[The After Hours 0.1.1 Update]
The After Hours: Office Predators » Devlog
Hey there, beautiful furries and furry layers, BCSM here!
Our post-jam update is out and it’s quite a big gameplay makeover!
I’ve finally had the time to focus more on programming and gameplay, as opposed to juggling the H-Scene animations, sound design, UI and tons of other stuff. Here is a (probably incomplete) list of changes done to the gameplay:
- HIT DETECTION! Or actually what people meant by that. It’s much clearer whether you’ve hit the target or not.
- A complete makeover of that terribly soapy and slimy combat system, the main game plays completely differently now. Better tried out and felt than explained in text, though!
- Mob and boss rebalance. Shrimpie is not as much of a punching bag anymore, but she will get even more love in the future updates. The enemies feel stronger, but so do you!
- Better attack telegraphing for all enemies, the shark is now merciful enough to give you a little bit of time before completely obliterating you with her tail!
- Projectiles don’t go through walls anymore.
- New input system, hopefully fixes it for people that used to have problems with it before.
- Controller support! I suck at playing with those things, but it’s still super fun! Tested on DualShock, should theoretically work with any gamepad. Not all UI works with them for now, though, so don’t throw your mouse away for now.
- Unconventional aspect ratio support, showing some love to ultra-wide screen enjoyers and such.
- A gallery to view your unlocked h-scenes
- A new h-scene (currently Patreon-exclusive)
- Dash cooldown (and dash-related bug fixes)
- A small tweak in our narrative/h-scene stuff. The scene that was used after defeating Lady Fin was actually meant to play after losing to her. Now it’s back where it belongs, and winning is rewarded with a new scene that makes more sense in the context of Lady Fin getting vanquished.
- Save migration. There is an in-game option to pack your saves into a code that you can copy and paste into a different client (e.g. moving from web to pc or moving from a demo build to a patreon build).
- A new game option.
- Slight and not-so slight visual enhancements.
- Tons of other stuff I forgot to mention
Files
TheAfterHours_0.1.1_web.zip Play in browser
34 days ago
TheAfterHours_0.1.1_Demo.zip 107 MB
34 days ago
Get The After Hours: Office Predators
The After Hours: Office Predators
An awesome adult furry roguelike game about one man's struggle to survive in a sexy zoo of a corporate world.
Status | In development |
Authors | BCSM, Doomerboychik, Koshhata, Wyq |
Genre | Action, Visual Novel |
Tags | 2D, 3D, Adult, Erotic, Furry, No AI, NSFW, Roguelike, Third Person |
Languages | English |
Comments
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I sort of reviewed the current state of the game on F95 but if I had to summarize the game in it's current state I would say.
The main thing I didn't address was the fact that this was originally from a game jam, as I didn't know that until afterwards. Had I known that I don't think I'd have been as harsh on the gameplay.
Story/Writing: 7/10. Would be an 8 if the intro was more fleshed out. I don't need to know the birth of the MC/how he got his job, but at least a little more explanation would be nice. Right now everything is just in a "accept what's happening" kind of state. We don't even know if these dreams are a recent occurrence or something he's always dealt with. Explaining the world dynamics even a little would also be appreciated, since worldbuilding is one of my favorite aspects of HumanXAnthro settings.
Sound and Music: 8/10. Honestly nothing to say about this, would be higher if there was more. Who does the music?
Art: 9/10. The absolute best part of the game. There's only 3 characters (including the MC) in the game and I love all of them. Can't wait for you to add more!
Gameplay: 4.5/10
I wish I could rate this higher but even upgraded it still needs a lot of work. Like I said in my F95 review perhaps I am just bad at the game but it still feels like there's some major weirdness how everything is set up, especially on how you fight the current bosses. My F95 review goes a little more into this.
Overall a game with a huge amount of potential, but with one area that definitely needs major work on before anything else.
Hey there Busyman4this, good to see you here on itch! Hope you don't feel like your review was some sort of "talking to a brick wall" moment because it absolutely wasn't. we were having a team meetup yesterday and some of your points were the main ones discussed there!
