Public Demo Release

Hey guys :) Finally got to play the demo yesterday and there are a lot of things I love about it :) There is a lot of potential there! However as the previous post already describes, there are some systems that feel quite buggy. Especially with battles it feels like there are some states that are not working correctly - usually when a pc is lust-ko'd. It creates all kinds of quirks. Overall I'm sure you'll iron those out eventually. Otherwise I'm really pleased with the demo so far. One suggestion: In my opinion the sex animations could trigger more often. How about giving enemies a chance to engage in sex as a replacement for their lust-attack when a pc is in lust-break mode? That would be a great opportunity to add more varied animations and more sexiness overall :p I'm aware that it requires quite some work, though :( In any case keep up the good work! Looking forward to seeing how this title progresses :)

Cammay

I liked the demo overall, but I have some major gripes I'd like to point out. 1: Voice Acting Some of it is okay, some is bad, but regardless of the actual actors it sounds to me like there is audio editing being used to raise and lower the pitch of their voices. Please, don't do this, it sounds bad and I understand wanting to make the voices fit the character, but I really think you should just find better voice actors rather than editing the voice acting you're given in an attempt to make it fit better. It doesn't work. 2: Lack of Clarity There are a lot of clarity issues that make it hard to know what you're doing. You have no idea what your character's accuracy, damage range, critical chance, etc. are, and while it's not a big deal now it will become an issue later when things like hit chance and the chance of effects like stun or poison working will become the difference between victory and defeat. It's also unclear what max health and the lust limit actually is for your characters, making it hard to know who to prioritise healing or lust healing on, assuming that later in the game there will be ways to reduce lust in battle. There also seems to be a positioning system in place since Jesse's charge hits all enemies in a line, and there appears to be both melee and ranged attacks, but this isn't explained at all and seems under-developed. I think it would help to make the game feel more unique from Darkest Dungeon, which the inspiration from is very on-the-nose, if different moves can change the position of the characters in battle both up and down and forward and back. 3: Lack of Polish There are many issues here, but I'll just point out some notable ones. Your characters only face one direction regardless of where they're travelling in hallways, enemies don't play their death animation when dying to poison, the lust meter doesn't actually fill to the top when a character reaches 100 lust, and there are probably other bugs I can't remember off the top of my head or was fortunate enough to not encounter. The demo over-all feels very rushed. That's not to say it's all bad, while it has a lot of issues I still think it has a lot of potential, and the art is quite good overall. It mainly just needs more polish and some thought put into the battle system to make it feel cohesive and unique. I'm going to make sure to keep following this because I think this could be great with enough time and effort.

That One Guy Who Never Pledges

I agree with most of your points, but I think it's worth pointing out that the characters don'y only have sex with the enemies when they're over 100 lust, they also have a chance to use a random move on a random target from my experience.

That One Guy Who Never Pledges

There are varrying penalties when it comes to Character X Character interactons. yeah. it'll be more apparent in the proceeding updates.

Sommelier

Yes, just one quest for now. :)

Sommelier

Is it supposed to skip Mouse's turn when Jessika gets an in battle sex scene?

Cereliona

Is the demo just to do alfs quest then it's over ? Not complaining or anything, just want to be sure I'm not missing anything

Rick Riddick

that'll be taken into future consideration if ever we have the funds to delegate it to another person.

Sommelier

i am begging you, to make this accessible for Apple products. i along with some others ik would love to play this game

Evzen

Have you not seen the Blizzcon footage? 😉 https://youtu.be/n5QRgpjfarY

squarenuts

Navigation is WASD.

Sommelier

This might be a stupid question, but during exploration, how do I advance to a next room? I reached the obvious "door" at the end of the hall, but neither clicking on it nor any of the usual keys (up/w/space/enter/e/f/...) seem to do anything, so I'm stuck. Listing the controls somewhere might be useful, even if it's just a readme file.

TanukiSama

I agree with pretty much everything Patron of the Strange stated.

Weird this is the third time my message is gone. Anyways, another try: No offense taken, Strange. :) In terms of how we want to proceed with most of the suggestions raised , We'll do more balancing overhauls once we get more enemies and characters to play around. We're going to release a roadmap on what to expect in the following months as we still have long ways to go to polish and complete everything. As usual, all we need is time and effort to push through. As for the dificulty, That we'll have to discuss this internally as most players have a varied dificulty threshold. I'm glad you liked our small demo and I am thankful for your comprehensive feedbacks. Please look forward on the the next iteration.:)

