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HentaiWriter

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IMPORTANT NOTE:

Unfortunately, Reclaim Reality has been cancelled.
You can read the entire post-mortem for the game there; it's a long read, but it has lots of documents we used for designing the game, the entire game's plot summarized, and so on.

We learned a lot of lessons from making it, and learned what not to do in the future so as to prevent anything like this from happening again, as well (which is also talked about in there.)
If you'd like a refund, contact me on Patreon and I'll be happy to give you one.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Hey there! We're working on an 18+ only video game called "Reclaim Reality"!

You can get the Public UPDATED TO V0.05 Demo right here:

- (downloadable)
- (if you're on Mac or Linux, or your computer can't run the downloadable one)


The Public Demo contains most of the first "area" of the game, the Frontal Lobe!

Or, if you'd like to read more about the game first, hear some of its music, look at some of the art and so on, you can do that below!

(And of course, as always, if you'd like to support us on Patreon, you can do so by going to
.)

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Reclaim Reality is a hybrid Visual Novel/Adventure Game within the Science Fiction genre. What does that mean?

It means that unlike a standard Visual Novel, you'll be;

  • Picking up items to use both in exploration and on allies
  • Able to move to where you want, when you want
  • Needing to use your reaction time to respond to dangerous events
  • Fighting bosses in multiple genres of gameplay
  • Strategizing your movement to incur the least damage possible
  • And more!

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But before we go any farther, let's talk about the basic plot itself!

(mild, early game spoilers ahead; we can't really explain much about the game without giving this part away, unfortunately)
Set in the year 2200, you play the part of Melinda , a 25 year old woman with the ability to analyze and deconstruct a situation like nobody's business.


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Unfortunately, all the intellectual ability in the world won't matter if your brain itself is under attack, and that's exactly what's happening in Reclaim Reality.

Melinda is trapped in her own psyche; she's been poisoned, and doctors have been forced to put her in a medically-induced coma to slow the damage to her body.
Good news, though; after countless hours, the doctors now know exactly what needs to be done to cure her of the poison in her brain, allowing Melinda to be woken up from her coma safely.

The bad news is that Melinda's got two tasks she can only do from inside her psyche, and she'll need to do both well to have a chance of surviving.

  • First, in the short term, she'll need to "degauss" parts of her brain, allowing the doctors to cleanse that area of the poison temporarily, giving her a reprieve on permanent destruction of her mind.
  • And, well, the only way to "degauss" parts of her brain is to flood her brain with endorphins, and the strongest burst of endorphin release possible is of course, sex.

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So to keep her mind cleansed of the poison for now, she'll need to convince and persuade those that she runs into while in her psyche to sleep with her, giving her extra time to solve the mystery of how she ended up like this to begin with.
As for a permanent cure to the poison, that's her second task; she needs to defeat the eight things in each area of her brain that are preventing the doctors from doing a full cleanse of the poison. W
ait, destruction?

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The doctors can't explain it fully, but there appear to be automatons roaming around Melinda's brain on a level not fully understood by said doctors; what they DO know is that only Melinda can stop them.
You'll be fighting them in boss battles during the game, and every boss battle is an entirely different genre of gameplay with full animation, with some of the following genres being a part of some of the boss battles;
  • Fighting
  • Platforming
  • Rhythm
  • Puzzle
  • Action/Adventure
  • Tactical RPG
And more!


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Time's ticking though... and if that weren't enough, it looks like those closest to Melinda are appearing in places all over her mind as well! For example, there's;

Her best friend, Sylvie:

Her girlfriend, Alice:


And her boss, Ruth:


As well as over 16 other cast members! Here's a few of them;

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So, to recap, your initial goals are;

  • Combat the machines attempting to prevent you from curing yourself
  • Stave off the sickness by winning over your friends and convincing them to sleep with you
  • Fully defeat your sickness so you can be released from your coma
  • Solve the mystery of what or who poisoned you in the first place
  • Figure out why people from the waking world are in your psyche too

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Sure, let's jump right into gameplay features then!