Thanks for a ton of attention and goodwill you're giving to our game ( so much in fact, that it was enough to go out of your way to study wtf this game is and write a follow-up when you realize it's a jam game). About the points raised here:
1) It's a very interesting point about our storytelling and a big gotcha moment for me xd. I wrote like 2x of what's currently in the game and the team went TLDR and made me trim it significantly. You're giving me an excuse to raise that point again lmao
2) We use the free stuff, with plans (but no clear understanding of "how") of commissioning music when we're not as broke
3-4) Just as planned here! Our team is comically art-skewed. Basically, we have a team of 4 people, 3 of them only doing the art and the 4th (me) doing everything but art, including even the story writing and stuff (and actually some art too if you consider h-scene animations that). Somehow we just figured that in the long run the gameplay and stuff will figure itself out but we do need the most awesome visuals possible. And, well, that people don't get off to gameplay I guess. We do know it's frustrating rn though, so gameplay is the most worked-on thing in this patch and probably will be in the next few. Would be too much goodwill for you to care but if you did we could send you the jam release (0.1.0) to sort of get a feel of the dynamic the game is moving in. It's honestly painful to play from today's perspective xd
We may not be replying to everything (although I wish I could!), we do read everything and the words you type somewhere out there in this universe do echo with our actual voices IRL when we... read your feedback out loud to make a point in yet another argument/discussion lmao
Hey, thanks for the very through reply. I felt less like talking to a brick wall and more figured that you were more active on the Itch page, as I find most devs aren't overtly active on their F95 pages unless they planned to release their game publicly from the start. (Speaking of which, you should submit a ticket if you want to get a Dev title on there!)
TL;DR *is* a valid take to a degree, at least in the terms of "this is a game where you can bonk a shrimp and a shark (or is she a dolphin? It's a bit confusing at times, but I assume shark making dolphin jokes, would it be awkward if you added a Dolphin character later?) and seeing the MC's transportation routine could easily be pretty wordy and overall not matter in the grand scheme of things, but I still feel like these are good grounding moments for the player and can even be used to setup future character/story arcs. One idea that pops into my head now would be perhaps the MC having a laptop/computer/phone that he can check his emails on, and maybe some of these emails are from before the start of the story. How far back would depend, but you could definitely stuff like him getting his job, email exchanges with his boss/co-workers/friends, hell, you could even have exchanges with his parents/grandparents. I'm not exactly sure how the story is going to pan out and whether the lewd conduct will remain solely in the dreamspace or not, but sometime like that could also allow stuff like lewd photo exchanges and the like. Hell, you could do a limited version of GTA and have a few fake websites the MC could browse and get a better idea of the world. The great thing about this is if a player doesn't care, they can just ignore it and be none the wiser.
If you want you can definitely send me the jam release and I'll check it out. Though as you said, I'll probably say something like "oh god!" when I see what it used to be like.
IMO I think the primary thing to focus on gameplay-wise is the way the player "feels". NPCs being a bit jittery can be forgiven by most if the character feels fun to control. My advice would be working on how the primary attack combos with itself and working on a way to naturally combine that with the secondary AOE attack/dash. Since the MC is using a Katana/sword, some kind of beyblade/spin to win dash attack would feel very natural in terms of flow, and definitely some sort of block/parry should be considered. As someone else stated, more obvious tells on what elements do is another great consideration. One of the things I thought when I saw lightning as a option was something like "Huh, I wonder if that will do more damage to these guys because they're aqua/fish-themed?" and I don't think I'd be the only one to think this. So I don't know whether that's a sign that enemies of zones should be more vulnerable to certain elements or not, but it's something to consider.
In terms of art, I think the only negative I could say would be something that a few others have said: The 2D animation looks kind of weird compared to the 3D environment and some scenes might need one or two touch ups, like the way the penis inserts in Shrimpie's scene. One consideration might be mixing it POV shots/variants of H-scenes? This might make it less jarring, as it's easier to "imagine" it as 3D if it's coming from the MC's POV, or at least this is what I think.
Woah, this is pretty crazy. Surreal to read all those ideas right after working on implementing so many of them :D
You're up for a surprise once the next update is out, I'll say this much. I think I may have said a little too much already, but you've pretty much guessed those updates yourself at this point, so kinda fair!