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Ha! Glad you approve.

Of course, glad to take feedback as long as it's civil! That said:

"Gotta be completely straightforward, this type of games (smut) isn't my type of game in any shape or form."

I mean no offense by this, and don't mean this as an attack, but if that's the case, why are you playing this game? These games exist primarily as frameworks to get people off, to entertain in the explicit realm. If you're not interested, that's fine of course, but why play this then? I suspect you have notes on gameplay, and I'm happy to discuss, but just understand that any game mechanics etc in these games exist in service to that primary goal. Absent the explicit content, it's just...kind of mediocre small-time RPG. 

That, said, let's get into it! 

"I wished block had more practical usage besides like 3 enemies (2 being bosses)"

These games in general essentially exist from a base of me starting with the defaults RPGMaker MV supplies, and then tweaking here and there and building as it occurs to me, if it works. Block is/was there initially simply because it was part of the basic moveset of characters in the game engine, and I thought it might serve a purpose in the games eventually (and it looked kinda neat). As you noted, it DID end up getting used a little, but not a ton yet. I am blending it in/finding a few more uses for it in Chapter 3, though they're a bit subtle. Not a core thing by any means.

Glad you like the charge mechanic. It's not exactly big-brain, but I saw another game use it as a basic way to not just have battles be "press attack repeatedly" without having to actually design a complex system, and shamelessly ripped it off. It's a lot, for a low dev cost. A lot of things in the game are like that.

" I wish there was some sort of maybe in game passive which told you that you do regain all energy back after the fight,"

It's a deliberate design decision in these games to explain only what's absolutely necessary. If there's a core item or switch or whatever that's not already blindingly obvious, I'll sparkly it or light it, if there's some flow point that might not be obvious, I'll have Mezz say something to himself, but otherwise, this is very much a game that expects players to figure things out on their own. It springs in part from my experience playing a lot of barely or not at all translated Japanese eroge, where EVERYTHING had to be figured out by me due to the language barrier, and I was always impressed at how many games were entirely possible to figure out knowing only meager Japanese. So that's been a kind of dual guiding principle for my stuff: on the one hand, I don't hand-hold, but on the other I do my best to make sure it IS fairly easy to figure everything out if you poke a little. There's also a lot in the games kind of hidden around the margins; non-essential, but for those who do manage to poke around enough. 

Long story short, you DID eventually notice your energy was refilling. And you got to feel smarter for working that out yourself rather than having a pamphlet given to you. So working as intended.

Oh yeah, the item "trick" with one of the bosses was something I was very proud off...only to find that a lot of people just tank it the hard way anyway! Which is fine, and an intended option, but it's much, much easier if you do it the "right" way.

Ah, ok, now I'm starting to see where you're coming from in terms of the explicit content. This comes up a lot, so let me dust off: THE SCALE.

Games have a scale of sexy. An admixture if you will. Almost every game has at least a LITTLE sexy (even the original mario bros and fucking pacman, though it's minuscule). But you can slide that divider on the scale one way or the other, more sexy, less serious story, more story, less sexy. What I've found, at least in my experience, is that that divider should NEVER BE IN THE MIDDLE. It has to bias, either to one side or the other. You can have a very horny game with a bit of story, or a very in-depth story with just a bit of sexy, but half and half doesn't work. So I, obviously, bias toward sexy. 

Please understand I don't meant to mock you, but I've seen this reaction a few times, and it's always a little amusing.  "Why is there so much porn in this game it gets in the way of the gameplay!" Because it's a porn game. More specifically, it's a game about losing control, humiliation, corruption, and all kinds of mind games. That's why you lose control in some sections. That's the point. It's hot (to some people, myself included). If it isn't to YOU, that's certainly understandable, people like different things. But again, all of this exists in service to the horny. I think some people just don't understand this somehow. There isn't too much sugar in the coffee, there's just the right amount of coffee in the sugar, because this is a coffee pastry, not a cup of joe. 