  • Yuri (lesbian)-based game, with robot tentacle scenes too!
    • All tentacle scenes are skippable, though!
      • They only show up if you lose to bosses.
      • All the robot tentacle machines are entirely robotic!
      • There are far more yuri scenes than tentacle scenes!
  • 13 women that you can get involved with!
    • All of them with yuri scenes AND robot tentacle scenes!
  • 21 total characters to interact with!
    • All with intertwining backstories!
  • Voice acting for all characters by a cast of industry professionals!
  • Fully composed soundtrack with over 80 songs!
  • Every boss is an entirely different genre of gameplay!
  • Horror, Mystery, Romance, & Action are the four genre focuses!
    • There's no guro though, so don't worry!
  • Interact with the environment in a multitude of ways
  • Widely branching storyline with many conversations & outcomes!
  • A wide variety of locales and environments!
  • And finally, last, but not least, the "Brain Damage" mechanic!
Wait... the "Brain Damage" mechanic?



------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Finally, the rewards and demo releases! How do they work, you ask?


All demos are posted to the Activity Feed, under the "featured tag" that says "Demo" on the left of the Activity Feed!

And as far as the rewards go, they're fairly straight forward; around the first week of each month, I'll be sending you an email to the email on your Patreon account, asking you some questions regarding your reward.
(For example, at the $5 level, I'll ask what name you'd like displayed in the credits.)

Here's some additional information on how they work, too;

  • Any of the rewards titled (OPTIONAL REWARD) are simply that; you don't have to have your name in the credits/game/etc. if you don't want, for example.
  • For all the (OPTIONAL REWARDS), pledging just ONCE at that tier PERMANENTLY gets you that specific reward; you never have to pledge again!
  • Access to the activity feed (at the $1 and above level), as well as monthly demos (at the $5 and above level) however, requires monthly pledges.
  • Finally, all (OPTIONAL REWARDS) are one time only; meaning, if you pledge at say, the $10 tier one month, pledging again won't get you your name in the background of the game twice.
We'll be posting updates to the Activity Feed weekly, and we'll also be reading the activity feed daily and responding to any and all questions within 24 hours here on ULMF too, so if you've got anything you're curious about regarding the game, critique, so on, feel free to ask!




That about wraps things up; we hope you're looking forward to the full game and future demos, and we're extremely grateful for any and all support, feedback, critique, and anything else that you'd like to contribute to help us make this game a reality!

If you want to contact us on ULMF that's totally fine, but here's some social media for our games in case you want to contact us in other ways;













And of course, the Patreon one more time if you wanted to support us (and get access to the backer-only Discord, monthly demos, other rewards, and so on);
 
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Chapman

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I have to say, the public demo was great and the amount of effort you guys are putting into this game shows how much potential it has. I'm a bit surprised at the lack of patrons the project has compared to what it deserves because the demo alone shows off great things. The art/character interactions are both adorable, both the writing and voice acting seem very promising though I hope there are more scenes where lines are fully voice acted, and the game runs very well. The UI is also creative in both design and functionality.

My only critique is that the action bit could be introduced better via a tutorial but the execution was still concise. Also some captions might also help for certain things in the menu (perhaps having a toggle in the options menu), just so the player may more easily recognize what certain buttons mean.

Overall, I feel like Reclaim Reality demonstrates promise as both a solid indie game and a solid 18+ VN.
 
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HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

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I have to say, the public demo was great and the amount of effort you guys are putting into this game shows how much potential it has. I'm a bit surprised at the lack of patrons the project has compared to what it deserves because the demo alone shows off great things.
Thanks a lot; that really means a lot!

A big part of that is that we're just now starting to market/advertise the game and get this public demo out; we've been building up art assets (for instance, we have the 2nd boss fight all animated and such; here's some of the animations, without the GUI for the fight, at lower quality than they are in-game so that they'll fit on ULMF);

GiftedCommonBug-size_restricted.gif LikelyDeadlyBackswimmer-size_restricted.gif 2I22EJW.gif

We also have theme songs for every character in the game done; you can hear a lot of them at if you scroll down and pick load more, then ctrl+F by "reclaim reality".
A few of my favorites that weren't the five characters in the demo are;

Jamie's Theme -
Delphine's Theme -
Polly's Theme -
Lorraine's Theme -

So by getting a small chunk of the art/audio stuff done in advance even past the demo, we can hopefully have a buffer of content that'll let us keep putting out demos without needing to wait too much on art/audio stuff.
The engine also took a lot of work to get done with a lot of the features we wanted to do for it, but that's mostly done now too :D

The art/character interactions are both adorable, both the writing and voice acting seem very promising though I hope there are more scenes where lines are fully voice acted, and the game runs very well. The UI is also creative in both design and functionality.
The GUI was 90% done by , the sprite artist for the game too (some of the other features in it were done by Zylinder, our background artist, who also did the logo for Reclaim Reality and Eroding Ego both), and yeah, I think it's really great aesthetically and functionally, for sure.

