Re: [SLG] Jack-o-nine-tails
Bunch of bugs (many of them not yet mentioned in the thread) and proposals. Sorry if this comes of negatively since it's only criticism, but no praise. I think the OP already summed up all the nice things about this game, and i've got to say that despite its bugs, flaws and for my taste a bit too digusting dark themes, it's still my favorite among the "genre". I ragequitted slavemaker after 20mins of playing, yet still am playing this one after over 20 hours.
I've already PMed this to the author of the hggmod - then got my account activated 3 mins later. Sorry about the redundancy.
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Outright bugs
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Regular random crashes:
This is hard to pin down, because i happens in a rather wide range of circumstances. Here's the limitations i've observed:
- Only happens while at home
- Only happens while switching from one "screen" to another (i.e., just navigating the menu has never crashed. It happens for things like clicking on slave/assistant avatar pic, opening the training menu, or on new day begin)
- Only happens after at least several minutes of playing. Never happened shortly after a fresh launch.
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The code for deciding which sex reward options are available, seems to be mixed up in a frustrating way:
- Cunniglingus (5) available already when slightly horny
- Vibe (4) available when moderately horny
- Petting (3) Available only when lust is maxxed.
WTH? It's basically reversed. Array order bug in the code? Let me guess: The options are pushed into the array in one order, but then are selected in the switch block in the opposite order - amrite?
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Strange behavior of number of possible master orgasms during active sex:
This might be "by design" or a bug, but it certainly is neither intuitive nor rewarding. In short, the higher the slave's sex skill, the more "cum buildup" points will be lost when cumming. Sure, i think we can think of a reasoning for this, but from a gamedesign POV, this makes no goddamn sense, since the player is basically PUNISHED for raising a slave's sex skill: The higher the skill, the LESS you will be able to do during active sex.
Related to this is the consequence of being "overfucked" (i LOLed when i first saw that) and the slave then becoming guilty. This can easily happen, if the slave's skills are not totally maxed, so going at her twice is possible, yet they are so high that the 2nd time will always result in overfucked. Again, you could justify that in a rather amusing way, but from a gamedesign POV, it means that a more skilled slave will perform WORSE.
I mean, seriously - this is a PORN GAME - yet active sex, as well as the lust mechanics (i'll get to those later) are the probably worst designed and most buggy aspects of the game (while it shines in other aspects). Priorities?
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Master/Slave Climax-counter during active sex is useless:
It would be better if it weren't even shown, because no info is better than false info. For the master as well as the slave, you should basically never draw assumptions from those counters, because they wildly jump around from one action to another. Any implied "scale" is a lie, and will change to something entirely different as your next action is executed. There doesn't even seem to be any logic about when you're forced to cum, because it certainly isn't 100 as stated in the wiki - sometimes it is 100, other times it's much lower - throw a coin about which interpretation the game might decide on this time around.
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Some assignments and scenes seem to be bugged with regards to orgasm denial. One reproducable case is milking the fiend:
If you do this as part of TRAINING, then the scene will proc as expected - everything correct, including checking of orgasm denial. HOWEVER, if you do it as an ASSIGNMENT, then:
- The orgasm denial check will be ignored
- The slave will orgasm
- The slave will gain the relevant mood change
- The slave's lust will be reset to zero
- Yet the player gets no notification of any of this. All the observant player will notice is a mood change, and the slave's lust suddenly being zero, for no given reason.
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The following mostly is a translation error, but the underlying feature itself IMO is so bad and completely unneccessary, that it should be killed with fire:
When you ask a slave how she feels, and she tells you that "I tried so hard, but you haven't told me a single good word" - this is extremely misleading to the player, because it doesn't mean what the textbit implies.
Intuitively, the player will assume that this is about not REWARDING the slave with nice words ("Moral Encouragement"). Nope! What it is about, is the "Encourage" TALK OPTION, which is tracked completely seperate from all the rewards and conditions.
Basically, no matter how much you reward your slave with "Moral Encouragement", no matter how much you reward her with all kinds of other things - slaves demand that you periodically use the "Encourage" talk option, or their maximum mood will be capped to happy, while their average mood drops by TWO notches. This not merely seems to be a flag, but a counter/score. I.e., i had a case where i had to "encourage" her on TWO consecutive days, until she stopped complaining about it. That is, you can have a completely happy, obedient and fearless slave, which you reward in every possible way, including words - yet she will complain about lack of nice words and take a mood dive, if you don't periodically use that "Encourage" talk option. Wat the hell?
Please, don't even bother fixing the translation - just axe this entire horrible "feature"!
Keep "Encourage" and "Threaten" as simply a tool to raise mood/fear every few days. So, with sufficient skill/domination, it becomes an OPPORTUNITY rather than a requirement.
Technical implementation issues:
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Rewards as well as rules are stored globally, instead of per individual.
For rules, this might be considered less of a problem - it's annoying and requires more micromanagement when switching slaves/assistants, but for the most part, it doesn't outrightly result in bugs. Though, there is one exception: The "vaginal vibe" flag seems to be reset whenever you switch slaves.