All that said, I WILL say that the games, in general, ARE very deliberately structured so that if something happens, you really, probably let it happen. You probably know what's going to happen if you poke around that weird pipe in a deserted tunnel. You probably know what's going to happen if you don't stand up to Mahir, or keep losing to the mobs. It is difficult, often VERY difficult, but you should be able to play through the game without any sexual content at all, as long as you don't lose. The whole premise, the whole underlying kink of the games is that you COULD have avoided it, technically. But you didn't, because it was easier not to, and things kept sliding farther and farther into corruption.

And I want to underline that again, because you brought up the tunnel specifically. I can't TELL you, that ruins the whole thing. The whole point is about risk. But basic storytelling clues should key you in that this is a risky action to take. I'm glancing at it now, the prompt is:

"There's something stuck in the vent.

Try to knock it free?

Yes     No"

If you've played any survival horror, you know what this is. You know that when a game asks "Do you want to take obvious action x?" instead of just automatically DOING it, there's a reason. The meta implication is "Shit's about to go down, are you ready? Have you saved? Are you SURE you want to do this?" This is basically ripped off directly from Silent Hill, but a bunch of games do it. It's so well established that the games eventually start toying with it and keying you up only for nothing much to happen. But you know it COULD, and that it probably WILL on one of these prompts eventually. I just want to emphasize this because choice IS important in GT. There's risk, and the unknown, but you do largely end up where you choose to be. And if not...reload! While I try not to be TOO bullshit, these games are designed with the expectation that you save often, and rotate your saves.

I'm not mad or offended, in fact I'm somewhat honored you're actually interacting with/perceiving this as an ordinary game, instead of a smut one. But it IS a smut one. That is its purpose. I feel strongly that explicit content works better if it's paired with CONTEXT: setting, characters, gameplay mechanics, etc. That's why, for those into it, playing something like this is a lot more fun than just looking at a stack of pictures. But these games are, at the end of the day, tools for getting people horny. If you want to try to enjoy them WITHOUT that I suppose you can, and again, I'm honored you would even try, but it's a little like ordering the salad at McDonalds. That's not really what it's for. 

That said, there's nothing wrong with enjoying the characters or the setting. I do too! But that sexuality is a core part of what these games are, for better and worse. 

Boars are mostly the first game. There is boar scene early on in GT in Haven, but it requires a few different steps to unlock:

1. Transferring the datacrystal.js file from the first game AFTER YOU'VE COMPLETED A GAME where you were defeated a bunch. It goes in the js/plugins folder of GT, overwrite the one that's already there.

2. If you've done this correctly, the SECOND time you return to Haven in the intro, a scene should trigger as you walk past the alley next to the hotel.

Nice! Yeah, a few people told me, reached out to thank him but haven't heard back -.-. Very cute (and very hot) stuff though.

Oh hey, glad to hear from you, and glad you're enjoying the games! I hope you don't mind me leaving this in English; I'd just be running it through auto-translate anyway, and whatever you have set up on your browser is probably as good or better.

Really appreciate the kind words. I do what I can, but knowing people care certainly helps as I power through these long development times. So on to the questions:

I use RPGMaker MV. In my opinion it's the best version. MZ is a minor upgrade that adds some neat little things (for example when you program an autopath for a character, it actually visualizes it for you instead of you having to hold it in your mind), but it's not essential and I don't want to risk breaking old plugins. The version after MZ turned RPGMaker into a plugin/addon for Unity, which is a horrifying and disgusting idea.

I refer to the games as "Chapters", and the plan is, and has been, to eventually have 5 (the one that's currently in development would be #3). We'll see if I manage to get that far though. Each game is designed to be its own story as well though, so even on their own they should be fun enough.

As for other games, we'll have to see. There are a lot of options and possibilities out there, but things change fast, year to year and even month to month. We'll see where I am when and if I finish this series.