We do plan to have full voice acting, not blurbs, once we've finalized the script for each Lobe/area, too! Glad you liked the writing so much also, I really wanted to make the characters feel real/believable, and I know I'm not perfect in that but hearing feedback like this lets me know I'm on the right track.

My only critique is that the action bit could be introduced better via a tutorial but the execution was still concise. Also some captions might also help for certain things in the menu (perhaps having a toggle in the options menu), just so the player may more easily recognize what certain buttons mean.
Absolutely, we plan to have something for that in the full game where Vera would be shouting out info to you in little text boxes (with voice of course) at the top of the screen, and the same goes for the captions in the menu too, definitely things we want to get in.

Overall, I feel like Reclaim Reality demonstrates promise as both a solid indie game and a solid 18+ VN.
Thanks a lot, again, that's really flattering to hear :D
 
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HentaiWriter

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Just got the Reclaim Reality demo up on Newgrounds:
And if you want to download it outside of a MEGA link:
 

censuur

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I know the intro states there's going to be a better introduction for the main character, but is the writing on the demo final or just the draft? It feels rather... rough, with a supposedly remarkably intelligent, analytical character behaving stupidly and impulsively. For example; she suggests to Ruth that she's going to try some theory, and immediately assumes success without verifying in what comes off as a really out of character attempt at comedy. The protagonists is also regularly making overly trite and factually incorrect assumptions; the idea that you can't read in your dreams is about as mistaken of a myth as the idea that you can't experience pain in your dreams. The myth revolves around the fact that attempting to read in a dream and getting confusing results (nonsense language etc.) happens because that part of the brain is less active while you sleep. It leads to the protagonist making a key observation late (her confusing and nonsensical situation should have this be the first assumption, rather than a late dismissal based off a false understanding) and being wrong about it. All in all this results in a typical "please stop talking" kind of character where I'm constantly bothered by a character speaking with authority where they've already demonstrated to be out of their depth.

The way Ruth is introduced also feels awkward, we're spending more time explaining things to Ruth than we actually did figuring them out in the first place, which further reinforces the idea that the protagonist is just overly presumptuous instead of actually competent. From the reader's perspective you've basically just spend five minutes getting the same basic gameplay interaction explained twice over in excruciating detail. You know little about the protagonist and even less about the person she's speaking to other than that she's your boss and you seem to have an good relationship, if a bit overly familiar and friendly, especially given that, to the reader, this character is a complete stranger. While this seems like a bit of a pedantic point to be making, the story goes on and by the end, you still know little to nothing about Ruth or her history with your character, and seems extremely absurd for her to even be in this situation.

Overall, it feels like the characters are acting very unnaturally, you go from a very good moment on the roof with a good reaction to the events that transpire, to being on the ground floor and the characters making the baseless assumption that they're now safe, and they strike up a conversation... Why? They just made the assumption that they were possibly in a kind of simulation whereof they don't know the rules and encountered a clearly hostile force attacking them outright, you'd think they'd at least bother to check if they're safe a little more rigorously.

I've been rambling too much already, so I'll summarize;
) The protagonist is acting far too contrary to her archetype making her come off as undeservedly arrogant rather than analytical.
) New characters are introduced far too quickly which interrupts the flow of the story.
) Much of the early interactions with new characters is spent on talking about the premise and the mechanics of the game, giving no room to actually introduce the characters, and dragging out exposition far longer than it needs to.
) The interactions are inconsistent, bordering absurdity at times, perhaps this is just me not appreciating the comedy, but the attempts at it feel very disruptive tot he narrative.
) Having all the characters be somehow unaware of the situation they are in, especially given the situation they are in, feels very unnatural, while this is possibly just setting up for some twists later on it makes the premise very unbelievable and hard to follow, it puts far too much strain on my suspension of disbelief, especially how the characters largely just go with the flow without really questioning the absurdity of what is asked of them, or their own sanity in experiencing it.

In conclusion, while the premise seems very appealing and the overall gameplay was good, the writing leaves much to be desired to the point where it's a detriment.
 
