The Dark Circle - A Halloween Adventure

[shadow2k]

This is a little Halloween themed game I've created as part of a new series I am working on of episodic adult games in my Grrl Power universe.

 

 

Audrey Thompson is a girl haunted (literally) by her traumatic past.  Most avoid her - saying she is cursed, haunted, or a witch.  Now a young adult, Audrey has become a proficient ghost hunter, searching out the paranormal wherever she can find it on a quest for answers, hoping to some day solve the mystery of her parents' deaths.

 

On this dark Halloween night, Audrey's quest has taken her to a strange mansion deep in the woods near her home town of Moon Valley.  There she seeks to take advantage of a Convergence - a point where the mystical Ley Lines cross, in an attempt to contact her parents and get the answers she seeks.  But a mansion built upon a Convergence is no coincidence and as she enters, she discovers that she is not the first to be drawn to this mystical place of power.

 

Guide Audrey through the spooky haunted mansion as she discovers what became of its former occupants, and uncover a sinister plot by an evil coven of witches who seek sacrifices to bring about hell on earth.  Can Audrey stop the coven?  Or was her arrival all part of their evil plans?

 

Fetishes you will find here:

* Ravishment

* Clothing Destruction

* Breeding

* Demons

* Modest Female Protagonist

* Heroine Violation

* Weird and Scary male doms

* Lactaction (a little bit - but only if certain things happen)

 

Feature List:

* Traditional RPG Combat

* Dungeon Crawling

* Optional Sex Scenes (they can be aborted or skipped entirely)

* Non-Terminal Failure States (you can't actually lose the game, but every time you are defeated your score drops and it affects the story)

* Short (a playthrough can be completed in a couple of hours at a normal pace)

* Score Attack (try to get the best score possible - being defeated lowers your score, but earning XP and doing key things in the game increases it)

* Possibility to complete the game without being defeated (can try for a no-sex playthrough)

* B-Movie style plot

 

As of this posting, the game is in beta, so it probably has a few bugs but I am working on getting those fixed.  I have tested it quite a bit and completed a playthrough on my own so I know it's finishable, but I don't feel I have tested it quite enough to say that it's bug free or perfectly balanced.  I wanted to get something playable out before Halloween since it's a themed game, so here you go.  This game is free for everyone to download and I am going to be using it to gauge interest in this type of game as well as to hopefully drive more interest to my Patreon.  Bug reports and feedback are welcome, and should help me fix any remaining bugs faster.

 

There is some replayability to the game - the early and mid game will mechanically play out differently if you take different routes through the mansion (some routes are also more difficult).  Also, depending on what happens to you during the game your score will vary.  I'm still working on getting the score thing to a satisfying point.  At the moment, you can grind your score up infinitely by just putting off the final boss and grinding enemies but that's not terribly fun past a certain point and I don't want to encourage that, so I might make the score time based.  The game itself has no hard time limit or failure limit, so you can play at your own pace, but I'd like to have time be a factor on score calculation.  That will be for a future update.

 

Download it from my Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/dark-circle-15101783

 

[myuhinny]

Looks interesting and the player in the screenshot looks cute. Will download and check it out.

 

I have one question how the heck are you suppose to start this game? There doesn't seem to be a .exe file in the folder.

 

Think I figured it out you need to click on .html but there seems to be a error when doing that you get a black screen with the error failed to load: data/actors.json.

[shadow2k]

Hmm.  This might be the first RPG Maker MV game I've actually tried to release.  You are right, there is no exe.  I guess with MV they made it so you have to export it first.  Well, thanks for catching that.  I'll get that fixed ASAP.

 

Edit: (Update)

Ok, so what I had uploaded was my dev files, which is how I'm used to doing things since I like to include patrons and fans in my development process.  But with MV that doesn't work since it won't actually create an executable file unless you tell it to export the project to a distribution package, which I'm not used to doing (since I have previously only worked in VX and VX Ace).  In short, you can play the game with the dev files but only if you own RPG Maker MV (you can load the rpgproject file with MV).

 

tl;dr

I'm uploading a version with a runnable exe now.  It will probably be a few hours because my internet up speed is pretty low, but once it's up I'll update the links and post an update here.

 

Thanks again to myuhinny for catching this so soon.  I can't believe I didn't even think about checking for that.

[myuhinny]

Your welcome it helped that I saw the games thread at about the time that you posted the thread so I went to check it out right away. I'll wait till the new files are uploaded since I don't have RPG maker and I already deleted the files since there was no .exe in it. The good thing is that uploading to mega.nz usually uploads fairly fast and also downloads pretty good as well.

[shadow2k]

Ok.  I've updated all the links with the new version of the game (that's actually runnable).  While I was uploading it, I did some more testing and came up with some more fixes and made some changes to scoring as well, so I'll have a new version uploading overnight too.  None of these updates will break saves, so you don't have to worry about that.  Just copy your saves over from the old version to the new one (once you have saves) and it'll update your saves with the new features and fixes.

[myuhinny]

Ok I downloaded the RPG maker MV trial version just to test the game took me a few minutes to figure out how to start the game with it and it seems alright but holy fuck you need to really really really tone down that fucking music during the sex scenes it's way to fucking loud good thing I wasn't wearing any head phones or my ears would of been blown.

