Very impressed so far, especially considering this is the first public iteration (like the map… wow).
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Looking forward to this!
When out meeting Areal. A scout reported back to the officer after giving up. Told him ‘he’ instead of ‘she’ probably got a lover at village.
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Oh I forgot about that one, thanks for telling me! Just fixed it.
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Still can’t edit the main post, so I’ll just leave the update here for now:
I’ve just updated the WIP! This update includes fixes for most of the reported errors, patched the stat overflow issue (hopefully!), fixed the infinite loading bug when choosing your own name, and got the stats working—though I’ll likely still tweak it further. I also added a few more choice options in some places, included a new scene with Zatus, and extended the story a bit more at the end. Altogether, the update adds about 15k words, bringing the total WIP length to around 85k. Due to the ammount of fixes, it might break a few saves though, sorry about that.
If anyone spots any errors or bugs, feel free to let me know and I’ll fix them as soon as possible! The next story update might take a little longer since I want to take my time in the next few scenes. Thank you all for your patience, and thanks so much for reading my story!
Also, I wanted to ask you all something—would you prefer to wait a bit longer for bigger updates, or would you rather have smaller, more frequent ones?
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smaller and frequent for me, lets me know the games still alive
maybe open a poll for that if you know how
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Oh, I didn’t realize I could create polls here! I’ll definitely do that then—thanks for letting me know!
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What would you guys prefer?
- Smaller updates but more frequent
- Larger updates but less frequent
0
voters
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Smaller but frequent updates are better for feedback and stuff as the game progress. The problem with larger updates is that authors tend to get caught up and try to add too much at once to make the wait ‘worth it’, which make the wait longer which make them want to add more etc.
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Please don’t go on hiatus for unseen periods of time, please don’t abandon this!! I am already hooked.
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Don’t worry, I have no plans of abandoning this story. I’m really enjoying writing it, and I’ve actually been planning to bring it to life for a few years now!
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Well, “Black Dragon of Calamity” is causing me to have dark souls flashbacks- but I’m interested in seeing how things develop. I’ll keep my eye on this.
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All right. I enjoyed the story very much, it’s a great concept and I love dragons (and angels - which is how I choose to visualize Aurelians).
I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but I felt like the quality of the writing improved a lot in roughly the second half of the game - more or less since MC leaves Emberford.
In the earlier parts I sometimes thought the choices were too focused on the 3 personalities that we’re supposed to choose from, and to me it felt a little forced. An illusion of choice, so to speak: if, for example, I decided I want to play as an arrogant toerag that thinks themselves superior to the puny humans, than I actually had no real dialogue choice - I can only pick the matching option. Which, sure, I’d probably pick anyways, but… idk. It feels like I have to. And it’s kind of repetitive too. 5 of the first 6 choices are basically “just my duty/ I am the best / my life sucks”. And of course that’s a major theme of the story, and it’s a good one too, don’t get me wrong. It just felt like too much at once.
In the second half, on the other hand, I felt that it all came much more naturally. We come to question our role in the world and opinion about Emberford, Azgor, and so on in conversations with people (Zagur/Arael/Azgor himself), or in reaction to various events (the orc raid / the Aurelian [?] invasion at the end).
I liked Azgor’s character quite a lot. I loved every single scene with Arael in it. We barely saw the prince/ss but they both seem pretty interesting too.
I never write this much, and a lot of it is technically negative, but I swear to you - this story rocks. Any issue I may have is in, like, formatting or however you want to call it. The actual heart of the story is excellent, and I’m sure you will make something really good out of it.
Thanks for writing.
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Thank you! I’m really glad you liked it, and don’t worry about the criticism—it’s genuinely helpful. I don’t have any experience writing something like this, so feedback like yours really helps me understand where I should focus and improve.
And honestly, I completely agree with you. I’m not entirely happy with the first half, especially before the Warden leaves Emberford. Early on, I was trying to set up a system with three clear main paths the MC could follow, but as I kept writing, it started to feel a bit forced, and more natural, character-driven options made a lot more sense to me. I definitely want to go back and rewrite some of those moments; I’m just still figuring out exactly how I want to approach it.
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I should read the update soon as I can.
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Very interesting start! Lookin forward to seein how this story develops!
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Amazing work! Wow, it’s way too easy to fell in love with MC here. I chose a MC who sees himself as a weapon and vthinks he would only lives to serve his obligation, yet has a bleeding heart deep inside. It was a very satisfying experience! The way you write your scenes are so vivid, and you have an ability to make characters come to life. Both the prince and princess are extremely charming even though we only got to meet them once. They both seem to have complicated personalities and not just some 1-dimensional cliche characters. Initially I thought it’s a calculated ambitious mastermind (princess) vs. kind inspiring but maybe naive leader (prince) trope, that’s not the case. In fact, I feel the prince, who I assumed to be the naive type, has actually more scheming going on than the princess. The princess is more intelligent, but that doesn’t mean she understand how people work, which might make her more naive in this case… oh well, but anyway it was loads of fun. Thank you so much for creating this work! Minor bug report by the way, seems like theres dialogue within the choices in later part of game that are all lowercased and lost the period at the end.
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Thank you! I’m really glad you enjoyed it! I love character-driven stories, so I spent a lot of time focusing on the characters before I even started writing—crafting their backstories, goals, and personalities to try and make them feel more “real.” But honestly, the hardest part for me has been finding the balance between making them interesting without taking the spotlight away from the main character.
And I really loved your analysis of Ecbert and Theresa—there’s definitely more to them than meets the eye!
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Thanks! I’ll make sure to fix it as soon as I can.
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Congrats on the Demo! Solid writing with many choices, I loved the MC’s voice and Azgor is such a fun character. As for feedback I recommend switching the singular {they} pronoun to a plural {they} so the writing flows better (I say that as a NB person). I do wonder if Vadis will be a possible RO in the future 
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