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HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

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I know the intro states there's going to be a better introduction for the main character, but is the writing on the demo final or just the draft? It feels rather... rough, with a supposedly remarkably intelligent, analytical character behaving stupidly and impulsively. For example; she suggests to Ruth that she's going to try some theory, and immediately assumes success without verifying in what comes off as a really out of character attempt at comedy. The protagonists is also regularly making overly trite and factually incorrect assumptions; the idea that you can't read in your dreams is about as mistaken of a myth as the idea that you can't experience pain in your dreams. The myth revolves around the fact that attempting to read in a dream and getting confusing results (nonsense language etc.) happens because that part of the brain is less active while you sleep. It leads to the protagonist making a key observation late (her confusing and nonsensical situation should have this be the first assumption, rather than a late dismissal based off a false understanding) and being wrong about it. All in all this results in a typical "please stop talking" kind of character where I'm constantly bothered by a character speaking with authority where they've already demonstrated to be out of their depth.
The writing in this demo is all up to change; much like how the entire writing for the Fire Level demo of Future Fragments got thrown out once we had moved on and retconned the dialogue some to fit better over the course of the whole game, you can expect that a good deal of the writing in this will get changed or altered as well for the full game.

Now with that said, I feel that the way I'm presenting this story (with lots of unreliable or intentionally skewed narration, as I usually do in my games) isn't something you're going to enjoy, and that's fine, of course; there's a particular reason I'm doing a lot of what you consider to be bad writing or nitpicks and such (I'm not saying I'm a perfect writer either though, of course, I've definitely got flaws), and I completely understand why you feel this way about it, but all I can say is that it is fairly intentional with most of your points in regards to things I have planned for the full game.

Things like her being incorrect about the dreams, and so on, is intentional.

To put things in context though for a lot of your critique, and as a mild spoiler but you'll eventually realize this as the game goes on (or we'll have it in an opening sequence, similar to how we did with Future Fragments);
- Prior to the game's events, between 2050 and 2150, the world underwent what was effectively an apocalypse thanks to overuse of technology and abuse of natural resources
- A good 80%+ of humanity was wiped out, and out of drastic measures, a world government was formed to allow resources that were remaining to be shared equally, and to enforce law globally to save the planet/humanity.
- Part of this new law involved was basically wiping out and banning a good deal of prior technology/human creations and collections of knowledge, to prevent humanity from ever abusing natural resources/overbearing on technology again.
- Another part of it was that nature must be integrated with all existing and new technologies, which is why the backgrounds have a lot of nature embedded in them and such.

So as a result of this, some assumptions that the characters are making that may seem haphazard to us (or outright incorrect, like the dream stuff) is intentional because it's from their perspective of having a lot of things that were common sense to us/common knowledge no longer be as such, and not the player's perspective.
As the game goes on, the player will realize more and more of what exactly has changed compared to our society/culture in modern era, and a lot of the "misunderstandings" would be ironed out as a result.

The way Ruth is introduced also feels awkward, we're spending more time explaining things to Ruth than we actually did figuring them out in the first place, which further reinforces the idea that the protagonist is just overly presumptuous instead of actually competent.
I would disagree about going as far as to say they're presumptuous, but yes, it is intended that there are hints that they're "forcing" their display of competence.

From the reader's perspective you've basically just spend five minutes getting the same basic gameplay interaction explained twice over in excruciating detail. You know little about the protagonist and even less about the person she's speaking to other than that she's your boss and you seem to have an good relationship, if a bit overly familiar and friendly, especially given that, to the reader, this character is a complete stranger. While this seems like a bit of a pedantic point to be making, the story goes on and by the end, you still know little to nothing about Ruth or her history with your character, and seems extremely absurd for her to even be in this situation.
As for why it's absurd for her to be in this situation, this is also something answered and again ties into the "Dropping the player in a situation that is alien to them" scenario which is intentional here, and of course not for everyone, but it is intended.
If you want another way to think of it, think of it like how Memento did things, except instead of being put at the end of the movie, you're being put at the midway point, playing forwards, then wrapping around back to the beginning and then to the middle again, where you now understand the context of the "beginning" of your gameplay experience with said context from later on.