No problem asking about translations though. The way that works is simple: people are free to do fan translations, and if they like they can submit them. If I take a look through the translation and it seems stable/decent quality, I share it. So the answer is that there will be a Russian translation as soon as someone makes one, which hasn't happened yet to my knowledge. I think there was talk of one at some point, but it never happened. If someone wants to though, the files are all there, unencrypted text, and using something like Translator++ can help you keep track of your work and avoid typos that break the formatting. No rules other than try to be accurate, and human translation is preferred. If you use more that 20% machine translation material, be sure to say so.

And again, thanks for your support, and kind words. Much appreciated.

Glad you're enjoying the games so far!

I thought there might be a config file that could be tweaked for keybinds, but it doesn't look like it. No plans to custom code that at this point, has too much potential to break other things. I will point out though that the Japanese controls are A and Z for your confirm and cancel buttons, which is much more natural than enter and shift, buttons on the left, movement on right. All available by default, and easier than trying to mash your hands into that one part of the keyboard at least. 
I did originally intend to do some mouse control with the glory hole mini-game, but it just isn't doable with the way RPGMaker and available plugins handle mouse input. Too flaky.
And no, no discord. This is the place to discuss the game, ask about bugs, share fanart etc.

People have asked, no plans at the moment, but we will see. And thanks! Glad you're enjoying the games so far, and same to you, hope it's a good holiday season.

Oh man, haven't been to hypnohub in ages.

Oh there's a lot of possibilities. Only limited time and space to put them in, but there will definitely be some fun ones.

GT you mean? Really appreciate it. I mean at the end of the day, it IS just the porn game. I'm not making earth-shattering art here. But I take these games seriously when I'm making them, and I'm glad that comes across at least a little. There's a lot of potential for explicit games that just isn't explored, most of it is extremely flat. It's an interactive medium, and you can do a lot of fun things with that if you care.

Oh MV, which came out around 2015/2016 I think, is a huge step up from the earlier stuff. Much better gui IMHO, huge plugin ecosystem. If you want, you can basically put the whole thing up on blocks and make it whatever you like, because MV swaps from being an ordinary exe to basically just a headerless browser running a big pile of javascript. So definitionally, anything js can do, MV can probably do as well. 
MZ came out a bit later, which was more of a modest tweak to MV to improve the GUI a bit more, add a few things here and there. And then...they made it into an addon for Unity. YECH. I'm content to stick with MV.

Thanks! Yeah, I really enjoy the RPG format, because once you have a few art assets you can easily drop in a new NPC here or there and add some more little dialog etc. It's easy to fill out the little corners of the world, and a fun thing to work on.

Oh I've definitely considered doing more with Scratch. Aside from the dating side content in 3 though, that'll probably be saved for 4, as 4 will be somewhat tech-themed. It'll be a good fit.

Glad you liked it! I'll definitely agree that the forced return to the glory hole are a little flat: there are many experiments here, and not all of them work. I assume MOST people probably only did that route as a secondary anyway though, or had an earlier save before getting addicted, so it wasn't the end of the world. 
But yes, Mezz is DEFINITELY aware he's desirable. Or...well it's complicated. He's smug about everything, including that. But I think he's one of those people who's laser-focused on a particular thing, in this case being the image in his mind of what a "hero" is. He's not SO laser focused that it makes him an asshole, he still cares about and helps other people, and not just to stroke his own ego or live out his own self-image. But it does make him a little blind to other things, like how Scratch feels about him, or maybe even the thugs he encounters. 

In his mind, I think he sees all those interactions through the lens of "bad guys torturing the hero", or in the case of say the center path, the hero doing something sly to sneak past. Mezz I think is one of those infuriating people who's very good at what he does, but never really takes things fully seriously until he's FORCED to (which he obviously is, quite frequently in these games). Again, not to the point of being an asshole or being shitty to people, or being totally divorced from reality: He's still somewhat practical, down to earth, helps people when they need it. But he definitely has an ego, and VERY much enjoys what he does, and gets kind of caught up in it all. Which is why it's so much fun to pull him forcefully out of that.

