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(+1)

Hello!

I was able to enjoy the VN up to the machine translations. I think what you have is a very likable, lighthearted slice-of-life story and setting.  The AI art is well suited, and the characters are all distinct in backgrounds and personalities, as they play off each other nicely, especially in the D&D scene. That being said, I still would like to make a couple of suggestions.

I feel like AI art tends to makes the character sprites stiff. In other words, the sprite poses are a little bit too perfect. They play nicely to their core personalities but not so much to their emotions. And speaking of emotions, since the theme of the game leans towards being comical and light-hearted, I feel the emotions should either be more cartoonish or animated. I'm not sure if AI art can generate faces like that, however. Also, I feel it is hard to focus on both the emotions of the characters and the textbox: the words are too far away from the faces. My suggestion is to either increase the sprite size or move the textbox a little upwards and increase the font size. I feel Renpy's default font size is way smaller than non-renpy visual novels, so you can always increase it if there's room. 

I also feel some scenes go too fast, especially if the scenes are emotional or dramatic. It is better to take things slower in those passages, since readers might miss out on certain elements, especially if they are elements you want your reader to pay close attention to. A good way to either make scenes slower or bring attention certain ideas to the player is to reiterate. A lot. It might look repetitive on a word document, but I feel like good visual novels do that, or at least the ones I've read. I tried scribing word-for-word a fifteen minute scene from one of my favorite visual novels as a writing exercise, and boy, do they reiterate a lot of the same ideas in different words. But it's preferable, since readers tend to not flip back or check the text history, and it helps control the pacing. Speaking of which, another suggestion writing-wise is to limit the use of pronouns when referring to objects or persons in the previous textbox sentence. E.g. readers might fail to fully pay close attention to one sentence only to be hit with "And so she did this" in the next textbox sentence, completely forgetting who "she" is, and is forced to flip back. This example isn't referring to anything specific in your writing, for I am guilty of this as well.

Anyway, those are my two cents, feel free to accept or ignore them. I hope you continue to enjoy making the game, and good luck with it!

(+1)

Hi Improb, thank you very much for your feedback and I'm happy that you enjoyed the game! :)

Indeed, at some scenes I was thinking about switching to an SD  style to make it more fun. There were some problems that let me decide against it, though: First, players who are not as familiar with anime tend to be put off by that. Second, more importantly, the AI art is limited in that respect, as you suggested. It's pretty good in giving cute SD characters (which you can see at the start of the game with Petra-chan), but funny, hilarious characters are difficult to generate. Using a larger font size would indeed be an idea. It's just that in some scenes it will cover too much of the picture, I felt. Maybe I'll add it as an option.

The timing of a VN is always a very crucial and difficult problem. Ultimately, it's also a matter of taste of the player: remember that I thought your game might be a bit slow? Maybe we have simply different taste there? I will have to collect feedback from multiple players on that to find the optimal amount of progressing. I will also revisit some of the "slower" scenes and see whether extending them slightly would seem to be a good idea. It's definitely a good point to take a closer look at, thanks for pointing it out to me!