This also goes for the character backstories; there's a very dense document I've got covering all the characters, their interactions, backstories, etc. so that I can pull from that to write them in a way that would make sense if they were naturally connected to one another and talking normally, but of course, as you pointed out, the player is being dropped in without any context to this relationship and has to pull clues from how they're interacting as to what their backstory could be. This is also intentional for this particular plotline.

Overall, it feels like the characters are acting very unnaturally, you go from a very good moment on the roof with a good reaction to the events that transpire, to being on the ground floor and the characters making the baseless assumption that they're now safe, and they strike up a conversation... Why? They just made the assumption that they were possibly in a kind of simulation whereof they don't know the rules and encountered a clearly hostile force attacking them outright, you'd think they'd at least bother to check if they're safe a little more rigorously.
This is another scenario from back up above, where from our perspective, you're absolutely right.
However, from their perspective, there is a particular reason or two that I haven't covered in game yet *why* they're so nonchalant about this and seem to recover so quickly.


The protagonist is acting far too contrary to her archetype making her come off as undeservedly arrogant rather than analytical.
I generally try to go against archetypes, intentionally.

New characters are introduced far too quickly which interrupts the flow of the story.
This is also intentional; I go for quick introductions, then have the character re-interact with them many times over the course of the game. There'll be many times more you'll go back to the Frontal Lobe to talk to the characters and get to know them; the initial events with them are intentionally haphazard and rushed so as to both fit the mood and to throw the player's assumptions of the characters off, as they don't have the context (as I wrote above) about who these people are and why they're acting the way they are.

Much of the early interactions with new characters is spent on talking about the premise and the mechanics of the game, giving no room to actually introduce the characters, and dragging out exposition far longer than it needs to.
I'll agree with the exposition stuff; in the full game, there won't be as much of that, but without a proper intro, some of that stuff I had to put in there so as to not totally lose the reader.

Having all the characters be somehow unaware of the situation they are in, especially given the situation they are in, feels very unnatural, while this is possibly just setting up for some twists later on it makes the premise very unbelievable and hard to follow, it puts far too much strain on my suspension of disbelief, especially how the characters largely just go with the flow without really questioning the absurdity of what is asked of them, or their own sanity in experiencing it.
This ties a lot into the above things; if you asked someone from the 200 BC to jump into a plane flying from California to New York, they'd think you were either a witch, an angel, or that you were asking them to get into the maws of a demon or something else insane. For us, the premise, what's going on, and everything else is definitely absurd and out there, I agree. But for these characters, a good portion of what's happening to them is something they experience to lesser degrees in everyday life.

In conclusion, while the premise seems very appealing and the overall gameplay was good, the writing leaves much to be desired to the point where it's a detriment.
Just to be clear, I'm not saying your critique is wrong or bad; you're definitely right on a lot of it, and I'm not saying my writing is by any means spectacular or amazing or flawless.
All I'm doing with this is just clarifying that a lot of the parts of the style of writing are intentionally that way for a reason in this plot, and I completely understand if that isn't to your taste (or to others); it's just the way that I write my stories, and while some like it, some never well, and that's fine of course. That said, I'm always up for improvement and such, but there will also be things that I stick to just because of the style I write in. I welcome the critique and feedback all the same, though. :)
 
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HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

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@Zepheral will love this cuz yuri
Also, that's a LOT of genres :O
Yeah, we've got a good wide variety of game genres planned, most of them hybrids too.

For example, the second boss battle with gifs I put up above is a combination of rhythm games and point & click games.
The next boss battle is a hybrid between stealth games and RPG games; the next one after that is a combination of a tactical RPG and a bullet hell game, and so on.

Each of them would be done by a different artist too, both for production time and to give each boss battle its own feel, etc.
 

Stuffie

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I love how HentaiWriter actually edited out his original opening words "So I'm gonna make my replies here brief, ..." right before that wall of text, damnit I was going to jump on that. XD

Pretty amazing how many projects you're doing at once though. Plus if I ever make a porn game, I'll recruit you as my PR guy. ^^

@Zepheral will love this cuz yuri
The God of Lesbians is being summoned! :O
 
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HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

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I love how HentaiWriter actually edited out his original opening words "So I'm gonna make my replies here brief, ...", damnit I was going to jump on that. XD
Yeah, I realized it'd just be better to clarify everything in one post, and it wouldn't take too long either, so I went for it.

