itch.io

IT'S ALIVE!

Cute lil' game. A bit too monotonous/slow-paced, but given the amount of "not implemented yet", it may just be because of how limited the content is for now.

This is really surprisingly good. I wonder why I never noticed this game before.

I expected a weak imitation of Trials in tainted Space, but from the first few minutes it's pretty clear that it has an identity of its own and solid execution and it looks like you are nowhere near done with the project.

Just one thing I feel like criticizing, the players has surprisingly little control in many situations. Often when approaching people out of curiosity, you are forced into a fight with no retreat and in my scenes, when you agree to one thing, your character will also agree to three steps up from that, it feels a bit jarring sometimes.

Or does this have to do with personality values? I'm assuming personality will be expanded upon more in the future.

Really liked this game thank you! My first successful run took 35:05 minutes.

I wish it was longer and had more spooky stuff, but the only thing that really bugged me was that it takes about a second after a crop was harvested before you can plant a new seed. That kinda tripped me up, because you can plant and water at the same time.

Also on that successful run the maxed out bucket was not enough to water every crop in the third field, I don't remember that happening the last time I got that far. Is there some subtle randomness or could the upgrade system be buggy?

EDIT: Also fishing seems to be a bit too out of the way, I didn't even notice that it is a thing until I was about to win, so I never even caught a fish. I dunno, maybe it's a game changer if I focus on it super early.

But you forgot to change the thumbnail. lol

I think Unity is likely to be forced to revert their announced changes, because I don't think what they are doing is very legal, but the board of directors may be attempting to destroy the company on purpose.

Either way, as long as the people on the board and the CEO aren't straight-up arrested, I think continuing to use Unity is a huge gamble, but porting is hard...

I assumed obedience would be needed for something and those "no preference" pets can't have obedience, but I guess the game is in a very early state, maybe it will be really fun later!

This seems like a lot of thought was into it already, but at the same time, it is rendered unplayable by some really obvious problems...

You cannot tell what preferences a "pet" has before having to decide to keep it forever or sell it, which means selling makes sense exactly when you can't handle any more pets, but simply can't turn off trapping.

You also can't rename pets, so while giving them a name as an identifier does make it slightly less confusing, the names can't have any meaning.

Pets can have the same "like" and "hate", which makes zero sense and ends up happening more often than you would expect and basically prevents those pets from ever having any obedience, whatever obedience does.

Assignments have to be redone every single day, which becomes extremely tiring after like 5 days. Why is there even a "confirm" button?

All of these are really obvious and trivial problems with massive impact. I just don't understand how something like this can happen. I feel bad for criticizing the game so hard, but I really feel like all of these problems could be fixed in like 5 minutes when everything else in this game probably took days to make. I just don't get it...

Thank you for the info!

One more thing, is full evolution currently implemented for any of the hybrids?

I believe Vulpix normally needs a fire stone and judging from the lack of sprites for most of the hybrid evolutions, they are not implemented yet?

Oh, Noivern "training" seems to be bugged. The picture never disappears when you are done. lol

Afaik water stone is still not a thing,

Noivern is in! It's related to Dewford quests.

Thank you, I have found that part out myself now, sorry for being noisy about it.

It also seems that you have fixed the berry collission! ...But half the berry fields are still barren for some reason

(I found all of this now, I just didn't expect it to be gated behind relationship levels)

That would be quite sad, but save issues from the development phase to the full game are to be expected and ultimately the final builds are what really matters.

Anyway, regarding this build, 0.4, I don't see a changelog, so I can only talk about what I have seen,

The gymleader in Petalburg, when talked to after all quests are done has dialogue that starts with "Dad:" I know this is temporary, but it's still really silly.

In Dewford, I took a quest to apparently give a new trainer a reality check in route 106, but there's not a soul in that place. Not in the cave, either. Is it somewhere on the water? But surf is not a thing yet, right?

There's currently no way to progress past Rustboro/Dewford, right? All that seems to be left for me to do at this time is the end of the Marowak quest line in Route 116 and I doubt that's gonna be a major progression key.

When I check the bed in the player character's home, it gives me the option to "reset all interactions". That sounds scary, what exactly does it do?

