Proof of Life #114: Progress Report #2

Thanks for responding. Just wanted to do another quick response in return. Re: starting the game in childhood. Like I said, I think it worked really well in HC2 – so if you’re confident in this approach I think go for it. Just wanted to present options more than anything else. Re: twofold role for side characters. I hadn’t really considered that you wanted to examine the side characters using a different lens than the main characters (by fetish instead of by relationship). Looking back, I think you did a good job exploring the different fetishes with the side characters. I guess my feedback would be that these don’t need to be mutually exclusive – it should be possible to explore the fetishes while also setting up NTR with the main character (which I would have found much hotter/more engaging). Re: sexually inadequate MC Like I said, this is really just something I personally enjoy rather than something I think would objectively improve the game. If it fits in the context of the story and you have an opportunity to include it – great! If not, I think that’s fine too – and I think your reason for not including it in HC2 makes sense. I should say that I really really enjoyed the Happy ending. It’s the first ending I played, and it’s my personal ‘canon’ ending for the game. I liked that it had a lot of thought and content put into it to make it a ‘good’ ending for the MC and the village as a whole (finding Thania’s husband was amazing). I really hope HC3 includes a happy ending as well. With that said, I don’t think my enjoyment of the happy ending would have been diminished by having a sexually inadequate MC – I liked it more because it was a ‘good’ and happy ending for all the characters I was invested in (and because the MC regained his relationship with the female characters), not because the MC was now a sex god :P. I would have been just as happy with Celis ‘putting up’ with mediocre sex because of how much she loved the MC. Re: editing I must admit it didn’t even cross my mind that you might write directly into RPGMaker – I just assumed you’d do the script in a word document and copy paste it into the game. That does make things more difficult – you could ask a professional editor to read a word document, but it’d be a harder sell to have them actually play through a niche fetish porn game :P. I still think it’s worth the effort – when a game has the kind of errors a simple editing pass would fix it makes it feel low quality or cheap (which your games absolutely are not – I mean you’re hiring someone to make custom art assets!) If you’re up for it something simple you could do would be to have a standing ‘typo bounty’ – for every ~10-20 typos or grammatical errors a patreon finds (the first person to report it to you only), you could offer them a link to that month’s $20 build of the game. Then in every release thread just make a comment saying ‘Please reply to this comment with typos’. Hope that helps 😊

Hokagine

Well, the Ff8 and Ff14, as far as I'm aware, also use Triple triad as a side thing. Same for the Witcher 3 and Gwent, that is nowhere relevant in the game. Still, people loved it, and I want to recreate that feeling if I can : )

N_taii

In the game "Cleo - a pirate´s tale" is a card game as a side thing too. It´s mandatory but not important. except for a joke. If Triple Trident stays as a side thing then why doing the work for nothing? Afterwards no one might appreciate it. Feels kinda ......well.......sad.

Bl00dm0uth

Hmmm, I hadn't thought about the card game before, but putting it in the banner might give potential players the idea that HC3 is centered around Triple Trident or that it is important in the game, while it is actually just a side thing that isn't even mandatory to complete all the storylines.

N_taii

Thank for the feedback! : ) I’ll address a few of your points here: the main reason I am starting the game from the MC’s childhood is the fact that he basically gets stranded on the island after a shipwreck. Because of this, I believe it is extremely important I show how he settled in on the island, how he got to meet and the other female characters, as well as use this as an opportunity to give an early introduction to the general settings of the story. That’s why I don’t really see starting as adults as an option, as I think the game would lose a lot by skipping over the MC’s childhood considering how essential it is to set up the rest of the story, as well as character development. I know flashbacks could be an option, but the constant switching of perspective could prove quite annoying. I’ll try to have a childhood introduction more straight to the point this time. Oh, and no mini-games, meaning the length should be a lot more bearable. I’ve also thought about a few freeroam events here and there. Nothing extraordinary though, just to entertain the player a little before the action starts. As for the characters, I must admit their roles were twofolds: the main characters were there to give players the full NTR experience of the loved ones being taken away, which is why there was much more emphasis on their relationship with the MC. The side-characters’ roles were to provide different fetishes and settings: daddy fetish for Solana, impregnation fetish for Thania, and BDSM and corruption of a strong character for Neve. This is why much more thought was put into their scenes than their relationship. But as you said, this could easily be fixed. At least, all 4 female characters of HC3 have a direct relation with the character, as opposed to Thania and Neve, who were technically no more than inhabitants of the same tribe. About the MC being sexually inadequate, believe me, I have thought about it for HC2. Ultimately, I decided against it, mainly because it would heavily undermine the Revenge and Happy ending. If the MC is shown has fundamentally “lacking”, it would be harder for players to really immerse themselves into the story of a MC turning the tables on the antagonists and having the girls for himself for the Revenge ending, or having a loving and fulfilling relationship for the Happy one, knowing that, at the end, he will never physically live up to the antagonists. I just didn’t want that shadow of the MC that will “never be enough” looming over those endings. Finally, about the editor, your message got me looking into it. The issue is that RPGMaker really isn’t suited for editing periodical updates, as there is not tool telling me exactly what text I added since the last update, or simply anything that would display all in-game text in one file which would make editing far easier than going over every event of every map, or copy-pasting every line of text onto a Word document. Of course, it’d help a lot if I could find someone willing to play through every update and notifying me of everything that needs fixing, but it’s not exactly an exciting job to do^^ I am currently looking into it and trying to find a solution.

