That looks good! You should use such an animiation as screenshot #1 or #2. Those get shown when hovering the game in the browse section.
Ponydragon
Recent community posts
You might want to reconsider having two different levels of individual priced files. Itch currently has no way of increasing the amount. Someone paying 10 and later deciding to want to get the extras from tier 18, can only do so by paying another 18.
You could also make a dlc project page to offer the soundtrack separatly or something like that to mitigate the shortcomings of Itch payment options.
Gay isn't an activity. It's an orientation.
In context, it is a tag. And that can very well mean an activity in the game, that can be called gay, even though the characters might be bisexual.
It is just tags. One has to balance people looking for/avoiding certain content. If you have m-m action in a game, "gay" does the trick. Nuances that one or both of the characters are not oriented exlusively gay, are better explained in the description.
So, yeah, it is not what "gay" means, but it is one of the things the tag "gay" can mean.
Oh, it is not about abuse of tags. What they mean and what they are used for is in the eye of the beholder. Usage, importance and applicability is often debateable.
But if I browse for certain tags, I have expectations.
To be found by people browsing for tags, just look what tags are used by similar games.
Disclaimer. I did not try the game. But some advice from a user's perspective.
Tag the setting, gameplay and game tags. Not the fetishes, except outstanding things. See popular adult games for examples. List the fetishes in the description if you want to. You only have 11 tags.
An outstanding thing would be weight gain. But a dude screwing some ladies is ... well, you did tag it adult already.
The only adult tag you need is adult. And you do not even need that, but it is better to have it, because people look for it. But you must mark your game as having sensitive content. You want tags like fantasy or gothic for example. And it is debateable, if your game is a 3d game. Just look at similar visual novel what they use for tags, so your game can be found by tags. Yeah, some tag simple things like the type of sex or sex itself. Or even indie for crying out loud.
If your main character is not gay/bi, do not tag lgbt or lesbian, just because there is lesbian sex in it. Assuming male-protagonist here.
You need more screenshots. And maybe a longer description.
Wish you well. And if this is not a kinetic novel, I might play it someday.
Oh, you can like the fetish and if the target audience really voted for this and the dev planned this all along, all is good and well.
But there are some kinks that I see a lot of people begging for or hating on. Often on games that do not feature the kink to begin with or feature it in a way that actually is not what people think it is.
Here for instance I do not see preg in the planned kinks. Adding it later is kinda a big thing, because it is one of the dealbreaker kinks. Like futa, ntr, gay, incest, furry and so on. Some people like it, some people do not care, but some people actively avoid it.
It depends on the game and the setting and how exactly one wants to implement it. Pregnancy in particular is delicate, because of all the realism it entails. We are talking about a suspension of disbelief lewd game, where things happen, that do not happen in real life and other things that would happen in real life will not happen ingame. Like the women having a headache and being not in the mood or the mc being too nervous to have a boner.
Anyways, it is a big thing to add in a game and not something trivial like the question, should a solo masturbation scene be added or not. Well, actually, adding it onscreen for the male mc would be a dealbreaker kink for some ;-)
Having no longer access to more artwork from the same source would be a reason to change the art. I was just lamenting because it read like you did it for other reasons.
I look at lots of nsfw games and comments and the impression I got was, that AI is not really popular. It is tolerated, not something to brag about. Pixel art would be a counterexample. People highlight it and advertise with it.
And the timing was just too weird. I downloaded a version with AI art, while the screenshots were still the old ones. And after playing a bit, I checked back with the page and wondered why I never got to the part with the screenshots. When I reloaded the page, you had changed the screenshots and made this devlog.
And here I was, wondering why your screenshots looked nothing like the game I just tried. The new "art" looks bad. There is nothing to sugercoat. It is same as you see in all those shovelware AI adult games. Yawn.
You might want to reconsider that change. If you did it to make the game look better, it failed. Tbh, with the new screenshots I probably would not even have tried the game. And I am not even an AI hater. It just looks bland and boring. People do not go looking for games because they have AI art, but some avoid them because of it. You have actual game play, AI art does not enhance your game, it degrades it.
At first I thought, after playing the game and looking at the 2d art again, aha, the dev is replacing the placeholder AI pics with real art...