Sommelier

After about 3 hours with the demo I would like to list my thoughts. First of all this is an incredibly solid foundation. The art is great, I love the turn based combat (why did turn based battles die out? Why I ask?) and the voice acting is very pleasing in more ways then one. The systems and core game mechanics worked well, I didn't find any bugs or glitches but then again I'm one person with 3 hours so take that with a grain of salt. Now while I could keep heaping praise I do have a points I would like to hit on as well as some ideas I wish to throw into the ring. Note: If anything I bring up is already being dealt with in someway shape or form then please disregard. Things I feel that need to be worked on: 1 – A lack of pregrame options and no in game options. Not being able to mess with sound levels at all was rather annoying. 2 – Combat animation length was a bit long and you really notice it when you are fighting a large group of foes or are running into the forest for the dozenth time. 3 – Given that you have to pay a heavy fee to reduce lust even a little you will run out of funds just trying to manage the lust levels. 4 – Even with heavy upgrading I never felt like my combat power was going up. I even started a new game and put all my starting funds into my basic sword and it still felt like I was doing the same damage. 5 – Have some after combat drops. Having even small gold drops after combat would always give that feeling of accomplishment after wining a fight. It sounds odd I know but the idea of “you won have this thing” is always fun, hell the whole idea of looter games are built on that idea. Random ideas of mine: 1 – To help with the lust system you could lower the price of it, pay a one time large fee to remove all fees, or maybe go on a quest or two in aid of the sister and have her lower or remove the prices as thanks. You could also have two different lust lowering churches one with a standard white robe priestess and the other being the current one. The priestess could offer you lust removal at price with no catch while the current church could offer much cheaper lust removal but the sister would ply her 'craft' on whoever takes her up on the offer. You could even have two side quests regarding the churches. Rather then the overdone “pure girl in white” make the priestess just as lusty as the sister of pain. She could slowly get more and more glamours outfits as well as the church getting more and more golden tipping the party off at what she is doing with your money. At some point the party could confront her about that and that could lead down the path of getting 'private' healing and such. For the BDSM sister the more you use her to lower lust the more she slowly starts bringing the party into the world of BDSM or something like that. 2 – The gear system. I can see two good possible systems springing from I saw in this demo. One is a kind of evolving gear idea. Basically you never find new gear rather you keep upgrading the stuff you have and every time you max it out you can reforge it into better gear with a new upgrade path with appropriate art changes. Or if you plan to do a full item and gear changing system you could have set items at set points or just random drops. As why you would bother to upgrade items in the drop system given you might replace it in even so soon a time as the next dungeon run maybe each fully upgraded item would give you a permanent buff or perk of some kind. 3 – Level system and/or perks. I know there is the buying power system in place but that's not really what I mean, I'm talking hit enough things with a stick, you get more badass to use bigger sticks to hit bigger things level system. Now aside from the bog standard level up and stats go up it could rather be a perk system. Basically you level up and you get a perk point rather then stats getting better and these perks could be anything. Take the flat thief, one of her starter perks could be...an evade perk. You take it she gets 25% boost at evading attacks. You could even do a smaller perk tree with levels of the same perk. You level up the evade perk a few times and she ends up with a 50% boost and so on so forth. 4 – Difficulty and content locking. For difficulty, if you plan to in fact make more then one difficulty setting, the normal three of easy, normal, and hard can work just fine but I will add this. This is a sex game therefore you are going to have people that want to coast through the game so they can enjoy the 'plot' as it were. Therefore the easy mode should most likely be very easy, you can even give it a funny name like 'one handed mode' or something like that. The hard more on the other hand is for people that want a true hardmode RPG feel with normal sitting comfortably in the middle. However...content locking...please...please! If you hear nothing else...please hear this. Do not lock content behind difficulty. I love RPGs and I will often play them on harder modes of play but I will be the first to condemn difficulty locking so please, just don't do it. Now the other type of contenting locking, patreon locking, is a more fluid subject. I'm fine with what I call minor patreon locking, cheat codes and the like, that's all fine. What I don't like is when in game content is locked. Now I'm not talking about the chest idea, from what I understood you planned to have pateron members have greater control over chests and that's fine! That's a nice, cool, and non intrusive thing to have open to members. But I will say this, at the end it's not my call and I do understand why what I call major patreon locking happens, I just don't like it. And I think that's it really. I would like to restate that I am in no way any sort of professional reviewer or game dev, I'm just a (from today onward) fan stating my thoughts. I in no way seek to upset the members of Venus Noire JC with this and will remove it if requested. With respect and with bright hope for the future of Jessika's Curse - Patron of the Strange

Patron of the Strange

Thank you so much for reporting bugs Jashin. this will be fixed in the next iteration. We'll be doing alot of QoL overhaul once we set up the next iterations. Please stay tune. :D In terms of the button to "do " the scene when the lust is broken. No we won't add buttons as it is intended to play that way. Also for the items: When it appears on the ground, you can technically leave them be as they are received by the time you open the treasure chest and it's just a confirmation on what kind of loot you have received.