N_taii

Why not having the girls at a table playing your card game with a fifth person whose hand is only seen . That hand is crumbling or a part is ripped of and you can see the darkness inside that hand . Or let one girl play against that hand and the others are atanding around watching. There is also enough space on the table for the gamename

Bl00dm0uth

Hey, really enjoyed your second game, and I’m just starting to go through the first. Just wanted to give some feedback now, while you’re still in the planning stages for the story. Sorry, it’s kind of gotten away from me as I’ve actually typed it out so it’s a little bit of a monster now. Please know that this is coming from a place of wanting an already great series of games to be even better. First, I completely agree with your decision to spend time establishing the emotional connection between the MC and the female characters. The key to NTR as a genre is the emotion it triggers in the reader around the ‘stealing’, and indeed without this it might as well be any other porn game. To have the ‘stealing’ matter there needs to be a strong bond established between the characters. This is something I think HC2 did well - about the best I’ve ever seen - with a couple of the characters (Aywin and Celia) and poorly with the rest (Solana, Thania, Neve). I think the childhood section worked well to establish the relationship between the cast, though it perhaps stretched slightly too long. Have you thought about shifting some of this section (showcasing personality, cementing relationships, etc) to take place while the cast are adults? The advantages I can see here are as follows: you can showcase their adult personalities rather than their childhood ones, and you can tie this section together with the main plot and use the characters for ‘light’ NSFW scenes - which should help with the feedback that the plot and NSFW aspects take too long to get going. Examples of ‘light’ NSFW scenes between the MC and the female characters you could use to develop personalities – skinny dipping together, truth or dare, kissing, over the clothes action, intentional or unintentional flashing. Second, and tying back in to the above in what worked for me with Aywin/Celia, and didn’t work with Solana/Thania/Neve. Throughout the game there was constant reinforcement that the MC mattered to Aywin and Celia, and that Aywin and Celia mattered to the MC. They thought about each other constantly, made plans and did things together, considered how their actions would affect each other – because of this you got a real sense that the characters cared for each other, and because they cared for each other the ‘stealing’ of the characters and thus the NTR worked. Unfortunately, compared to the above dynamic the side-characters just ended up feeling extraneous. You started well with Solana – the childhood crush definitely worked and carried the early NTR scenes. But after this Solana never really spent time with the MC and you lost the sense that the characters were important to each other. And unfortunately, Thania and Neve never really felt important to the MC or vice versa. I don’t actually think it would have taken much to fix this, so hopefully it’s something you can keep in mind as you write HC3. For Solana, she just need to keep spending time together with the MC and Celia throughout the game – as the NTR progressed this could start interfering (arriving late to meet-ups, leaving early, sneaking off, etc) – and keep thinking that after she’s ‘paid back’ Goras she still wants to get together with the MC, until she finally admits to herself that she loves Goras and his money too much to ever stop. A similar thing could have been done for Thania by having her take on a surrogate mother role to the MC after his father died, to ‘pay back’ the MC’s father looking after her family after her own husband died. And Neve could have been set up in a teacher role towards the MC. Thirdly, and again on a similar theme, I’d suggest spending a little time towards the end of the game with the MC and female characters to give ‘closure’ and show how the MC is now less important to the female characters than the antagonists. Have the MC discuss their new relationship with them (+/- with the antagonist), and have them explain that they no longer (romantically) love the MC. Have the femMCs obviously blow the MC off to spend time with/fuck the antagonist, and make it clear the MC knows what is happening. Fourthly, and this is more of a personal thing, but I really enjoy when the protagonist is shown as inadequate sexually. For example, by having the female characters attempt to have sex with the protagonist instead of the antagonist, but he’s so inadequate that after trying a few times the female character ‘gives up’ and goes back to the antagonist. And finally, please think about hiring an editor (or offering incentives to your Patreons to give editing feedback). It’s a shame for a game that’s otherwise so high quality and has so much care put into it to be let down by typos, misspellings, or the occasional awkward sentence structure when all it would take to fix it would be a simple editing pass. Again, sorry for writing ‘War and Peace’. Hopefully it doesn’t come across as too harsh, that definitely wasn’t my intention. It took me like an hour to do, and the only reason I spent the time is because of how much I enjoyed the game. If you want to discuss things further or in more detail just let me know.

Hokagine

I am not a fan of the leash thing, it also implies too much BDSM. But I like the throne idea... maybe put one of the antagonists/shadows on the throne, grabbing the princesses butt, maybe also implying some kind of a plot against the crown, and the other female main character next to the throne with the respective antagonist/shadow behind her. They could all look at the MC who also could be a shadow but we can just see the back of his head on the bottom of the picture implying the POV...

Pete

The throne thingy I had thought about honestly, but couldn't come up with something satisfying enough that could fit a game's banner. As for the kneeling, I'm not too sure about it because I'd like them to stand up, so any person glancing at the banner has an immediate idea of what the characters look like and their body proportions. Kneeling would hide some of that. Besides, what angle to use? From behind the throne, where the heroins face "the camera"? But then, how to represent the shadowy figure? Or from behind the girls? But then their face would stay partly hidden, and that's not good either. As for the leash, why not? However, having only one guy holding all the leashes might give the wrong impression that only one antagonist is doing all the NTR, which is not true. Also, while I do agree that submission is a pretty important theme, I think corruption is more important, and this is really what I wish to portray in the banner. Lastly, a leash would show too much progression, as if the girls had already submitted and thus been put on a leash, which would be kind of the end of the game. I'd like to show them in the process of being reduced as sexual playthings for the antagonists, like with a hand on their butt or on their breast. Thanks for the suggestion btw, but as you can see, choosing a design for the banner can get pretty damn complex^^

N_taii

For the banner maybe as you have a princess in this game maybe have a shadowy figure sitting in a throne with the main girls kneeling in front of it. If you really want to play up the submission angle maybe even have the girls wearing leash's which the guy in the throne is holding.