does the game keep any internal backup, export system, or recovery method? I lost an entire game file my clicking the load button, no not by overwriting or saving just loading an entirely different save file slot, about now 3.5 hours ago. the save in slot 2 overrode the slot of file three and when i went back thinking i just clicked the wrong one now there were two of save slot 2 and none of what was in slot three. im tired, sad, hungry, and my sleep plans are destroyed. this is incredibly disappointing and not okay and i have better things to do with my time than have my time wasted by barely even subpar dev failures. if you have a backend way to resolve this mess that would be great. and no an apology will not suffice. please actually fix the error you caused in your game and see if you can in any way see where lost data might have gone.
Faelern
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so, it TURNS OUT if you load a save and then a different save the save you just loaded before gets erased and then instead the second save is then doubled. which MEANS you can just ACCIDENTALLY WIPE A GAME!! hey dev? this HAS to never happen again. and before you ask: no, i didnt accidently click overwrite. i clicked load. this is unacceptable for a game that has a save mechanic at all. you should NEVER have to worry about the game itself WIPING A WHOLE GAME AWAY/ please fix this urgently. pause everything else to fix this. yes its that serious. hours are gone because of that. not okay! because not only can I not get that save back I CANT GET MY TIME BACK!! Furthermore, I can't access my older save to even try and fix anything that was lost in the save your game erased because - again - anything I load will just erase the NEXT thing I load. so my options now are: keep playing a game from a load I already decided I didnt want to keep playing or completely start over, because thats when I last saved. And despite NORMAL game logic, its actually good my first save was that long ago and I hadn't touched it since because if I had I wouldnt be able to start over. But its also very annoying this happened because even if I start from the previous early save I can tell the npcs generated are random and change and thus the WHOLE FAMILY I spent all my time building is permanently impossible to replicate. And any attempt to try to get something close to what I had is - you guessed it! - screwed! Because of your load error. Because logically there's no point in trying to fix what a load error broke if the error hasnt been fixed AND there was no way to prevent this loss BECAUSE of the error. Even if I had saved a few turns before the load I lost ... I wouldve just lost that too. Which is the load error itself. so, yeah. unacceptable. im fuming. and I didn't think that was possible for this game. how frustrating. please fix this swiftly. not months from now. the save is non functional technically otherwise.
update: less than five minutes later ... I'm done. I'm done. The load errors are too many. So, I had noticed this earlier but it wasnt a big deal then: when you save before ending your turn it doesnt always load that turn. it loads the turn you presently have. you know? the one that happened after the save file you're loading up? yes, very much a problem too. Because it means that when you want to load something you're kind of flipping a coin to see if you can even load at all. I can't stress this enough: if an AI is being set to handle the load mechanics per turn, please stop that and just learn how to code a load and save file correctly. my goodness I've never seen a game fail at LOADING. Nor saving the correct moment. That's just too many errors. I really cannot play this. Im trying and its making it harder actually to stay calm not easier.
update 2: i spent 3.5 hours trying to fix this to no avail because it seems that YES! the game truly did erase a whole save, rewrite it without my permission or me EVER clicking save before it did that, and now ... im tired and frustrated and hungry and my head hurts and nothing can be done that this has been my life for four hours. cleaning up someone ele's mistakes. i was really hopeful but ... the disappointment is still there even if i had found the original code for the file that LOADING had overwritten. this is really not okay dude.
mm no. i think its well balanced as it. i didnt suspect that person because it felt obvious then i looked back at the dialouge and went "ahhh i see where i shouldve pinned the culprit down by" but like at least three people were saying incredibly suspicious things. and what happened thirty years ago?! i need more characters, more locations and more deaths. this was great
I really need this to be much longer. Theres a lot of lore for something thats too short to actually explain any of it. and thats way past the culprit even. like clearly SOMETHING happened 30 years ago but like ... explaination please??? some more character points would be great. ill take more people dying if needed but like ... i need what was hinted at to be made good on and no i dont mean the ending. literally just the things people said
you are a BLESSING for making sure things were saved in browser storage! THANK YOU! My only qualm is you really might reduce anxiety by putting that on like the top line of the bio because I just didnt come back and check because i just assumed computer games that didnt have a manual save function just automatically didnt save anything. ive never seen otherwise be true in a game til now!
mm i dont super love the ending since or shifts the concept of being okay onto whether people do certain things at a certain time instead of literally anything in your control, which isnt how reality works. trying to make yourself feel better tends to be exactly why you feel awful because its just a cycle of remembering how bad things feel. the ending was a terrible place to end things
its something to pass time with but its not exactly engaging because its too simple. "sparse" is an understatement. not everything needs to be mind boggling challenge that perplexes the nervous system and tests the capacity of your critical thinking function but ... this ... couldve been ... more. its so repetitive even bothering to continue past level 2 isnt really worth it if you know level 3 & 4 are all the same with maybe an extra bird
update: ... i wrote this on level 11 and genuinely just ...paid so little attention i didnt realize how fast id breezed through them. yeah. this is wayyyyyy too repetitive and so easy i kept waiting for there to be something that prevented me from continuing and like every level i just kept going "... thats it?" but ... its just ... placing blocks and gems. its not even sudoku level of thought needed. its well drawn but i truly cant say anything past "its something to do if your mind is dead and you just want to kill time"
sweet mercy! if this had any MORE filler text I'd just start typing lorem ipsum command into a word doc until i got bored. My gosh!! It should not take fifteen and a half eons to establish a character not liking a party! my word!! brevity is a skill! and everytime after the intro that more unnecessary text was happening I just kept thinking "theres no way everyone else hasnt been rapidly clicking through to get to the actual game right? because at this point i dont care WHAT happens, just that SOMETHING does!" and if that was the point? bravo! but sweet mercy thats not something I as the player need to feel WHILE playing. Quite the opposite! That feeling is how games get dropped for months then by the time you return youve forgotten what the heck is happening and then oh right! this text! gosh! and then the problem repeats itself. Since this is a demo theres time to fix it - please make the words in the game ACTUALLY WORTH BEING THERE.