Rewards on the other hand are an outright bug, and it makes training of multiple persons on the same day a nightmare:
Since there is only one array of reward flags (a global one), if say you give slave1 reward X, then switch to slave2, now slave2 will behave as if it already received reward X.
This becomes worse, by the player getting no indication in the menus about which rewards were already picked. As a result (if combined with the global reward tracking), you cannot efficiently train multiple slaves per day without pen and paper notes.
And not just per day: Gifts and treats do not reset daily. As a result, if today you give slave1 chocolate, then tomorrow you give slave2 chocolate, the game will argue that slave2 got choc twice in a row. Yep!
I suppose from a programmer POV, the situation is that changing usage of the global flags would be too much a nightmare to refactor. That's fine, you don't need to touch that code at all. All you need to modify is the code for switching slave and assistant slots: Have a seperate redundant storage per-person for rewards and rules. Then when switching slots, do the appropriate load/store. Basically, the current global array becomes the "RAM", and your new per-person redundant storage becomes the "disk". As a result, all the code dependent on the global flags can remain as is - you just have to swap the contents of that array, when switching the slave/assistant slots.
The posted hgg-mod seems to have implemented this at least partially. It seems to work for rules - i'm not certain about rewards yet, which are the more serious issue. The readme doesn't mention anything about a rewards fix. Gotta test this more to be certain.
Strange design choices:
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Intuitively, as a player you'd expect that slaves gradually build up lust on their own slowly, even without you doing something. You'd expect that the speed at which this happens depends on certain stats.
But in fact, regardless of stats slaves barely build up ANY lust by themselves, unless they're nymphos. While the slaver apparently is a perma-horny bastard, all the slaves are perma-cold on their own. They only start building up lust if you let them engage in sex actions and deny orgasm.
As a result, the vaginal beads are basically MANDATORY - it is the first item you should buy. It took me over 20 HOURS of playtime to figure this out, because seriously, who the hell would expect this to be mandatory?
The whole thing is basically designed to make toys and denial mandatory. That is unexpected on its own, but it gets worse with the interface, because: It means you basically want to have orgasm denial enabled at all times, except of when you want to allow release. BUT: Exactly that is when you will forget to uncheck it before i.e. giving an erotic reward, since the option/indicator is on different screen.
There has been no other issue in the game that has caused me so many reloads - not even the crashes.
By now i'm saving about every second action i take: Do a, do b, save, do c, do d, save, ....
Why? In this order: Orgasm denial management, crashes, lack of indication which rewards have been picked already. Those three things are responsible for me spending half of my playtime with saving and loading.
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Combat system. It certainly is "creative" (and cryptic unless you read all the tooltips - and even then i still after 20 hours didn't understand the status effects fully yet). Problem is it might be too creative. Without some kind of tutorial, it's a black box. I figured out the rock-paper-scissors style relationship between enemy defense, and own attack quite quickly, but understanding the consequences and the "why" - i still don't think i fully got that.
Then there's group fight mechanics - i'm sorry, it just doesn't scale - it's fundamentally broken. When the number of attacks increases linear with the number of opponents - that just doesn't balance. There need to be some kind of dimishing returns for quantity over quality. The game practically admits how broken this is, when it sets up group fights against a dozen enemies which all have 1 hitpoint, to compensate the OP advantage of multiple attacks.
Then, there's difficulty scaling. With most master fights being entirely random, and many of them unwinnable without potions and/or extra hp - it basically means until about midgame, 80% of the possible combat scenes are unwinnable. Yet, if you put a gladiatrix into the arena, with good armor (i.e. your own), you notice something very strange: Gone are the high hitting attacks - the slave with good armor only takes minimum damage. This works even up to becoming the champion (so, before the special fights). So, let me get this right: The opponent of the fight for the champion title, deals 1hp damage against gothic armor. BUT a bunch of BEGGARS at the fog hit gothic armor for 4-10 damage? WAT?
Why was that done? I can tell you: It again is a kludge for broken mechanics - this time scaling. See, the master later on has access to potions and artefacts, which MULTIPLY his endurance in combat. To keep things interesting for midlevel and highlevel masters, enemy damage has to be multiplied as well. The problem is damage-scaling has to happen for ALL combat scenes - even supposedly lowlevel ones. Hence, there are no fight scenes adequate for the early game.
Why? Because combat rewards are RANDOM! When rewards are random (i.e. slave quality), then there is no reason to accept the hard fights. Hence, a highlevel player could farm easy fights and get similiar rewards. To prevent this, the game just makes the "easy" fights difficult as well, rather than fixing the rewards.
Lastly, i question the benefit of killing the master on combat loss. See, this is a game no one would be willing to play without reloads anyways - in case of combat even less so, given the random nature. As a result, the player will always save before combat and reload if he gets killed. What's the point of that? Why implement a "punishment" which the player will reject anyways? A more effective penalty would be (treatable) wounds and -3 energy on loss - then a player might actually accept that penalty, instead of reloading. For the few rare masochists, add an option to keep the current behavior.
Sandbox mode == Cheat mode?:
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I think intuitively one expects sandbox mode simply to be the game without the story aspect. So, basically "freeform mode".
