Bad Ritual
Your already high-risk/low-reward job gets about thirty times more dangerous when you inadvertently release an ancient archdemon into Sanctum City. Armed with only a recent promotion and the begrudging support of your enigmatic boss, Tahira, it's up to you to decide what to do with Siruud the Devourer.
Keep your head above water as you try to break your bind with a dangerous archdemon, either pursuing the perfectionist Tahira who harbours a deep and secret resentment for your demon, or by abandoning everything you know to help Siruud understand what happened the night he was arrested.
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04.01.24
Howdy! Chapter 5 is up and ready to go, for both Siruud and Tahira.
CURRENT BUGS: The magic bug, the bane of my existence: sometimes upon reloading a save, variables (not just magic but notably magic) decide to change back to default. I assume this is happening because I was cursed by a witch, as I can't recreate the issue on my end which means I'm shooting ghosts in the dark: but mark my words, shoot them I will. I just need to decide how best to fix it.
UPDATE: I uploaded what I THINK will fix it but the only people who can tell me one way or another are you all because it has never not worked on my end dskjsfhsd
UPDATE 2: First fix didn't work, here's my second fix that also repairs instances of out of control incrementation of personality stats and the chat bubble not changing colour because I'm sillay ;)
If you'd like to support the development of the game, consider donating to my Kofi !! Become a subscriber for early access, copies of certain games, and monthly drabbles at Employee of the Month tier !!
Development log
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Wow, I had so much fun reading this! I really like the story and ngl, I love the Siruud path. Gotta ask, will there be more chapters? Would love to see more of them! (totally understand if the game's finished)
It's not finished !! I just juggle games to make sure I don't burn out 😂 this one JUST got it's update so it won't shuffle back to the front of the line until the other ones get theirs, but it's definitely still in development. My game Hybrid's up next, if you wanted more reading material 😂 thanks for commenting !!!!
Ah, okay, thank you for the reply! I'll def check out the other ones when I have the time. And no problem, I saw someone on Reddit recommending your game so I got curious, and I don't regret it lol
Woah, played it again, still awesome! Anyway, minor question. Is the Eden introduction scene cut? The one with the electrocution(???I think? my memory is unreliable) and spilled drinks?
Uh, no electrocution, but the spilled drink bit might have been cut on the rewrite!
Ah, thanks for the confirmation!! (seriously, wtf is my brain cooking lmao)
Gfhjub zapping is thankfully not within his skillset. He'd be unbearable with so little as static 😂
Wow this was amazing !!
Thank you !!!!! I'm glad you like it 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚
I'm not usually into these kinds of games, but this is genuinely really fun, and the writing is awesome!
Thank you !!!!! 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚
Sorry for the bother but I was wondering if this was something on my end. It's preventing me from progressing as well.
I think it was just an old save that no longer works, not exactly sure though.
Oh boy I hope it's an old save issue because I couldn't begin to guess why it's trying to reimagine your MCs name as a number djhfjzjf does it work on a new game?
It does. I'm so sorry for the bother and the very late response.
Oh no you're good, I love an easy solution: unfortunately, sometimes old saves don't move forward !! Luckily that's why I made the build a save feature, so you're at least able to jump up to where you were !!
found this throughout accident click and i'm so glad i did!! really fun read with great dialogues and world building :) so invested in the future storyline
What a lucky click !! I'm glad you like it 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚
i found this game some time ago and i've been rereading it every now and again, and i love it every time! I love the writing style, it's very unique and immersive, and the characters are so well written - they feel like actual people and not flat characters! siruud my beloved <33 I also really appreciate the amount of character customisation u can do! overall just such a great enjoyable game, im so looking forward to new updates of this <33
💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚 Thank you so much I'm so glad you like it 💚💚💚💚💚💚
“MC with small height X Moments with Siruud” is the most CUTE thing I have seen!! Please keep posting content of this game, TAKE all the breaks you need and take care of yourself when necessary, just don’t abandon this project because it’s really beautiful. If I could, I would even contribute money, but I’m still underage to start earning anything :,(
PS: I played this game a couple of years ago and I’m glad to know that it is still active to this day. Thank you for creating this wonderful project and for continuing to create content for it <3 English is not my dominant language because I speak Spanish, so I apologize for anything that may not be well understood-
No I get you !! Thank-you so much, I'm glad you like it !!!! 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚 don't worry, BR is in no danger of being abandoned !!
