Betovering House (WIP, Update NOT ON THE DEMO: March 13th 2019)

[exordice]

I’ll mention upfront this game is probably only for those aged 15 and up, I’m not especially sure how that kind of thing works especially in other countries. There will be lots of swearing, violence, some mentions of alcohol/sex/drugs and possible risque content that will be completely optional if it ever gets put in at all.

Here's the basic Plot™:

The MC is a human. Not a witch, or a vampire, or anything of the sort. Just a plain old human. And they work for a group called The Agency for Protection of Magic Peoples and Creatures. Also known simply as POMPAC.

They sent our friend MC in to befriend and hopefully help these young people, since they themselves are around the same age. Their job is to get to the root of everyone’s issues, and try to help them out so they can live fulfilling lives. It is hoped that, one day, they will no longer need the aid of POMPAC and will be able to live on their own.

Sounds like a tough, but simple job, right?

Although… Life’s never easy when magic’s involved.

TL;DR this is a story about becoming friends with a gang of messed up magical folks. There is more to the plot than that though. I won’t say too much because spoilers y’know?

There will be some upsetting themes in the story but I don’t really want to put specific triggers here because none of it’s in yet. Also, it’s mostly all stuff that happened to the characters in the past if that makes a difference.

You can also romance the people! Or not, whatever floats your boat.

For anyone interested in that or just the characters here’s a little bit of info about them

The Gang

Name: Ursula Gordon
Gender: Female
Age: 19
Species: Witch, Elemental
Appearance: Long dark brown hair. Light blue eyes. Pale skin. 6’4"/193cm tall.
Personality: Usually quiet and unassuming, Ursula can seem difficult to get to know. But really she’s just a whole bundle of anxiety and nerves and once you break through that there’s a lot more to her as a person.

She has trouble controlling her magic due to her unstable emotions and frequent panic attacks, something you are there to help mitigate when you can.

Name: Dodge Keller
Gender: Male
Age: 21
Species: Witch, ???
Appearance: Short black hair. Brown eyes. Dark brown skin. 5’11"/180cm tall.
Personality: Dodge is… very something. He’s certainly uh. Special. He’s not the smiley sort, to put it lightly. In fact, he probably hasn’t smiled in years. He’s quite angry really. One might say irrationally so. At least from an outside perspective.

He struggles controlling his emotions, much like Ursula. But his issues are quite different from hers. As is his magic.

Name: Nina Ramos
Gender: Female
Age: 23
Species: Werewolf
Appearance: Shoulder-length brown hair, ends dyed red. Amber eyes. Deep olive skin. 5ft5in/166cm tall.
Personality: Boisterous and occasionally rowdy, Nina is a force to be reckoned with. She’s strong in both physicality and presence. It’d be impossible to ignore her, even if you wanted to. She doesn’t seem to begrudge her turning either. In fact, she seems to relish what she’s become.

Apart from one aspect of it. The SLP. Sine Luna Plena. A rare werewolf-specific disability, if you will. It causes her to randomly shift even without the aid of the moon. Which is… not good.

Name: Arnold Fischer
Gender: Male
Age: 24 (?)
Species: Nix
Appearance: Long dark teal hair. Grey eyes. Fair skin. 5’8"/172cm tall.
Personality: Arnold might be even more special than Dodge. In a better way. He’s upbeat, friendly to a fault, and always seems to have a positive attitude about him. Despite his less than positive past. It’s admirable, that’s for sure.

But he was raised outside of human society, and so has trouble controlling his transformation. Thus, he avoids water whenever possible. Which limits what he can do.

Name: Raymond Song
Gender: Male
Age: 37
Species: Human
Appearance: Short black hair. Dark brown eyes. Lightly tanned skin. 6’1"/186cm tall.
Personality: Ray is, to put it simply, everybody’s guardian. He’s the one who looks out for them, who does things they can’t do, who thinks about their needs when they might ignore them. He’s kind and caring, and snarkier than you might expect.

He doesn’t have any problems. Not ones he’s willing share, anyway. His job is to be burdened; not to burden others.

TL;DR anxiety personified, one angery boi, strong independent werewolf, the shape of water, and Group Grandpa

I will mention here and now that you probably shouldn’t expect regular updates. I am not consistent enough mentally to be able to stick to some kind of plan for that sort of thing.