Pretty amazing how many projects you're doing at once though. Plus if I ever make a porn game, I'll recruit you as my PR guy. ^^
I'd love to do PR but I'm just totally filled with what I'm working on now; I can definitely refer you to some good people for that though :)
And yeah, the only reason this is possible is because I'm the writer on them and not the artist or programmer, and because every game has different team members to some extent; that, and pretty much no-life-ing this stuff around 15+ hours a day, 6 days a week, haha.

I don't ever plan to do more than 2 big games and 1 small game at once, though, that's about my limit work-wise.
 

censuur

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Since my previous post, on reading back, seems a little harsh I do feel I should add I enjoy the writing in Future Fragments, and I'll definitely give this another shake once there's more on offer. I understand a lot of the writing is intentionally misleading, though you might consider putting a few more hints here and there so that a skeptical reader knows you're intentionally doing this, rather than out of lacking competence. There is a LOT of extremely poorly written pornographic games out there (and poor writing in general) and I doubt I'm the only one who was burned on waiting to see if it got better. It's not that the writing here is bad, but it seems ill fitting as an introduction.

This ties a lot into the above things; if you asked someone from the 200 BC to jump into a plane flying from California to New York, they'd think you were either a witch, an angel, or that you were asking them to get into the maws of a demon or something else insane.
One last annoying nit-pick. This is actually rather unlikely. We can observe from technological differences in the real world that exposing under-developed people to sophisticated technology (for example, when the English colonized Australia and their interactions with the Aboriginals) the responses to these technologies tend to be rather mild. There is a lot in the world that we don't understand today, but we understood much less thousands of years ago, seeing more of what we wouldn't understand wouldn't provoke any kind of extreme reaction. People understood the concept of flight, they can observe birds, they understood the concept of transport too, and of taming and controlling the world around them. These basic facts easily combine into a ride-able element that transports people through the air. Of course, intelligence also plays a large part in this.

Anyway good luck on the rest of the project, and don't let my opinionated nagging bother you :p
 
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HentaiWriter

HentaiWriter

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Since my previous post, on reading back, seems a little harsh I do feel I should add I enjoy the writing in Future Fragments, and I'll definitely give this another shake once there's more on offer. I understand a lot of the writing is intentionally misleading, though you might consider putting a few more hints here and there so that a skeptical reader knows you're intentionally doing this, rather than out of lacking competence. There is a LOT of extremely poorly written pornographic games out there (and poor writing in general) and I doubt I'm the only one who was burned on waiting to see if it got better. It's not that the writing here is bad, but it seems ill fitting as an introduction.
Understandable for sure; it's a really fine balance between "letting the player know stuff is intentional" and "making it too blatant so the whole foreshadowing/surprise is ruined", you basically want the player to pick up on it themselves and feel smart rather than give it to them on a silver platter, etc.

I think I've also identified one large flaw with the demo, and one large flaw with the game. We intend to fix both of course, but those are;

1) The large flaw with the demo is that the porn takes too long to get to; with FF, the porn was there, immediate if you wanted it, but with this, you need to go through a fair amount. The solution would be to front-load some of the porn by having a scene BEFORE she goes to the hotel, or right before she wakes up (which is what I plan to do; she'd be (from her perspective) dreaming about sex with each of the characters in quick flashes, finding it odd, and then noticing later how the scene was the same when it actually happens.)

2) The large flaw with the game itself is that too many people didn't realize you could pan the backgrounds in the Subway (which some people didn't even visit, so we need to make it more clear that you can visit different areas whenever) and the bottom floor of the Skyscraper, but they also didn't even realize you can pick up items around the area and that all the backgrounds have multiple clickable areas which alter the script and such. The solution here is to light up the clickable areas when you hover over them, and to have text above the mouse similar to when you're about to go somewhere that notes things like "inspect <thing here>" etc.

One last annoying nit-pick. This is actually rather unlikely. We can observe from technological differences in the real world that exposing under-developed people to sophisticated technology (for example, when the English colonized Australia and their interactions with the Aboriginals) the responses to these technologies tend to be rather mild. There is a lot in the world that we don't understand today, but we understood much less thousands of years ago, seeing more of what we wouldn't understand wouldn't provoke any kind of extreme reaction. People understood the concept of flight, they can observe birds, they understood the concept of transport too, and of taming and controlling the world around them. These basic facts easily combine into a ride-able element that transports people through the air. Of course, intelligence also plays a large part in this.
Right, I mean I agree with you then in that particular instance, I'm just more trying to get across that some of the lifestyle changes in this game are fairly different from normal everyday life nowadays, bordering on lack of common sense etc.

