Alright, I just downloaded and played this until the "ending" and I must say I love it so far, in principle. The MC is cool, the ideas are nice. The plot is very cliché and predictable but it's nicely presented. I like the art style too. Faces definitely have an amateur "feel" but it's original, charming and sexy.
Ha, glad you liked Rose as I like her myself as a MC
I hope it seems cliché and predicatble, I am trying my best to make it seem that way, so I can get some "WHAT?! ... Oh... OOOHHH" much later
A few notes.
. Way too many cutscenes, too much info dumps and too fast. It's nice to know after that ending I got to the game is supposed to open up but that took me a good 3 hours of almost only reading.
Haha, I know, after chapter one I started toning it down, mostly because I like making those cutscenes too much. Though, I am used to Japanese VNs and their old RPGs, so I may have not seen it as much of elements to go through, because 3h of reading is generally not much
But as I said, I already realized that.
. Too verbose. The biggest problem I had playing this is that the game takes 4 sentences on average to say things it could say in 1. Not only that but a lot of stuff gets repeated. Sometimes in another cutscene shortly after or in the same one that's going on. That's infuriating and just makes me want to skip most of the dialogue.
Hmm... I will have to take that into consideration and keep in mind when writing something next time, maybe even go through the whole game again and try looking for exactly that to nail it as, honestly, it's something I didn't realize/see.
. I like my plot heavy RPGs as much as any nerd but this is a game before being a book, and it's just the intro chapters. I appreciate putting some variety in scenes and sutff you can do and none of it was too frustratingly hard to get either but again, getting stopped every 7 steps for a cutscene makes this so tedious. I would have much preferred not getting as far in the story and see more of the actual gameplay. This seems to be extremely ambitious with a lot of promise of this and that. We've seen a lot of game take long years after years of slow progress until they inevitably get abandoned.
Battles in that part of the game would make a huge difference, but at the time, everything related to battles was not done. Though, it wouldn't lower amount of dialogue/cutscenes, but would give some extra break from those XD
On the part of the story... Actually, not that far. Game that can be finished in 9h is short, even if a player is ignoring every side event out there. This is not going to be short
But I agree that it may seem ambitious, but realistically it's the lowered standard of games that makes this. Creating scenes, dialogues and all those parts is done quite fast. If we ignore images, first village (Sedara) took around two weeks to finish. Chapter One so far was less than that. Yet, it took two months after demo was released.
It's because of images, drawing is the biggest time consuming part. However, this time I don't have as many clothes to do, so it's much better in terms of needed drawing for next release. I just added too much clothes to the demo XD
Also, projects often get abandoned when artist gives up and goes to do something else or team just doesn't work out. That's why I am doing drawing myself, as well as writing and every technical stuff. If I could afford extra people to work with me, it would be proofreader/text editor and someone to deal with technical parts. In case of some people dropping out, I am not left without anyone to draw or anyone to write.
Plus, right now I am working full time on it and that will continue until my personal budget for this runs out. So if patreon won't work for financing this, it will then be a really long development due to lack of time because of work. Either way, sooner or later but I will tell this story - preferably sooner
. That might be me just being stupid or missing it but I couldn't find any way to progress my lewd stats (exhib was stuck at 5 and slut was stuck at 93) so I had to use the debug NPCs to even do the Tavern scenes. I didn't see any hint of the other costumes that are in stome pictures either. Also after the first village I never got into a lewd situation ever again and that jsut sits wrong with me for a game like this.
In demo, game tips had a note that "for the demo" stats can be boosted to gain access to new scenes. In this release boosting was removed and debug npcs left for that purpose. I didn't want to forget about it and leave player with high stats, while some story events take into account current max player can get at each point in game and don't have certain versions (for example, Maid events have only first tiers of sex events as there is no way for MC to have high enough stats).
Other costumes were in the demo, available in a shop. That was to literally show them off. Since MC can only have one type of each clothing and clothes are given during story progression, as rewards from events or some other means... None can be bought in shop. Those clothes will be available later during the game. And while game itself should handle with ease having more than one cloth type in inventory, it's not how I designed this.
Actually, I did plan on having initial scenes of new lewd events for 0.1.4... But battle system took huge chunk of time and then I had to extend whole part as much as I could to at least try giving a feel of how much time passed (though, still failed at it, at least that's what I think).
While I assume some people hoped for some lewd action with her "teacher", it would be way out of character for both of them. Not to mention, there is secondary aspect to that.
Events in Sedara (without using debug NPCs) were more or less tame (minus bad route
). Rose as MC is quite perverted and what happened between her and von Bonkoff couple was quite close to a girl which doesn't know anything about sex and gets tangled in some weird shit.
Now situation changes drastically, because MC took a huge mental shock. She can push forward as a good/neutral person or degenerate into a villain. At the same time, she can become a slut, exhibitionist, both of those or none.
Depending on player's choices, for Rose it may turn into form of coping with things or just loosing it.
There is a huge story element to all of this, an in-game reason if you wish, which I won't spoil, but at the same time, it won't be explained in-game. Some people will realize it (or already did), some will not.
