Itās cheaper than a sandwich for hours upon hours of work.
ā¦And also ur supporting an indie dev.
I totally get if someone doesnāt want to spend the money. But what drives me up a wall is people that come into a thread solely to complain about a very trivial (and warranted) price
Ok im sorry, i understand it
Hey guys,
Just wanted to tell you that the next update is coming along and that we hope to release it soon.
Hereās a little list of what it`ll add to the game:
Oh, and before I forget hereĀ“s some more character art:
But thatĀ“s all for now.
Live
Hey there! So Iāve been able to explore the entire content of the current version (Iām pretty sure) and first of all, I like a lot of whatās on display here. I think the game is very promising and worthy of support.
With that said, I have a lot of criticism, both positive and negative, that I think would be useful to share here.
Letās start with the positives:
Now with the negatives:
Now that youāve read all of that, I know what youāre thinking. Thereās a lot more negatives than positives, or so it would seem. But first of all, I realize the game is still very early in development, so naturally thereās a lot thatās not quite there yet. The purpose of my āreviewā is to give the developer some useful pointers on where to go next rather than to dunk on an unfinished project.
As Iāve said I think the game has a lot of potential, very good foundations, and this criticism is my way to contribute to its development. I wouldnāt have bothered to type such a long comment if I didnāt really like the game a lot already
I hope what Iāve said can be useful, and I can elaborate on some of my points if need be.
@livegoeson4
I also agree with a lot of your points there
A lot of the writing is good in concept, but lacks in execution. Mainly dialogues. With many typos, grammatical errors, anachronistic dialogue, jarring use of the past tense (my advice: just write everything in the present tense), the writing feels amateurish at times, which is a shame. But like I said, the foundations are good with the girls all having distinct personalities and back stories, and the WG events are pretty well made, so I think with a few passes and corrections you could achieve greatness.
I believe English is the not devās primary language and that the dev is also the only one doing the writing, so thereās no second opinion to grammar check or proof read their work.
I think the game clearly needs an inventory system, because having to make multiple trips to the bakery and buying things one by one quickly becomes tiresome. More food options would be great as well.
I agree an inventory system needs to be implemented as I tried to guy two pies at once and found out that I only had one when I fed it to one of the girls, so as far as I could tell I still spent the gold on the second pie but didnāt get it
At times, I donāt really feel like Iām playing a Sultan, but rather an average guy. I think someone in the thread also touched on that, so i wonāt repeat myself too much. But to summarize, I think the main character should feel more assertive, more āin powerā in the dialogue. Which shouldnāt prevent him from being a good guy, but right now the power fantasy isnāt really there.
Yes I agree thereās nothing that really makes you feel like youāre in charge, the best I think you get is with the bakery as the baker treats the player like they are important. There needs to be more impacting dialog for the court room events, something that as the ruler of the land you have the power to make any hard decisions and anyone that wants to argue with the new sultan will face the consequences and you can implement policies to help shape the land : an example implementing a policy to allow more food to the people to allow them to grow fatter and happier but that would make the nobles angry from that policy, and you can have a opposite policy to do the opposite that raises taxes to keep the people poor
The throneroom gameplay loop is too basic at the moment. I think you probably are aware of that, but I really think you should have more decisions to make, and they should feel more impactful. Also right now, itās hard to tell at the beginning what the purpose of military power, public opinion and political power is, because the game doesnāt really give you an in-universe incentive to raise them. I also think in general, the game lacks āimmersionā so to speak. I would also love to see more NPCs reacting to your growing influence, power and harem
@TarMinastir if you donāt raise some political power there is a scene where the people try to revolt but are stopped by your adviser, it does nothing and changes nothing but if you just focus on making the girls fat you will get reminded to actually do the throne room content
I know Iām replying to TarMinastir but I do have the same points and I just wanted to add to some of his points and also try and clear up points about grammar and spelling, I believe everyone should look at all games being developed here with a gran of salt for anything written as the dev might not naturally speak English, or they might not have anyone helping them with the writing and thus being able to proof read their work.