I’m glad that you are taking care of this game and won’t abandon it. I wish you the best of luck in your days ^^ 🙏🏻🙏🏻🎉🎉🎉
I love this IF and i can’t wait for the finished version 🥹
side note: is there plans to add something like a “save to disk” function? i closed my phone for about five minutes and chrome decided to be super unhelpful and refresh and i lost all my progress 🥲
I would have to write that by myself. While it's not impossible, it would be a deeply frustrating process as any bugs or troubleshooting would annoy people who have played sugarcube games and expect it to work flawlessly as an engine feature. People already get annoyed with me because my game isn't sugarcube 😅 I wrote the build a save function so you can easily get back to where you were at without starting over.
no i get that :) it's a mobile flaw moreso than anything on your end, i was just wondering bc i've seen it in a couple of other games and it has saved me from the fatal chrome refresh :') it was just a fist shaking moment bc i was at a really good part :''')
thank you for your reply and thank you for the game :)
No problem !! I've been thinking about it but I'm hesitant specifically because its just played on browser which means different file structures for each device 😂
Yea so I have some bad news for you, your "magic" bug isn't so much limited to magic only, other variables are also randomly affected on reloading a save.
Like I reloaded a save a few times to see the other reactions and on one it reset my background, on another my height (I found this one out by digging around in my local session storage of the webpage) and so on.
Also this seems to be an unfamiliar environment (by that I mean I have done a few too many misclicks) for an IF, usually its either twine or Cscript, what are you making your book in? Good luck with debugging though.
This is Twine. Is this from a recent playthrough or one you've already done? Just so I can tell if you were playing with the initial fix or not.
oh I just started actually... had to restart a few times.
I didn't know twine also came with this template.
This isn't a template, I made it! And dang that means my fix isn't working. Thanks for letting me know !!
ok so, idk if you can reproduce it, but when you go to meet the CEO and you're texting tahira during it, on the page where we shove the phone in, if you visit the profile section, it apparently registers the changes to personality stats from the previous choice every time you visit the profile on that page, didn't check if it carried on to other pages though.
like first time you visit, irritability and compassion are both 6, and if you chose the irate answer from previous text, it will increase the irritability and decrease compassion on the next visits to profile tab.
Edit: also the text bubble colour stopped applying (its stuck on blue), I tried refreshing the tab but that didn't fix it.
OKAY SO colour bug, squashed (I was changing the colour before the object existed, which means that nothing was changing and it was spawning in as its default colour), incrementation bug (the one where the personality keeps going up between pages) SHOULD be fixed. Magic bug, I tried a new fix, idk if it'll work or not because I still can't reproduce it OTL
Such a good story!! I notice a bit of glitches with the character traits though. I had the same problem as others where frost changed to flame. Then, in the third chapter, my height was changed from short to tall. Maybe the passage of chapters is effecting the traits? Not sure :b
HM I'm starting to thing it's linked to loading saves, did you do any of that?
Definitely! I think that could be the problem also... reloading saves causes problems in other IFs I have read.
just wanted to let you know of a tiny little bug i've noticed. i select frost user, and I can save the game just fine, but if i load the save it switches to flame user. otherwise everything is great and i loved the last update :)
This magic bug is the BANE OF MY EXISTENCE. See, I've known about the bug through two updates but I CANNOT recreate it, no matter how closely I hew to the user experience of the person having the bug, and not everyone is experiencing it. If you could tell me your browser, device you were playing on, and when you noticed that it'd switched back, that'd be cool. I'm gunna try putting in a constant check I just have to research into how to keep it from changing and how to keep that from breaking everything 😂😂😂 right now the going fix is to clear cache and cookies, but keep in mind that will delete save data for all Twine games you play where you can't externally save the data.
oh no! hopefully one day you'll be able to figure it out D:
i'm in google chrome and using a macbook pro. i tried to do some testing for the bug and this is what i've found out. if i don't load a save at all through the entire playthrough then I keep the frost magic the entire time (i checked character stats every few choices). however, if i at all load a save the magic resets to flame immediately. i spent a hot second seeing if it would stay frost if i got through plot points where your type of magic is tallked about like siruud telling mc that they can feel their magic, the battle with bright, after telling siruud about the battle with bright and mc thinking back to the magic they felt, and then i tried one last time at the complete end of the playthrough and all of them switched back to flame magic. i then tried this for blight and could not recreate the bug. additionally while doing that i found out that if you do runs with two separate mc names, that the names for all the saves change to the name of the mc you are currently playing.
Thanks for the info !! I might be able to cook something up from this 🙏
I am so glad I found this. I love Siruud so much
💚💚💚💚💚💚 I'm glad you like it !!!!!
You had me at pen caps. I love your humor! This was such a fun read, and I absolutely adore the conversation choices. I love that you can be so sarcastic. Excellent job, and I cannot wait to get to know Siruud better. Thank you so much for sharing and all your hard work!!
thankyou so much for enjoying it 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚 and for commenting fjdhdksn 💚💚💚💚
"its so sad steve jobs died from ligma."
