[Twine] Escape from Enderon 0.0.8

[Varlance]

Hello! I'd like to introduce my new game (in development):

In Escape from Enderon, you play as the companion to the Prince of Valencar. Your caravan is ambushed en route to the capital city of Enderon and you are forced to journey back to Valencar through hostile territory. Bandits, guards, bounty hunters and slavers are all out to get you, though!

Escape from Enderon is built in Twine 2 with Sugarcube 2 format. It should run in your browser (I use Google Chrome) like other Twine interactive fiction games.

The main focus of the game is to avoid being progressively restrained and used for sex (and in future content, enslaved/dominated). The game is M/M focused.

Trello board: https://trello.com/b/150woSdI/enderon-game

Features:

• Simple customisable player character
• 12 items of clothing and 11 weapons - not all can be discovered yet
• Simple combat system: 15 enemy types across 5 factions, although not all can be encountered yet
• Combat evasion system: try to avoid combat by running or hiding from your enemy
• Choose from 4 player classes with a minor bonus and disadvantage to each
• Win condition - travel for long enough through Enderon and you can achieve victory (currently quite difficult due to game balance)
• Forage for useful items
• Minimal inventory management: the game makes inventory decisions for you
• Masturbate to reduce arousal
• Restraint and restraint removal system
• Combat defeat outcomes currently present: (1) nothing happens (2) rope handcuffs (3) rope handcuffs + rope anklecuffs (4) penis shrinking (5) stripped naked (6) blowjob (7) facial (8) robbed of money (9) robbed of money and items (10) progressive restraint + bad end (11) forced to masturbate penis (12) anal sex (13) anal sex with possible addition of chastity
• Limited physical transformation (penis shrinking) as a possible outcome of defeat in combat

For more info, visit https://www.patreon.com/varlance or https://www.varlanceinteractive.com/tag/escape-from-enderon/.

Feedback welcome!

 

[karunama]

I'll give this a whirl and get back to you asap. Might be a couple days before I have time enough to do so, but I'll fit it into my schedule somehow.

 

[karunama]

So far the content is quite limited and repetitive. I'm assuming a lot of that is due to the current stage of development. It is a bit jarring/disappointing to lose to a slaver and not get enslaved, but again, I assume that's just incomplete. I have to say though, I didn't really see a way to make the alarm level go down. IIRC, surrendering is supposed to help with that, but as far as I can tell, it does nothing. Is that also a WIP?

I also found it incredibly difficult to get the bad ending from being super restrained . I was surprised by how much it took. It was like 14+ weeks into the game before a guard finally roped my collar and led me away. I have to admit, I was hoping for a longer (lewder) description of my end, but nbd.

 

[Varlance]

Thanks @karunama. I guess my priority will be to add more content! Alarm level should only go down when the player is captured (not implemented yet) and the bondage bad end is temporary.
Does the game need more of a progressing storyline where travel results in bits of story being revealed?

 

[karunama]

Hrmm... I don't think it *needs* it. I could see it being beneficial after a fashion, but I wouldn't call it necessary by any means. The basic premise is pretty clear and clean cut, so anything extra is just that; extra. Things I personally think the game could use... well, you already know that more content and especially more variations of lewdery, but I'd say in particular that *victory* based sex scenes are the big thing missing.

This is ostensibly a porn game, so in the current build the character and player have opposing objectives; The character wants to escape battles and/or win fights, but the *player* wants to lose battles because that's where all the porn they came for is hiding. In the current build, the character exalts in their victory because they get lots of new equips and later victories will be easier, but for the player it's anti-climactic; you just fought a tough battle, but didn't get any sexytiems for your achievement? Sadface.

 

[Stemwinder]

The primary gameplay loop needs some work. In a text game especially if it's easy to mindlessly fall into a series of clicks then a player's eyes glaze over. The areas are all the same so I quickly stopped checking them and it's so easy to simply reload when you get into an encounter that this also becomes part of the loop.

To keep the tedium from setting in you need to break up the loop with something that engages the player's attention. Quests are the obvious way but currently the game's travel system doesn't really support such a thing; the travel areas would need to be less "generic stopping point 2 of 8" and more a real location so that the player can reach them specifically and interact with them. When you explore as a player you're really hoping to find something interesting and as-is there's nothing to find but equipment and progress toward a vague goal that isn't rewarding in any way.

The erotic content seems to be envisioned in the violated heroine format (where it primarily comes from losing) but those have to be managed carefully in order to work. Players generally don't -like- to lose but want to see the sex; most of these games resolve this conundrum by "rewarding" the player for losing with some sort of progress toward a lewd goal that opens up more options. Right now there's not much of a reward for winning -or- losing, you just lose if you want to see sex and win if you want to progress.

Think about making the different legs of the journey memorable, how to reward the player for progress, and ways to make the primary gameplay loop fun and engaging.