How do you unlock Katerina
keep wondering around town once you raise up public opinion high enough, the game will tell you that the people are happy and celebrating
Thanks for the in-depth review)
IĀ“m glad you enjoyed the game, despite some flaws.
IĀ“m aware that the writing can be improvedā¦ And with time it will for sure. I had some ābeta testersā who wanted to help me with that but I only got very little feedback regarding the writingā¦ I hope the next ones will be more up to the task. And once I improve the writing, the feeling of power and authority will hopefully become more apparent as well.
Your idea with the correct dialogue options to continue the feeding is interesting for sure, I will have some thoughts if I might integrate something like that.
YouĀ“re right, IĀ“m doing all the writing and coding myself, but as I said, I had some people who were supposed to help me out a little but didnĀ“t really regard the writing in the endā¦
As for the throne room events, they were supposed to be very different. The SultansĀ“ subjects were supposed to come with petitions to him. But I had to ditch that for the time being and change it up to Jamal, therefore I changed the dialogue a lot. I did that because I wanted to release the game at that point and not wait for the sprites of the petitioners to be made. But I will come back to the original idea in later updates.
And the event that Jamal stops you at certain points is due to mismanagement of your kingdomās statistics, it will give you some leeway and raise the affected value a little. There are events for all stats, and itĀ“s even possible to lose the game if you keep mismanaging a stat for too long.
Could you please tag this as a spoiler?
sure, its now blurred for spoiler
though to be honest you have the game set up to tell the player this, and unless players just focus on the first girl and thatās it; they should run into this naturally just by doing all of the possible intractable things the game tells you to do.
You have a oracal that tells you how to unlock new girls, you have stats for the kingdom that go up and down and any player would want to raise up their stats and add what changes, explore the town is the only way to get events to pop up, so just spamming that and seeing if anything new happens should be natural
I would respectfully disagree. I really dislike the idea of unlocking harem characters with how they are generally implemented. I had no idea about two of the four girls until someone mentioned two names I knew I didnāt encounter in my play through. One of them I didnāt even know about or play through her content until a few days ago. Iām all for having events or secret scenes with this type of design but literally being able to miss entire characters due to how they are unlocked is not great to me. If the game is set up to where you will eventually unlock everything character naturally this wonāt be an issue but it for sure was not that way for me.
I would say this sums up my issue. You arenāt given a reason to do something in game and as youāve indicated you have to raise in game status and just see what changes.
I feel like the management and harem are two different parts of the game currently that donāt naturally interact. And all the girls are so separate not only from themselves but the sultan that it feels like the sultan has platonic tenants in a big empty palace. And no girl or other person occupies the palace at the same time.
But maybe Iām one of the few who didnāt find every character naturally on a first play through and itās not a common issue.
That is why I implemented the Oracle and the tips from Jamal if the player can`t find them.
But since I have heard about this multiple times now, I will either lower the required values or implement events that will guarantee you unlock every character after a certain time.
first off love the game, really enjoyed both the writing and the art! Yixing is my favorite.
I also missed two chars my first play through, until I came here and saw names I hadnāt seen before.
The main issue I had is that I wasnāt clear what action I had taken to unlock the character; I didnāt know if it was a single stat, a combination of stats, talking to certain other characters, or if it just unlocked automatically after a certain amount of time.
Seeing the unlock methods after the fact they all make sense but while playing I had no idea. I think if the link between the method of unlocking and the character being unlocked was clearer then this may not be as much of an issue, because if I knew that the method of how I unlocked my first character I would be able to extrapolate off that and guess the rest of them.
@livegoeson4
Thank you for reading my review, I hope you found it helpful. If English is indeed not your first language I canāt really blame you for the writing mistakes, but itās a shame you didnāt get the proper feedback from your beta testers.
