[ ABOUT ]

Explosions rip through the engine room, forcing your spaceship to perform an emergency landing on a remote planet. It is far from the galactic shipping lanes, and inhabited only by reclusive lizard people. After taking shelter with them, and attempting to call for aid, you soon find yourself embroiled in all sorts of science fiction intrigue. Why is everyone being so evasive? Where did the captain go? ... and why are all the lizards so hot, anyway?

LIZARD GAME is a point-and-click adventure, with kink overtones and light RPG elements, that investigates some of these questions.

🔞  18+ only, thanks!  🔞

All said and done, there are about 40 thousand words in the game, but a lot of these are to account for skill checks and event flags. You don't have to do it all in one sitting either, since there's a savegame system. Depending on your reading speed and your experience with adventure games, you're looking at around 30 minutes here, maybe up to 90 minutes if you go for 100% completion.

There are two endings that can be gotten through normal exploration (WAR and PEACE), plus a third one that requires some lateral thinking, planning, and/or backtracking (NORMAL).


[ CONTENT NOTES ]

This game contains gently pulsating lights. There is one instance of the screen flashing red (but slowly), in the ship at the beginning, after the crash happens.

The game deals with themes of community, transformation, identity play, and the logic of empire. It has perhaps a little too much socio-economic context. There are mental shifts, but "personality erasure" explicitly does not happen. What does happen is lizards, of a variety of genders, in shiny and impractical clothes.

Depending on the path you take, conflicts and violence can occur - even if things work out in the end.

No sex scenes, but 🔞🔞🔞 obviously. It gets kinkier once you unlock the 🦎🦎🦎 premium skills 🦎🦎🦎, and start to invest in them.



[ INSTRUCTIONS ]

The whole game is controlled via mouse (or touchscreen). To walk, LEFT-CLICK anywhere (or touch there.) To interact with a person or object, LEFT-CLICK on them, then choose the appropriate action from the menu that pops up.

In dialogues, you can also press SPACE or RETURN to advance the line, and you can use the NUMBER KEYS on your keyboard to select a dialogue option. (If your platform has one.) This is in addition to left-clicking. A keyboard is pretty optional otherwise.

To see all interactable objects on the current screen, click and hold the lightbulb icon. To see your skills, use the icon below that, which resembles a PDA. Make sure you spend your experience points! You can keep them in reserve until you see an option that you really want to take, but in that case you will miss their interrupts during normal conversation. Your call.

Finally, to change settings, save or load your game, use the pause menu (on the left hand).

If you encounter a glitch, you can probably fix it by quitting to menu and reloading the autosave. There shouldn't be any game-breaking showstopper bugs left, but it's possible I missed something in testing.


[ VERSION HISTORY ]
* v0.4.0: Levels are now pre-loaded on startup, not during scene transition, to improve stability in the web build. In-dialogue emoji have been replaced with pre-rendered images due to Chromium issues. Fixed a few misaligned hotspots. Corrected misleading in-game text.
* v0.3.7: Fixed a bug relating to the skill reset function, as well as a few minor display errors
* v0.3.6: Correct a small oversight in the lead-in to the WAR ending, fixed a broken event flag relating to the villain, and fixed a smattering of UX bugs
* v0.3.5: Initial public release
* v0.3.4: Final internal testing release


[ CREDITS ]

The main writer and developer is me, Kaye, of https://snowcean.net/ fame. Credit for the big lizard portraits and some additional design work goes to my good friend Kat. The music is CC stuff, as are some of the visual assets - see in-game credits for details.


[ SPOILERS ]

Don't worry about skill choice too much. You unlock the ability to reset them pretty early in the game, and you can do that any number of times. The three endings do require specific skills, but other than that, skills exist mostly for flavour text. With enough effort you can lock yourself out of the "NORMAL" ending, but that one doesn't exist anyway.

If you're truly and genuinely stuck, here's a list of the bare minimum skills you need to complete to finish the game. You can paste them into rot13.com (or a similar website) to uncover them. Note that the "WAR" and "NORMAL" endings rely on getting an interrupt from a specific skill, when visiting a specific location, not on a locked dialogue option.

"PEACE" Ending:
	Lbh arrq n fvatyr cbvag va nguyrgvpf, gb trg vagb gur fuvc'f pnetb onl.

"WAR" Ending: 
	Lbh arrq bar cbvag va bofreingvba, be pbby, jura lbh ivfvg gur cvengr yrnqre. Gura lbh jvyy haybpx n arj bcgvba jura punatvat bhgsvgf ng gur one. Gb npghnyyl trg gur raqvat, lbh nyfb arrq gb ohl gur hfr-bs-jrncbaf fxvyy.

"NORMAL" Ending: 
	This ending is deliberately hard to find, with one of the unlock conditions being hidden deep in a conversation tree in a location you have little reason to revisit. It's intended as a reward for those who want to wring the maximum amount of information out of the game.
	Lbh arrq bar cbvag va bofreingvba, be pbby, jura lbh ivfvg gur cvengr yrnqre. Gura lbh jvyy haybpx n arj bcgvba jura punatvat bhgsvgf ng gur one. Lbh nyfb arrq gjb cbvagf va abezny, naq rvgure gjb cbvagf va yvmneq be guerr cbvagf gbgny va artbgvngvba naq vafcvengvba.


"NEW GAME PLUS" Bonus:
	Make sure you read all the way to the end when you get to the rambling outro. But just reading the Readme already puts you into the top 5% of players as far as I'm concerned. So, if you really truly only have one playthrough in yourself, and you want a completely disorienting experience, here's how you get the bonus.

	Vagrenpg jvgu gur pbhpu ba gur Nanybthr svir gvzrf va n ebj, jvgubhg fvggvat qbja. Guvf jvyy fgneg lbh bss jvgu na vapernfrq ABEZNY fxvyy.