I’m also not really looking to publish this. I don’t think it’d make the cut to be honest, since there’s going to be a lot of swearing and other things COG might not allow. But I do still plan to finish it and let people play it.

Link to the game: https://dashingdon.com/go/3255

I enjoyed writing it and I hope you enjoy playing it! Let me know what you think, point out my mistakes/errors (there’s gonna be some I’m only human) and yeah!!! Have fun!!!

If you have extra questions, or want to learn more about the characters, feel free to ask me here or on my Tumblr! (I swear a lot and answer NSFW stuff though so be warned!)

March 13th Update: Going through a rough time with my personal life, so no updates to the demo yet, sorry! See here or here for a little more detail.

[Sovereign]

Looking forward to reading more

[EclecticEccentric]

Everything about this is intriguing, from the plot to the characters. The writing’s good, and I love the sardonic tone, although I think you can use a few more commas when breaking up clauses, since long sentences without a comma or other punctuation can break the flow of narration.

I wasn’t reading with an eye to errors but I did notice one:

This should be “its”

I think this should be in numbers instead? It might just be personal preference, though.

Also, during the hair and eye color choices, it would be nice if it said “…green eyes” or something similar, not just the color. While you can reason out that a pair of something means your eyes, and that the colors of the skin refer to your skin, the flow is a bit off since you have to think about whether or not you are choosing correctly.

Also, and this may also be personal preference, I think Ursula’s constant stuttering makes her dialogue a bit hard to read. I think it’s better if you show it in one instance and simply say in narration in other instances of stuttering, or you can limit the stutter to one of the first words instead of nearly all the words in a sentence.

The story also states a lot of what you’re feeling, and while I really appreciate the sarcastic way in which it’s delivered, it feels a bit overbearing especially when introducing the characters. The characters have very vibrant personalities, and the internal commentary on their movements can be a bit overwhelming. For example, Arnie’s nervousness is repeated over and over in all the passages with him in it, and it seems a bit much.

Your page-breaks are very well-placed, and the pacing is fast but not overwhelmingly so. Since the characters are introduced pretty quickly, their distinctiveness is also especially good.

Good luck with this!

[exordice]

Thank you for your feedback! I’ve fixed those little spelling mistakes, but kept the height as letters because I found numbers a bit clunky myself.

I also think the eye/skin colour descriptor thing is a good idea I just didn’t consider reading it from another perspective since I knew what it meant and always breezed through it when playtesting. I didn’t change the hair one though because it didn’t fit the sentence structure.

As for Ursula’s stuttering, I appreciate it might be hard to read at times but it’s an important part of her character, especially as the story goes on. It’s meant to be a little bit excessive because the stuttering and stammering then feeds back into her own anxiety ultimately making it worse.

I’m not sure how to handle the latter bit. I have reread Arnie’s scene and changed one or two lines but other than that most of it has a purpose for being there. It’s not quite visible yet, but his nervousness is out of the ordinary for him and that’s why it was mentioned quite a bit. If it seems overbearing I just don’t really know what else to take out/fix to be honest.

I do really appreciate the constructive criticism though, so thanks again!

[Megus]

Very interesting read; loved the character interactions and can’t wait to see how the story comes along

[Aleksa100]

Very interesting…love the group so far (even dodge) Lookin foward on seeing more of this

[E_RedMark]

I love it! wanna see moar!

[Logan3000x]

Is this a real show or one from your WIP universe

“Or like Kyia sucked Henlo’s dick in the last ep of Battlescar.”

[Ninja1]

Seems very interesting. It was the title that got me first, I pointed at the screen yelling: “I know what that word means!” And I hoped it would be a fun game and so far it is. The characters are quite nice and it they actually have real personalities, which is something that really draws me in. They are like real people and you did well on that. Personally, as a stutterer and as someone with anxiety, it felt really weird to come across Ursula but I am glad that you are writing about that quite well in my opinion. It rests my anxious heart

Anyway, keep it up and good luck with your game.

[Delphi]

I haven’t been able to do any in depth reading because school but for a first chapter, its pretty good! There’s no obvious bugs, glitches or anything of that sort and the save system works as it should.

