Saintsridge Angels is a text-based adventure game following Seth, a third-year in the prestigious Saintsridge University in California.
For most of his time here, Seth kept to himself, letting days, weeks, or years pass him by without much event. But one day, his childhood friend invites him to move in with her, and the five other women she’s living with, as the only man in their unofficial sorority.
Confused but curious, Seth agrees to meet these sorority girls, and in doing so, may change the course of his life forever.
A story about Love, Angels, Demons, Family, and Sacrifice.
Saintsridge Angels is, first and foremost, a psychological horror, which tackles a variety of topics, some of which users may find disturbing. It is intended for mature audiences only; a list of content warnings can be found in the game’s opening screen.
Introducing my Interactive Horror Story- Saintsridge Angels! This is a project, still in development, that I’ve been working on for a long time. It delves into a variety of dark and heavy themes, with a focus on characters and relationships that feel deep and realistic. Its horror depends on your ability to form a connection with others, and so the people you meet on this journey are as complex and human possible.
If you’re looking for a slow-burn and a deep, emotional journey through harrowing, personal obstacles, please give Saintsridge Angels a try!
I haven’t actually played, but noodling around in the tutorial, it looks like imgur is used for hosting some images shown as popovers when you hover over dialogue – perhaps they are character images or something? (e.g. 1, 2)
imgur doesn’t serve images to the UK any more (since about October) – see screenshot for what we see. Maybe you can’t / don’t want to do anything about that, but it’s something to be aware of. (If the images were hosted on itch, I think that’d work fine in the UK.)
Not actually due to the UK OSA
This isn’t actually due to the UK’s Online Safety Act – imgur were fined under data protection law about their handling of childrens’ data, and decided to take their ball away (coverage from BBC, The Register) – it’s not a government-mandated block. I’m unclear if the data handling concern is just about children with imgur accounts, or adtech, or that anyone on the Internet including children might see Bad Pictures served by imgur, or all of the above; certainly a recent press release by the regulator leans into the latter.
(btw if this is going to turn into another discussion of government regulation of the internet, let’s do that in a new topic, not this game announcement topic)
Interesting. I’ve never heard about hosting images on itch being a thing you could do, but if imgur is unavailable in some regions, I definitely want to fix that. Thanks for letting me know.
I played through this enough to get to a screen telling me there was no more content, so I hope I got a pretty good look at the game. In general the writing was quite readable and the pace was good; there were a few typos but nothing egregious enough that I made special note of it.
I found the visual presentation of the game a bit janky, for lack of a better word. The colored text for each character was an interesting idea, but I didn’t really like having to hover over the text to see the speaker, and having the image pop up in the corner was a bit incongruous. It also won’t work at all on a touchscreen and likely has accessibility issues as well. I think it would work better if you had some sort of a “speech box” macro for each character. I also found the yellow-on-light-blue choice links a bit hard to read, especially when hovering over them and the text turns a different shade of blue. On the end-of-chapter screen where you could see your relationships with each character, the aspect ratio of the images was distorted (they were much too narrow so they looked “stretched out” vertically) and the names didn’t align with the characters. This may be due to me playing on a 1280x800 screen. Also, one other bug I noticed: I disabled timed text but I still ran into timed text, later on in the game. It might also be nice to be able to go back and read the character’s thoughts on a concept later on, for example, the Parths are introduced before knowing their relevance and I would have liked to have been able to go back and see that screen again.
I liked the characterization of each of the main female characters. It felt like each one definitely had a distinct personality that came through, especially during group activities like the board game or poker game. I liked their banter, too. I was a little less keen on the protagonist: sometimes it felt like there were options that weren’t on the table but maybe should have been: e.g., the only options in the first exchange with Jessie are “Flirt” and “Talk down to her” without any more neutral option, there was no way to escape the situation when Aurora started getting handsy, etc. I get that each choice adds more work though so I can understand needing to restrict things a little.
As for the story of the game itself, it was interesting enough that I kept playing, which definitely counts as praise… though I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about it. It started off with a cute “harem anime” vibe and then abruptly descended into darker stuff, which I’m sure was intentional but the tonal shift still felt a bit abrupt to me. It was also hard to tell what was “real” and what wasn’t, which was interestingly foreshadowed by the board game night where the narrative shifted to being like they were actually there, and I also got the sense this was intentional but may have been confusing in a way that could detract from the story.
Admittedly I also never really had any sense of how my choices were actually influencing my bonds with the characters. For example, after Mabel apologized and things seemingly were better with her, the relationship actually dropped from 0 to -1 (which may or may not be a bug)
I don’t want to nitpick too much or come across like I thought this game was not good, so that’s enough criticizing it for now. Instead I’ll just add that you could sidestep the whole image hosting thing and embed the images in the game itself, as passages full of base64 encoded text. I use SugarCube so I don’t know how exactly you’d do it with Harlowe but I’m pretty sure it’s possible.
