Five Paths - Text Adventure - Early Alpha V1

[Arthotus]

Welcome to Five Paths, a Text Adventure where you save the Kingdom of Light by adventuring down Five distinct paths of adventure! You play as a beautiful young human adventurer and encounter all manner of obstacles that seek to stop, eat, seduce, and even transform you! It's currently only about 2% done, but I'd love to hear thoughts and criticisms so far! It's currently produced as a flash game, with the download link below.

Five Paths- Alpha V1

Screen Shots:
Start Menu:

Spoiler: show

Start Menu

Standard Story Screen:

Spoiler: show

Story Scenes

Genres/Fetishes:

Spoiler: show

-Fantasy Setting
-Female Prey
-Female Predator
-??? Predator
-Monster Predator
-Plant Predator
-Fatal Vore
-Unwilling Vore
-Willing Vore
-Implied Digestion
-Sexual Themes
-More to Come!

Feel free to ask questions, give suggestions for improvement, or critique what I have so far! I'm not terribly fast, so it could be awhile before another update comes out, but copious amounts of praise and interaction from you, the voting public, may or may not get me moving more quickly.

[Arthotus]

Reserved for Quick Updates. This is where I will discuss future plans and mostly post informal commentary.

Five Paths - Alpha V2: Actual Spoilers ahead- Beware!

Spoiler: show

Main Focus: Continuing the Eastern Path
-Mostly Just going to keep writing more scenes and continue the story
-One Important thing moving forwards will be event and item tracking, like killing the giant lizard or taking the dagger. Future scenes will have different interactions based on earlier decisions!
-Depending on interest, I'll either release another update when the story reaches Cobalt City, or just after with some of the story events programmed that take place there(but not all because there'll be a ton of stuff in Cobalt City)

[wisecrack3]

Lots of fun so far, stellar writing on your part

I noticed that you threw in the towel with the combat system and went with picking which route to go down, though it's VERY important for testing, I can see this feeling a bit stiff in game. If I were to recommend a system to use then it'd be a SLIGHTLY (New options for different abilities) more in depth version of the combat for arcade games in SS13

http://honk.coolpage.biz/

Otherwise I've only noticed a couple mistakes where you forgot a space or used the wrong word (too instead of to, etc.), I can't wait to see more updates to this

[Arthotus]

The problem with combat is that I was hoping to keep the game fairly narrative driven, and combat is generally the opposite of that. Giving combat narrative focus is damned hard to do, programming wise, so I just felt like it wasn't worth it. I'll see about maybe reincorperating it in the future, but for now I'm just going to focus on what I'm good at, writing.

Thanks for reading! I'm glad to hear you want more.

[wisecrack3]

You're amazing at writing, the day you stop will be the day I force myself into a military parade uniform half my size from when I was 12 and get myself arrested for performing a 1-man 21 gun salute

[Monopolus]

It's very refreshing to see such writing in a community where some games....don't have that type of writing. Here's to hoping for more content!

[Turbotowns]

Always love player pred!

[Arthotus]

Ugh, I hated practicing the Feu de Joie. Instead of firing at the same time, we do it in a quick 'wave' in Canada. It takes forever to get it to sound right. For both our sakes, I'll just accept your praise and keep writing at my own glacial pace.

Thank you Monoplus!Progress will be slow, but it will continue.

Hmm, I'm not saying there won't be any chances for the player to be the predator in this adventure, but...there won't be many instances of it if there is. Sorry!

[EliseSB]

Always love player pred!

So... I checked it out immediately in response to this comment, but I couldn't actually find any player pred? The only battle I could find was the Lizard and winning just had me stab
it in the neck. How and where can I eat?

[Arthotus]

There is no player predator instances, Sorry EliseSB.

[Persona59523]

i wonder if you can use a website for the flash game

[Achenar]

Trying to do anything in the Gloomy Forest, including entering, results in an error - but only while in full screen mode.