I may or may not have sped through it just to test for glitches but it appears pretty seamless so I do look forward to a glitch free reading. Small/new wips always seem to have have at least one or two disruptive glitches which is reasonable even if it kinda ruins the first impression but it seems I’ve hit gold. I can finally read in peace thank you for coding it well UwU

I’ll be back eventually to actually read it but good job so far

[Baam]

It was pretty good! It was a quite intriguing premise. There’s always a certain je ne sais quoi about playing an average character in a world filled with magic or whatever. The characters seem great too. I’m officialy starting the fan group for Ursula by the way.

[exordice]

Thank you for the compliments!!

I tried hard to make Ursula’s anxiety realistic, and for her to be someone who can’t really control what happens to her. It helps that I also have anxiety and know what it’s like. I don’t stutter or stammer quite like she does, but I do have selective mutism which she also suffers from sometimes.

Also I’m glad you know what betovering means because it took me ages to pick a good name for the place! I didn’t want to be too overt.

[Nomad33810]

I thought that this seemed rather interesting even for just the first chapter. One thought that did come to mind was if dodge doesn’t care for us. Wouldn’t he insult us like if you are a short person he could call you shrimp.

[Arcane_warrior]

Why would anybody be so calm hanging around magical people kind of weird.

[exordice]

@Nomad33810

I thought that this seemed rather interesting even for just the first chapter. One thought that did come to mind was if dodge doesn’t care for us. Wouldn’t he insult us like if you are a short person he could call you shrimp.

Dodge doesn’t care for most everyone so it’s not really personal enough of a dislike that he’d insult the MC based on their appearance. He will still insult them on other things though, especially if he’s irritated.

@Arcane_warrior

Why would anybody be so calm hanging around magical people kind of weird.

Minor spoilers but the MC grew up with magic so it’s just a normal thing to them. They’ve known about it since they were a child, and about the existence of magical creatures.

[derekmetaltron]

Really great opening here, I love games with well developed and distinctive characters and all of yours seem interesting. Ursula is probably my favourite though Nina and Arnold are intriguing too. But a care place for a set of magical types is a great setup.

…you definitely scored points also by having the option for making Ursula be much taller than my character too (as I mentioned elsewhere I think I have a thing for taller women with shorter guys like me)!

EDIT: As someone who is friends with a woman who used to suffer from selective mutism and wrote about it in her first book I can respect you using it here and being okay talking about it on here.

[soprano]

Character-driven stories are my favorite kind of stories, and this one is right up my alley. I’ll only echo what has already been said and say that I absolutely love it so far!

I have one question though. By the end of my playthrough, my friendship with Ursula was at 20% and trust level was at 30%… however, with Arnie, my friendship was at 25% but trust was at 10%. I was wondering, shouldn’t I have more trust points with Arnold considering my friendship with him seems to be greater than all the others? Does he not trust us that much after all, or does he naturally not trust people that much?

[exordice]

Thank you very much for the compliment! Now, your question is a good one and I’ll just state here that trust and friendship reflect two different things in game. Choices made tend to raise or lower both at the same time, but this is not always true. And some choices you make may not appear to have an effect on relationships until later on.

To get slightly spoilery with it you are right that Arnie is less trusting than others. He does like the MC and considers them a friend, but it’s difficult for him to fully put his trust in anyone else. He’s not as open of a person as he seems in that respect, and he doesn’t really even know he doesn’t trust them. It’s more of a subconscious thing.

[derekmetaltron]

Slightly spoilery question if possible… since Nina can’t control when she turns into a werewolf, is she the feral kind which doesn’t have any semblance of her human self, or is her natural mind still there?

[exordice]

Thanks for the question!

Her mind is still present when she transforms under the full moon, like any other werewolf. However, if she begins to shift without it’s presence it causes intense pain which can have the effect of reverting to a more animistic mindset. Nina is pretty good at controlling that sort of thing, and so often keeps her wits about her where others would go into a fit of rage.

Extra (spoiler-ish) fact: When SLP triggers a shift it’s most often a partial-shift, not a full one. As in someone’s arm might turn furry and they might grow claws, or one of their ears will shift into a wolf one. A full transformation during a fit of SLP is uncommon and Nina herself has never experienced it.