Thank you so much for playing! I really appreciate the feedback, the game’s obviously in a very early state still so hearing this stuff is super valuable.
That’s fair, though the hovering feature is something that was added as a tool to help remind players when they need it, or for the colorblind. Generally, the intention is for the colored text to be all that conveys who is speaking from the main characters, but if there’s a better way to communicate this while still maintaining the general writing style, I’m always open to new methods.
Noted, I’ll play around with some darker colors for either the background or the text to make it more visible.
Ugh, the screen resolution. Jesus christ, the screen resolution. I have been fighting with this problem for the better part of a year now, and have gone through multiple possible solutions, and I just can’t seem to jump this hurdle. No matter what I do, I can’t manage to get the game, its text, and its images to be formatted the same way on different screen resolutions. It seems like it should be such an easy thing to manage, but I cannot seem to find any way to get the game to just shrink or grow with a player’s screen so things can stay in their proper place. I bet that contributed to your annoyance with the speaker-pop-up feature too; on my screen the pop-up window appears in a section in the bottom-left screen where no other text or information ever appears, so it looks neat and unobtrusive. But I’m well aware that for other players it will overlap with the sidebar text, or the text of the game itself, which sucks.
And yeah, it makes the ‘view relationships’ page a mess, too. I don’t know man, I’m gonna keep trying, but I have just had no luck on this front.
Do you remember what scene(s) this happened during? It might not be a bug. While I made a point to re-write all of the larger scenes where text auto-advances, there are a few minor instances where it remains, mostly because they happen in moments where the scene advances on its own, without any input from the player, or if there is literally only one line of text that auto-advances, for lore-important reasons. I should probably add an addendum in the beginning that disclaims there will still be very minor instances of auto-advancing text, even when disabled.
But again, it only happens during very short bursts, like, no more than 8 seconds, so if you got stuck with a longer one, that’s my mistake, and please let me know.
It’s not so much that it adds more work, I’d be willing to write a few more choices for smaller moments, and I still might- but the reason you may feel a little out of control for some decisions is because you are. Seth isn’t a player insert; you have sway over some of his decisions, but he shouldn’t feel like a stand-in or extension of you. That’s something that will hopefully feel a little more intentional and well-communicated as the story develops more.
When Jessie and Mabel had their fight in chapter 3, you sat down and kept watching the telenovela with the others, right? I won’t say too much, because how you feel about the pacing is valid regardless of whatever route you took- but you actually did miss something pretty big during that chapter, which effects the rest of the story moving forward, and the sort of awkward tone is a consequence of that. I’m not saying that to wave the criticism away, just saying that things would probably feel different on a different play through. Mabel’s bond dropping to -1 is a bug though. It going down is correct, but I thought I put up a failsafe to keep it from dropping below 0, but I guess I didn’t implement it right.
I’m actually curious how your story ended, and how many supernatural events you ran into, I’m interested in knowing how the decisions you made correlate with how much you felt the story did/didn’t work.
Regardless though, thanks again for the feedback, I’ll definitely be looking back at this when I start making my next few tweaks or working on continuing the game.
I like the idea of a little colored “speech box” with a little headshot and caption off to the side, but this may or may not be what you want stylistically.
I have been there. CSS can be pretty finicky and it feels like every time I think I’ve come across a definitive solution something else breaks. I took a look at your code and it seems like you’re using spans, which might be part of your problems, because they’re not really designed for this. Maybe you’d have more luck with divs using display: grid? Worst case, you could always party like it’s 1999 and use a table.
The game over if you didn’t join the sorority was the big one that stands out, but I know there were some others that may or may not have been intentional like Jessie and Mabel’s fight.
Also, I went back and replayed the part with Mabel and Jessie, and went upstairs with her this time and there was a decent amount of timed text there.
If/when I replay the game further I’ll pay more attention to this!
Ok, Mabel not liking that he didn’t go talk to her and the bond dropping because of that makes sense, so I will revise my criticism to say I think that what exactly happened could possibly be better communicated. Especially after I replayed that part and went to talk to Mabel this time and saw the whole big thing I missed!
The big supernatural event was the fight with Kat after reading Ophilia’s diary which kind of took me by surprise because it was a big shift in the direction of the story, although the dreams kind of foreshadowed it… but dreams are weird. (During that playthrough, I did miss the whole thing with Mabel) And then at the very end, Charlie was shooting everyone for some reason and there was supernatural stuff happening but that was very close to the end of the game as it is now so I’m not sure how it was going to play out.