You finished them! I honestly forgot they weren't complete; your "in progress" versions had a really neat inked look even at that stage. Glad to see them with color and shading though, there is some TEXTURE to these. Love it. And you draw a very cute Mezz! Thanks for taking the time to do art of the game, and two pieces at that! Much appreciated.
Also, while the boars wearing bondage harnesses certainly isn't canon, I love it here, and especially love that even the harnesses ALSO have the goofy shoulder spikes. Perfect.

Same to you!

F4 fullscreens RPGMaker MV games, and works for both CS and GT. That said, keep in mind the artwork and rendering resolution for the games is fixed at 1024x768, so you're just duping pixels if you make the window bigger than that. The games are deliberately designed to be run in fairly small windows, but if you want to fullscreen them, you certainly can (and RPGMaker even preserves the aspect ratio!).

Well thanks! I'm glad it's gotten to a point that people do at least somewhat enjoy the art.

No, I definitely considered that, but ultimately rejected it. For one, pink ends up softening and feminizing a character design a bit, it pushes things in the direction of "cute", which isn't helpful here. It also just doesn't flow well with the other colors being used. And finally, while I'm FAR from an expert on color theory, there's this idea of variety vs conformity when you're designing a palette for a character. In oooold games people would deliberately re-use colors because of tech limitations, and in traditional animation the same was true, but for practical reasons, to save time in the ink and paint department. But even with those limitations gone it's still good to keep to a narrow band of colors, maybe five or six-ish, and slight variations on those colors, because it makes a design more unified, less chaotic. How "compressed" or monochrome a color scheme is also conveys psychology: generally things that are dangerous, sinister, grim, etc are less colorful. And since the whole aesthetic of the games is to be a bit cartoony, this is heightened even more.

So yes, pink there would be more "accurate", but subjectively it doesn't flow/blend well imho, and "objectively" it doesn't convey the feeling of the character well, and adds too much variety to the design, making it overly "active" and "noisy". It's not that pink is "bad" in a vacuum, no color is good or bad. I just don't think it works well in context.

Sorry, didn't see this for some reason until just now. "Outside" of c:? If you're unzipping to a folder on C:, that's still on C:, which in most cases is the system drive. If possible I'd try it on another drive/partition (as long as it's not external). Theoretically a folder plopped down on C: should work though, it's mostly system folders like My Documents that might give you some odd results. What errors are you seeing? From the extraction, or when you try to run the game?

It's been a conscious effort to not just do skaven, but these guys are definitely a little more cognitively gifted (a LITTLE). 

It does certainly open up some fun possibilities. Lot to chose from.

No, you were somewhat right to begin with, though to some degree it's both: more enemies to a mob, and probably a few more mobs on the map (though not going crazy with this).

The payment processor thing is part of larger push this year, and into the future, for increased censorship and surveillance, driven by moral panic and apathy. The specific situation with payment has not gotten any worse or better, but the larger picture continues to get worse. Even more states continue to pass porn ID laws, which are effectively laws attempting to intimidate people out of consuming explicit material in any way, since if they do, their name goes in a database, which will obviously be used for blackmail and coercion in the future, either by the government, hackers, or both. Buy porn, give your government ID, a year later there's a hack, billboards go up in your city with a bunch of the id photos, including yours: "THESE PEOPLE ENJOY [socially unacceptable kind of porn]. DO YOU KNOW THEM?"

We'll see what effect this has on Itch. A number of states are also attempting to ban the use of VPNS to access explicit sites (and will likely succeed, in the sense of passing the law). If they didn't, VPNs would obviously make short work of their surveillance attempts. It's unclear how any of this will work, but if it sticks we are rapidly moving toward a totally de-anonymized internet where, as we've seen elsewhere, you can then be penalized, jailed, debanked etc for saying things the government doesn't like. So we've moved a bit beyond just porn censorship: we're now looking at the potential for TOTAL censorship on the net, enforced by jail time. Meanwhile, Chat Control (all tech companies forced to de-encrypt and monitor all communications of their users) has been resurrected in the EU after Germany killed the first proposal, and will be up for yet another round of negotiations and deal-making.

