Someone92 wrote:What most people are annoyed by is not the difficulty, but that the game is (perceived as) unfair.
What I think are the main issues of this game are:
- Unclear game mechanics
- Limited information
- Randomness
- Not skippable, recurring events
What I exactly mean by that, and how it might be fixed:
Unclear game mechanics:
This is pretty evident. That without a guide even the very first fight is an almost insurmountable hurdle is bad game design. The first fight should be a linear and somewhat scripted fight that serves as a tutorial to teach you the game's mechanics.
E.g. in the first escape, the tutorial fight, "deep slumber" effect kick in way harder while inside than in most other escapes; this teaches the player that "Rest" comes with a penalty if used inside. Next, "Pleasure" does very little if you are still in the starting position, so the only option is "Wriggle out". Eventually you cannot advance any further. At this point the player will eventually use other options. If they use "Pleasure" at this point the girl gets heavily aroused, indicated visually, audible and textual. This teaches the player that the girls have g-spots. Now the way is clear, and with "Wriggle out" you manage to peak out; at this point the game should ensure that you have almost no Stamina left, so the only option is "Rest". Unlike previously, you do not get hit with a severe "deep slumber" effect, teaching players that it's much saver to use outside.
Limited information:
The sight distance is extremely limited. This isn't much of a problem right as you do not have to quickly navigate through the levels, but will become one if you ever have to escape outside in real time, like in Insides.
Dunno if it's planned to implement such gameplay mechanics, but if so the sight distance has to be increased. The camera could be further away, but most of the screen is blackened expect for a cone in front of you. The fog could also / or be gradually lifted the longer you stand still.
Randomness:
Some randomness is unavoidable, and it's hard to make a genuinely challenging RPG with turn-based combat and just a single person in your party. Along the g-spots patterns are properly the best way to create a challenging yet "fair" combat system. The player has to learn the tells and how to react to them, otherwise they are heavily punished.
E.g. every 3+1d3 turns the girl grabs her breasts. In the next turn she fondles her breasts, and if the player has not selected "Pleasure" that turn the girl gets annoyed and the player is pulled in.
Overall, this would make every escape harder the first time you try it, but a lot easier once you have learned the patterns.
Not skippable, recurring events:
Even well-written, well-animated and well-designed events get boring if you have to watch them the n-th time.
As you are planning to have to use the girls to travel, make it possible to skip an escape event if you have cleared it before.
Let me tell my opinions for each one of these points:
-Unclear game mechanics.
We've told this before. We didn't have a yet good idea on how to do a tutorial for this game since we were trying to avoid it to have a too big.. tutorial feeling, let's say. So we decided to launch like it is now and to write the escape guide in case players had troubles. Again, we got an idea on how to explain things in the next update so this point has already been fixed.
-Limited Information
Ok, let's make this clear. The zoomed camera is pratically my way to have a feeling of a player into a giant world. There aren't any other ways that I know to do that on rpg maker. The tiles have a fixed dimension and literally noone in the world draws tilesets specific to be of a shrinking map. Even because that would probably mean every map of this and the other game should be
enormous to get the right feelings and proportions. Your suggestions won't work anyway. We're trying to give a very big immersive feeling to this game so things like a black cone of view and fog won't work.
The former would mean you're permanently in a completely dark room, with only a flashlight of sort that let's you see. Completely nonsense if you think that noone else has these lights and that you would have this darkness even during the full light of the day..
The latter would be even worse. Thick fog around you in buildings would mean that there's a fire in the place! Letting out so much smoke to basically chocke everyone in the building. Not really the best, I think....
-Randomness
Again, back in immersive perspective. We don't have patterns because there won't be any in this situation. Leaving aside how hard it would be to code those patterns that you say, since all that level of polish requires quite the amount of lines of code as you could imagine.. it won't be immersive. A foe that tells you what its next attack would be is something very stupid. And even provided it does, a smart enemy won't be so stupid to keep doing a same thing you're able to dodge/defend/etc. We don't have mindless animals here but smart human girls.
- Non skippable, recurring events.
Way too hard as you could think. And totally immersion break. There won't be any rational ways to explain this in terms of what happens to you and how exactly did you get in a specific place at a specific time. So that would mean either putting a choice or leave it to complete random. But having a choice destroys the main feeling of this game and complete randomness could become problematic too..
