Others Going Deeper [Beta 1.5] [NRFB Games]

[Quinn]

I'm getting a crash after I finish a floor (Did tutorial and it crashed) Then skipped tutorial and opening and crashed once more after I finished a floor. Not sure why this is happening.

Love the concept though. Especially if you can use the dungeon to corrupt the girls and have fun with them in camp or something.

 

[NRFB]

RE: Spam click crashing
I still can't even get it to happen with an autoclicker set to 1ms, but it does seem to be a thing since so many people are saying as much. I have an idea about maybe having dialogue scripts pre-load all the resources they're going to use, as well as adding some additional safeguarding against a place that something could be POSSIBLY getting set to null in the case of slow loading (if that's what's happening?), but I'll need to check with people who can reproduce the crash to see if it works. Definitely my top priority. Very unfortunate that this never came up during earlier alpha testing.

I don't know if pure avoidance is intended to be possible, as it is now it seems to be part of the gameplay, like an occupational hazard of girl fighting monster, the brainfuck monster gets a mental hit in after she dodges a couple of times and the girl's lust goes up.

I know f95 is sensitive about this type of thing, but to anyone who is thinking "I can put my pp in this girl so nothing else should ever touch her" this is probably not the game for you.

Android version?

Technically possible with godot but the current UI would probably need some rework to make it phone screen friendly. As with a mac version, I don't mind people letting me know if there is demand for it, but it shouldn't be a surprise that figuring out how to do it is a lot less compelling than actually making the game.

This looks like a fun game and I'm not having any issues with it.
I did want to ask about the 'Debug' in the title. Are there actually debug options or is that just a part of the Alpha build?
I'd love to be able to experiment with some different builds for the knights without feeling the pressure to pick the correct stats and skills.

I have the the actual methods for opening the debug menus used for testing turned off in the uploaded version, but they do exist. I've had the idea previously that I might release versions with the full debug menus enabled to some supporter tiers, but that's in the future.

Spoiler: The good post with a lot of feedback

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[Bocoboco]

Game's neat, will watch with interest. Not sure why, but I haven't gotten a crash yet, and I've played through to this version's NG+.

Quick question, though:

What's your plan for corruption? Will it just be a bar counting up til it ends a run? Or will a character's behavior start to change the more corrupt they are?

 

[bobbot]

this could be interesting, making this comment as it downloads... prob shoulda made it after but before i started i had things pop in my head. noticed curses and the monster girl and mind control tags in there, any plans for monsters to transform the charactors like a werewolf attack? also speaking of monsters how many will have extra mechanics tied to them? like a slime eating the partys gear mid combat or a cockatrice stoning people? also speaking of mind control will that be used to alter the charactors fighting abilitys, like sealing some of the more damaging ones or replacing them with useless or harmful versions?

 

[NRFB]

Game's neat, will watch with interest. Not sure why, but I haven't gotten a crash yet, and I've played through to this version's NG+.

Quick question, though:

What's your plan for corruption? Will it just be a bar counting up til it ends a run? Or will a character's behavior start to change the more corrupt they are?

There will definitely be scenes/events that change or even require certain levels of corruption.

At present I believe there are only 2 (or maybe only 1?) skills that require a certain amount of permanent corruption to enter a character's pool of learnable skills (it isn't a very high amount of corruption either) and that's about it. Everything uses the same requirement checking system though, so I can compare any of a character's stats (corruption of course included) to determine their eligibility for anything.

this could be interesting, making this comment as it downloads... prob shoulda made it after but before i started i had things pop in my head. noticed curses and the monster girl and mind control tags in there, any plans for monsters to transform the charactors like a werewolf attack? also speaking of monsters how many will have extra mechanics tied to them? like a slime eating the partys gear mid combat or a cockatrice stoning people? also speaking of mind control will that be used to alter the charactors fighting abilitys, like sealing some of the more damaging ones or replacing them with useless or harmful versions?

I would like to see you revisit these question after playing the game. It feels a bit premature to answer them beforehand.

 

[Bocoboco]

At present I believe there are only 2 (or maybe only 1?) skills that require a certain amount of permanent corruption to enter a character's pool of learnable skills (it isn't a very high amount of corruption either) and that's about it.

Oh, cool. I have no idea if I saw either of those skills, but my characters all hit mid 50s (with Raine in the low 70s) for corruption before the game stopped me from going deeper.

 

[molitar]

Looks interesting and a bit like a board game.

