A bunch of fixes make the game much more pleasant to play (now characters out on missions come back, crying characters with low blue bar don't stay that way forever). There're still some issues with the core gameplay but for the content, that's largely admissible so don't take this as me complaining, I like this game and am just giving suggestions and critiques.
TL;DR: I really like this game and went on a brainstorming tirade to think about how to make it better.
To offset the critiques I will first note some things I love:
- I love the race system, it's not rigid and has tonnes of variation in possibilities (at least as far as I can tell). my dungeon master was a black-furred wolf lady and one of the people who she impregnated gave birth to a red-furred wolf since her mother was a red-headed elf. That was really cool and I'd love to see more of that sorta stuff.
- The AI Shojou Ai like inventory and systems sound really cool with having a bunch of items to equip and use in crafting
- There's so much variation in character creation possibilities (I love character creators so this is automatically a huge huge plus)
- As someone who loved both dungeon management games like Dungeon Keeper and colony sims like Dwarf Fortress, the idea here is really cool: capture and buy minions, have children with them, or do lewd stuff, it's your dungeon; that's super cool
Noted Bugs
- If you continually ask someone how they are it will restart the animation they make when they are spoken to, this will mean they will slowly move towards the camera (if done long enough go through the camera)
- The rotate bar will rotate only the main person, instead of both characters while in an interaction with two people
- Seemingly randomly my futa keeper became pregnant, this could have been because of an interaction where she took the place of the sub but all other characters at the time were female
- If you start alchemising then back out the selected ingredients are still there when you return but aren't visible so I had no idea why I wasn't able to select ingredients until I hit the button to craft and was given the result of the previously added ingredients
Gameplay Notes
The alchemy system feels awful to use, you have to buy ingredients then use them blindly to get things you likely don't want and won't use, I used it more in my first playthrough on 0.16.1 but now I just don't care to mess with it when the act itself isn't fun and the reward is minimal
- Maybe have the ingredients imply the result instead of ambiguous flowers (an ingredient that means "grow" plus an ingredient that means "body" gives you a random potion of growth for some part of the body)
- Have ingredients be given by gameplay or a buildable room as well (like killing invaders giving you red flowers, raising the dead giving black flowers, some missions giving flowers, the farm giving green flowers randomly, or a flower garden which gives x amount of random flowers every y time
The fact that you can't interact with characters who hate you while they are prisoners is silly given that this is a game about dungeons (where you can buy and keep slaves) and all characters consent
- If it's an issue of balancing then perhaps have a reverse relationship metre: at the moment you can only have a good relationship with someone, maybe add a submissive bar which when increased will allow the player to force interactions (maybe balance it with having a chance of retaliation, a negative event, or a mind-break style mechanic where their personality can change)
- Perhaps have it so that a character's relation only matters if they're not a prisoner but otherwise is ignored
The "spam 'how are you'" exploit is still in the game and I'm not sure about an easy solution: as it stands it takes forever to relations up with a person if you don't spam 'how are you'
- I have the feeling this will be remedied once the "tell me about yourself" option is implemented but I can't be sure
- Perhaps having small "get me an X" quests to increase relations
Currently, Dungeon: Keep Her is stuck in a genre divide between a dungeon management game like it's namesake and colony sims like Rim World, and in a way also just management games in general. It has the absolute minimum to be both and does neither very well, that's not to say it can't do both or do both well, just that as it stands it's in a weird place. There's no real reason to kill invaders unless you don't like them or want their clothing but don't want them as a prisoner (though you can always sell them so no biggy there). There's also little reason to tend to any individual's needs as their needs feel largely inconsequential (just ask them "how are you" twice to fill up their social, pack them with veggies if they're hungry, pay for a wash if they're dirty, etc). In terms of management games, it gives you resources and events but events are just "oh no someone got near the dungeon, wanna fight them?" and resources are mostly
- Work more on the dungeon management elements:
- Give dungeon management better incentives such as rewards for killing invaders, quests to kill or imprison certain invaders
- Have different races or different attributes mean better work for certain jobs such as wolfies being worse at crafting or elfs being better at researching (akin to Dungeon Keeper)
- Introduce party combat: just adding the ability for a 2v2 or 1v3 would greatly increase the fun factor of the dungeon management especially if different races have different combat abilities ala Dungeon Keeper
- Add more personalization with layout (this is harder as how the game currently works but would help with all elements overall), just the ability to have rooms and corridors or differently sized rooms but keep how character navigation and positioning (per room positioning that is) how it is or a more thorough rework of the room system, either way will make the game more fun to play
- There's currently a rough outline of layout mattering with the existence of spike and barbs rooms but both are so minor that they only matter before you have a good fighter (at which point every single invasion is a cake-walk), maybe add more interesting tactical options for rooms or change how invader AI works rather than just straight forward (which again would indicate a larger rework of how rooms work unfortunately). Imagine a treasure room that stores gold for the player but if reached by a raider will have them book it for the entrance with some of the gold, maybe allowing the player to trap the room at cost of money to rearm it after every time it's triggered, or a room which administers poison on dark brambles then it's activated by entering any ritual room which makes them woozy or somehow injured.
