Diaspora - Updated 12 February 2024 [First Draft Complete!]

I’m certainly willing to work on something that’ll help mitigate these issues! Could you explain more about what you mean?

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You know, like, while the game is in beta, a choice at the beginning of the game that allows you to move to a menu where you choose a chapter to begin at, allowing the player to effectively bypass playing the game fully again to try a new route or a specific chapter.

Everything minor is set to default variables, except your name, stats, romance if applicable, or relationship values. Havie did this. I don’t really know how. It was really useful as his game grew longer.

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Ah, I understand now. This is absolutely something we can work on. Much obliged for the suggestion!

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This. Update :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:

I don’t know if I picked the temple options in a different order or what, but I had no problems with them. This sort of bugs are difficult to find and fix and I just want to say that I feel your pain, guys.

Some non-story related stuff

and you sink into the depths of slumber. It’s a couple of days later when Pan and Aisling approach you together.

Maybe put the second sentence on a new paragraph?

They stop withing reaching distance by some unspoken consensus,

Within.

builds around them Pan until it’s in fact difficult to see them directly.

Pronoun and name.

colors blending and sweeping over the the shape of The Omen.

Repetition.

Story (mostly fangirling)
  • You broke my Deaman’s heart like three times this chapter. First over his ship; you know he’s in love with that thing and seeing it destroyed was harder than he will ever admit. You’re evil and I love it.

  • When Aisling told him she wanted to be the clan’s shaman. His bharda is growing up and starting to be her own person, and although he said he was alright with that he was screaming internally xD

  • Everything Pan. The whole we-are-saying-iskendi-but-we-are-so-not-talking-about-the-iskendi chat. Beautiful. Being able to somehow address the elephant in the room is nice and these two need it, even if they are fighting so hard not to think about it.
    I especially loved the “What if there’s no other way for them to survive?” option; you could hear the heart-break from over a mile.

  • Their chat about Aisling, and Pan being proud of my Deaman because he loves his bharda. So. Very. Married. I felt like they were discussing their child and I’m totally on board for that. You have no right to make me feel this giddy.

  • Aisling hugging Pan. Yes.

And that’s all my old-lady mushy feels. Now I can be normal again or something.

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Loved the Interlude from chapter eight. At first my favourite was Pan and then Sangarinus but the last times that I’ve played (not that I’ve played a lot :shushing_face:) …I think they’re reversing and with the interlude I’ve enjoyed more the Sangarinus’s path… I don’t know, I’ve created two MC it’s impossible to choose between them.
You’re making a great job with Sangarinus and Pan, I like that they’re very detailed and defined.
So, good work!!

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I think implementing some kind of shortcut system would be a very good idea. If this tops out at 16-20 chapters that’s otherwise just an unfeasible amount of re-doing. The game Guenevere (Guenevere (WIP)) had something like what I think @Laguz means. I think that game had a different/simpler stat system, so I’m not sure how that would translate but it might be worth looking at. The author is still active on tumblr and seems very nice if you want to ask someone about it. I saved at the landing point so we’ll see how that works out.

Okay, I have three save files with three different ROs and three different adventure partners in the last chapter so I can give some variety in feedback.

Riona - 2-3-5-5, high humor/low aggression, allied Castulia, RO Sangarinus.
Seighin - 5-3-2-5, high humor/high aggression, allied Iskendi, RO Aisling.
Eithne - 4-5-4-2, low humor/high aggression, isolationist, RO Izzy.

Very long Interlude 5 spoiler stuff;

Summary

I’m not exactly glad that the choice to save the companion or your ship has serious consequences, but I think it’s the right and smart choice, no matter how outraged I am. My poor crew. My poor boat. That hurt. It made me rethink my decisions about saving in chapter seven for a minute. Riona saved Aisling, Seighin and Eithne did not save Pan and Sangarinus, respectively. I’d still save Aisling but. Yeah, it cost me.

Cute detail that if Aisling is in charge of the hospital area it’s efficient, organized and she’s already started drying herbs and if she’s not it’s just a disaster area. Sangarinus can’t stand up in the shelter. Aw, honey.

I think I’ve landed on “Not a real Valravn, just a guardian taking the manifestation most likely to disturb the PC.” I’m leaving room for me to be wrong but that’s where I’m at right now. Riona thinks it was a guardian, Seighin is refusing to think about it now that it’s over and Eithne thinks it might be her father but isn’t sure.

