Post by komehara in The Transfer Student is from Another World! jam comments

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I’m still mid-game but posting my remarks so far.

I like the mood and the story flows simply. Setting is classic but it’s difficult to see where we’re heading without clear character goals. But should be adequate for slice-of-life.

Maybe the main character doesn’t tell much about themselves although they do reference childhood memories, I have difficulties establishing their personality (I have the same issue when writing a VN at first-person though).

UI issues:

Sometimes the narration box disappears, we see the BG of character sprites appear/disappear/change, then the narration box comes back but not cleared. So I take some time finding where I was in the text

Story issues:

Cerise said she spent days in the library with her friend, then later during sports MC says “she mentioned she didn’t spend a lot of time for reading earlier”
“This can’t go on much longer or homeroom will end” => is MC worried about that despite the battle? Or is Cerise strong enough MC doesn’t worry about surviving anymore, but more about silently coming back to school?
Hero tries to throw a stone to help Cerise after she got her armor and sword, and worries about hitting her

Typos:

“read it for fun once you’re returned it” => “once you’ve returned it”

Bugs:

Error: when saying “I… have an idea”: “Cerise eye_closed not found”
Error: when saying “Anyway…about those monsters”: “Cerise mouth open not found”

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ruewn1 year ago

Hi Komehara!

Thank you for taking the time to write out your thoughts on our game! I'll be frank that due to constraints, the current version really is closer to a concept over a fully finished story. We're definitely interested in wrapping it up sometime though, so I hope you can look forward to that. Some of the planned beats or revisions might address some of the story issues you've listed.

When reading over the script, I joked with the writer that they should do more slice-of-life stuff in the future. I can't actually make any guarantees on that, though ;)

We agree with your statement on fleshing out the main character more - personally I'd like to see more introspective passages to figure out who they are, but I'll leave it to the author to make the call on how the character is presented.

Your list of typos and bugs are helpful and appreciated! We weren't able to get a full testing pass in before shipping it - I barely had enough time to jump around to several of the chapters starts with debug. I'll look into the UI issues for future passes- some were by design since (to my limited knowledge, at least) fading in a sprite hides the narration box, but I felt that there wasn't enough of a passage to clear the text. I do understand that this may impact the reader experience though. I'm not as familiar with Ren'Py interfacing with itch.io to know if publishing a new version would kick a reader back to start, so I might hold off on pushing out updates until we have a good number of changes to commit.

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komehara1 year ago

OK! I personally find the narrative text quite elaborate for a first pass, I spend a lot of time polishing my text but it’s quite not as much “novelized” (I’m also not a native speaker and don’t read a lot of novels in English, so I just write in simple English; and my narration phases are told as if the character was speaking casually).

Indeed, I don’t have an easy solution for the sprite changing and the narration box reappearing. In other games I’ve played using NVL mode, either there were no particular sprites shown (sound novel) or the sprites were shown on the side (Magical Revolt: Mimiko’s choice).

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