https://chyoa.com/story/The-Idol.47144 Making a page here for people to post feedback and bug reports on. Since this is going to be more of a game than just a branching story, bug reports in particular are appreciated, so I don't have to tear my hair out over whether or not the story appears as intended or not
I read the first real chapter. First off, I'm intrigued! "Guy who lives in female-only household discovers ancient magic and uses it to fuck everyone" is hardly a novel idea, but you've played it well. That is, of course, assuming that is in fact where the story is going. You've already explicitly subverted some of the standard tropes (like the old (wo)man in the magic shop) so it might not be! The only real criticism I have so far is that you choose some weird words and sentence structures sometimes. For instance, you write "Undaunted, you began looking around the store", but as far as I can tell, nothing has happened for the protagonist to be potentially daunted by, unless it's the unusually aromatic tea. "You watched, slightly confused, as the woman brought up a small, red ledger from behind the counter." What is there to be confused by? The item doesn't have a tag, so she's checking her price list: seems perfectly normal and expected to me. "The voice of Emma, your older sister, shouted" A voice can't shout, but a person can. "The journey home was brief, carrying the clay idol in a small plastic bag." 'The journey' is the subject in this sentence, making it seem like it carried the idol, rather than you doing it. On a slightly higher level, you could just skip this entire section (the one whole sentence ), leaving the journey home completely implicit, and simply start the next section with greeting your mother. You don't have to account for every moment, after all. "You suddenly jumped to your feet as a knock on your door was heard." You've put effect before cause, use the passive voice 'was heard' (who heard? Make it explicit), and the 'suddenly' begs for a reason. Why are you jumping to your feet? Are you scared? Guilty? Embarrassed? Angry? I know this is all a little nitpicky, but since it happens a lot, it might be something to be aware of. I also clicked around a bit in the post-prologue game itself, but you have way too many 'TBC' chapters. As a reader, I don't want to have to search for the things you've already written. Possible bug: "Take $$ AND my panties and FUCK ME". Tuesday afternoon, chapter 6.2. Is the story supposed to end abruptly when you go to bed Sunday night?
Thanks, glad you like it! Fair enough, I'll probably do a rewrite of the prologue at some point in the future to deal with grammar/logic inconsistencies. Not at all, this is valuable feedback! It'll be like that for a while unfortunately, as the story is in its early stages - TBC means "To be continued", meaning I haven't had time to fill out that route yet. The idea for the story is that you're supposed to be able to just wander around and do pretty much anything, and it will lead the character/reader into some sort of accidental (down the line perhaps deliberate) sex scene. Could you be more specific on what the bug is? Do you mean that one of the dollar signs disappeared? I've switched it to "Take cash" instead, since the $ sign seems to be reserved as an identifier for variables and confuses the editor. It is not, it's supposed to loop around to Monday. Figured out it was a misspelled variable name and fixed it - thanks for the report!
I just meant it's discouraging to click around and constantly find dead ends everywhere. Better to just not have those branches until there's something there to find. I understand, you're pretty early in the story, but even at this stage, if you give me a choice between taking 12 actions, and only 1 of those actually leads anywhere, then at least 10 of those other 11 choices shouldn't exist yet. Readers shouldn't have to stumble around hoping to accidentally find something good. I should always feel like I'm in control, even if there's few real choices to be made. Don't make me do things that are essentially random: having quests only progress at 1 time on 1 weekday in 1 place essentially forces readers to do everything 21 times: no bueno. If my goal is to impregnate the twin sister, I should be able to figure out reasonably easily how to progress in that direction. For example, by repeatedly visiting her room, or by picking up blatant hints that she showers every evening and peeking on her in the bathroom. Oh, no, I thought it looked like some code accidentally leaked into the text output. I've never done anything with the game features of CHYOA, so I figured I'd point it out just in case. Adding anywhere between 1 to 3 dollar signs probably fixes it. I'm still not really sure what that title means, though.
Was going to say that I'd rather not delete branches I've already established, but then quickly realized that I can just make a variable that is never true to hide them until I flesh them out. So, I'll go do that! The title is ripped straight from Pornhub, so take it up with them I guess
Oh, clever! I did look into if it was possible to unpublish chapters, but I hadn't thought of that approach.