I loved the bird watching joke and so did Seighin.

I liked seeing Pan and Aisling doing magic-science. Aisling was very cute with her little journal and I liked seeing more of how magic is thought to work in this universe. I am 1,000% here for Aisling being shaman. An excellent idea. I’ve been hoping she would end the game as the clan’s shamen since pretty much the paragraph where we find out that the last shaman was a mage. Seighin and Riona support her enthusiastically, Eithne hesitantly. I just can’t play someone who crushes her, that is a level of Jerk I am not able to enjoy. She’s Aisling! The most harmless and inoffensive of all living creatures. And her arguments whenever you try to discourage her are really sensible and hard to counter. Seighin suggested healing, Riona suggested something new and Eithne suggested combat magic, which felt a little inconsistent with her character but I wanted a spread of choices.

The RO scene with Sangarinus was adorable. He makes you a tiny little critter! Having the figurine be customized to your highest stat is a little thing but it’s a nice detail. I think the most shocking twist of this game is finding out that Sangarinus does not give objectively terrible hugs. He hugged someone and maintained eye contact through a personal conversation. He is making huge strides here. The conversation about his trauma was elliptical but did good work. It doesn’t feel like you (the writers) are dragging the information out, it just feels like Sangarinus has a really hard time talking about it and won’t except under specific circumstances.

The RO scene with Aisling. !!! It makes total sense that she would just come out and say she loves the PC. She’s actually known the PC for something like 20 years, had a crush for who knows how long, is aware of her own emotions and willing to express them and recently had to face the prospect of the PC, herself or both of them dying with things unsaid. But it still makes me super happy. Once she’s the clan’s shaman they are going to be such a power couple.

The RO scene with Izzy was great. All the characters have such interesting backstories, I love finding them out. I like the variation in how you can handle the RO routes between characters. Aisling and Sangarinus are always going to go pretty slow, I think Cormac has one speed, Pan has two separate ones depending on whether or not you’ve mutually decided to keep it casual and Izzy is fine with either going slow or not, mostly up to you. I also appreciated on this playthrough (because I screwed up and didn’t notice until I was several chapters too far) that if you don’t lock down Izzy pretty fast Aisling nabs her. There’s a good sense of characters not waiting around for the player, but having their own stories. Minor typo/missed word here.


I’m guessing “Castulia saw no great need”?

I dithered a little about whether to make an effigy of Orlan because it felt wrong to have a funeral for him without Roise being able to attend. I decided on Eithne yes, because she wouldn’t delay doing The Proper Thing by Cine standards for any reason, Riona and Seighin no, because they would prefer to wait until they can get back home and be with Roise for it. But they definitely would think it was important to have a funeral as soon as that would be practically possible.

This is maybe slightly weird but I really liked the funeral? The details all felt very suitable for the Cine and I think characters with any combo of characteristics could find something appropriate to say.

It’s hard to play as someone who won’t trust Aisling, both because pretty much everyone likes you less and because it’s so obviously making things harder than they have to be. Nevertheless I persevered for Eithne. She even snatched the Eye back after getting her ship back like new. I’m trying to walk a line where Eithne cares about and trusts Aisling but is just dead set against magic. It’s annoying.

Riona and Seighin were properly grateful, and I’m hopeful that that will count for something in the scene I’m sure is coming, where you can try to convince the clan to calm down a little about magic.

I’m looking forward to trying to escape the island. I’m guessing that the big choice next chapter will be between to try to control the leviathan and take it with you, break the connection with the Eye and kill it, or just escape and leave it there. Riona and Eithne are both inclined to kill it, Riona because that’s a terrible existence for anything and Eithne because magical creature = kill it. Seighin wants to take it with him see if it can be set up to guard Divio in a slightly less, ah, flamboyant manner but will defer to Aisling’s opinion because she’s the one who would have to actually control the thing. It’s interesting that both Aisling and Sangarinus seem to be leaning toward mercy killing it. As the game has progressed I’ve come to think of them as the two characters most similar to one another, weird as that would have sounded in the beginning.

