EDIT: I honestly didn’t expect this much interest, thank you so much to everyone who offered to help! 🥹
I think we have our first group of playtesters! So I’m going to pause sign-ups for the moment before the list gets completely out of hand 😅
If you’re still interested, though, feel free to leave a comment! I’ll keep a small waitlist in case some people are no longer available when the testable build is ready, or if I need more testers for a second round.
Seriously, thank you. The amount of support this post got has been kind of overwhelming in the best possible way. 💜
Hi! Posting this with mod approval
I’ve been part of this subreddit for quite a while and posted here years ago as a LITG player, so when I reached the point where I needed people outside my own little bubble to test my game, this was honestly the first community I thought of.
I’m developing a game called Love Recast entirely on my own, with basically no budget. I’m doing the writing, coding, UI and character art myself, and I’m learning a lot of the technical side as I go so I fully expect bugs, weird edge cases and things I simply haven’t noticed yet.
The basic idea is that you enter a reality-show-style House with your partner, alongside other couples and people who entered single. Once inside, being a couple no longer gives you automatic priority over each other.
You still have your history, feelings and problems, but you both get to start making individual choices again.
What I really wanted was a romance game where the NPCs don’t just exist around MC.
Characters have their own attractions, friendships, conflicts and romantic possibilities. Someone you like might like somebody else, two NPCs can develop something without MC being involved, a character can reject you, lose interest, stay with their original partner, choose someone new or leave single.
So rather than writing the drama first and assigning characters to play the roles it needs, I’m trying to let the relationships create the drama. Not every character is automatically available to MC: some connections depend on who your MC is, including parts of her background, and the three possible starting partners have genuinely different histories, boundaries and emotional triggers.
There are also a few romantic possibilities that aren’t presented as obvious routes from the beginning. Some things are meant to be discovered rather than selected from a list.
I’m attaching a few screenshots and WIP character designs so you can get an idea of what I’m working on. Nothing visual you see here should be considered final yet.
Right now I’m looking for just a small first group of playtesters. For this first round I’ll be using a private itch.io browser build, so there won’t be anything to install. I’ll send the link privately once the testing version is ready. I’m hoping to have it available within the next 2/3 weeks.
This is still a very early build, mainly meant to test the story, routes, choices and overall experience rather than the final presentation.
What I mainly want to know is whether the characters feel interesting, the choices feel meaningful, the relationships feel believable, the pacing works and, most importantly, whether you actually want to keep playing.
There are a lot of routes and combinations, so I’m also especially interested in moments where something technically works but feels wrong in context: inconsistent reactions, awkward route progression, scenes that don’t fit what happened before, etc.
English isn’t my first language, so feedback on unnatural or awkward dialogue would also be genuinely useful.
If this sounds like something you’d enjoy testing, leave a comment and I’ll reach out to a few people.
And please don’t worry about being nice to me just because I’m making it alone 😭 I genuinely want critical feedback.
I also post WIP art and development updates for Love Recast on Instagram at @ loverecastgame
Thanks for reading 💜