The card game has some interesting mechanics. Plays too slow. Needs a speedup setting. It is like playing Monster Train on normal speed. Card animations look only nice for five minutes. Some of those upgrades are actually bad and you cannot refuse them. Like discard instead of expend. I cannot say I fully grasped the expend mechanic. But when I discard my 7 cost card, I do not get the 7 points to fuel the two mimics with the maso to one shot most enemies. Same with the upgrade to have a card cost 0. That is not really helping. The current game mechanics punish you for playing cards, so you only ever play your best cards. Also, too much text clicking. And your door mechanic and those chests and whatnot could use some tooltips to explain what is going on.
I sometimes wonder, if the adding of pregnancy content increases or decreases the potential audience. The people begging for this content sure make it look, like it is super popular. But I think this is a distored statistic. They beg for it, because it is unpopular fetish.
For me, pregnancy is a turn off. A big one. It puts realism in a light hearted lewd game. What next? No anal anymore, because they did not clean their rear entry preemtively? Also, if pregnancy is possible, the characters would know this and not have casual sex all the time without condoms!
I say, if you ad impreg, you should add condoms. And remove the anal content. Also characters should talk about birth control a lot more.
If there was a way to activate sleeping without running out of stamina, I did miss it.
I am used to some time management, but mostly in twine games. And they of course have digital time display. And typically there would be an option to rest or nap to gain a little stamina back. Or trigger a full nights sleep/end of day.
Don't read too much into a single experience of your game.
I think what irritated me about the clock was, that night and day of course do not correspond to 0-12 and 12-0. But there is daylight twice with some hours and the irregular sleep times disorient me.
Since you added night effects, you might want to consider using the sun as an indicator. Sun and moon wandering across the sreen. Or as a background of the clock or whatever. Or a more granular night and day, with dusk and dawn in between. Speaking about the lack of light on the map in night.
It is mostly the sleep times I think. If a day is scheduled regularly, I do not need to think about what time it is after waking up and have some inkling what time it is depending on how many things I did. What could do the trick is tell me how long I slept or rather what time I woke up. There is a sleep dialoge anyway. It could end with something like, you sleept till 6:00.
Your "conversion" includes a chromium browser. To play this not on windows, you would have to exctract the app (which is 27.5 MB) and run it in browser.
I cannot say that I understand how this game is supposed to work. It is rather confusing. I did not figure out, if it is possible to sleep on demand. Or how to gain favor with the ladies.
After reading your tutorial on ng, it got a little better. Sadly this information is not presented in the game. Or in a way that I would find it. I played management sims before, including yours. This is among the most non intuitive confusing things I experienced. For example the click that advances time. That happens just about everyhwere. And do I have to acknowlege work messages or not. Oh, and one click too many will advance time, because clicks outside of click areas still do something - but not rest. Most annoying is the time management with the auto sleep. Maybe I did not find the rest button, as the gift button also was hidden in plain sight. A game that has time slots for events to happen should have something like that, and not make me go sleep at the time I want to do something and give me not opportunity to shift my sleeping times.
An analog clock is nice on paper, but who can read those anymore. You could have both. And night is a little very dark.
If you make click areas visible, that is nice. But people expect all click areas to be marked, or at least the important ones. Like that pond. But more importantly, click areas suggest, that clicking elsewhere does nothing. This is not the case here.
When reading a skill up to 20, there is a bug. It just keeps telling you, that your energy is low.
Game could do with an introductory screen that tells you the basic setup (story). And maybe something similar as you had in that beach game, where you could see what each button would do. But maybe I just did not realize that the inventory button would be repurposed, because your tool tips are deativated when a girl is present. Changing the icon from storage box to a gifting icon would also do the trick.
Helpful tooltips can usually do most or all of the job of a tutorial. They are also not in the way and let a user advance at a chosen pace to new elements of the ui.
Will probably try again later, but my backlog is big.
I cannot tell what triggered it. But three of your projects are indexed and three are quarantined. Including the one that only has the csv file. Open a private window and click any download link. The message only appears when you really do click the link, and not earlier. Earlier the only indication is, that the games do not appear in search, if you search for LAGS.
