't really interest me that much.

In a game like yours, with a TF sub-focus, that ratio will most likely be much much less, and with Art as a limiting factor per scene, my sexual expectations for the game are very very low.

Don't want to end on a bad note though! Just wanted to keep it real with you. Thanks for working on your game, and I hope it finds its audience. Good luck! FOR REAL :D

This will become a full paid game.

It's not free. I  worked very hard on it, and so did the artist.

Glad you enjoyed it.

Don't stress too much about learning patterns exactly. There are small patterns to the patterns. For instance, Rouge's first arrows are duplicated, and so are her last 2. So technically you only have to remember 2 arrows, per habit.

I don't know what to say then. Sorry it's not working for you T_T

Hmm... saving should be working fine. Are you running the game on a windows machine?

Press Z to select.
X to go back.

I apologize but I'm confused.

Are you asking for how to unzip the game, and run the executable, or are you confused about controls?

The game has "install instructions" if you're confused about what to do right after downloading the game. If you're using a MAC though, you can't play the game.

Check the controls here on this page.

Probably antivirus false-flagging the EXE.

"The experience is much more "play a game" than it is "masturbate," but that is totally fine and enjoyable."

That's the norm tho?

Glad you enjoyed the game :D
Some people just don't expect even a slight challenge in turn-based games, and especially in adult games so it just wound up this way. 

If you visit the discord, as a $1 patron you can see all the planned enemies and even previews of future animations.

Hmmm... People are already complaining that the tutorial's too much. I really can't pile on more.

Regarding skills and their importance, it's something I think people should figure out on their own. Not only that but each skill comes with a description of what it does.

Learning how to play the game well is part of the game.

White is the current  habit. Total amount of squares is total amount of habits.

I did not base the game off of Undertale. I don't know what you mean by a card system as I've never played Undertale T_T

Cards? I don't understand.

Sorry, in order to create a MAC version, I'd need to buy a MAC machine. Those are extremely expensive, and I don't have the funds.

I'll be adding a tutorial review when playing the game. Hope it doesn't stay too confusing if you can just re-read how the battle system works.

I hope you don't mind if this is a bit long-winded as a comment.

First, I want to say wow. This game's production values are quite high! I think my eyes were wide open during the entire play session to say the least!

The overall concept of the game is interesting. Adventurers go on adventures where lewd stuff can happen. With a title like Jessika's curse I can see that there's going to be some kind of overarching narrative though. I wish you luck on the game as a whole!

Now about the gameplay experience as a whole.

First the hub world:

It looks beautiful, and the NPCs are brimming with personality.

When I was thrown into the hub city and the message said to explore, I thought I would be clicking on buildings since that's where an ! point was. Turns out you can only navigate the town using the icons at the bottom left. I don't think that's very intuitive. I think if an area has a quest, instead of showing the marker via the in-world location it should be shown via the icon, OR you should be allowed to navigate the town by clicking on the buildings.

You can't tell what the skills are in the skill upgrade menu. You only see icons but not what they actually do. Maybe hovering over the icons should give you more details?

You cannot re-enter the forest after defeating the boss. Don't know if that's a bug or intentional though.

I'm also not a fan of the lack of sound effects when interacting with buttons and the like. This part shouldn't be too hard but I hope you guys don't neglect it.

Oh also the Church doesn't have a current location tag.

Regarding the menus themselves,

I don't think the designs are very future proof. I haven't seen a scrolling menu at all. So will there only be 8 levels to increase your weapon by? Is it just a weapon and armor for equipment? What happens if a user has 20 skills?

Also when I was trying to level up to 4 while I had 200g and the cost was 200g I couldn't do it. Is the cost calculation g > cost or g >= cost?

When it comes to exploration I have a few things to say as well.

Currently, all movement is designed with moving "right" in mind. When they stop they stop facing right. The camera is always facing right as well, but there seems to be times when the game wants you to move left.

The times you move left, I was feeling that the camera being so right-centered was wasting screen space with information I didn't want.

The parallax on the last layer is also incorrect. The last layer of parallax should always be centered on the camera. From a programming perspective it moves the most, but from a visual perspective it shouldn't move AT ALL. Always where the background is. Your first and second layer parallax is perfect though.

Before I get into combat, I'd also like to mention the battle transition. I think it's interesting that you guys are aiming to have the battles happen right there on the field. If that's the case though I think the enemies shouldn't just appear as they do now. Maybe jump out of the background or at least fade in.

Also, the treasure chests stay on the minimap after you open them? I understand the enemy icons staying if the combat is recurring, but the chests don't make much sense to me.

Now Regarding Combat:

It's very straightforward and simple. I'm actually not a fan of super simple combat systems but complexity usually comes with time and this is just a demo so I don't mind. There are a few errors/bugs I'd like to address but I'll save those for last. First a general flow conversation. Right now the flow is to click on the enemy, then click on the skill to use. I think maybe the reverse would work for a faster battle flow. Especially if you can choose which skill to use with the numbers. So press 1,2,3, or 4 then click on the target. Some skills don't even need targets so choosing a target first is moot right.

I'm also not sure I like if I can't tell the numerical value of how much damage I'm taking. Usually if you show damage numbers, you'll show the actual HP in number format somewhere so you can better strategize. I don't think the current display is very helpful when it comes to planning strategies.

Also regarding the turn order, I don't think you need to show turns of people who have already gone. If the active turn window is scrolling left, then I think the active position should be the far left. There's no value in knowing who has already gone.

Overall the combat is fine otherwise... I'll mention my personal suggestions later, but I'll now be talking about the bugs I found.

