Scarlet Sorceress (full beta open, 372k words), Romance, High-fantasy

Right my feedback.

I couldnt spot any grammar or spelling mistakes. The game components are a real strength and excellent. Love the battle style of using up stats as if resources. The characters and plot dont deserve any form of criticism, but didnt attract me as much as your game mechanics. Maybe they could be your next focus for improvement? Your writing is tight. There’s room to add and expand the character portrayals and development. Or if wish, could have more writing about the character’s internal world and character arch.

Dont have to, some authors prefer to makes games that are more sandbox visual novel / video game inspired, nothing wrong with that, your game feels like that at moment, but could balance this with focussing more on interactive fiction elements (plot + characters, more book-like).

My fav games feel like both. But thats just me.

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I don’t mind the gender lock — I play unlocked and locked games equally, so I don’t mind either approach.

Re: the demo, is saving weird on mobile? I only appear to be able to make a single save and new saves aren’t overwriting it. Not sure why, but I lost a playthrough just now :frowning:

Edit: problem seems to vanish and recur.

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Thanks for the feedback! I probably won’t be making large plot or writing expansions/changes to the existing content, but it’s definitely something to consider if I’m adding additional chapters. If I’m getting to that, I can focus on more story content.

That’s very strange… I’ve tested it on my mobile devices, but I don’t think I have this issue. If your mobile browser is on private/incognito mode, or if you had just cleared website data, it might wipe saves.

When you play the game again, does it continue from where you left off, or go straight to the beginning?

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Normal browser, not incognito. The first time I played, I could only do a single quick save and was unable to make a new save or delete the quick save. The second time, I was able to make and delete several saves but a few chapters into it, the bug resurfaced: I retained a bunch of saves, but could no longer delete them or make new ones.

If I refresh, it takes me back to the beginning and all saves disappear.

I did end up finishing the entire game, but I basically had to fly by the seat of my pants being unable to reload at all…

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That’s unusual. Hmm… sorry to hear about the lost progress. Check if playing the game on cogdemos (link shared) gives you the same issue. Otherwise, I’m not sure why this could be happening.

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The CogDemos version seems to be working so far!

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:confetti_ball: The game has already crossed 2000 views and 1000 browser plays on itch.

Romance seems to be a very useful tag, perhaps unsurprisingly. :thinking:

I’ll share the analytics sometime before the weekend, once the first full week is up.

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Congrats on launching, I’m excited to sit down and play it! :smiley:

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Take your time. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Ok, the first week is up. If anyone is curious about the analytics for this game, or how itch analytics look like, take a look here.

image


(Sat 22 is low because it’s just been an hour so far. I think itch does timings in UTC.)

Close to 3k views, but not quite there yet. :sweat_smile: There is a fairly high ratio of browser plays to views, which is probably to be expected since most folks clicking the link here would already be interested in playing the game.

As expected, most of the traffic came from the forums, although itch made a very substantial contribution to the total. I think this was largely because the burst from traffic on this forums propelled the game up the “New & Popular” section on itch under some key tags/filters, which in turn helped with visibility on itch. (unfortunately, you need to be popular to get popular :chicken: :egg:)

The game peaked at 36th place under the “New & Popular” section with no filters/tags applied. It seems to have gotten some views there, but it placed much higher under certain critical tags, which we’ll talk about below.

The otome tag actually brought in more views. I suspect that it’s an underserved tag, and Scarlet Sorceress spent the entire week near the top under “New & Popular” and “Most Recent” with the otome tag applied. This was due to a lack of competition, as only five more games with that tag were released/updated in the past week. By comparison, there were over eighty titles tagged Interactive Fiction released/updated in the same timeframe.

Romance seems to be a pretty popular tag as well, as expected. I’m guessing there’s a huge demand for this sort of thing from the free VN crowd. Scarlet Sorceress peaked at third place under “New & Popular” pretty early under this tag, but slid down as the week went on.

Quite a number of people were also looking for content with both the “Interactive Fiction” and “Romance” tag applied.

People looking for browser-playable games also gave some views. My gut tells me that it is beneficial to have (mobile-friendly) browser-playable games, although the only way to truly know would be to compare numbers with a downloadable version.

