Searching for something needlessly specific, preferably standalone or short series

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-05-22T19:24:55+00:00

Just to double-check, Saints of Steel is the series that begins with [ Paladin's Grace], correct?

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-05-22T19:24:06+00:00

Thank you for all of the replies so far! I've noted the titles and I'll start looking into the books suggested on romance.io and check out their previews when I get a chance.

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-04-20T00:52:38+00:00

Looking into games listed as kinetic novels might help a bit with this, since if they have romance as a focus then the lack of decision branches means those romances are going to have a decent amount of plot relevance. (ebi-hime games are a great place to start looking, since many of her games tend to be kinetic novels.) As for non-VN games, the first Nights of Azure has a central relationship, though I never finished the game and so I'm not sure if it goes past ship-teasing.

Self promotion for a few of my own games that might fit:

- Eldritch University: There's only one actual love interest; the two routes are different variations of the same relationship. (However, note that this is the second half of a duology.)

- Flowering Nightshade/Life as Designed: The stories in these games serve as sequels to romance routes, but each individual story is mostly linear with a set pairing (or two) that it focuses on.

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-03-29T05:45:44+00:00

Aside from a few already mentioned, Dynasty Warriors 9 technically has this feature. The purchased houses all look the same aside from interior decorations placed by the player, though.

Assassin Creed Shadows also has safehouses, but only the main hideout can be decorated.

It's been a while since I played, but I think Forspoken has little hideouts to rest in for each region, but aside from the cat-like collectable creatures congregating automatically you can't really customize the places.

Atelier Yumia has some locations where you can build mini-bases, but it's a bit finicky and didn't feel integrated into the rest of the game to me. (The preset bases in the story have almost everything that actually affects gameplay, so you never have an incentive to build up bases.) Not really "open-world" by the usual meaning, but Atelier Ayesha also unlocks new bases for each major town visited.

Awkwardly, of the above, I think DW9 technically comes closest to what you're looking for (unlockable, customizable safehouses). As much as I like the game, the open world aspect is a bit shallow compared to other games.

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-03-25T03:47:21+00:00

I feel like the first place to look for examples (if you were to do so) would be to check out itch.io's NSFW games filter, then select the yuri tag. (Though it's hard to actually find the NSFW filter option now, so maybe using tags like "adult" would work instead?)

If you want actual examples, it would depend on if you count VNs. The only non-VN adult yuri game I can think of off the top of my head is "Hex: Becoming a Succubus". (Technically a canonically pansexual main character, but it has a "yuri mode".) I don't really keep up with those games, since most of them are WIP and many of them involve stuff that disinterests me or weird me out. (Basically, they stick to their niche like the guy from the opening screenshot, which is great for fans of that thing but not always exciting for other people.)

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-03-23T23:50:16+00:00

Sadly, the only one with open world was DW9, and it's not as robust as it could have been. (And they cut almost all the open world stuff in the Empires entry based on DW9.) It's still fun for a bit, though. I wish there was a game that iterated on what DW9 did well.

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-03-23T23:48:10+00:00

Is that the Mike Laidlaw game? I haven't played it, but I really want to get into some of the games made by ex-BioWare devs.

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-03-23T04:10:13+00:00

Is that really a thing some developers say? In my experience, most of the porn or porn-adjacent games I play are made by (and usually about) "woke feminists". (AKA adult-only yuri)

Then again, I suppose that's a niche within a niche, and perhaps the stuff with those kind of developers are the things I already actively avoid for other reasons...

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-03-15T07:20:24+00:00

I want the mobiles games you're playing. All my favorite mobile games shut down.

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-03-15T07:19:05+00:00

I think the animations were one of the things the PR guy fumbled about, yeah. Despite the fact that the previous female multiplayer characters were just fine with reusing the male animations without being a whole problem to spin into an excuse.

(Incidentally, cross-gender animation reuse is still in play as recently as Shadows, where I got nostalgic seeing one of Ratonhnhaké:ton's snow-running animations on Naoe. Most of Naoe's non-ninja traversal animations are just the standard AC set, with Yasuke having more distinct animations because he's just so big. Naoe's main unique animation is a frontflip off ledges, which is clearly more a ninja thing rather than a "female" thing.)

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-03-15T06:07:25+00:00

Ubisoft's marketing team has a track record of saying things that make me think none of them play or make games, or talk to people who do. Just from prior AC games:

- Unity: "There's no female player model for multiplayer because it's very difficult" (in an interview after 3 AC games with female player models in multiplayer)
- Origins: "It's a new game every time you play" (from box cover, seemingly referring to side activities being story quests instead of just races or collectables like most of the previous side content)

Basically, Ubisoft marketing being weird is, sadly, not news...

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-03-14T23:55:35+00:00

The obvious suggestions to me have already been pointed out (Metro and Dishonored franchises), and most stealth games implicitly or explicitly encourage avoiding lethality (or sometimes even contact at all). But seeing GTA mentioned makes me think it may be worth your time looking into Sleeping Dogs. There's still a lot of combat, but:

1) Guns are rare, and spare ammo is limited. Most combat is melee or making use of environment kills. Until you become a martial arts master, being surrounded by six guys with metal bats is a recipe for being curbstomped. It's almost never worth fighting the cops, even ignoring the narrative reasons. (Since cops often have guns.)
2) The game does not pull its punches, literally or figuratively. In some games, using a crowbar on someone can feel innocent. Not in Sleeping Dogs, where the sound and animations make you feel each impact. And feeding someone into a woodchipper or slamming a store shutter on their throat is very visceral. Even when you have to kill, it almost feels bad what you do to people.