At the moment Riona is still hoping to destroy the Eye but if that’s not achievable a distant second choice is a tie between giving it to Castulia, possibly in exchange for something (more land?), and keeping it while allying with Castulia. Seighin is wavering between giving it to the Iskendi and keeping it while allying with them. Eithne is going to destroy this stupid rock if it kills her. If that is absolutely, 100% impossible in any way she will grudgingly settle for going back north, wiping out the clan’s enemies and then throwing the damned thing into a fjord.

I had no new error messages at all.

And so, to bed.

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A shortcut system would be much appreciated as I have been avoiding reading new stuff because I can’t devote the time to get thru the whole game (it’s so long and that’s amazing but also it now takes me an hour to get to new material). Fallen Hero has a really good shortcut system for the retribution WIP that I’d recommend checking out.

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Hey everyone!

Thanks for the feedback on the new chapter so far. We’ve spent the last couple of days working on a sort of shorthand save-state creation system (thanks to @Laguz for the suggestion!) It doesn’t let you jump in at any chapter whatsoever, but right now we’ve got 4, 6, and 8 up and running, and we’ll probably include 10 and 12 when we get there, too. We really hope this cuts down on the amount of work you have to do if you happen to lose your save, and we’ve tried to account for all the most major choices in the process.

Of course, it’s completely possible that this system itself will be a little buggy, and I should warn you that you can use it to create “impossible” states (for example, one where your best friend is the one who ends up stranded with you in Chapter 8), but as of the moment I don’t think any of the impossibilities are game-breaking, so to speak. In any case, we also anticipate needing to tweak things, so if you notice anything that doesn’t work like it probably should, feel free to let us know!

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Finally! I am free! :0

Chapter 8 is so cool… so cool. I’m sorry for everyone who got like, Aisling or a wimp MC. You didn’t get to witness Mr. Autism beating the absolute shit out of Mergo’s Wet Nurse on the floor with one raw autistic possibly fractured fist.
autism rights iskendi do not interact

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“fallen asleep, lulled by the hot afternoon and he gentle swaying of the hammock”

the gentle

“White-gold light, shimmering not entirely unlike an aurora of sorts, builds around them Pan until it’s in fact difficult to see them directly.”

???

“The grimace that results is the most discomfort you’ve seen him express, and it fades almost immediately. He sheaths his knife back at his side. His sword seems to be missing entirely—perhaps he lost it to the water.”

To “sheathe” is the verb, while “sheath” is the noun.

I love how not only do you interact with the characters, the characters interact with eachother… no one feels like a satellite character except maybe sometimes slightly Cormac if Aisling is preoccupied since everyone else just avoids him lmao.

You asked some really good questions over the interlude that didn’t have an obvious “bad choice” or even made me feel bad for taking the aggressive or anti-mage tone because you keep the sides balanced. It’s great. Love this. Love Pan.

Well, overall I’ve managed to salvage something of my runs, anyway. Bless you.

love is stored in the autistic sang

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Wow I can’t believe you wrote such a long updates :heart_eyes:
My heart was racing when I played this, I didn’t want the demo to end and it kept going for quite some time. Thank you for that :smiling_face_with_three_hearts:
Pan is just…can I have more of Pan please? My MC can’t live without them. He gave Sangarinus quite a shock when he told the guardian that the one he can’t sacrifice was Pan

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This is a good point. Cormac does kind of feel like he’s out on his own. Aisling is tied in to the plot with magic but also because Pan is mentoring her, and Izzy had an entire side plot for herself. If we aren’t romancing Cormac, he does feel separate in a way. This could be my playthrough, though. He has one of the highest friendships for me which means I didn’t get him in the ziggurat, but I’m also not romancing him, so he’s sort of Not Appearing in This Episode (or episodes) since he’s mostly in the background in group scenes.

Additionally, I’d love more varied interactions between the main 5. What would a conversation between Izzy and Pan or Cormac and Pan be like? Aisling and Sang? The opportunities for awkwardness are truly abundant.

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Aisling bounces off the protagonist, but also Pan and Cormac and Izzy if you got them together. Izzy has her personal quest, and seems to be the general conversation starter in many group scenes.

Pan and Sang bounce off eachother: Sang doesn’t interact with many people by himself but this one constant is enough to keep him afloat. He seems to be okay with your mother, wish we’d had more scenes of that because he might not be a satellite character to the protagonist but that doesn’t mean he isn’t one to Pan.

