itch.io

Yeah it's honestly my preference tbh Sleeve Shock would've worked really well having an extended they/them phase, but unfortunately they/them isn't something super common and understood by people, for it not to be confusing in a narrative where you don't always get easy context to know who's being referred to. You'll notice I use the character's name a SHITLOAD for this exact reason.

The original idea was to have the mc gradually drift from he to they to she through the journey, but people complained about they/them being in the game as being confusing, and so now it just jumps to she/her after the ritual.

According to Steam tracked stats average time played is 1 hour 50 minutes, and it's currently sitting at 42,000 words

Black contract hasn't gotten a steam version yet unfortunately.

And we've run out of steam keys to giveaway for the minute, we've been mostly doing free months of patreon

You should play every update on a fresh save, that will solve this problem. Text you've already read can be set up to be quickly skipped through to get back to where you were up to.

Unfortunately most of these are big enough to be a whole different game. 

We had a more gamified approach to Cufflinks and Cages, with the daily cycle, and content being awarded through completing the work tasks, and people for the most part did not like that game.

This was our first game, and we picked a tempo and kinda stuck to it. Sleeve Shock is now getting more of a minigame treatment, and then our newest project the Creature of Castorfield is  all non-linear, and you're exploring to try and uncover the plot. Unfortunately as our skills have grown, Shackles hasn't been able to keep up, but we've been focusing on keeping the story going because I really like how it all plays together.

I am curious though, if we were to add minigames or something to this, what kind of thing would you be wanting?

Happy to report the fish minigame has been fixed

That's the plan!

Happy to report that the fish minigame has been completely replaced to be way more simple.

We actually have members of the community that complain if the pecking order is disrupted even slightly, especially if the MC isn't at the bottom

It should run like any other RenPy game, you might be able to find troubleshooting on their website about running RenPy games.

Yeah and I can imagine it's a nightmare for mobile users too, it's on my to-do list to fix it

Nope! This is a malesub fantasy game c:

Happy to hear it!

We're working really hard lately to try and keep it going, because all of our games are delisted, so the support means a lot to us!

There is plans to update this one in the future, we want to explore more end-stage story for the two characters. The plan was to do it once we got a little in front with our two new games: the Grand Butt-sex hotel and the Creature of Castorfield, but because of the itch delistings, and mastercard situation our budget has been slashed, and until we can recover and get our sales up or patreon numbers up this is unfortunately only a wishlist item

I have no idea, Cubze has really pulled away from working on art projects since working with us, so we don't know if something is happening behind the scenes or not.

Cubze is the original comic artist, and Cubze is not part of THM Studios, just simply worked on projects with us when we started out

Yeah, if there's no more comic chapters released, we won't be able to adapt them

yep!
I find it handy to have the saves backed up somewhere, but usually for Shackles saves aren't that important imo

You have to download the game again each time, and I recommend using a fresh save each time. Once you've played through the game once, you'll get access to the scene skipper which will let you access whichever path has new content or that you are missing

Oh she's going to be the main villain for a while, and there'll definitely be a route where you can focus on her, but I didn't want to rush to that just yet ;)

It's difficult for us to add the time for each update to have an APK and exe version, so it's something that we've looked at doing a big conversion for at the end of the development cycle, as all the images need to be resized which takes time.

We're going to likely do a steam and itch simultaneous release, and the reason why we're held back from releasing on steam is that people play it on launch, and then leave a negative review that it's too short that stays up unchanged for years. So this time we're waiting until there's likely an hours worth of gameplay, which might be some months.

For the first couple of months of updates it's going to be patreon exclusive, but we'll put out devlogs on here so you can see how it's progressing!

You gotta play on a fresh save! :)

Mouse over the fish, and the ones that change colour are to be clicked, ones that don't change colour have a chance of removing all the ones that you can click.

Yes! but not exclusively, there'll be female and futa characters that tangle with the main character

I get an error that says failed to initialise graphics, can you include a downloadable version?

<3

can you post the crash log in the discord, or a screenshot?

If the people on Patreon decide that they'd rather we focus more on our other games, and that Shackles need to be completed, that's when we'd look at stuff like android ports and translations. It's not worth doing it while we're doing monthly updates.

1. The development of Shackles will continue for as long as we have Patreon support, which means the game could potentially continue to get updates for ever, and be gigantic. According to Steam stats it is currently played for 1h 38m on average.

2. Is there going to be a sequel? well that would require Shackles to be completed, see above.

3. When is shackles going to be completed? see above.

4. As for an Android port, we don't get people asking about it that often, so I can't imagine there's a giant pile of people that only have a phone and are waiting to play out games, to justify the large amount of time spent to reconfigure all the art assets to fit the mobile screen resolution size to be able to release an android port. So it seems unlikely.

Absolutely! MarcieMallard, our writer is possibly the funniest person I've ever met, and the game will definitely have goofy moments and shenanigans!

Soon!

Currently looking at 10USD same as Shackles of Ellswyn, but nothing is locked in at the moment.

You need to play through on a fresh save!

It should be explained to you in the Dialogue right before entering the minigame.

But to summarise:

Click the buttons that match the letters of the code on screen, in the correct order. When there is a Forward Slash "/" in the code, wait three seconds, then press the next letter in the code.

It's supposed to be a cliffhanger ending ;)

So that when we do add more content later, we can elaborate on that scene

This error has been caught and fixed!

The fixed version is already uploaded, you just need to redownload the game :)