Sommelier

Thanks for releasing this demo. I hope you don't mind me giving some feedback. -Pros- - Good animation work on the characters. I can tell a LOT of work has gone in to the animations. - Good music selection so far, ambient, solid tracks. - Basic game design is sensible and has a good flow. - The sex scenes mixed in to battle is a good idea. Most Eroge RPGs are counter-productive in that the player needs to lose or do poorly to get sex scenes. Which doesn't make sense. Players should be rewarded for doing well. So I feel like you've struck an even balance with that. However, you may even want to put an option or gameplay function in the battle menu like "rape the enemy" so players can trigger the scenes on demand when they're over 100 lust or have met certain conditions. -Cons + Suggestions- - Vagueness of gameplay. The tutortials and explanations that are in the game now are good, but I think more of the game's basic design should be explained. Example: "When a character's lust meter is high, they have a good chance of pleasing themselves with enemies!" instead of "characters might not do what they're told" Also, I think at the start of the game, you may want to put arrow indicators on where to click or explain to the player "Click here to Visit Alf's Shop" - Battle slowness. The battles feel like they move way too slowly and drag on and on due to the speed and waiting on enemy and character attacks. I would speed up enemy attack animations by about 30-40% and maybe character animations by 10%. My reasoning behind this is players prefer to see what their characters are doing, more than what enemies are doing. - Difficulty interacting with chests/boxes. This is just a minor gripe, but when I encountered the first chest, I kept clicking around and thought it was bugged, until I realized I had to move my characters right in front of it, then click on it. There's nothing else on the screen, the chest isn't going anywhere, I think if the chest on-screen, players should be able to open it. Or it may be that the "clickable" area of the chests are too small? Might want to enlarge that. -Bugs- - Playing the game on anything High/Very High/Ultra causes slowness which can lead to bugs. Such as being able to click on the church, then the Blacksmith, which causes the cutscene to play while the Church UI is in the way. You might want to advise players to keep the game set to Very Low/Low, as the graphics setting in Unity doesn't seem to affect the game's visuals at all, since it's all image and sprite based. You may also want to let players know the game is in early alpha and is still very unpolished. - Enemies not playing death animations when killed by poison damage. - Clicking on the map, then hitting escape brings the Escape menu up UNDER the map screen. - Other Suggestions- - Implement a confirmation dialog when spending money/selecting upgrades. It's easy for a player to click on something by accident and buy something they didn't mean to. - Decrease the amount of time items/currency appear on the ground before vanishing. I feel like players are just gonna be sitting there staring at the item for 2-3 seconds waiting on it to vanish confirming it was added to their inventory. This could probably be sped up. Also, I don't want to sound hateful or disrespectful, but the voice acting is really low quality. Some of the worst I've ever heard even in an eroge. Though I know there's probably nothing you can do about that at this point. In my opinion, it's not a bad game, but still needs tons of work until it can actually be enjoyable to play. I do thank you for your efforts and look forward to the completed project.

Looks like your link had an extra '0' at the end that isn't part of the URL. I can see the post if I paste over https://www.patreon.com/posts/public-demo-27270964 . I also see in there that $1 patrons will indeed be excluded from all future game builds. Bummer. Guess that makes the $1 tier just a tip jar. Okay, good to know.

Sleepnir

Weird it does. Let me try: https://www.patreon.com/join/jessikascurse/checkout?rid=2305300&redirect_uri=%2Fposts%2Fpublic-demo-27270964

Sommelier

That link leads to a 404'd Patreon post, maybe it got taken down?

Sleepnir

It's here and available to all patrons (https://www.patreon.com/posts/public-demo-272709640, dunno, maybe patreon was acting up?

Venus Noire JC

Odd, I am a patron but never got any message yesterday. Guess you mean non-$1-tier patrons or it was on the Discord and I didn't look there, whoops

Sleepnir

It's the same one I gave the patrons yesterday, yeah.

Venus Noire JC

Oh so this is the most up-to-date demo released yet even for patrons, right?

Sleepnir

Hi Justin, We'll have to assess on how it goes when all the game assets are in place. we've already tried it when we're starting. It works fine as it currently stand albeit with some needs for a UI and game repositioning.We're not entirely sure how it'll fare once we're far out of development ... Hence our reservation. Our main concern, if ever we did that, is what will be the benchmark phone it'll work? How many man power we'll have that will make it android friendly etc? So yeah, we're on the fence right now. We want to make sure that if we promised a platform, we should deliver and not forget about it mid development. We may give you more decisive response in the future. All the best!

Sommelier

Got a question since I just found this game, is there any plans for a android release?