This game only has ten tags out of hundreds of available tags, so I can’t comprehensively say which tags are more likely to get interest on itch. Still, you can see the tags on my itch page, so it might give a small idea of what works and what does not.

Let me know if you have questions. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Here is some feedback for you!

I love the way stats work in this game. I usually prefer IF games that are more novel-like but having to balance which abilities I’m using in battle is surprisingly fun! I like that choosing a specialty just affects regeneration, so I can use all abilities instead of having to pick the same “correct” choice over and over again. I will say that even on easy mode I tended to drain my stats quickly (especially so during The Mystery of Castle Alaire), but by the late game I had tons of points with not many opportunities to use them up. This may be a skill issue, though.

I will say that I’m unsure why the game is gender locked (the PC could be male or nonbinary without anything story-wise changing), but if a female PC is part of your vision that’s fine. Personally I never play as a woman, but since this game had a strong otome visual novel vibe I didn’t mind it too much.

Some of the ROs could use development. Gaius and Sofie are nice but no interactions with them made me intrigued or excited to romance them. I think that their current scenes could be expanded on to give a better sense of their deeper personalities; why should I be interested in them outside of them just being nice? I liked Mystria the most, but felt everyone lacked a little depth and charm, especially since romance is supposed to be a focal point of the game.

The cat familiar is cute, maybe customizing what color he is would be a nice addition? I’m not sure if he’s meant to be orange like in the game art. Personally I’m partial to brown tabbies and black cats :black_cat: :heart: The game says multiple times that having him around strengthens our magic but I don’t think it’s an actual mechanic. Perhaps choosing his fur color could function similar to customizing the PC’s appearance, giving different stat boosts? Just a suggestion!

+ Typos I noticed

Missing quotation marks in these sections:


Missing commas here:


Missing periods:


His mistress:

Should be you and your:


Overall this was really cute, and I had fun playing it! :sparkles:

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@forestnymph thanks for the feedback. Yep, I was trying to aim for the cute vibes.

Yep, I noticed this when self-playtesting. I might be adding more content down the line with more places to spend points at the later parts of the game.

Regarding the gender-locked player, it was part of the Otome VN inspiration, mainly. For now, I’m probably still leaning toward keeping it, but I’m open to other opinions if some feel strongly about it.

Character writing is something I’m still trying to get right. :joy: probably need more practice. But I’ll take note.

Unfortunately, I’m at the mercy of whatever copyright-free-to-use stock assets I can find on Pixabay when it comes to art. :sweat_smile: I meant this to be an open to interpretation thing, but I suppose I could allow players to specify the cat’s color. It’s actually an interesting thought.

I’ll take note of the typos.

Thanks again!

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So I finally finished my first playthrough of the game! I took my time because I wanted to be thourough with my feedback.

General Thoughts (no spoilers)

I generally prefer my IFs to be more story oriented than mechanically oriented, but I really did enjoy the mechanics of this one, making sure you’re regenerating enough of your stats, and keeping track of your jewlery.

I also really enjoyed the setting and the overall vibe of the story.

Something about the end felt a little off to me, but I’m having trouble trying to decide how to put it into words. (Might need another playthrough for this.)

Things I really liked (no spoilers)

The cat. (I called mine Jasper.) I love having a cat, but also that MC is constantly thinking about whether to bring him or needing to go home to feed him. Basically, I appreciate that the narrative is always aware of our cat.

The option to play a healer. Despite the ways fire is a source of purification, I feel like whenever I see fiction with elemental based magic, fire is always flashy and destructive, so I really appreciated the fact that we can specialize in other aspects of fire than destruction.

I really liked the Castle Alaire mission. I felt it was suitabky suspensful and nerve wracking, but also not frustratingly difficult. (I felt the same about the Spiralkeep investigation. Castle Alaire just stuck with me more.)

Things I gelt could be improved (some spoilers)

I may have just not picked choices where it came up, but I felt like there were a lot less options to use healing than alchemy or destruction. I filled my healing bar to 100 (on easy) multiple times and didnt feel like I had many opprotunities to use it after the begining.