During relatively long battles, turn order got a bit messed up. Sometimes two enemies acted at the same time, even though I never saw that before. I appreciated it since it made enemy turns go by a bit faster, but I feel like it might've caused some errors at well. At some point it became my turn before the enemy even finished returning to their starting positions.

Not only that but enemy positioning on the map didn't look good at times.

The enemy on the far right is on top of the building?

Mouse is on top of the rocks? Visually it doesn't look good in my opinion.

The camera also overextended at times and just made everything look aweful (on the left and right side of course.) A simple clamp should fix this when it comes to the camera though.

I noticed you were doing this strange thing where the character's positions weren't absolute in battle. As the characters moved the camera would follow them, but the character's positions would also move relative to the camera and I don't think that looked good personally.

OH! Also, move the camera down a bit more during battles. The bottom menu covered up alot of the cool motion and action really often. The battles showed too much of the trees and upper side of the screen. There's nothing interesting happening there, so it felt disappointing missing out on the cool animations because the camera didn't center on the characters.

Regarding the adult aspect

Well this is a general controversial aspect to discuss. Everyone's got their own tastes and reasons for doing what they do, so I'm not going into that. I'm only going to talk about how I feel the adult elements were integrated into the game.

To be honest, I'm actually a bit disappointed with how long I had to play before I saw any adult aspect show itself. Second time I played, just to see whether the forest was randomly generated, I didn't experience any adult content throughout the entire experience.

Regarding the audio
I'm not sure I liked Jessika's voice actor too much. Maybe when I saw the image, I just had different expectations for how she'd sound. I think the voice actress sounded a touch too serious.

Mouse was pretty great though.

Suggestions

Regarding Exploration, I think retreating should allow you to keep all of your loot. At least have an exit area so that if you go all the way back to the starting location you can leave while keeping all the stuff you got. Also when you switch locations your character should appear the door of the location that leads back to where you came from in my opinion.

Regarding development, I don't think your enemies need a death animation. Your animator and artist is amazing, and I don't know how fast you work but death animations are only useful if the death target can be revived. Usually players can revive dead allies so they have a death animation. If enemies can't revive dead allies, then it might be better to just have them slowly disappear or flatten or something. You don't have to give yourself too much work.

Regarding combat, I really hope you don't ignore passive abilities and unique actives. Passive abilities are always running, but don't think of them as just stat steroids. Like Passive Ability - When health is lower than 50% strength is increased by 50%. That would be a good passive ability, but you can do some interesting things there too.

For instance, you can have the passive ability... ummm... let's call it Weak Chaser . Weak Chaser - When an ally inflicts a status ability on an enemy, teleport behind the enemy and slash.  Or maybe Greedy - Attacking a stunned enemy has the chance to rob them of some gold.

Passive Abilities have the effect of encouraging players to adapt their play-styles and use different abilities.

Regarding the adult stuff. First I must add that I'm actually a really large fan of female assertive positions. I love cowgirl and all that, but I don't like this game's adult content because I'm not a fan of sluts, yuri, or the ugly_bastard tag. Ah... I should've said that earlier hunh XD. Yes... I don't like the game's adult content, but that's just a personal preference of course! Please don't let it color your perception of what I wrote. I did my best to be objective!

My suggestion regarding adult stuff would be to make it easier for it to happen and to not rely too much on chance for when it does happen. I think it's frustrating when your characters don't listen to commands even if they ignore to do sex stuff.
Maybe you have the option of having sex with the enemy at any point in the game as a different skill set. If you succeed in having sex with them you do damage to them and they might attack allies? Since I'm not personally invested in the adult content, I can't really say much here, but I will say that the game's very low in sexual content as of this moment. Anyway to make it happen more often, without it feeling like punishment would be good in my opinion.

Oh regarding input. I think if you're going to ask the player to use the mouse to traverse the HUB menu, you should allow the entire game to be played solely on mouse. Click right to move right and left to move left, use skills with clicking skills then the enemy. Currently 90% of the game can be controlled with the mouse and 10% can't. It's incongruous. PERSONALLY, I feel like you should also have 100% of the game be able to be controlled by keyboard as well, but that's just my preference.

SAVE MENU

I hate autosave only style games. Let me save when I want to, and load when I want to. As a dev I can understand doing autosave only for a demo (i'm doing the same thing lol) but yeah... PLEASE add it soon.

I won't be following the game as sexually it doesn't interest me, but I seriously wish you guys the BEST of luck.

____

EDIT: Oh almost forgot to talk about unit movement. This is one of the aspects of the game I didn't like during battles. When a unit attacksthey basically teleports straight to the enemy (which I don't mind at all actually for mouse - looks dope) but when they're done, they don't actually jump back to their starting position. I don't think this looks good.

The goblins throwing their bomb also looks bad. The bomb doesn't move in the air at all. You guys need to add some tweening for some of these battle motions.

I hope battles in the future give drops or gold in the future because right now there's no real incentive to seek out combat.

EDIT EDIT: Oh man I almost forgot. I should probably tell you but I found you through erodev if you're concerned about marketing. I'd also like to add to be careful with yuri content. Give players any amount and the expectation will be to include futa. Once you have futa fans though... they're gonna harangue you into including more and more of it. It happened to a dev my friend was following... What was the project called... uhh... LEWDMAZE! Yeah that's what's it was called. It's basically a futa game now even though you can tell it originally wasn't supposed to be.

I'm sorry, but this is hard to fix unless I understand the specifics of what is confusing T_T.

What part of the tutorial did you not understand?

What confused you?