"who the hell is steve jobs?"
"Ligma balls"
*gets throw out window*
Bright in a Hank Hill voice: that soon to be corpse ain't right.
Loved the update so much! Cannot wait for more!
glad you liked it !!!! 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚
This story lives rent free in my head for years now!! Great update 💛
Also, not sure if you know, but on mobile if you choose to build a save and open the customization page, the second column doesn't fit on the screen, so you can't change whatever options are here. Maybe it's just a problem on my phone though, I'm not sure 😬
H'm, it ought to be auto launching into landscape. The box is checked but it's not doing it for some reason 😅 maybe the way you're holding the phone just trumps orientation setting no matter what? But overall best experience is gunna be landscape regardless, for the fit. Glad you liked it !!! 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚
Nooooo I didn't want it to end...like omg I love this so much. I enjoy arguing with Mr. Grumpy Sirruud aka soon to be the love of my MCs life.
Xnfjjd glad you liked it 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚
Found a bug that was too funny...When you enter the profile screen and go back to the story, the codes adjusting the stats run again, thus each time you check the stats on a same page of the story, you change them one more time. Hope you get it fixed some time, haha.
H'm, so the way I understood was that going from the story to the profile page and back again adjusted something, but I'm not seeing the same behaviour. What part were you at when you experienced the bug, because it sounds like one of my patented Quick Fix Code Solutions is busted because testing at random isn't giving me any variance in the personality numbers dlkjhfsdjk
Think it occurs somewhere in Siruud's route near where you break into the company. I tried several choice pages after you meet the receptionist nd they all have this issue.
(edit: It's fine again when you set off the curse, guess it's just sw in the middle)
Lemme poke around and see what I can find !!
omg i love this so much, your writing feels so effortlessly funny
Thank you 😊💚💚💚💚💚💚 I'm glad you're enjoying my lame jokes fjsmxbkan
Hi, love your work. Just one thing, when I load from a saved file, my magic always changes to fire user regardless of what it was before. Thank you and keep up the good work.
OHMYGOD okay so. We don't know why this happens but the bug is so SUPER specific that last time it was reported only one or two people could reliably recreate it. Try clearing your cache and cookies (this will delete Twine data), closing the browser, and reopening, but I'm not sure if it'll fix it: this is my white whale.
I got this bug, and it also bugged the pronoun (it changed to They/Them when I loaded), and if I closed and opened again, it appeared "Quinn Reid" in the save file before loading lol I managed to fix after cleaning cookies and cache on my browser (even if I only played through the itch app, but the clean cache and cookies in it had zero effect lol Really don't know how exactly it stores, since app and browser both have different save files). I think it must be conflict thing? I mean, when I updated, I forgot to make sure the previous version was uninstalled, and I uninstalled everything before purging the cache... lol
Were you trying to load an old save?
There wasn't even an old save to load, it had been so long since I played lol Just two html files in the folder, the most recent one, and an old one from... 2021, I think, named "bad ritual" instead of index, and the folder was 1.8mb even after taking out the "bad ritual", but after taking it all out and installing again it's at 1.1mb, that why I'm betting that it was caused by some type of conflict or something.
H'm the only thing I can think is that the way. Because the itch app is at its best installing like GAME game files, and I find it behaves a little funny around htmls since they're not actually an installation (everything happens in your browser, no files are created, the html is just downloaded and stored in the browser). Try playing it from the launch button?
i swear the dialogue in your games gives me life. the sass. the humor. the back and forth banter between characters. its glorious.
Bdjrksjf glad you like it !!! 💚💚💚💚💚💚
aaaaaaaaaaa this had me shaking with excitment!! Loving the update, and the whole patron and warlock thing reminded me of dnd
Sjfjdjsj eldritch blast would have been useful last chapter 😂
OH MY GOSH! I remember playing this back when the first chapter came out, but I forgot the name... I'm so glad I found it again! Can't wait to play it tomorrow, probably from the beginning.
a good time to find it !!! It updated yesterday 😊💚
Aaaaaaa I like it so much! The seamless worldbuilding is truly delightful (hello demon nightclubs??), can't wait for more and def will check your others IFs out <3
💚💚💚💚💚💚 So glad you liked it !!! Update is coming on theeeee 31st I think? Or it's up right now on my ko-fi page.