 

I mean it kind of defeats the purpose of having sound effects for the girl during the sex scenes if they are never going to be heard because the musics so fricken load you can't even hear her let alone hear yourself think. The only reason I knew she had sound effects was because I was listening to some of the videos files using gom player.

[shadow2k]

That's strange.  I use headphones when I am developing and the sound levels seem fine to me.  There may be some differences in hardware that could be causing it, but I'm not exactly sure what I could do to fix it.  I didn't think there was a difference between the sound levels during video playback and the sound levels in game, but I can check it.  Even so, I've never seen them vary by much, so such a large discrepancy seems like it might be a hardware or codec problem.  It's possible MV's codecs aren't great.  The entire movie playback system in MV seems pretty rudimentary, though I felt it was enough to get the job done.

 

This is something I will have to look into and experiment with but since my experience was different it may take some time to come up with an elegant solution.  In the meantime I might see if I can put in some kind of option that you can turn on that will automatically lower music volume during movie playback.  I would make it optional since it seems it wouldn't apply to everyone.

 

In any case, thanks for the feedback.  I've gone ahead and added a note to my design doc to remind myself to look into this further next time I have some time to dev again.

[shadow2k]

Update: Apparently RPG Maker MV's distribution packager left out a stock sound effect for some reason.  I've created a patch which should fix it here: https://mega.nz/#!xpkDnKwS!2LQ09CbLdTP-Cteqhi8C5TJu0svN2_wEtGyN1Fo3szo

[saviliana]

When I enter a combat, there were error of missing enemies picture assets, mind you repack it?

[shadow2k]

Which asset?  I need to know exactly which one since apparently there is a problem with the distribution packager leaving out random files.  So I'll have to replace each missing file via a patch.

[saviliana]

Which asset?  I need to know exactly which one since apparently there is a problem with the distribution packager leaving out random files.  So I'll have to replace each missing file via a patch.

Anything form the folder

 

sv_actors

 

Every battle there are errors form it actors assets were not found.

[shadow2k]

I'm working on a new version with a few fixes and an option to reduce the volume of music in sex scenes as requested.  I noticed an option in the packager to exclude unused assets which I normally turn on in order to reduce file size.  I'm turning that off this time to see if it fixes this issue.  Technically that shouldn't be necessary since the packager should know what assets are needed and which arent (otherwise what's the point of that option to begin with?), however if that is indeed the problem then this new version should fix that.  And if so, I guess that means that option is bugged, and I won't be using it again.

 

Thank you to everyone who has been participating with bug reports and feedback so far.  These issues wouldn't be getting fixed without you.

[shadow2k]

The new version is up on my patreon now.  This should fix all reported issues thus far.

[myuhinny]

Seems to work a lot better I did notice in the demon sex scene that there seemed to be one scene that would only show a black screen and you had to hit ESC to move to the next scene. Music during sex scenes is a lot better now and you can actually hear the girl now. Must only be 2 people that can sex the player up in the game? The warlock and the demon.

I did notice the sex scenes vary depending on how much of her clothes are gone.

 

I do find it hard to believe that anyone would actually ever be able to get to the end of this game without cheating there is just no way in hell that you are going to be able to move and sneak past that many enemies think the only thing that I didn't find was the white tome found the black one though.

 

Played it for awhile normally then cheated and beat the boss with no babies then just ran around and let them have fun with her.

[sen4mi]

I really like the design of this game, for the most part.

 

It's not very erotic, perhaps unfortunately?, but I still like it a lot. 

 

One thing I think I would change, though, is

Spoiler

the wild magic "sleep" - it might be realistic in some sense to have everyone afflicted with narcolepsy and then have to wait however long before you can wake up. And maybe there is a discoverable way of defending against sleep. But sitting there waiting for a wild magic wave to either wake you up or finish you off can take quite a lot of time...

 

[sen4mi]

16 hours ago, myuhinny said:

I do find it hard to believe that anyone would actually ever be able to get to the end of this game without cheating there is just no way in hell that you are going to be able to move and sneak past that many enemies think the only thing that I didn't find was the white tome found the black one though.

I am not sure what you consider "cheating" but I finished the game with two defeats without having to revert to a previous save. I think I could do it again, from scratch without the defeats (but there's a huge random element involved so maybe not on my first try - or maybe I revert to an old save a time or two).

 

Edit: if you want tips on my approach:

 

Spoiler

• You will have to engage in combat - just avoid being overwhelmed. Stick with fighting single warlocks initially.
• Sleep after every battle, initially - that will gradually build up your abilities
• Do not bother repairing clothes until you have learned your spells and are geared up - it's too expensive
• Decompose all potions (and swords) until you are have built up your abilities and have good gear
• Once you have befuddle and zap you might be able to survive two battles without sleeping
• Once you have healing and a good staff you can survive most encounters
• You do need potions later on, though

 

 

 

[myuhinny]

I played for quite awhile but always seemed to lose so then I later cheated by changing some stats for her but I left her attack alone as you don't want to make her OP. 

[sen4mi]

On 12/4/2017 at 4:19 PM, myuhinny said:

I played for quite awhile but always seemed to lose so then I later cheated by changing some stats for her but I left her attack alone as you don't want to make her OP. 

If you get to a point where you seem likely to lose (rate of damage taken seems likely to defeat you before you can take down your opponent) you can almost always escape (unless you really got in over your head, or your luck is really bad, or you do not recognize the problem early enough - you might need two or four escape attempts). Or... that was my experience. Maybe I was just lucky?