Like some others have said, I feel the story could use more characterization for the ROs. I saw earlier in the thread than you didn’t want to do much rewriting, but I do think a little expansion of the scenes where we get to hang out with the characters 1 on 1 could go a long way.

I also think Uncle Hawthorne’s role in the story could be somewhat improved by including a scene with him early in the game. I don’t think he actually appears on screen until after we find out about our mother, and our relationship with him gets weird. I think if we had an opprotunity to interact with him earlier as like baseline for our relationship, instead of just being told by the narrative, it would make the reveal with our mother a lot more impactful.

Possible Bugs (big spoilers)

I only caught one typo, which I did not get a screen shot of :woman_facepalming:t2:

During the investigation of the Spiralkeep well spring, I got the scene with Lorn,


Except, I didn’t actually slay the fell beast, I just scared it away.

I don’t have any screenshots for this last one either, but when the sorcerers of Spiralkeep were trying to reclaim our mother’s memory orb, I chose to distract them until Uncle Hawthorne could get through the barrier. He captured Mystria, but when I went back to Spiralkeep with the queen to negociate, Mystria was back in Spiralkeep. The game awknowledged the awkwardness of us having fought in the past, but didn’t explain why she was back there after I saw her captured. Im not sure if this is an actual bug or just sonething that could have been explained a bit better.

I tried to be as thourough as I can, but do let me know if any of my feedback was unclear, or if you need more details. (I’ll try to do another playthrough when I have some more freetime.)

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@Cat-Toes thanks for taking a look.

I’m planning to add more healing checks in the next draft. A few people have pointed this out, and it’s some which should be fixed.

I probably won’t change existing chapters too much, but I’m planning to incorporate more backstory for future additional chapters, so this is something which I’ll take note. Unfortunately, I was aiming for a minimal writing style, and I admit story and characters may have taken a hit in the process.

Hmm… this is actually a very good point. I might put some future content around this.

Yep, coding error. This will be fixed. The game assigns the wrong outcome value for the fellbeast variable if you drive it away.

I’ll need to take a look at this. This was made towards the end, so it received the least self-playtesting, and I suspect there are plenty of bugs I need to squash. I probably should have spent more time bug testing this before beta release.

By right, there should have been a scene where you visit Mystria in Guardian Square before paying a visit to Queen Alyss. I suspect this is a pretty severe coding error to fix. I think the game incorrectly assigned the outcome variable where the mages managed to escape.

Edit: This was caused by an incorrectly named variable. I’ll need to find a good time to push out a hotfix. Thanks again for spotting this.

Thanks for the detailed thoughts and the bugs. I’ll make the changes.

Take your time. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I am here to deliver my promise. :saluting_face:

basic typos punctuation errors

Ch 1 (i think)
completely unchanging, Unfortunately, - comma instead of period

Ch 2
"Anyway, something else to pass the time? - missing close quotation (during amity lake)

"We know absolutely nothing, besides what you and Sofie told us. The Guardian Order has plenty of questions, but little in the way of answers. Still, this earth sorcerer could be dangerous, especially if he’s creating Dire animals in the Eterna Forest. This warrants an investigation. – missing end quotations

“I’m ready,” you say, picking Midnight off the floor. Let’s go." – missing quotations before Let’s

"Looks like a witch hunter is looking for me. What do you want? – end quotations

Lanna & Ria sidequest

She does not seem to be entirely clueless, although are still the better baker, working in your own kitchen. It will be up to you to run to show this time. – Although you are & Up to you to run the show

Suddenly, you head an ominous bubbling in the pond behind you. – hear instead of head

Ari gathering sidequest
not difficult to observe her as she swims around, picking up flora and fauna at every step, as well as any other useful materials, on the lakebed. – at every step while swimming?

Alaric Castle Mystery
(upon finding the fellbeast) but it grow stronger as the three of you close in on your target. – grows

Chocolate sidequest
it does not take long to sense a magical aura from within. – forgot to caps the i

Breaking into the Archives
“Sofie and I be meeting Erling,” Gaius says. – will be meeting?