omg i am so glad that i have finally found an if that isnt abandoned, those are kinda rare these days. i havent even started it yet, but i have high hopes
Make sure you're squinting hard at the unconfirmed abandoned works: there was a year between the latest update to this and the last one 😂
PLS, THIS IS SOOO GOOD!!!! The writing is immaculate and the humor is chefs kiss , u must be one hilarious mf 🤌🏾 I'm so excited for the next update!!! Siruud literally has me crawling up the walls, gigglin and all that. I'll never beat the monsterfucker allegations 😭😞😩 thank u so much for your hard work 💞💞💞
💚💚💚💚💚💚 I'm glad you like it !! There's another update coming but I gotta finish Tahira's chapter first
siruud got me kicking my feet and twirling my hair fr they’re so enemies to lovers 🥰🥰 thank you for this wonderful demo!!!! i can’t wait to play the rest!!
💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚 Ty I'm glad you like it !!!!! Next chapter we start really getting into the enemies to lovers meat and potatoes fkdjdks
finally got the chance to play the new update, still love it to the bits. thank you heartforge, can't wait for more!
ty !!!!! 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚 Glad you like it !!!!!!!
oh my god this is amazing!!!! i genuinely can't find the words to describe it but your writing is just EVERYTHING!!!!! i can't wait for more!! AMAZING JOB JSKAJSK <3
NFIDKXHFKEJ thank-you so much. New chapter is coming once I finish it fjkd 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚
I would like to mention a bug. If i load a savefile my profile and the story says im a flame user when i actually picked blight. (Great Story so far though ;3 )
Update: I deleted my cookies and it works now :)
I'm that fool who forgot the basics of the game. So when I was reading the first page I was like 'yeah, real life shitty job, all demons are really here, hell on earth, so true' until the 'lighting your fingertips with magic' part
and
then
I was
so confused
LOL
I'd deffo take fire powers at my regular devil job 😂😂😂
Thank-you !!! 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚 I'm glad you like it !!!!!!!
"P...please...ligma..."
"Ligma balls!"
Now with an achievement 😂😂😂😂
I had to choose that to. xD
GOTTEM
I really love your writing style so much! I appreciated every little new detail that was added and thorouhghly enjoyed coming back here in general. Siruud is such an interesting character, I just love to be able to sick my small ball of a socially awkward mc on him. It's a treat. Especially cause Siruud is not enarmoured with the mc from the start, I prefer all the little bumps on the road to understanding and appreciating one another. That's what makes a dynamic much more authentic ✨
💚💚💚💚💚💚 I'm glad you liked all the new stuff in there !! Hopefully the next chapter starts to bridge the gap between allies of convenience and make things a little friendlier 😘
This is amazing. The way its written, the action, the humor....its so awesome. And after that ending, I just want to launch into Siruud's arms and wrap both of us into a quilt worm form hidden from the rest of the world (no matter how confused this will make the poor demon. xD)
neidnfd it's all fun and game until you accidentally build a quilt sauna !!! 💚💚💚💚
hey! ive only played a little but i ts a great game!! i was just wondering if there was an option to download it? i might just be blind lol
Nope, it launches in browser !! This is to keep the experience consistent so that is doesn't launch weird because a phone is a slightly different size than average 😂 the only benefit to downloading I think would be offline access in which case the CSS would stop working 😅 so everything would look....bad.
Omg i love this soooooo fucking much!! it's so good!!
Glad you like it !!! Public update is coming on December 22nd (or you can get it early on my ko-fi 😉)
That was just a DEMO?
holy bajesus, that was fun. I can't wait to see where this leads,
here comes Adbaldar the blight-caster, but that's just a side note-
I wish that when ya' finish the ending, ya' would be able to press the back button whenever, since- you're pretty much in sandbox-time at that point,
See I never let the back button remain because idk how Twine would react to a player clicking back a bunch and then trying to save 😅 and with the way it tracka history I don't know that I could reliably shut off saving just by checking to see if you got to the ending. I get what you mean tho: hopefully the build a save is an okay compromise !!
And, obligatory (both for you and anyone reading this 😂) updates are still in motion !! I don't think I'll need to change much at all for the last chapter but rewrites for the one before that have been way more complex than I anticipated !! But hopefully when the new version drops its just as good 🥰
take all the time you need for updates, like I always say, a rushed game is a buggy mess, and don't forget about motivation, work too much and you might lose said motivation, we all care about ya' here :D
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I'm going to go absolutely insane I love siruud so much OMFG GOT ME KICKING MY FEET AND BLUSHING FR!!! Your writing is such a sweet treat to read and i'm so excited for what you have in store for us!! I will be following along dutifully
AHH thank you !! October's been super busy so the rewrite slowed down but there's a couple new things in the updated version that I am SO excited for people to see 💚💚💚💚💚💚