 

[dhannywest]

Impressed by the mechanical system you have put together for this first release. Very smooth and polished for something not made of premade visual novel parts. Played through two runs to the bottom of current content with one finishing at around 15 corruption on each knight and another where I cranked it up to ~80 each to see scenes.

Tutorial stage gives you the impression of the heroines exploring on their own clearing a floor fast. First few floors on your own quickly shows that exhaustion is the number one malus to worry about. Red ending up on a tricky trap or Yellow ending up in a rough fight might get some statuses and damage/lust in but that exhaustion bar is causing most of my corruption breaks. Main mitigating strategy is keeping everyone together with the well-rested buff and sending one back to camp to rest up when the buff runs out. Coupled with Blue's support skills, nasty statuses like sleep and curses like masturbation the buddy system is supreme.

The main problem with this conservative strategy is rapid clicking the turn end button while the girls rest at camp for 10 turns. A mechanic you sometimes see in old ASCII roguelikes is a 'wait until something happens/until fully rested' button. Similar for the time the girls take to walk from camp well rested back to the rooms to explore. No actual resources are taken up unless you have the masturbation curse to worry about. Would also be nice to not collapse every menu when moving between floors.

Generally the UI is clean and usable for what you are doing but I agree with a few other folks who said it was a little unclear what was going on in various rooms. The way challenges build up a counter and inflict their damage/effect when it fills could maybe use a visual bar filling up when researched to make it a little more clear than checking numbers against numbers against what you remembered the number used to be. I don't think the top tab to see that info is necessarily bad but it is a little more cumbersome than having that info hover above the room when a heroine is there/the room is selected.

Dark rooms and the scry spell are a slick way of taking away control from the player in a foreseeable way. A heroine getting caught in a dark room trap and your scry is 10 turns away from being active is a crisis of ones own mismanagement. It would slightly weaken this tactical consideration but I would like to tell, say Yellow, to just run from any fights she uncovers and not chance it with her nothing in strength. Still vulnerable to a monster inflicting a status that keeps her from fleeing every time but would make sense when building her for maximum trap handling. Same for Red built for fighting monsters and fleeing traps.

I can tell where content is going that isn't there yet so I won't harp on the lack of camp actions and MC interactions. I did notice the flying dildo monster got extra scenes when the heroine was inflicted by status effects and worried finding all the scenes for these monsters would be a pain of hoping to luck into getting a status into finding that specific monster. Maybe researching a monster reveals conditions to get other scenes from them. Or maybe I'm mistaken and the description used the same term as a status effect and it was just the result of a successful attack. Either way having a way to confirm if there's scenes one missed would be handy.

Overall this is a slick little management game and I hope you get to put down all the ideas you have for it. Some UI and quality of life rough edges here and there which aren't even that bad in the grand scheme of things. Little lacking in adult content right now but there have been first releases of other games with far less.

 

[Flargnock]

FYI, I've been playing on mac with Wine. Certain cutscenes crash the game, but besides that, it seems really compatable with macs. You could probably get a working mac version, if you wanted to take the time.

 

[NRFB]

Tutorial stage gives you the impression of the heroines exploring on their own clearing a floor fast. First few floors on your own quickly shows that exhaustion is the number one malus to worry about. Red ending up on a tricky trap or Yellow ending up in a rough fight might get some statuses and damage/lust in but that exhaustion bar is causing most of my corruption breaks. Main mitigating strategy is keeping everyone together with the well-rested buff and sending one back to camp to rest up when the buff runs out. Coupled with Blue's support skills, nasty statuses like sleep and curses like masturbation the buddy system is supreme.

"Grouping up is too strong" has been a concern I've had for a long while. I don't think grouping up is a bad thing, just that there should be some trade-offs/things that disrupt it. I have some ideas for that coming eventually.

Dark rooms and the scry spell are a slick way of taking away control from the player in a foreseeable way. A heroine getting caught in a dark room trap and your scry is 10 turns away from being active is a crisis of ones own mismanagement. It would slightly weaken this tactical consideration but I would like to tell, say Yellow, to just run from any fights she uncovers and not chance it with her nothing in strength. Still vulnerable to a monster inflicting a status that keeps her from fleeing every time but would make sense when building her for maximum trap handling. Same for Red built for fighting monsters and fleeing traps.

Ally AI is extremely rudimentary right now, though I have had some thoughts about a sort of 'default behavior' menu in the character sheet that would cover the kind of thing you're thinking.