Is it really necessary for the "Special" Pokémon to have separate dex entries? Especially since there seems to be no way to actually fill that entry and they are just called "Ralts" "Vaporeon" etc. there, not something like "Special Ralts". I see people talk about eggs and I see the "dating sim" mechanics with a bunch of NPCs and the special Pokémon, but there seems to be absolutely nothing I can do with these as of now EDIT: I didn't realize you can buy flavoured candy in the store, I expected it to be some berry-based system later on. This locked me out of a lot of content.

And is fixing the berries really not just a matter of copying the events from the gardens to the right of Petalburg to all the other fields?

Do we have to worry about save files becoming incompatible with future versions?

I am playing this like a normal Pokémon game. Gotta catch 'em all!

Also ETA on Pokemon with impossible evolution conditions such as trading? I saw before that you were going to give them a level condition instead, but I have found out that in later Pokémon games there's actually an item that emulates the trading condition.

Yes, I can see it now, too.

I assumed it was just temporarily hidden for some reason, but since I couldn't find any way to tell what was going on I decided to make sure and mention it here, too. Good to know I won't have to worry about this in the future.

I have tried using GitLab just now. Can't find my own issue. It's probably hidden for some verification process, but just in case the system just eats it: I suggested improving the interaction hitboxes so trying to disarm the bottom one of two vertically stacked traps won't make the character try to disable the top one instead and set off the bottom one.

Gitlab? Very well, I will use that in the future!

But I have to disagree about sleeping. Originally I assumed the best way to sleep was to find some secluded corner, take off most clothes and hope that nothing would find me for like a minute, but this was extremely unreliable, especially in later levels and then required me to make my way through the hordes of reinforcements to hunt down the vacuum to get my stuff back and then leave without losing all the stats I just regained, but this is just the wrong way.

If you sleep near the exit, you can take power naps between reinforcement waves, wake up, destroy the new wave, then go back to sleep. This would work in any room with excess weapons and shoes(you would lose the regained HP again if you can't put on shoes while destroying the reinforcement wave. Without weapons is doable, especially with wild amulet/sharp glasses, but can go terribly wrong) This would allow regeneration of 2-3 HP per nap, which sounds tedious, but it helped me get deeper than I would have otherwise.

But now the addition of sleeping bags has buffed this strategy tenfold, now due to the potency of the regeneration, shoes and weapons aren't necessary anymore, because the HP loss due to...gymnastics is negligible compared to the HP gain from sleeping.

PS: Is there a lore explanation for enemies that have improved vision for clothed targets? I get numinescence, but this is weird.

Now what's the best way to keep the feedback organized without an ever growing tree of threads? There's always a bit more to say~

My idea with the guards problem would be to have a maximum number per floor, maybe scaling based on floor size and just skip extra girls if too many, but dropping them a little deeper in also works.

Resting is not as annoying anymore since the addition of sleeping bags, I can reliably fully restore my stats on any level that has one, though it made me overconfident.

As for stuff related to the Wrapper update:

I do in fact roll up to the exit to camp when I have a sleeping bag. It consumes dozens of max stamina, but that doesn't matter since I can regain like 200 between reinforcements.

I found the debug menu by accident before, but I kinda don't wanna use it since my Vinculopedia is like 98% complete now and everything had been done organically so far.

In my experience I get like 1 catsuit, normal or loose for every 5 of every other item, so I guess I must be unlucky. But I don't see a reason to wear a loose catsuit, the stats are terrible... I would only wear it to test Living Suits. I guess it has higher def than the normal catsuit, but if the normal catsuit had 0% Def, that would be a buff anyway imo.

Unrelated feedback:

I would like my camp to be a bit more lively, but I don't wanna summon more girls and sacrifice them to the abyss just to get new camp music, plus it gets harder and harder to get them back out, since there's no way to rescue a girl without getting another stuck at least as deep... Is that an integral design decision? That one girl must always be stuck as deep as possible?

Are features like "Way to move girls back a few floors/flee from the dungeon(Like in The Enchanted Cave)" likely to be added?

Or a way to get a nice camp that acts as a display of the player's skill, rather than a monument of their repeated failure?

More reliable ways to execute sneak attacks? Like lock-on or lurking behind corners when an approaching enemy is known(Would probably makes Will-o-wisps a lot less scary)?