If no one’s romancing Cormac, and you’re not openly antagonising Cormac at every opportunity he’s just… there. He used to bounce off Aisling early-game, but now she’s preoccupied with the magic part of the plot and healing and Pan and also her possible gf.

The island part gives a lot of characters good development but a) Sang still can’t go 30 minutes without mentioning Pan, godbless this man has no friends and b) this development only happens to the character that dislikes you.

Which is a great way to learn to like a character you might have been cold to, yes, and that’s great for the player to help them become more attatched… but for a character you’re cooly neutral to and doesn’t have much interaction with others… they’re just kind of there.

If you take a more plot-relevant character like Pan, Aisling or Izzy to the island… Sang and Cormac aren’t getting much show. I had the blessing of taking Sang, but Cormac I mostly agree with, so he’s just sort of existing to talk about Cine Things and not much else. If you don’t engage with Sang as much as possible he’s a PTSD autistic and Pan’s friend.

(kicks Cormac and Sang together) engage, bastards. you both don’t have friends. by the end of today i want you either besties or trying to kill one another

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It’s been just about a month since our last update, and we’re happy to announce that we’ve got another one for you! Chapter 9 is Now Playable!

Pretty good speed for us, but it helped that this chapter is not one of our longer ones. Chapter 9 might be a little shorter, but it’s got several very important decisions to make, including the fate of a certain fiend of the depths, as well as something we’ve been building up to since the early chapters: your choice of who to speak to now that you’ve got the Eye. It should be pretty difficult to make it through this one without making any enemies.

Coming up next will be some personal quests that occur in the aftermath of your decision, starting with Aisling and Cormac. We hope you enjoy the update!

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@AugustArria @Jaybirdy
Typo in chapter 9.

It’s perhaps the most neutral route you can think of, and you feel it satifies your morals

Satisfies

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The new saving system seems to work! I haven’t saved with the new way of skipping to later chapters because I have three save files, but I have gone through the questionnaire to replicate specific playthroughs and ended up roughly where I thought I would, so I’d say it’s pretty accurate.

I just did one save file, I’ll do the other ones as I can.

Eithne

Summary

Start of chapter stats;

Summary



End of chapter stats;

Summary



I decided to use the Eye to kill the squid, told Aisling to shut out any attempt at communication, took the Eye away when she collapsed, gave it back when that appeared to have been a bad choice, told Aisling to kill it because it’s an abomination, and let her and Pan decide who did the storm, because the nosebleed made me nervous for Aisling. We were neither eaten by the squid nor dashed to pieces by the storm, so I feel good about those choices.

I didn’t ignore the Iskendi ship, asked Pan’s opinion, had them hide it, and here’s where I might be really dumb. I have met Elif before, right? That’s Bal’s niece, that we met right after going on that walk with the mage couple after the ritual? Am I confusing her with someone else? I’m almost certain we’ve met but it’s definitely a first meeting here.

In any case, I treated it like business, claimed the marvels of Cine engineering brought the ship out intact, honestly told her we’re going to destroy it, rudely told her to leave while I wan on her boat, was solemn when announcing myself, was thrilled to see Chief Mom because I am not a monster, got up when I couldn’t sleep, said that I had wanted to wait to burn the effigy until we could do it together, and man, I hope something really good happens for Roise soon. That poor woman. She has had a terrible last… Like. 10 years.

I really liked the “sparring” between Aisling/Cormac/Sang! I think I’ve said this before, but this really has some of the best characters I’ve seen in a GoC game. They’re not just props for the PC, but people I’m interested in in their own right and I enjoy seeing them interact.

I scolded Aisling for doing magic without me, because Eithne is, as I have established, a pill.

The Cine play rugby. Of course they do. I had Aisling freeze some water, because Eithne’s pill-ness about magic does not extend to sports, I guess. Also, I thought it would be more fun. It was. It was delightful. Aisling scores the winning goal! Sang mentions that the Empire has arenas in the capitol and he doesn’t consider what happens in them sport. Okay. That’s. Certainly something I’m going to be thinking about if our relationship with Castulia goes really sour.

“At somewhere around sixty summers, he would hardly have found himself with the title of elder, save for the fact that so few people of greater years survived the voyage.” Well that’s depressing. It also makes Leitis extremely impressive.