I can tell where content is going that isn't there yet so I won't harp on the lack of camp actions and MC interactions. I did notice the flying dildo monster got extra scenes when the heroine was inflicted by status effects and worried finding all the scenes for these monsters would be a pain of hoping to luck into getting a status into finding that specific monster. Maybe researching a monster reveals conditions to get other scenes from them. Or maybe I'm mistaken and the description used the same term as a status effect and it was just the result of a successful attack. Either way having a way to confirm if there's scenes one missed would be handy.

Some monster/trap scenes require characters to be in a certain state, although most of the time if that's the case it's a state that the monster/trap can put them in. As for tracking down scenes:

Obviously I don't have it set up at all, but the spots for it exist. I'm just not sure how I want to handle viewing previous scenes because they may be different depending on the state of the character/which character it is, but still use the same dialogue script. But yeah the idea is that there will be some way of eventually researching the requirements for scenes you haven't seen yet.

FYI, I've been playing on mac with Wine. Certain cutscenes crash the game, but besides that, it seems really compatable with macs. You could probably get a working mac version, if you wanted to take the time.

Just have to figure out how to do the stuff it wants for export. As for the mentions of crashing, it wouldn't surprise me if that's just the same crashing issue that other people have reported. Speaking of:

RE: Dialogue Crashing
I still have not nailed it down. I've set up a build that preloads all the resources for dialogues ahead of time and that didn't solve it, I've also had someone reproduce the crash with as much logging as I can find enabled and didn't get anything useful out of it. Still trying to think up another approach for what it could be.

 

[bobbot]

tried it and it also crashed on me in the tutorial... not sure why it just poofed for semingly not reason.

 

[NRFB]

I've been making some progress on the crashing. I haven't nailed it down yet, but it seems to be something with input handling of mouse clicks during dialogue. There appear to be places where spam clicking makes the crash much more consistent, but it does not appear in any logs, nor does it give any error messages to use even in the engine's editor.

It's worth pointing out that nobody has been able to crash the game using the space bar or the buttons at the bottom of the dialogue box to advance text so until I can zero in on a fix, that appears to be a workaround.

 

[Jords37]

Hey Dev, what is the override.cfg that got downloaded when I started the exe file? Is that some kind of virus or is that something else?

 

[Fishface]

Hey Dev, what is the override.cfg that got downloaded when I started the exe file? Is that some kind of virus or is that something else?

It's in the OP.

Installation:

• The game may create a file named override.cfg within the same directory as the .exe. This file is used to save in game settings only.

Anyway, game seems fun. I've gone a couple floors deep, and my main problem so far is that it seems like taking it slow is way, way too good. Keep people grouped up, have anyone too hurt or statused go back to camp to heal, etc. Well rested is obviously there to mitigate the problem somewhat but that by itself just encourages going back to camp multiple times because you get more benefit if you do less in between each Well Rested application. There's a turn counter so obviously you want people to go fast but I haven't seen a reason to do so yet.

Also kind of annoying when, eg, red wanders into a dark trap room and just, like, fails a bunch and gets like three points of permanent corruption just from that. Obviously dark rooms are there for a reason but I feel it might be at the point where scry has the megalixer problem, where you don't want to use it until 'you need to' but you don't want to use it when you need it because you might need it more later. Obviously I can't expect you to fix one of the most common problems in gaming but I do feel like there needs to be a balance where dark rooms are still a scary threat and Red fruitlessly bashing her head against what I assume is a shock trap (but couldn't actually tell because it was the first one I ran into.)

Oh, also, like the option for a female protagonist, but I didn't notice it was there until my third or so run through of the prologue because I hit the crashing a bunch. I defaulted to male the first two times and just assumed that was the only option until I randomly got the female option the third time. Didn't realize the M was a button. Might just be my bad though.

 

[Elsiss Surana]

Okay, I've been trying to figure this out, but what kind of mind control do oyu have planned for this game? Is it just the corruption system altering the skills the characters can learn and how lewed they are, or is there going to be actual instances where some of the monsters can do things like hypnotize the girls and control them to do things. Will we ever see one monster hypnotize one of the girls and then send them against the others. Will we ever have to rescue one of the girls who has been captured by a trap and is being actively brainwashed. That sort of mind control.

 

[NRFB]

Update (hopefully the final one) on the dialogue crashing issue:
I believe that this is the fix, as I cannot get it to crash with the previously figured out consistent crash method, and neither can people that I have sent it to. I promise I will get everything uploaded to the file hosts and whatnot properly tomorrow but it is 3 am and I am quite tired from digging to find the obscure thing that was somehow crashing the game with no error logging.

