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(2 edits)

Hi there! I'll answer some of your questions! Although I wasn't aware of these questions until now (after playing) so I may not be able to answer all of them!

  • How much time did it take you to go through Galactic Love Utopia: Arrival?
    I didn't time my session since I wasn't aware this would be a question. It didn't take very long, though. Maybe an hour or two at the most?
  • Would you prefer the portraits of characters who are talking inside the text box to be static rather than move
    Yes, I would prefer them to be static rather than move! Sometimes the animations of the images inside the text box move in a way which is distractingly out of sync with the on-screen sprites of the same character, so I think things would look better if the side images were static.
  • If you turned on adult content, did you feel like you the appearance of such content was too sudden/without warning?
    I didn't turn on adult content. However, I was impressed by how naturally the option was presented to the player. It felt quite organic, in my opinion. (As did choosing the name for the protagonist.)
  • What did you think of the default settings for music, sound effects, and voices? Did you change any of the settings such as lowering the volume of one of these types of sound or increasing them?
    I play with voices off, so I turned the voices off. I do recall, at some points, wondering if there was music playing and turning my computer speakers up to check.
  • Who was your favorite character so far and why?
    Other than Ai and Os (who I assume aren't real characters) I spent a considerable amount of time with Kyta, Sho, and Ando. Kyta was very "DOWN TO EARTH???" *cough*  Kyta was chill. Sho was cute but actually a bit hyper for me...! And Ando.... made me feel upset. Iroh ran off right away but is still a big cutie! To be honest, choosing which love-interest to pursue in a VN like this is often difficult for me. Iroh is probably my favorite because she's super cute, but I also like Kyta and Sho well enough.

Other than that, I have a few other things I'd like to say. I hope you don't mind:
(Lists are a little hard to do on here...!) ^^;

> I feel that the sprite animations could generally feel smoother and less rigid
There is no offence meant here. Time and effort has clearly gone into the sprite animations and I know working on them more would be more work. However, I do feel that things feel noticeably fast and rigid, and I feel that if more time was spent making the animations feel smoother and less rigid, you'd be very glad you took the time to improve them. It could make a big difference. :)

>An option to turn off sprite animations would be appreciated
This has nothing to do with the above point. I've just found that I, personally, have significant difficulty reading visual novels when there's a lot of movement on the screen. (I have no issue when it comes to lovely falling leaves or other similar particle effects, though.) A lot of animation can unfortunately distract me - or even give me headaches - when I'm trying to read. This is mainly an issue when there are multiple animated sprites (and/or side images) on the screen at a time. So, I hope you can understand why I'd appreciate the option. Still, I understand if you decide not to include this option.

>There's the very occasional typo or odd word choice
Not my intention to micromanage - each writer has their own style - I just noticed a few typos and odd word choices.
At a certain point, people are talking or thinking about how Ai and Os are fluent in various languages. However, the word "fluid" is accidentally used.
Other than that, at some points in the early section of the story, I noticed people using the word "that" rather than "who" when thinking or talking about people. For example... "I can't disappoint the people that are following me." could be... "I can't disappoint the people who are following me." and "You are not the only human that has been..." could be "You are not the only human who has been..." We each have our own writing styles, but I feel that switching "that" with "who" in those situations may feel more natural.

> I loved the greenhouse and the CG in it!
They were beautiful!

> Scrolling through the gallery seems a bit slow.
This is a very minor thing - I noticed that scrolling with the scroll bar takes a noticeably long amount of time before you can fully see the next image. A page system, rather than a scroll system, may be preferable here? But this is a very small nitpick.

That's it! Thank you for sharing an early version of your visual novel with us!
Good job!!!!

(I.... don't suppose Kyta showers or uses any saunas. Would... she die?)

(+1)

Thank you very much for the extensive feedback!

Some responses:

> I feel that the sprite animations could generally feel smoother and less rigid
I fully agree and the sprite animations used to be smoother actually, but we had to cut a ton of frames due to Ren'Py's  limitations. Regardless of your computer's strength including more than about 20 frames for the animation turned out to make the game extremely laggy. In some cases we had to cut the number of frames down from over 200 frames, so you can imagine how much of a difference that makes in the final product. Unfortunately leaving these frames in would have made the game close to unplayable in some parts, so we had little choice. A sprite that still has a little more frames would be Maaku, the demon girl you briefly see at the start, and you can still notice some performance issues during her brief appearance.

> An option to turn off sprite animations would be appreciated
I can definitely understand this point since the idle animations are ongoing and it's part of the reason why I asked whether the side portraits would be better as static images as well. It's not as easy as just having the game show only a single frame unfortunately, so it will require quite some development time to create and include/match what's currently there as an animated version with a non-animated version. So any extra user options like that might have to wait depending on how we spend our limited time.

> There's the very occasional typo or odd word choice
I am the writer and English is not my first language. I have a proofreader, but am a little reluctant to accept big changes to the meaning of sentences so I might have accidentally ignored some fixes that were required. I will have a look at them.

> I loved the greenhouse and the CG in it!
Thank you! The artist for this and similar illustrations in the future is: https://x.com/KaruheYKH

> Scrolling through the gallery seems a bit slow
Since the gallery is not yet functional I will have a look at this once we can properly test it as it is intended to work.

Hi there :) I heard what you said about the animation issue. If you're using images which display individual frame image files from your image folder one at a time in quick succession, you may want to look at movie sprites, instead? I'm still learning, but I'm interested in movie sprites myself and found the Ren'Py Tutorial game's Quickstart -> Video Playback section to be helpful. In that section, they talk about how movies can be displayed just like any other image (IE, like a sprite) and they touch on the fact that videos can have masks to make them transparent. They only mention that briefly in the tutorial, but there is a section of documentation which a kind person on Lemmasoft Forums pointed me to, which covers movie masking in more detail: https://renpy.org/doc/html/movie.html#Movie So, it seems like it's possible to make movie sprites which have transparency, and as far as I understand, playing movies is easier on Ren'Py than the manually-displaying-individual-frame-images method. (I think the movies should be .webm files, though.) I hope this may help. Regardless, I wish you well! :)