This is another reason I'm trying to get the game out as soon as I reasonably can. But no, to answer your question, no plan to change pricing at this point.

Ha, well I appreciate it!

Aw thanks, glad you enjoy the worldbuilding. Like I've said, a lot of how I make the games just comes down to instinct and what I want to see in a game I play, what I think is neat. And instinct leads me to having actual interesting backdrops for the stuff to happen on (and also spending ages editing together tilesheets to make that happen -.-). 
"Cannon fodder" is actually pretty simple in this engine/genre though: the enemies are fairly easy to kill, and there's a lot of them. They exist to make the player feel good about themselves, feel like they're powerful and making progress, and also a safe introductory zone for learning the feel of the mechanics and gameplay. That's the general RPG framework anyway. And then we sprinkle on the filthy implications of that. I try to make most of each game first from the perspective of being "legit" and clean, and then add in "but what if it went wrong?" In theory if you play through the games on the "pure" route, they should almost entirely resemble ordinary RPGs. I want the filth to feel like you took a wrong turn down an alley in the game somehow and suddenly significantly changed the narrative and framing.
In terms of more specifics than that though, not a lot to share because I haven't fully worked it out yet. I will say that the fights with the rats will be fairly simple: not a lot of battle-sex art (because again, the meta-implication is that you're "not even" supposed to lose to them, so why would there be?) But if things go far enough south, there will be some...interesting things happening during fights. And after.

Probably won't reuse, as the setting for this particular one is a bit...odd and removed from the rest of the series (though it will tie in here and there). 
But no, I'm sure everyone would have liked more battlesex stuff, and there will be a fair bit of it with the wolves, but "there's only one enemy with palette swaps" was a recurring direct complaint for both games, which is somewhat understandable. The client dogs were an attempt to stem this in GT, but then they ended up in their own area and not really appearing in combat. The rats ALSO ended up with their own area, but you will definitely be fighting them!

Man I wish I was. It is steadily improving though, and I am a LITTLE proud of these standees, because they represent a mostly successful effort to break out of the really stiff, flat poses I did for the hyenas and the boars. The second especially, but even with the first I tried to have a little more life and flex to the pose, rather than looking like a pressed leaf. And I'm pretty happy with how it turned out!

Ha, excellent!

Yeah, like I said, most of that, aside from the scene stuff, was already finished a while ago, and I don't want to spoil ALL of it. So for now it will probably be more basic stuff like this. Might be one or two more explicit preview pics before release though, can't say for sure.

Oh you say that, but you're gonna be ready to strangle me with the amount of lore this thing has. Still every one of these is an experiment in different ways, and in this case, among other things, I wanted to go a little ham with that, create a really lush, weird (but fun) setting. 
Glad you like the look! I wasn't thinking of DST, though I can see some slight resemblance. Just aiming for the bleak and creepy, while not TOO dire. One of the problems I've had making this while sourcing secondary assets, ESPECIALLY music, is that most stuff is either too happy/cartoony "spooky" or way too dire and intense. Hard to hit that middle ground, though I think I'm managing so far.
And thanks, you too!

GT you mean? Check out the pinned guides by OpenFireplace on the main page.

Exactly. I'm sure he won't have any momentary slight slip ups that end up rapidly snowballing into something worse.

Exactly :D. Or his back. Or strung up. But of course that could NEVER happen.

Aw, appreciate it. It'll be interesting working with them, because I usually think of rats as being larger characters, but in this case they're more like weird little gremlins. I mean not THAT short, but they will be one of the few enemies Mezz faces that's not taller than he is.

GT you mean? Shouldn't be hard crashing at all, no. Keep in mind that RPGMaker does not like being run from external drives, system folders, basically anything with the potential for weird file permissions situations. 

Otherwise though, let me know what the error is if it's ongoing.