[Nayko93]

a good premise , good writing too , I'm curious to see more

but there is some things that you can improve :

a way to have more control over the zoom would be cool
the text is either too small or to big , if you zoom in it's too much and if you zoom out it's not enough
and a way to control the background and text colors , white text on a totally black screen it's hurt my eyes a little

unfortunately , flash player is not the best engine to make this type of game and does not offer you a lot of control on your work ..

quest engine is a better option , classic , but good enough , you can add sound and picture if you want , thr player can control the size and colors of the text ( only the size in the online version ) , and it's really easy to use
and you can make a online version , so you can update it when you want , and more importantly , correct the game without having people download it each time you make a little update

or you can work in twine , a little more harder , but you can make a lots of good things too

just some advice , it's your game , you do what you want

[empatheticapathy]

There's so little here that I don't feel I can give a meaningful critique.

[Arthotus]

Achenar, I couldn't tell you what causes that error. I'm only a junior programmer and that seems like something deeper than just 'I missed a semi-colon'. I'll look at it, but I doubt I'll be able to fix it. Maybe, but I doubt it.

Persona59523, I will look into trying to get it hosted somewhere, maybe newgrounds or some such. Thank you for the suggestion.

Nayko93, Thank you for the compliments. As for your suggestion about the text size, I don't think it should be too difficult to add in a control slider. It's a good idea, and I was considering it as an option anyway. Background/text colour change should also be easy, just a matter of implementation in a way the player can change. These are actually one of the reasons I'm not using quest. My original intention wasn't to make -just- a Choose your own adventure, but to actually program a 'game'. I eliminated some of the more complicated elements that would have made this distinction more clear, like combat, but there'll be more later.

empatheticapathy, I've never claimed it was very far. It's a snippet for initial feedback, not a finished product. If that's not enough for you, come back when it's further along.

[superdeathsnake]

I agree that flash probably isn't the best program to make a game, especially with it's shelf life rapidly declining.
Rather than using quest, I think that Twine would be a much better alternative. It's relatively easy to learn, and is a good language for text based games.

[Arthotus]

Superdeathsnake, thank you for your concern, but most of the point of this is to slowly teach myself coding. Using a short cut like Twine is more of a step back in that regard. I realize flash isn't 'the language of the future', but it has the most free accessible tools and tutorials for what I need. I'll likely be pursuing the above mentioned suggestion of finding a website to host it rather than requiring a download link.

[Ayra42]

There is no player predator instances, Sorry EliseSB.

Wait really? Too bad...

[Forstand]

Really excited about this project, and can't wait to see what you come up with! Love the female prey POV.

My only comments so far:
1) Just choosing "Success" or "fail" was a little unsatisfying. Would it be better to have some kind of randomness or chance about whether you win or lose an encounter? Or maybe there's a right choice that always leads to victory and a wrong choice that always leads to defeat.
2) I wish the "losing" branch continued for a little bit - like maybe you can try to climb out of the monster's belly after it goes to sleep. Or maybe you can choose to struggle or accept your fate, even though both lead to the same ending. I think that would improve the reader's feeling of connection to the main character.

[Arthotus]

Hey Forstand, welcome to the party. That's for the support!

So to 1), I originally developed it that way, but i changed it to the current system for two reason. First, and I suppose I could have solve this a different way, but hitting a wall moving through somewhere didn't really feel very good, even considering its a vore game. In the reverse, getting lucky and coasting through the entire (short as it is) story without seeing any vore scenes also made me feel silly. To my thinking, I decided to give players the option, though they don't really know what to expect by 'fail' or 'succeed' content wise. Maybe there will be 'fails' in the future that don't result in Game over? The second reason was that making the chance to succeed or fail felt...bad for me, as the programmer. I was just never really happy with the success or fail rate because, as was said before, you only really try once. If you pass, you never see the vore, if you fail too much, you never progress. Even after a short stretch of the game(like half of what you guys got), I got fed up with making up 'chances' and just switched to the binary 'Do you want to be eaten or not?'. In fairness, there are some scenes where end screen isn't obvious, and there'll be more moving forwards.

To point 2), I'll consider it, but I don't like giving people choices that aren't choices, you know what I mean? If I give the player a 'Try to climb out of the lizard's stomach' prompt, I'm too much of a gamer to not make that option at least have a 'chance' to succeed. Maybe not having those prompts is a by product of my answer to point 1), but it's also a matter of content too. I cant put 100 hours into every single vore sequence, coming up with branches on branches on branches, of this project will never, ever finish, instead of just the normal never.

I hope that gives some insight into why I did the things I did, but I really appreciate your suggestions!