Anyway good luck on the rest of the project, and don't let my opinionated nagging bother you :p
No worries, it's good critique, and it gives me more viewpoints on how people are experiencing/viewing the game for sure.
This is effectively the "Fire Demo" for Reclaim Reality, where a lot of stuff is going to get improved over time, new features we've got planned will be fleshed out and added, etc.
The only problem is that the FF demo got its funding for us to keep going early on with that demo, but this demo... it's not looking so good. If things don't improve I'm not sure we're going to be able to pay the artist on a month to month basis, which means production might slow down dramatically (let alone being unable to afford full voice acting).

Once the sales for FF come in when that's completed, I'd be able to afford to pay the artist extremely well as well as pay for full voice acting, but that's 9-ish months off, and I'd rather have the game doing decently (I'm not expecting it to hit like $10k or something, but $3k or something is what we're aiming for ideally) than slow it down heavily until we can afford to pay everyone etc.

Don't get me wrong, I heavily appreciate the people who ARE backing it, it's just for the amount of art the artist is putting out, they'd need to focus on where the money is so they can pay their own bills, and if that means giving more time to something else making more money than this until either the pledges go up or I can pay them with FF game sales, then yeah, I can't blame them for that.

I'm going to try my best to get the word out about the game though, and hopefully Frouge can add in that 2nd fix up above and I can add in the 1st fix through the editor for a last-minute build change on Newgrounds and downloadable versions, etc. both within the next 24 hours.
 
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Alright, thanks to feedback from Newgrounds, F95, and the posts here, we've decided to significantly rework the demo and its features.

Here's the changes that'll be coming;
1) Clickable areas/items will now get text on the cursor notifying the player that the area they're hovering over is clickable and what exactly it is they're about to examine etc.
2) Each time Melinda meets a girl, and right at the very start of the game, a flash of a future sex scene will occur, to front-load the sex scenes a bit (and this actually ties into the existing plot, just in a more blunt way).
3) Adding the "highlighted blue text" on important story notes like we have in Future Fragments, to make skimming through the story easier
4) Splitting up large chunks of text in a single text box window into two text box windows
5) Going through the story and cutting down on extra verbose sections to make going through the core storyline slimmer/faster/easier to digest for people
6) General check over the storyline to make events more relevant to change #2 and in general

We're aiming to get this altered version out within the next 24 hours, so I'll do a post here when that's the case!

(Also, we've added two goals over at Patreon: $4000 for full voice acting, and $8000 for animating all the sex scenes!)
 
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So the edits are going to take more than we thought, about another 24-32-ish hours we're estimating. However, that's because in addition to everything listed above, we'll be adding;

- A rudimentary gallery (no SFX, visual effects, text, voices, but it'll be unlocked once you beat the demo once, and it unlocks all sex scenes, even if you didn't see them)
- New end-demo screens with clickable characters to hear their themes and future boss gameplay animations
- A fix for a black screen problem some people seem to be having on the HTML5 Newgrounds demo
 

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Holy guacamole that's a good demo. I'd love to give a critique, but the only thing I'd be any good at critiquing is the writing, and most of what I'd've said has been covered already. If I had one unique critique, it's that the default audio balancing of quieter music and louder voices makes the voice blurbs really stick out far more than they should... but that's a useless critique anyway because the full game's gonna have full voice acting so the louder voices will fit perfectly.

That being said, I'm gonna kinda miss the blurbs. It kinda gave it a Persona feel. :p

Everything else is freakin' fantastic, from the sleek 'n' stylish yet functional UI to the gorgeous art, unique backdrops and enticing character designs. The plot definitely has me hooked and wanting more and, honestly, at this point I'd want to keep reading it just for the plot without even adding the yuri!

I mean, I'll take the yuri. Yuri is best. But like, this plot's got a strong start with enough intrigue to keep me wanting more even without the sex.