Aw, thanks, appreciate it. Just wish I had more to show, but we're getting there.

Point of contact for more elaborate things is my account on FA (just "bitshift"), via notes. That's obscure, but intentionally so. Helps filter out certain people.

Aw, thanks! And no problem, glad it's working.

Oh no worries. I can't fix every little thing, but especially with stuff like this I want to double-check and make sure I haven't introduced something game-breaking by accident. And in this case, it turns out I haven't. Working from the save clarified a lot:

-"Flashes Mezz a Look" and Grin are two different ones. Look is the "only occasional use" daze attack. And that move does pop up pretty consistently at the start of this fight on this save, which means RNG has chosen NOW to use it. Once dazed, USUALLY (though not always) they get Mezz's submission up to 100 pretty quick. And from THERE, they USUALLY manage to pull him into performing (this is called "provoke" in the code). However, HERE'S THE KEY BIT:

-Once Mezz finishes off the hyenas and they cum, notice the portrait that flashes, with "GONE"? Normally, you can serve the hyenas a number of times per battle, recovering and getting back into fighting. However, there's a mechanic that puts an upper limit on how many times you can do this, that resets after every full defeat. Every time you finish them off, you get one of those portraits indicating your "corruption" level let's call it, increasingly slutty. I believe there are 4, with "Gone" being the last. When you hit "gone", you're fucked: finishing a session with the thugs is an AUTO LOSS. So the reason you're struggling here is because you've painted yourself into a corner: You're walking around with only one service left (really, zero that you can do safely) and THEN you got nailed with the occasionally spawning daze attack on top of it. You were basically dead-bunny-walking the moment you started that battle because you'd already used up your "allowance" of in-battle fucking for this attempt. 

Keep in mind that the general idea of the storytelling here is that Mezz already has the conditioning, but it's flipped off, and he has to avoid too much exposure to it to avoid re-activating it entirely. The hyenas are toying with him, counting on just that happening. You can let that happen of course, and play the slut route, but if you want to be "clean" ish, you've gotta keep an eye on those portraits.

-Also, despite all this, this still isn't COMPLETELY impossible. I was still able to clear the enemies on this save on my second attempt, and the NEXT battle was easy, because they had already used their randomized allotment of the daze attack for a while and thus could only normal attack and slowly build submission (which they can't do fast enough). It's entirely possible to clear the area with zero margin left for fuck sessions, but you will have to save-scum a bit. Otherwise, just keep an eye on that. But with GT, there's not much inbetween: you either let the momentum take you toward being a good fuckbunny, or you keep yourself REAL clean.

Interesting, so you know all the basics already.

Taking a look, "Filthy Look" and "Dirty Grin" are the same skill/attack. Nearly 100% to hit if used, and raises submission by a certain amount as noted. On the default version of the hyena thugs, the grin attack is present, but lower priority than the basic swipe attack, so it should happen every so often, not constantly.

Are the hyenas doing their normal attack at all? If something has somehow triggered disabling that, they'll default to only the grin as that's all they'll have, but I'm not sure what would cause that. Check that you're on the most recent version, and upload a copy of a save it's happening on to catbox.moe for me to look at. Also, sometimes people will just get very odd RNG or weird glitches for reasons I've never been able to pin down due to a "bad save". If possible, I'd try replaying from a bit earlier (say a save right before Mezz is knocked out in the barrens, or even just when you first enter the district) and seeing if you still encounter the grin behavior on that save. 

I will say that yes, on a totally fresh new-game encounter, first mob in the first district, NORMAL hyenas, Mezz should not encounter a guaranteed series of grins (which would indeed lead to rapid max sub and quick defeat. That's not intended behavior. However, "after climbing the fire exits" implies you're actually about halfway through District 1, not just starting it. Have you gone through the tunnel and out the other side? In that case you'll be fighting some specialized hyenas, not the normal thugs, which does shift things a bit (although even then, it shouldn't be a constant string of grin attacks).