“He’s always bothered by something,” Gaius says. Anyway, goodbye." – missing quotation

After learning about your mom
“It’s not,” you say plainly. "I just want to talk. – missing quotations

Talking to your mom
“Is Amity Lake still around? There is so much I can show you.” With that, her hands glow with magical power." – extra quotation this time lol

Queen hops onto your broom
Has she ridden on one before. – ? instead of a .

Sexy Gaius times
before pulling of his shirt and feeling – off instead of… of :joy:

Sexy Elbrus times
“Are you ready?” Elbrus says teasingly, brushing his hand on your cheek." – Extra quote

odd transition or confusing moments

At the very start

Standard mode - Play the game the way it was meant to be played.
This wording feels condescending :sob:why have a story mode available if you’re going to say it’s not the way the game is meant to be played

Naming confusion – for some reason I thought the last name was a new first name that the lord chose for you :sweat_smile:

I wish I could see my stats sooner! Particularly for picking specializations and such, I worry I’m missing out on important info. I switched to the stat screen so many times during the character builder because I wasn’t sure what any of my choices were actually doing. Playing thru a second time I wouldn’t have this anxiety haha, but it wasn’t clear on a first time play.

Should chapter 2 begin with the start of the new day? Right now it’s click next chapter, more talk from gaius, then click ‘the next day’. It feels like an odd transition

When meeting Mystria
“Liselle, meet Elbrus. Water sorcerer.”

Elbrus gives you a low bow, before taking a seat on a rickety wooden chair.
– Odd transition from handing over half my jewelry to suddenly… being in a room of people, i think?

Alaric Caslte Mystery
Carefully, you put each trinket on, securing the chains and feeling the magical energies coursing through your body each time. No sorceress ever leaves her home, let alone faces a magical problem, without wearing her jewelry.

“Sofie, I’m not done yet,” you laugh.

Was Sofie supposed to say something here?

Going to the tailor with Gaius
Seraphine City is filled with beautiful stone buildings and bustling streets. Unfortunately, the townsfolk are not too enamored by the presence of a sorceress. A powerful magical aura, visible to even the ordinary folk, emanates from you. However, it is nothing more than a mark of evil to the distrustful townsfolk. Dark looks greet you every now and then. Still, this is something you have largely grown used to.

Thankfully, Gaius is by your side, distracting you with conversation. Occasionally, the townsfolk greet you with particularly hateful looks, which Gaius quickly counters with a stern expression of his own. Without him, you would likely be left to the tender mercies of the people all around you.
– Isn’t this the same text as when going to the bakery/a walk in the city with him at the start?

Breaking into the Archives

If I helped Ria on a previous quest, couldn’t she be in on the break into the archives? Or is that the clue she left?

general thoughts, feelings, and vibes

I’m pretty chill with not having a lot of customization for the MC, but because I was playing on carefree mode, I was mostly annoyed by re-entering changing my hair, eye, and skin tan without prompting before certain missions since it really has no practical use.

One thing that got me, though, was a thought I had during the night after getting halfway-ish through the game. I tried to age MC and landed on her being 16… and then I realized I could not disprove this theory. I think part of it is that my random evening scenes were almost exclusively reading fairytales and playing with dolls (at one point playing with dolls 3 nights in a row :sob:) I think some more random scenes that aren’t necessarily domestic or girl-coded would be beneficial. Seriously, I cannot tell you how relieved I was when MC’s mom woke up and did some serious math for me :smiling_face_with_tear:

In general I find it hard to pick siding with the outlaw mages because like, they want to rock the boat and stuff but personally MC has it so good? Like, Gaius is nice and the whole system lets MC basically run around on errands and do whatever anyway, and she’s never attacked by the townspeople (that I saw) when alone and whatnot. So there really wasn’t any benefit for me to side with them, esp after mom woke up.

I will have to be honest and say the romance wasn’t very engaging. I think it was because I could, for example, kiss Gaius at the solstice and then afterwards it’s never ever mentioned again no matter how much I pick him over Sofie – I actually couldn’t even believe I was able to propose to him in the end because he was so lukewarm the whole time and also because I accidentally romanced Elbrus at the same time. I misinterpreted “having a moment of affection” with him since I literally only spent one scene with him (brewing potions I believe) over Mystria but sought him at the party because I was worried I might’ve accidentally been racking up Mystria romance points or something.