In the interim while I am asleep, the (hopefully) fixed version can be found

You must be registered to see the links

If you don't want to download it, the issue of crashing can be avoided by either a) only using space bar/the arrow buttons at the bottom of the dialogue box to advance text or b) using the large dialogue box option (which is a non-default option but can be set in the display tab of the options menu (this solution is less thoroughly tested than a))

Sorry for any inconvenience.

 

[Rosen King]

The game definitely has some promise. To add my experience to the crashing thing, I should note that I crashed exactly twice while playing, and both times were when exiting the floor in some way. Once was when I completed the floor and chose to move onto the next one instead of going back to base, which immediately resulted in a crash. The other time was when I let the witch give one of my characters 100 corruption so I could see the ending. The character's icon shattered (not a bug, just the "death" animation), and I crashed immediately after that. If I'm not mistaken, both of those are times when the game would be autosaved (and I was able to pick up from right after I crashed in both cases, though I'm not sure if I missed some dialogue in the process), so maybe that's related.

I should also note that there was a dialogue bug when trying to view a certain scene of Elli being "exposed" by the Gazer. I was able to view it once, but a second scene came up with an exclamation point, suggesting I hadn't seen it before. Clicking on it brought up the "this pangram has..." text for a split-second before closing. This happened any subsequent time Elli got exposed as well, although the scene no longer had an exclamation point. (Edit: The same thing happened when Elli "shuddered in her sleep after smelling tea".) (A third case, this time when Lucette is put to sleep by flower pollen.) (And now I've encountered the *opposite* issue. A gamebreaking bug when I dismantle a beastial pyre with Elli, where the event text is shown but I have no way of advancing or closing out of the event. Clicking in or out of the text box doesn't work, neither the back nor forward arrows work, and the space bar does nothing.) (And issue #2 happened again while Lucette is forced to masturbate by the puppet hands.) (This time #2 happened while being addled by a mindfucker... But specifically on the second text box. The thing is, this one worked before the latest update. Maybe issue #2 was caused by your fix for the crash issue? But issue #1 was happening before that patch.) (Issue #2 again, this time on the fifth text box in Lucette's "held down by tentacles" event. I *can* move backwards here, I just can't progress past the fifth box. Same with the second box of the mindfucker from earlier.) (Aaand I've finally managed to reproduce that last one. Exactly the fifth text box on Lucette being held down by tentacles. So I can confirm that both issues #1 (disappearing pangram text box) and #2 (game refuses to progress past a certain text box) are consistently reproducible and always occur during the same events. I wonder, though, if they're related? Perhaps, what *would* have triggered the pangram text in the first box, instead causes a lockup if it happens in the second box of an event or later.)

On an unrelated note, I'm curious what sort of update schedule to expect from the game. I'm sure you don't have an exact date, but I know that when it comes to more complex games (i.e. anything that isn't just a generic Ren'py VN), the timing between updates varies between different devs, whereas the generic Patreon-fueled Ren'py VNs pretty much always go for the "monthly update" thing. I'm just wondering what sort of wait should be expected and how often I should check in.

 

[Estomac]

Hi NRFB! I Would be delighted to try your game, but I'm on MacOS. Would it be possible to deliver a MacOs executable, or a .godot project I could execute with the Godot app? It can't execute .pcs file.

 

[Rosen King]

I don't know if you already read my last post since I posted it, but just in case, I wanted to point out that I added a bunch of edits reporting cases of two different bugs that became quite common. The original post was from before the crash fix, but the edits were all from after. However, the issue with the disappearing text box occurred both before and after the fix. I'm not so sure about the text lockups, since they were all from events I hadn't seen before the fix.

 

[NRFB]

I don't know if you already read my last post since I posted it, but just in case, I wanted to point out that I added a bunch of edits reporting cases of two different bugs that became quite common. The original post was from before the crash fix, but the edits were all from after. However, the issue with the disappearing text box occurred both before and after the fix. I'm not so sure about the text lockups, since they were all from events I hadn't seen before the fix.

Issue #1 happens if there are formatting errors in scripts specifically (so for example the gazer expose event for higher lust levels was missing a couple of commas in places there needed to be some). The dialogue tries to load, fails to parse correctly, and closes. I've looked through all of the events you reported and found the script errors in them.

Issue #2 was indeed caused by the change. While I was setting up the resource preloading I broke the ambient sound player (which plays looping sounds like lewd noises in the tentacle event or fire background noise in the bestial pyre events).

I can slip the fixes for both of these in real quick. I guess that will teach me to upload builds at 3 am. Maybe I should look into setting up some automated testing or something...