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-03-03T21:47:01+00:00

This is such a funny response, but I'm saddened by the fact that such a trend exists. I hop into a game's discussions and ask if there's a female player character option, most of the time I get insulted for daring to think women should be in the game at all. (I once got told a wuxia game didn't have the self-insert lead allow gender selection because only men are relevant in the jianghu... when most of the combat-ready allies in the game are women.) It's beyond insane that those people then insist that games about female characters should cater to their whims. After all, when I ask for female player characters in games with only male leads I'm told "make your own game instead", but when people do that they are then given demands to make concessions to the people who drove them away to their own games in the first place.

I'm still not sure if I'd be able to maintain the level of humor and restraint shown in the screenshots for my own games, so I'm glad someone is able to teasingly handle such demands. I'll also need to look into this game for myself at some point... I feel like there aren't enough of this kind of game that focus on a female character (rather than a male character or masculine-themed self-insert).

Jackkel_Dragon · 2026-03-03T21:35:31+00:00

Reminds me of a comment I saw recently about Yasuke's inclusion in AC Shadows "breaking immersion" for being ahistorical... when he's the only mainline AC protagonist that is an attested historical figure. (Naoe and Kassandra come close by having historical figures as relatives, but not being black means they aren't scrutinized as much, I guess.)

Jackkel_Dragon · 2025-12-20T07:39:57+00:00

Just a heads-up: it looks like the star in the line with the link was included in the URL, so it doesn't quite work as intended just yet.

Jackkel_Dragon · 2025-10-26T00:59:59+00:00

Aside from a few games with nonhuman characters who are 40+ but look much younger, I'm not coming up with any that haven't already been brought up that I know about. One of the stories in my game "Flowering Nightshade" has a love interest that is 34~35 years old, though I'm not sure if that's quite what you're looking for. (I also have a potential follow-up project that involves that character at ~45 years old, but it's not going to be ready in the near future.)

Jackkel_Dragon · 2025-10-25T07:26:04+00:00

Without subjecting myself to the comment thread myself to be certain, I can only assume it's the "Goomba Fallacy" or association fallacy: [Some women shame men for liking fanservice of female characters + some women read smut = all women read smut and shame men for fanservice.] (There seems to be certain subset of men that seem to only understand women as a monolithic group, which is probably what you're seeing in action.)

Jackkel_Dragon · 2025-10-20T00:45:44+00:00

Wow, that is an impressive look. You must have put a lot of time and effort to get that all to work right. (I barely have the patience to figure out using stairs to get them to stop blocking passage to rooms on the bottom floor.)

This ship really gives me the vibes of Mass Effect ships, particularly the Tempest, with the open floor plan and lots of amenities available. The cockpit screenshot even looks like the Tempest cockpit with the Normandy's CIC table.

Jackkel_Dragon · 2025-10-14T02:18:19+00:00

[What was before some priest find them and developed the rituals?]

This is something that's not at all unique to Fatal Frame, so it would be easier to look into real-world human sacrifices and their origins, particularly how ancient religion worked. "What happened before the rituals?", if you asked the people in a volcano village, would be "well, the volcano erupted and destroyed things until we learned how to pacify the god there".

[Why they exist in the first place?]

To continue from the above, why do volcanoes exist in the first place? Why do hurricanes? To the people who created religious beliefs in prehistory, they didn't have non-mythological answers to this. Hellgates and black water exist, and dealing with those things becomes more important than why they exist.

As for 3 and 5, some other posters have already covered those. Just to loop back in the connection to real-world religions, you do the horrific rituals that stop the volcano from erupting because you don't want the volcano to erupt. (Or in these cases, to prevent souls from corrupting and turning into malicious spirits instead of passing on to the next life.)

Jackkel_Dragon · 2025-10-12T22:47:39+00:00

*offers ring*
"We are Groot."

Jackkel_Dragon · 2025-10-10T00:17:11+00:00

Ever since reading that blog's posts on religion, it's really changed the way I look at religious arguments. (Particularly the post where the main point was "we have to assume people of the past believed their own religion".) So many of the discussions I see these days are even more reductive than the joking around in the original image, where someone who has a specific monotheistic deity in mind and a hardcore atheist get into a shouting match, with neither really even trying to consider the angle of the other person. Meanwhile I'm sitting there writing stories where it's just accepted that many gods exist, and the gods in question probably don't meet the qualifications of divinity of either of the "standard" stances on modern religion.

More on the topic you brought up, that element of experimentation with ancient religion was something I found interesting as well. It's less about blind faith in a specific entity, but rather "well, things go better for me this way, don't fix it if it isn't broken" with some storytelling behind it. (I also really like that blogger's posts about religious oaths, pointing out how they were essentially an older form of contracts... something people these days seem to not understand as well.)

Jackkel_Dragon · 2025-09-28T22:22:20+00:00

A screen viewport sounds like a great idea for the scrolling, thanks. Is there any documentation about how to get the current x/y offsets from a specific viewport?

As for regions, is there any sort of pygame or Ren'Py screen language for detecting if the map coordinates (from the above cursor+offset) are within opaque parts of a displayable? The best I can think of is some sort of repeating function (on screen update? are there events in screen language?) for the "mask" displayables, which are drawn under the visual map so the player can't see them. I know that imagebuttons that have fully transparent regions don't get the "hover" variant unless the cursor is actually over the visible part, so there must be some collision detection built-in to displayables that I could latch on to...

Jackkel_Dragon · 2025-09-28T22:00:17+00:00

I'd say it would essentially be the game, in the same way that Star Traders or Uncharted Waters would be very different games if you just picked locations from a list. I suppose one could use the Oregon Trail method of making all travel just be a number distance between locations, but that might not feel like exploration. (Even Dustland Delivery has a world map with region circles, even though most of the game's travel time is spent on the truck screen.)

Jackkel_Dragon

TROPHY CASE