I greeted the elders, agreed with Daghan that if we change we might as well have died up north, and here I got stuck. I really, really don’t want to get involved in this mess. Eithne has been consistently isolationist and just doesn’t care about either Castulia or the Iskendi. I reluctantly said to meet with the Iskendi, both because they’re more culturally similar except for the magic which is a pretty big deal to Eithne, and because I already had much higher agree and friendship scores with Bal than the General. I don’t feel great about this, but I would feel great about any choice here.

I was uncharacteristically deferentional and chose “I don’t mean to speak beyond my authority…” because Eithne respects Tradition and Tradition means deferring to the council of elders. Everything seems okayish as I leave.

A fairly short chapter, you’re right, but clearly a pivotal one. I’m more or less okay with the choices I made but uneasy about the events I can see coming down the pike. I don’t know if there was a way to stay out of the Iskendi/Castulia stuff for longer, but I don’t feel ready for a fight right now, even with the Eye.

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@BrownBetty No you’re absolutely right that you’ve probably met Elif before. One of the things I realized I had to do for this chapter was account for whether or not the PC had already met her, as the scene where you do is entirely skippable. So I went back and added a variable for it, which defaults to false. So unfortunately those of you working from older saves are treated as though you haven’t even if you have.

Also, we totally understand that not every character is eager to throw in with one side or another here. For those of you hoping for a more neutral path through, hang tight. There will be options in the future that should open up some possibilities, but it’s naturally going to be a bit more complicated than just going in for an alliance and sticking to it. The need for a meeting was in large part itself a tactic to keep the wolves from your door a bit longer, at least as far as Roise was thinking. The choice will certainly have consequences, but no one is locking themselves out of a more moderate track just by making it! :slight_smile:

@Bugreporter Grazie!

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What the heck?

The game even gives us the option to state our intention to keep the eye for our own people, and in the meeting with the Council Elders we are forced to just sit there quietly while they act like giving it up is the only viable option?

Our father died for this, half our crew died for this.

And as the flashblack to our father shows, giving up the eye is not only giving up military might, but prosperity- plentiful farming, plentiful fishing, fresh water on command, forestry, animal husbandry. Weather control is like a cheat code for a Civilization game.

The Cine could even plan to go back home up North once the Eye is mastered.

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So I think an important distinction to make here is the one between talking to someone about this and agreeing to give it to them. As Roise (I think) mentions during the meeting, whether or not the Cine keep the artifact or do anything else with it is a downstream decision, so to speak. No one in the MC’s group is currently anywhere near figuring out how to use the thing for weather control, for instance, or even its more powerful weapon-ish capabilities.

So the idea is something like “going to one of these groups and arranging a meeting for some point out in the near-ish future is buying time at the very least.” Clan Maghnus isn’t currently strong enough (or in possession of enough ships, for example) to head back north and do their thing, with no one having adequate mastery of the Eye to make up the difference. The Elders want a meeting with someone (and yes, some of them do want to give the thing up for various reasons, but that itself is not decided at this meeting), and they decide they’re going to have one, but whether the MC sees that as bureaucratic obstruction to their aims or exactly what it’s best to do is in fact totally variable here.

As I said above, this only determines who is going to be at a meeting a few chapters down the line. It does not decide the fate of the Eye, or the Cine. There’s going to be plenty more variation available when it comes to that.

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At first, I wanted to use the Eye to establish some kind of control of the seas, giving the clan a huge advantage over the Empire and the Iskendi. As someone already pointed out, it would be a boon to our military power and could be used to improve our crops or have a better time fishing for food.

But now? After seeing what kind of effects that it had on Aisling and Pan, I’m leaning towards destroying the Eye. Yes, our father died for this. Yes, we lost crew members over this but the cost of using the Eye for the benefit of the clan far outweights the benefits in my opinion. The Empire basically has no Navy and their port has been destroyed, while the Iskendi seems to be well organized enough but I am sure there is a glaring weakness that they have which I didn’t figure out yet.

Without the Eye, having the clan build ships from the materials on the island, learning the local languages and having both sides come to teach the warriors in the ways of sea and land warfare, I feel like at this rate, we’d probably be okay for now.

I’d still need more time to make sure the clan is completely prepared for war against both but it’s still a far better choice than to use the Eye and possibly messing up on it somehow.

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