- Work more on the colony sim elements:
- Allow for more personalisation of the dungeon rooms such as needing non-prisoners to have their own rooms or barracks, allowing the player to furnish them to each character
- Make characters have traits and needs that make management of them more interesting (there's already the basis of this but all characters sound and act nearly identically as it stands)
- Give more activity to characters, maybe make excavation an action instead of instant, and have characters need to do more than just bathe and eat and even then there's stuff to add, for example, imagine having a dining hall where characters are set to eat at set times every day (either a random midday/afternoon/night/morning per character or something else) or barracks where character have to take turns sleeping maybe with varying levels of quality so the player can favour some minions over others or something
- Work on the management game elements:
- Add more events with decisions and rewards or penalties for maneuvering them
- Add effects such as topside issues that influence the dungeon (like an X race surge which means they cost and sell for less and there are more invaders of that race, or a fertility increase/estrus period for all of X beast race, blight on all food production)
The UI is pretty all over the place. It starts with the character creator of entirely dropdown menus in one large scroll box which sometimes resets unrelated fields when a field is changed, and ends with the oddities of the character menu or inventory screen. This is kinda expected from an indie game, especially one trying to do so much, but it'd still be really great to have better-designed UI overall.
There is a severe issue with quantity of people pushed upon the player. The game can only really handle around ten before it begins to have issues and logically you really only need around four to six to handle operations of the dungeon (example: food production is so fast with one fertile or fully upgraded farm that any more is just going to be excess no matter how many people you have). The game is constantly throwing new people at you with invaders, people offering to join, slaves, and potentially children. This is both cool and awful: cool because I love seeing new characters and especially new crosses through pregnancy but it's awful because there's no need for any of them and they'll just wander around doing nothing save for lowering the framerate and performance.
- Add new ways to use people: there's already the capability to scrap a body for meat to eat or sell an imprisoned minion, so why not add ways to have perpetual trade routes or minions with jobs outside the dungeon (this would need lots of thought as currently there's not much someone could do outside the dungeon), or even once factions are added, a way to trade people from a faction (prisoners who want to return or criminals who the faction is looking for) to the faction to gain affinity or something of the like
- Balance resources: food needs to be worth less or produced less, currently there's a really really low upper limit to the use there
- It's a bit out there but maybe allow the player to open a second dungeon in a harder location where they have to content with worse conditions and stats, they would be able to send characters from dungeon to dungeon and be able to have more people without effecting the fps too much (just have the unloaded dungeon not running and run a quick estimation of what it's resources would be once it's reloaded or something)
Balance is all over the place in general. Whether it's combat or resources: it's always slanted in the player's favour. That's not necessarily a bad thing in a sandbox lewd game like this, most people aren't looking for a challenge while "enjoying themselves", but the fact that it's so easy to do everything is kinda sad for those who do.
- Change the balance of combat by randomizing who gets the first turn unless it's the dungeon master (player character/"you")
- Change the balance of combat by making the use of an item end the turn or just cost an energy or something
- Change the balance of combat by making it so that you can't redraw your hand if you have no blue bar
- Change the balance of resources by making gold less prevalent mid to late game and make food less useful or more hard to get
- Allow things like "fertile", "rich minerals" and similar either able to be depleted or change randomly or something
The itch.io formatting has stopped allowing me to make lists so I'll stop it here, plus I don't wanna write any more of a novel and potentially annoy anyone. Thank you for reading.
Thank you KeepHer Dev for all the hard work! I'm excited to see where this game goes in the future!