Since you and @GrimRyu have pointed out that resource management actually has consequences and can lead to losing scenarios, I have a better opinion of the throne room system as it stands. I just didnāt come across these events in my playthrough, I guess I was just too good at the game
Of course I still think having harder political decisions to make would make the game more interesting, although I realize it is a big ask for a fetish game and itās probably not the main focus.
@Krodmandoon
I donāt think you are alone in this case, personally I had a really hard time unlocking Katerina and I wouldnāt have known she existed without prior knowledge of the game. I also unlocked Yixing a lot later than the first two but it happened more naturally, I think mainly because military power is a lot easier to raise than public opinion. Public opinion is too dependent on luck since some events will decrease it no matter what choice you make (the merchant one comes to mind). So I had to āgrindā a lot to unlock Katerina once I understood what I needed to raise.
I do agree that the way you unlock girls is not the best. The Oracle is a good idea in theory but I think the prophecies are too vague to really be helpful. I know this is how prophecies usually go but I didnāt really understand them until after I unlocked the girls.
So maybe Jamal could give more advice to keep your stats high? Just a thought.
I 100% agree, the management and harem are currently two separate things like oil and water that are trying to mix but donāt. I know from glancing at the patreon that livegoeson4 is thinking of group scenes with the girls but canāt get it to work out logistically.
Yup I agree the stats are pain to deal with, I used the good olā method of scrolling back on my mouse wheel to rollback if the RNG was not in my favour and I would just waste time in the bedroom and wait for the next day to try again. Yes the Oracle is kind of vague and kind of useless as you donāt need her to unlock girls once youāve played the game.
@livegoeson4 My thoughts about this game that hopefully donāt cause you to scrap this project due to how much we want changed, You donāt have to listen to us or my suggestions but hopefully these will help
For the harem, you would need to have it that all the girls unlock naturally as the player plays and quickly too for all of the girls to interact in group activities. I hate to go back on my stance on the harem needing more group actions but donāt look to add group activities until you have added more if any new girls to the harem. Get all of the girls you want into the game and then work on adding interactions with them all later, maybe once you have all of the possible girls unlocked you gain the new management feature of managing the harem from the throne room which goes into my next point
The management system, I think it should be force the player at the start of each day in the throne room and they must do an action there, either manage the harem like deciding how much food each girl gets daily or something on those lines, solve a citizen problem, issue a decree as the sultan, or solve some political problems for stats
This one is a spoiler, add some sultan authority to the game by letting the player decide to add girls we have fatten up into the harem, the baker at the bakery is a great example for this. Once you reach a max affection point by making her fatter, the player should be able to add her to their harem to keep fattening her along with the rest of the harem. This can be part of the method to unlock future harem girls
The Oracle, To make better use of her is to have her guide the player in story events, how to advance the plot next? go to the oracle and sheāll tell the player the story and unlock the flag needed to progress and now the player know what they will need to do to progress the story. You can still have the player donate gold to see the oracle and make her fatter let her be the means the story moves with as the player sees the oracle to know how to be a better sultan like their father. Let Jamal worry about finding new potential harem girls.
I hope this gives you some ideas @livegoeson4 for how to add more to this game, as no one really mentions it enough, you really nailed it by getting lustlord as the artist for this game his renders look amazing and I hope we get much bigger sizes for these girls in the future release.
I was curious does the game take place in the 16 century? I vaguely remember reading it somewhere.
Yeah thatĀ“s totally right - I also donĀ“t know where I posted about that anymore xD
I thinkā¦ deviart or patreonā¦ its been awhile.
Hey guys,
I know itĀ“s been a while but I wanted to let yĀ“all know that IĀ“m still alive and still at it. I kept my patrons updated but kind of missed out on posting here 
But anyways, the next version is coming next week and I really look forward to continuing to provide content for you)
Once this version drops IĀ“ll - like I previously mentioned - upload the first version for free on itch.io.
But as always, I also want to pump out some character art along the post:
ThatĀ“s all I wanted to announce for now,
Live
Looking forward to it!