how dare you. how dare you make me sad about my pretty starlight boy. i HAD to keep playing to not go to sleep to something that made me sad!
On the bright side I genuinely have no notes on this game. Well done.
Yes I'm still sad and mad at you about my boy! He couldve been ANYTHING ELSE. I THOUGHT hed be something else. Alas, I understand. Nevertheless, I do wish you warm pillows for the rest of summer.
this desperately needs something to speed up the game. tremendously. this is probably the slowest of idle games. and thats not good. its very much not worth playing if you cant even get through a few minutes without thinking "mm okay time to go find something else instead". it has the slowness of an idle game without the understanding of the premise of an idle game and thus needs an ultra fast speed option
not gonna lie feels like we missed on out. I really wanted the style of the begining to continue and the whole game just being a chat instead just feels like a huge waste compared to the prolouge. i stopped playing once the chat was all there was. yes i know its in the description but after seeing the prolouge it just felt like all that character choices and the prolouge were wasted on a game that is far less fun than what it couldve been and a vastly more interesting gameplay idea. it gave me the same feeling people have when they read a book and then later realize there were other stories in the book that actually wouldve been a lot more fun to read than what the book's main story was
literally cant get past the 2nd round of the game. i dont know what that says about this but i definitely dont think that the 2nd round was easy enough for being the 2nd round of the game. i really tried several different tactics but the reality is i just kept running out of life too early for any of them to pan out. its basically unplayable for me
Perfect! Glad you're willing to hear me out. Firstly, the artstyle is lovely and the initial meeting situation with the merman is well done. It does show the proper level of danger-light- for an initial meeting and sets up the situation of what to expect from the merman: desperate to escape to the point of reckless endangerment, will attack if near a person even if in a weakened state. Well done on immediately getting the player back into the merman scene by just skipping time. and the note of player accidently gong back tothe wrong living quarters out of habit *chef's kiss* because those small things are so important and I feel like sometimes they just get overlooked.
Now, the meat of this comment: I thoroughly believe that the normalcy of a visual novel demo being a lot of clicking through exposition or npc dialouge shouldn't be normal. This is a game before it is a story. And I feel like visual novels really take a lot of leniency of the "novel" part and really don't need to. In regards to your demo specifically the length's problem is that it was very much the realm of "I'm just moving along a pre-determing route not playing yet and I know at this rate it's going to be a while before actually 'playing will ' happen" and I could pretty much tell it was just going to go that way for a long while and then it ended RIGHT when I started thinking "oh! good! I can actually start playing now and choosing how I interact with him!" I think a demo should include the gameplay itself, not just "here's the story". That's a prolouge to a story, not a demo and I feel a demo should be the gameplay not game backstory nor just game concept being explained. It took so long to reach interacting with the merman that I was just waiting and waiting and waiting for the exposition to stop since from the first minute or 2 I could tell the entire game was about the merman.
Here's what I think a version of the demo in accordance to what I'm talking about could have been: quick meeting with the boss, jumping immediately to redhead giving warnings outside the place where first shift with mermans happens, then the first merman incident then time skip and immediately the feeding scene. In total everything before the "out the water" scene could be handled in max 5 minutes of gameplay. Yes, that's fast. That's the aim. I think demos should be about the crux of the game, not the beginning of what the exposition is. THe current dev style of visual novels and demos neglect to actually let the player play the game experience, just that the game they're playing will include: a merman who's once jumped out the cage and throws fish back at you opposed to like ... well, whatever the game is really about. Like, you see what I mean? I can't even give a proper explanation of what the main crux of the game is because I didn't get to see it. Yes, I understand - in theory - that it's about a merman who doesn't trust you and is willing to attack you. But that's not a game, that's just the equivalent of what the redhead and boss warned the player about. Thus, the length problem: it's doesn't reach the level of what the game's going to be enough and thus makes the demo feel like it's just exposition and thus the "slideshow" feeling.
Honestly it's wwwaaayyyy too short to be a demo. It was closer to a clicked through slideshow. Visual novels, because of their format and that they are essentially books you click through sometimes, need to be longer than actual games where you're actually doing something. A countable number of minutes of gameplay is too short for a demo
Completely understandable. And though I've barely gotten past day 2 I can tell this has a lot of content so I'm surprised it was done in just a month. Oh! smart move rotating the flat images.
How exactly DID you do that? I don't think I've that in an itch game before. Was it an animation effect that depends on what game engine you develop with?