It is weekend, so it might take a while for staff to look at this. If your account is not hacked (and it could be, without your knowlege. There is a thing called cookie theft), it should clear up.
There is an ongoing attack for years from scammers to upload fake games and stolen games with malware. I saw like 5 today. It stands to reason that Itch does something to fight those criminals. And that this something might give false positives. Those 5 were on older user accounts. That means, they did get hacked recently.
Oh, do not worry about the rpg maker issues too much, I hate that with all the rpg maker games. Especially the waiting time for the text to finish. Or that there is no dialogue log. Or that you have to double select items again to actually do something with the items you already see. Or that fullscreen is not a button in options. (The list goes on ;-)
That focus is not visible at certain places in the menu when you would want to know this value might be improved. Like, when munching fish, you do not know how much focus you currently have.
What did kinda worry me, was this testing with carrot villager. It looked to me, as if my save game might be corrupt. I guess I was not supposed to be so far in the game, without having Abby. It eventually resolved itself, but I did wait to advance the Sherman event, till I got Abby and only then talkted to both again. Bascially I could not talk to Sherman or Jessie route would start without me even having encountered Abby. Also, this "Abby" I never met, dragged me back from the Orks.
The customer count for the brothel might be wrong. Or my save game got corrupted somehow. I now have 3. No pamphlets, but upgrades to the building. It was 6 once with pamphlets.
The mermaid thingies might be buggy. I have lvl22 and 634en with collar. When first equipping the collar at lvl21, it was 400something. It is 886 with the mermaid one now. The refill item that sounded like it would be similar to animalize seems to not work. But the non-faint item is very usefull for orks. I could do 3-4 with timing the boost you can get in the event, but the ones on the world map were only possible with the mermaid thing.
The only really bothering thing about the majors wive is that she pops up a dialog every second. And it is inconstistent, when she "sees" you with her back turned. I did find one of the hiding places enventually and how to sneak past her. Maybe hide an item in there and make it repeatable.
If you want to minimize event questions, you have several possibilities. Make things like appearances a thing of character options that can be switched in menu. I imagine that rpg maker engine dictates the limitations, but you could have character specific equipments that are just how the chars look in events. They could change the maximum amount of sp or increase cost to start events. Or expand on the board options to ask something like "start with quick board selections for x sp?". The board might give different options for all recurring events. It currently only works for some events.
I guess the grape bush of death on the mountain is there intentionally (it removes 200 en).
Mary sold her v card twice. Once to Abby and later to Anno.
The tea time and the lunch break are not exclusive, but they seem to work like it.
I occasionally had Mary's profile image in the dialoge on the bottom for a single dialogue, without ever having Abby or Mary in party.
The message board tells the wrong version number.
The pamphlets seem similar to wine, but do not tell so in description. Looked like a bug at first.
The futa thing came a bit unexpected. You do well to have that shown at least in a screenshot. Some people do not like surprises.
I can wash my clothes from certain substances without ever having encountered those fluids.
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Some more subjective feedback:
The starting incest was a bit offputting.
When I discovered how to go to from the mountain area to the lower part of the mountain area that made my day. I had to double check if that was possible earlier. I. did. Not. See. It. Well done. Similar for the spa entry.
The game is lacking a certain goal and motivation, but it is not finished, so we will see. The rpg part is good in it's own right - which is rare to see in a lewd game.
(This is for 1.19)
Stuff that bothered me:
The rpg maker mechanics in general. Too many unnessary clicks. That engine is very player unfriendly by modern standards of quality of life in user interfaces.
Jessie/Timmy no longer gives carrots after Sherman has certain events. And it is kinda bugged how this starts. Also, this can happen before you had your Cecilia events, making it very hard to obtain the starting carrot. (Yeah, I did finally discover, where to get a carrot a cucumber and milk in one go)
Majors wive having eyes in her back and stunlocking me with her message.
No starting phase with orks, to use skills and items.
The ork collar is easy to miss, in combination with the non-hint at the cave for the scooba mask. It looked like a level requirement or a skill requirement, with the "later" text.
