Re: Corrupting the priestess
Played the game to completion and have some feedback and suggestions.
A few spoilers to those who haven't played:
Probably to start off though, I might want to frame things by saying humiliation isn't really my kink and there were some scenes that genuinely made me feel really fucking bad for the Alaine, though there were some that I really did like. Something about the protagonist having something against her religion and ultimately trying to get her to drop it completely kind of rubbed me the wrong way. But I liked seeing her find ways to incorporate her newfound whorishness into her priestess traits like finding ways to still help people in her own way. I would have really liked a "holy whore" ending where she manages to make her church have a comeback while still being corrupted. Once word gets out about her naked sermons I think she'd have a much easier time drumming up donations.
Most of what I have feedback wise is game design considerations though. Some of it is potentially feature-creep-ish so I can definitely see why you might have skipped some of these but they are suggestions if you want to add on to this game or for future ones.
1. The game is really damn grindy. Especially when you get to the point where self-worth only depreciates by one point no matter what you do. You keep hitting points where you've read all the content for all the jobs at her current level, but you're still mindlessly clicking through 6+ weeks of time to grind down her levels. It feels like you're padding the length a little too much. Also, you get very little money for the cost of the purchasable items, and if you make the mistake of buying the church upgrades at the start, you have a good dozen weeks of grinding at the first job to get the 300g to start the hospital job, which is very annoying. The numbers/time need some tuning.
2. going off that, I think the thematic of diminishing returns where her worth drops slower the lower her level wasn't a bad idea, but I think it should be handled differently. The fact that every event drops her worth by the same amount is kind of odd. the diminishing returns should be per event/action so that you can drop it faster by mixing things up, and surprising her. So, instead of talking and anal sex both dropping her worth by the same amount, Anal might be worth more initially, but if you do it for 3-4 weeks straight she'd get used to it and it'd stop working so well. It'd give you more of a reason to try all the different choices for saturdays.
3. It's really disappointing the church upgrades are just kind of there with no explanations. My guess is that her worth drops becasue you're fixing her church while she has failed to, but it'd be nice to have at least one sceene where you get her actual reaction to it.
4. Is there even a point to the reputation bar? The two stats basically drop in tandem and it's very hard to actually drop one without the other anyways. If you're going to have two stats, there needs to be both a reason and possibility for them to raise/lower separately.
5. The game is very linear and there's no failure state or setbacks, you just grind your way to the ending and your choices practically don't matter. Branching paths and multiple endings would be a major feature creep issue, but the game would be more interesting as a game if it were possible to fuck things up. I'd have a "happiness" bar or something to that effect to make choices actually matter and if you push her too hard too fast it decreases and emptying it out makes her back out of her contract. Then I might have a few events/choices that actually INCREASE her reputation or self-worth so you can be set back a bit, in exchange for the decreases to diminishing returns, allowing the stats to fluctuate a bit without the game becoming grindier. (You might need to tier-cap self-worth so even if it increases you can't go up a 'color' tier ever again since that would fuck up some of the event continuity)
6.You can go back to the old jobs for event variations, but other than that there is no reason to and you get exponentially less money. You might want to at least make stats very more in-between jobs. Like, the castle job basically makes her a harem girl entertainer but it's mostly behind closed doors, so it can have a higher self-worth drop than other jobs but leave her reputation nearly untouched. The tavern might actually increase her happiness (if you were to take my advice and add that stat) since once she gets used to it that seems to be the job she has the most fun with.
7.Endings. Here's the feature creep, but if you were to take some of my advice about stats it would pave the way for a few alternate endings. 1)The current ending from dropping both bars where she loses the church and stays your pet. 2) If you can drop her self-worth while keeping her reputation high, she keeps her sluttiness a secret and keeps the church but stays your pet in the off time 3) Bad end: She tears up the contract and walks, loosing her church in the process. 4) The earlier mentioned 'holy whore' ending, maybe trigged by maxing out the church but dropping her stats.
8. Shops: The "fun fund" isn't really 'fun'. You're basically buying unlocks for jobs and SLIGHTLY speeding up the grinding. You should be able to spend some cash on sex toys and outfits and stuff to use on her on saturdays. That's one of the feature creep ideas, but money is a very boring resource as-is. In it's current state, I'd rather just not have it at all and have the stats drop faster just from the jobs themselves and unlock automatically once her shame level is low enough.
In summary: I think the most important change you could make to improve the game is to make choices matter more by increasing the stat decrease/increase variability between your choices during events, Saturday sessions and workplaces so that they aren't all the same damn stat change, while possibly adding a third "happiness" bar you need to keep up to add a failure state allowing the game to feel more like an actual game with interesting choices you can make. While doing that, it would be a good idea to tune the numbers to actually decrease the playtime by a little bit to remove the grinding feeling of clicking through too many previously read events.
Sorry for the text wall, but the game is overall pretty good for a first effort at making this kind of thing.