Attack from a Wrapper seems to have caused an unrecoverable freeze.

The screenshot function failed, but from what I can reconstruct, my loadout was something like this:

Kukri Knife Mummy wrappings(Eyes) Collar Amulet of Freedom(I couldn't find anything better) Bikini top Leather Bottom Mummy Wrappings(Legs and feet)

I also get random red errors from Wisps, but those aren't fatal. Turns out sleeping bags are very common. Unfortunately this level did not have one, so I couldn't test restraining sleeping bag, but it seems to be so that wearing shoes is now a bad idea in general, since they are all way too noisy unless you have catsuit+muffle amulet and you can simply recover lost health using the sleeping bags. Footwraps are still OK, but they only last 1-3 floors.

Looks like I got here just in time! lol

Now since there is no inventory, I guess you will not really be able to take sleeping bags with you? Still seem extremely powerful, because after clearing a floor, there's always time to regain at least 2HP via sleep between reinforcement waves. If the sleeping bag provides x10 sleeping bonus, that's 20HP per one of these little naps. Seems very powerful, but very limiting because it will only work when there happens to be a sleeping bag lying around.

I think this is a good solution to the "Make resting viable without giving players a perfect safespace" problem. Although, some rooms have such harmless reinforcements(100% Twinkles or Holders) that it's safe to sleep there anyway.

Now getting the restraining sleeping bag into my Vinculopedia will probably be a challenge, it will require a room to have both a sleeping bag and and a wrapper, I have already fruitlessly looking for an opportunity to test what happens if a living suit attacks me too many times when I have a catsuit and if I get something different if it's a loose suit. It requires a room to have both a catsuit and living suits(preferably, patrolling) since I don't want to sacrifice the one that has been carrying me for dozens of floors...especially now that you decreased their frequency even more

This game is ridiculously addictive and I like it a lot.

I wanted to comment earlier, but had account issues. Well, what I would have written then would embarrass me now.

Now for actual feedback...

Maybe there should be a limit to the number of guards that can be on one floor. On my first save file, I got 6 girls stuck on floor 7, which meant that I had to face 6 guards before I could rescue them. Now that I properly understand the enemies and concepts like numinescence, it's not so scary anymore, but back then I felt like it was close to impossible. Especially since guards are noisy and tend to attract each other, forcing you to face multiple at once.

This game could also be called "The quest for good shoes". Do shoes really have to be obliterated when worn off? They can be manually fixed and they will drop in a broken state when broken due to an attack, so why not when worn off?

The controls are very rough, stealth attacks are extremely unreliable due to sometimes just not triggering and the character often rolling into the completely wrong direction or getting stuck on nothing, but I guess it's an early state of the game.

When I first played, I thought stealth was everything, any more than 3 noise being unplayable. You take damage for being exposed and/or not wearing shoes, but that amount wasn't too bad. I would still recommend new players to play like this, but once you get into the late tens, the damage from being exposed piles up and there are better options for stealth than being exposed(plus many enemies have numinescence vision). Now I think noise as high as 12 can be tolerable. Stealth is good and saves weapon durability, but if you know the enemies well enough, you can use some careful maneuvering or stamina for dodge rolls to take them out head-on.

That being said, if your noise is 1 or 0 and you can just rush through a corridor, instantly killing all enemies on the way, it's extremely satisfying.

Resting is currently very annoying, but a good way to level up, I guess. Also there seems to be a bug where sometimes all enemies will just stand in front of you and wait while you are resting. Kind of creepy, but beneficial.

I had seen a bunch of Pokémon fangames before and I think this one is very impressive! Exactly how much of this is actually your own work or work you specifically had someone do(Such as the extra art)?

This is not an accusation of any kind. There are no accusations to be made against a free indie game with extensive credits, I am just curious.

I got twice almost obliterated by a Ralts and a Magma grunt, but I like a challenge and never minded grinding. It's hard to cheese battles against enemies that have no weaknesses and are super effective against everything, but just one question regarding that: Are double types therefore four times weak against shadow attacks? Because that stings!

Also please, are you planning to fix the berry fields soon? The first field is inconsistent with the others and most of them only allow placing berries in places where berries have been before, not the entire field, it's the main thing hurting my Pokémon Gen 3 immersion.