Hell, even the sex scenes showing off some aspects of the character's personalities is really nice to see. I love Ruth's tryhard go get 'em attitude and Sylvie's awkwardness. I think you've managed to get yourself a new fan with this project! (okay not really because I was hyped for this way back when you first advertised a yuri VN but heck)
 
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HentaiWriter

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Holy guacamole that's a good demo. I'd love to give a critique, but the only thing I'd be any good at critiquing is the writing, and most of what I'd've said has been covered already. If I had one unique critique, it's that the default audio balancing of quieter music and louder voices makes the voice blurbs really stick out far more than they should... but that's a useless critique anyway because the full game's gonna have full voice acting so the louder voices will fit perfectly.
Yeah, that's assuming we even get to make the game at all, or hit that funding level; if we don't hit $2,000 by the end of February we're pretty much going to have to put the game on hiatus indefinitely at best, or just cancel it outright at worst, due to being unable to pay staff members (I fronted $18,000+ for the game's assets but I can't keep doing that forever, already in debt $8k+ because of it).

Hopefully though we can hit that because man I really want voice acting like you said, the voice actors we got for this are top tier; I can't say who they are because of aliases obviously, but we got some really amazing people to sign onto this and I'd love to see them get to fully use their skills with actual full sentences rather than these blurbs.

That being said, I'm gonna kinda miss the blurbs. It kinda gave it a Persona feel. :p
I think if we would have executed it better with the blurbs and done the script first and THEN recorded the blurbs, rather than the other way around, it would have worked a lot better, but yeah in general I think the full lines are better, haha.

Everything else is freakin' fantastic, from the sleek 'n' stylish yet functional UI to the gorgeous art, unique backdrops and enticing character designs. The plot definitely has me hooked and wanting more and, honestly, at this point I'd want to keep reading it just for the plot without even adding the yuri!

I mean, I'll take the yuri. Yuri is best. But like, this plot's got a strong start with enough intrigue to keep me wanting more even without the sex.
That's really great; that's what we were aiming for is that people who aren't even into yuri (or tentacles) might like the plot on the plot alone, so that means a lot :)

Hell, even the sex scenes showing off some aspects of the character's personalities is really nice to see. I love Ruth's tryhard go get 'em attitude and Sylvie's awkwardness. I think you've managed to get yourself a new fan with this project! (okay not really because I was hyped for this way back when you first advertised a yuri VN but heck)
One of the things I wanted to do was to present more accurate representations of what sex might actually be like between two characters; much like I was a stickler for having a lot of different moans in Future Fragments due to not liking games having the same 3-4 moans used over and over (and I realize that's a budget thing, don't get me wrong), I wanted to not have the characters just suddenly be sex experts and be comfortable and 100% full of lust the minute they started having sex, especially if they had history together that would have logically made things awkward.

I also wanted to do the Game of Thrones route sort of with revealing a few plot things during sex; nothing too heavy plot-wise, with most of it coming post-sex, but yeah, really glad you liked that also!

(Speaking of moans too, every character has around 50 moans and orgasms recorded, and then another 10-ish unique sex-related sounds, like Sylvie's awkward laughs, Alice's teasing laughs, Ruth's licking/grunting sounds, etc.)
 
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We updated the demo pretty significantly; it's changed a fair amount in features and dialogue!

for the browser build, and
for the downloadable build!


We've added/changed the following;
  • Semi-reworked plot structure
  • Highlights on important text to make reading/skimming easier
  • Much faster text skip/text scrolling
  • 30-40% of the script culled for main story stuff for easier readability
  • Hover-text for clickable areas to draw attention to them
  • Various bugfixes and features
  • A gallery added at the start (unlocked once you beat the game once)
  • A controls tutorial screen
Please let us know what you think of the new build and if you like it more than the last one if you played it previously, or if this is your first time playing it, please let us know what you think of it in general!

We also have a Patreon at ; after investing over $18,000 into this demo (and future content), if we don't hit $2,000 a month in funding on Patreon by the end of February, we'll be unable to pay our team enough to be able to continue the game, unfortunately.

So if you do enjoy the game after playing it, please consider supporting us! Any support helps lots :)
 
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Unfortunately, Reclaim Reality has been cancelled.
You can read the entire post-mortem for the game there; it's a long read, but it has lots of documents we used for designing the game, the entire game's plot summarized, and so on.

We learned a lot of lessons from making it, and learned what not to do in the future so as to prevent anything like this from happening again, as well (which is also talked about in there.)
If you'd like a refund, contact me on Patreon and I'll be happy to give you one.
 
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