Leech is a visual novel where you play as a healer in the Middle Ages. Keep your village safe, without getting burned at the stake as a witch.

Play time: 5-15 minutes depending on how fast you read. 

This is a short game that I made as part of March Jam, but I am hoping to expand it further in time. Any feedback at this stage is very much appreciated! Particularly things you would like to see more of in an expanded version.  


Comments

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Breaking kayfabe to say this, and I truly hope this doesn't come off as patronizing, but before you can receive narrative feedback (especially about an expansion), the interactive fiction needs to be functional. Clicking around, I encountered multiple errors and even a dead end error.

This was a very ambitious first game, but that requires all the more time to playtest. It also highlights a tricky part of Interactive Fiction: books usually can't be written in a way they "break," and even if a microphone or light goes out in a theater, a talented enough actor can keep the show going, but when interactive fiction has an error, not only can the experience itself stop, but it takes the reader/player out of the world and can be harder to convince them to come back.

I do not want this to be discouraging. There are multiple solutions: interactive fiction even shorter and smaller in scope can still have interesting decisions and take less time to playtest due to less moving parts. Conversely, more time and more friends playing can identify the issues with a game this size. I just think this was important enough to share, and did not want your first game to be met with silence.
(And if it is any consolation, this is coming from someone who also failed to properly budget the time required to make my interactive fiction functional in a month, and only barely made it past the finish line due to multiple social events canceling and converting most of that time into polishing. So I know how hard it can be, even with previous experience. Still, I'm better now than when I first started making games, and if you stick with it, you will be better as well!)

(+1)

Thanks for the feedback - it’s not patronising at all! I did playtest it beforehand but clearly not enough so I’ll budget more time for that for next time.