No sp option for the spa event to pull out
Despite reading the walktru later, I did not find the path to the grape bush. Also, the village is called campsite there, which is confusing.
Bugs I encountered:
You can enter Sunset Cliff at a time where you have not the abilty yet to leave a cliff you get pushed down, resulting in a dead end.
When Sherman gets to the next step, Carrot villager is no longer talkable. Instead there pops up a gender testing, and party after that is only Jessie and stays Jessie, at least for display. I had not encountered Abby so far, at that point. When I finally got Mary, I could repair that by using Mary in an event afterwards.
From what I remember, those accounts did not lose the ability to sell their game on itch. But rather itch did not want to act as merchant for them. While itch did not state clearly any specific reasons, I suspect a combination of different factors, including international tax issues and a cost/risk evaluation (all of which are higher for adult games). The accounts would still be able to sell with direct payments, but that is not possible for some accounts, due to payment processor restrictions. But they would still be able to have a game page and advertise their steam, patreon, subscribestar and whatnot. I would hardly call that a ban on adult games, as some called it back then.
Having sfw on by default will not gonna change anything about this.
But having a sfw mode will definitly open up some interesting possibilities, including making it easier for some streamers to play your game.
You might even consider a "sfw" release that can be (officially) patched to be nsfw. Some anime style games do that. Possibly to have a non restricted rating on Steam, so they can be browsed unrestriced and even sold in markets like Germany.
cheating is a common storyline in normal porn
And a lot of non porn drama and slice of life stories. I do not get the hate on such an everyday trope.
People see two dicks in a game and yell ntr, as if this is somehow threating to them. What do they do if they watch a drama movie? Hide under the pillows? Most of them do not even know what is meant with ntr. Neither do the developers using that term. Yes, two dicks in a game seems to be the common definition used by the ntr haters. No matter the circumstances. And if actual cheating is meant, their male character will usually cheat on all the women making the whining hypocritical.
But wait, there's more. It is curious, how those ntr haters go to game pages where literal ntr is in the name. It is written on the tin, and still they beg and ask for "avoidable". That is like going to a gay furry game and asking if the male on male action will be avoidable. What is the point?
A history box or back button for displayed text would be nice.
There are engines that do not even have "instant" text. Which is kinda mind boggling, since "instant" text is the normality in computers. You have to take extra effort to display text not at once, but putting each word or letter after the next. Imagine a website displayed like that. Or any text document.
Are there really people wanting text displayed like this? I skimmed a bit on the net, and apparantly the majority sets this to instant, the instant they open any vn type game. So why is this even in games, and if so, why is the default not instant?
I would wanna bet, some famous early vns used that style and when the genre was popularized, they just copied that feature without thinking if that feature enhances the game. It is not, imho, it is distracting, for the simple reason of how our eyes move when we read text. While I am not a T-Rex, I do react to movement such as moving/appearing text. Maybe it was voiced vn and they had the text appear at the speed of the voice but the vn without voice acting did not change the feature. Some do utter some sound effects while the text appears.
Probably some idiosyncracy, like people using wasd with their pinky on shift, instead of resting position with index on f. I get cramps if I try to rest my pinky on shift with index on d. And I need the little bump on f to secure my position. There I believe the historical reason was some kind of keyboard barrier how many keys you could press at the same time and shift was counted extra, so they did not use esdf, but wasd to get access to that extra key.
/rant
Interesting game. But could you please make the instant text option do what it says. There is almost half a second delay for a three line text to fully appear.
I never understood why anyone would even think about displaying text like a karakoke sing along text. Just because it is possibly with computers? Do people really read at the front of the appearing text? That might be doable for very slow appearing text. But if it is reasonably fast, it distracts because of the apparant movement. And you cannot "prefetch" from the corner of the eyes, hindering reading speed. Our eyes move in jumps, not continously - and as a triva, many people are not aware of that fact, or that they are blind while the eyes move.
How was this solved? I am serious. The developer asked for feedback and there is not a single visible interaction from the developer since. Random people claiming it is saf, or that many games have false positives, is not a solved situation.
If you do not have a very, very good reason to believe it is a false positive, you should never ignore such warnings. Not on itch. There is malware uploaded daily here.