But as it is, such a mode does not exist. Sandbox mode instead seems to be a "cheat mode", since you start off with a wagonload of money, the best house and best armor. Nothing against having such a mode, but could people who just wish to play "freeform" get just that? It would be trivial to implement - after all, it would just be sandbox mode but with different starting values.
Feature proposals:
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- Indicators for which rewards have been picked. Just display them in different color for example.
- More dynamic responses for the "ask" options. For example, when you ask them how they feel, there are only a few topics they have an opinion about, so we're dealing with manageable complexity here. Yet, they only have one response per topic, per mood. The relationship between master and slave isn't taken into account at all. As a result, you can have perfectly obedient and devoted slave with no fear or despair or spoilage... everything perfect.... yet if you didn't give them that stupid "encourage", they will say "I tried so hard, and you didn't even tell me a single good word". Xcuse me, what? That is NOT the response a perfectly loyal servant would give - it's what a NEW and REBELLIOUS slave would say. It completely breaks immersion and roleplay.
With just 4 variations of such a response, it could take into account the current personality of the slave. How so? Easy, have responses for the following cases: Neutral, Obedient/Devoted (Average of both), Rebelious (opposite), Fear/Despair (Average of both). It just requires a switch statement and some statchecks, to select an appropriate response. Heck, the coding is just 3 minutes work, per topic - phrasing the responses is more work.
- More ways to raise slave fame than arena and pony races. I know there's spread rumors, but that mainly increases the masters rank, which as mentioned before is usually undesired. I understand this is a major undertaking in terms of implementation, but given that fame is the 2nd most important attribute, since only it can work around beauty, this is a major issue of the core gamemechanics. I'd propose two other options to gain fame: Sex and arts. OR: Check the next proposal for a "two birds, one stone"-solution...
- A way to earn small amounts of money by letting slaves "work". This also would solve the problem, of not being able to repeat certain scenes, once a slave has mastered the ability. And as hinted before, it might be a (slow) alternative to gain fame.
Technically, besides of coming up with some nice textbits, i wouldn't worry too much about art, since for most tasks, you could for the time being recycle existing pics.
Designwise, i'd propose it to work like this:
- Assigning a slave to work requires at least 3 energy left, sets energy to -2, sets hygiene to "dirty" (or perhaps worse for some kinds of "work"), and costs 3 calories. You might want to vary those specifics a bit by the type of task/work - some might be easy/clean but pay less, while others might be harsh/messy but pay more. As a result, a slave can only do it once per day, and since it's disadvantageus to health, it will actually take up the majority of two days (the second day you'd work on health recovery).
- Slaves gain no experience from working.
- Slaves do very slowly gain fame from working (at perhaps 1/4th the rate of arena fights, since you can do it more frequently), but no higher than the relevant primary skill(s).
- Monetary reward would depend on the skill of the slave. As a rough guideline (to be modified by other considerations):
* level 1 (red) Work not possible
* level 2 (pink) Work not possible
* level 3 (violet) 7-12 sparks
* level 4 (blue) 11-16 sparks
* level 5 (torq) 15-20 sparks
* level 6 (green) 19-25 sparks
The above levels are not just for the primary relevant skill, but the summary of all relevant skills/attributes (i'd propose a 2:1 ratio for primary skill(s) and secondary aspects). Income as mentioned before might be a bit lower or higher, depending on disadvantages/risk of the type of work.
Notice no mention of failure/refusal chances yet - that i propose to be handled the same as every other slave activity in the game: Based on motivation, though i'd suppose a high skill (level 5-6) would make the work more attractive, so failure chance would be lower even with bad morale.
So, in summary: You don't get rich this way, and keep in mind it's only sustainable at a pace of at most every 2nd day, and then you can't do much training with the slave on the off-day, since it has to recover health and energy. However, it can pay the bills and at high skill level actually make a small profit.
It thus doesn't replace selling slaves, but is an additional option, and at the very least allows roleplay and a purpose of some skills beyond trade, as well as repetition of some scenes after skill mastery.
If in the future you'd like to expand this with more expensive to implement features, then my one suggestion is this: Please do NOT introduce the possibility of randomly losing a slave! The cost/reward ratio doesn't justify such a risk. Raising rewards also wouldn't work, because at low skill the risk would probably be too high, yet at high skill level the slave would be too valueable to risk it at all. You CAN introduce the equivalent of RECOVERABLE "accidents" with a major cost, but please refrain from anything permanent or semi-permanent - it would make the option unfeasible, so almost no one would want to use it. Another thing to keep in mind is railroading: If you decide to implement "accidents/surprises", consider the abilities and skills of the slave - possibly even of the assistant, if she supervises. Railroading the arena champion into physical submission for example, against the player's wishes, isn't just frustrating but also unplausible. Plus the player will wonder what in terms of RP is the point of a skilled fighter, when she can only defend herself in the arena.
As for possibly injecting fights into such surprise-events, one way to plausibly avoid permanent death, would be to not kill the slave/assistant at 0hp, but instead simply continue with loss consequences and (treatable) injuries.