I was typing up notes on a doc while playing, so I will leave you with this gem:
image

I had fun though. It was cute, and while I think it could be fun on harder difficulties, carefree mode was nice in that I could just be a badass all the time. :relieved_face:

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@zozopuff thanks for taking a look.

Yep. I’ve gotten this feedback from a few, so I’ll rewrite it.

I hid it from the start as I didn’t like having blank fields in a stats screen, but I could unhide it from the start… I’m thinking of a progressive structure to reveal fields in the stats screen as the character creation progresses.

Yep, that was intentional.

Fair. I might put in a transition scene in between.

She wasn’t, but now that you mention it, she could. It would make more sense within the dialogue. :thinking:

That was originally a standalone chapter, so there was some copy/paste from the bakery/park. It looked like it made sense when I originally ported and read the chapter, but yeah, I think I’ll need to rewrite and remove the repetition.

She won’t help you with this quest, and isn’t supposed to know about the break in. Some dialogue in the earlier chapter changes slightly if you did her side-quest first.

Truthfully… I wanted to have characters reference previous romance decisions, but this was laziness on my part since it could take a lot of work to write branching dialogue to account for this. I might get back to this at some point, but this one is a bit lower priority.

You need three points to romance a character. (I could publish a full guide as to where points are awarded, if anyone wants.)

I’ll take a look at the typos. Thanks for catching them.

I’m planning to add more random scenes in future updates. There are currently 12 scenes the game will pick from, so there will be some repetition.

The mc’s age is directly revealed during the Guardian Square break in. Did you find it? :sweat_smile:

Thanks again!

1 Like

No problem!! After posting I was like, oh damn, I hope I didn’t sound nitpicky :joy: I really wanted to be thorough, though I did lag a bit over the halfway mark just because it was like 1am and I’m not a night person lmao. I did have fun overall and if I bought this game as is, I doubt I’d have kind of buyer’s remorse or anything.

To be fair I am the kind of person who will look at stats before a game even starts just to orient myself with some of the mechanics or personality tags etc. It helps me get a feel for the character and world usually!

I think it would be even a small improvement if it’s just a boolean variable like (kissed) and if it’s true just adding flavor text to what’s already there! Nothing huge, but it makes it feel like there is actually a relationship happening.

Sadly I did not :sob: (this is where it was very late at night and comprehension levels were down :joy:) I didn’t catch it until MCs mother woke up and said it had been 20 years and that MC was about 2?? when she took the potion lol.

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Hi all,

I just pushed a hotfix for the game. I didn’t correct any typos for this one, just fixed one major bug and two moderate bugs. As far as I can tell, save slots and game progress should be largely unaffected.

Nevertheless, if anyone had lost save files and/or progress as a result, my deepest apologies. I’m trying to work within the limits of the choicescript engine, and need to balance fixing bugs with avoiding gameplay disruption.

I will also try to provide at least a week of notice before pushing any updates in future.

Edit: I am planning to release a major update around 5-7AM Eastern Time (9-11AM UTC) on Apr 19, 2025. This might disrupt existing playthroughs and save files.

You weren’t nitpicky. Thanks for taking a look. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi. I have played the full demo and I think it’s great. It really made me feel invested with the characters especially Erbus. One thing I really wish it to have is to have the option to side with the outlaw mages against the guardian and make Erbus the king. Throughout the story I felt angry because of how my MC was treated but I have no option to retaliate at all so it was really frustrating. I wish for the rolepay purpose, there are options to be more “evil” or radical. Thank you.

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Thanks, but could you shift your comment to this main WIP topic? :slightly_smiling_face: This version of the game has been dead for some time.

Regarding being unable to side with the outlaws, my original draft was that you could side with either faction to take out the other. However, I ended up cutting this as the game was already getting quite big. Maybe I could add this back, but it could take a lot of writing and plotting, so it’s probably not a very high priority unless I see more interest for it.

Thanks for playing it!

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