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(2 edits) (+1)

I have continued to advance in the video game, and I wanted to go back here to say how much I am enjoying it. It's beautiful. Have you done all the work? I mean, is this the work of one person or do you have someone who does the illustrations on one side and another who programs and another who does the texts...?
The sound effects are very good, really good: the sounds that the ship makes, with the ropes and the creaking of the wood, the idea of not using so much music to instead make that detail that really immerses you in the experience is great, feels like being in that place. And the lack of music also makes the beautiful violin melody on the menu screen stand out even more, a great decision in sound. 

I'm surprised to see that you've defined a set appearance for the protagonist, and I'm surprised at how cool it fit my personal case with the name I choose... because he's a white-furred cat, it fit in perfectly, I was a little lucky in my choice :D

And really, the illustrations are beautiful, and the facial expressions are very good, it really warms one's heart when you see the emotions so clear in the expressiveness of the characters. 

For now I'm only getting to know Sam, honestly it was Julian who I liked the most out of all of them at the beginning, I'm very similar to him in the sense that I make "witty" jokes and little joke-pranks and I have gotten the occasional annoyance from someone for letting myselft get carried away with the jokes and fun too much for accident, teasing without realizing that I am bothering or even becoming a kind of accidental verbal bully.
So... I really liked Julian, but then Sam showed up and at first I didn't like him too much because he seemed to have a bit of that light spiky attitude correcting Julian, reminded me of some rather annoying classmates I've known. But that impression began to change when I decided to sit next to him at the "table", which is that I had only two options and one of them seemed to imply that I had to ask Julian to move while Sam's option seemed to imply that there was already a free space next to him or that he was freer. But well, when he started making jokes at me and nudging me... I started to wonder if I had now captured Sam's attention (meaning that maybe he is one of those who instinctively show his interest by pushing or tapping as a way to get closer and touch because he can't think of any other way to be intimate), being that earlier Sam's attention had been drawn to Julian but with the last couple of gestures that the protagonist made because of him now the eye of Sam begins to be catched by the protagonist. And after finding Sam's nice taste more with his jokes, I decided to accompany him to sleep early simply because it seemed wiser to me because my character was still getting used to all that life of hard work and surely getting up early tomorrow, and then I had the moment alone with Sam before bed and he was quite cute, and the whole scene of waking up and seeing the sunrise... was very sweet and beautiful. I loved it.

I would like to offer, as a humble and respectful attempt to try to help the better well-being of this great work, to give some suggestions... just opinions that I think are right:
There are many instances in the game where the protagonist simply responds by auto-reacting to what is happening in one way... but instead of taking those instances to make more moments where the player can place their part in how they want their protagonist be. That is, the video game would benefit from having more instances of choosing options and in those cases it would simply affect a couple of dialogues about how he reacts to something, so it would be easy to do. For example, when Sam tells the protagonist that the protagonist's plate is actually his... I think it would be better to put the option for the player to decide if they want their character to be submissive or not (there are people who have a fetish for relationships with a Seme and an Uke (dominant male and submissive male) it is a whole subgenre or cliché of manga in the yaoi genre), it would be enough to leave it in a dialogue option... but, of course, if you wanted to work more on it, you could make dialogue options continued to influence the character's future dialogues, or from the beginning of the game give as an option just before defining the name so you can choose the attitude of the protagonist, whether the character is shy or not, upbeat or sad/calm, etc... but well, maybe it's easier to just give dialogue options to offer alternative reactions. Like that instance where you can choose to introduce yourself to your fellow recruits (Wolf and Julian) and start a conversation with them or just stand next to them and keep quiet while waiting. Or when Sam tells you that Arthur isn't such a bad guy in response to a dialogue from the protagonist... I didn't dislike Arthur that much, he is quite fine, I understand that he has a lot of responsibilities keeping order and he seemed like a proud worthy guy with a lot of dignity... maybe I, if I was in that world, could make a joke (when he's not around, of course) about how he always keeps his head so high above the others and with a haughty gesture that surely his brain must cool down or saying something like "One must feel alone so high up there", hahaha.

Great, very nice, videogame. Please, continue it. And thank you, really!

Hey, hey, appreciate you taking the time to write down your thoughts!

Yeh, the Sam face is mostly a leftover at this stage and will get rectified with a general overhaul for the character graphics sometime in the future. Just was the first character that got their art, so I ended up experimenting a little, trying to see what works, etc., moved on, and later realized it doesn't look that great. Just wasn't egregious enough of an issue to get addressed yet.

And no, it's not quite a 1-person production anymore. It was, initially, but since then I've had the chance to bring on some writing help here and there through the Patreon funding. So it's probably more of an 80:20 split currently, with a handful of scenes in the recent updates being written by people other than myself.

And as for your last paragraph, yeh the start is certainly worse for it, simply due to the introductory nature and me just learning my way around programming a VN in the first place. So it basically grows more complex the further you get into it. There might be some restructuring for day 1 at some point but we'll see. Nothing concrete just yet beyond vague thoughts that don't have too high of a priority currently given the available hours to work on it.

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When it is finished you HAVE to put this video game on Steam, I mean... it really has a level that deserves to be put there and everywhere. There are a good number of furry VNs on Steam, like Moon Fire (which is still in development but a demo is already offered with the first 2 chapters and is promised to be completed by early 2024) or The Hayseed Knight (which has an atypical artistic/technical level focused on transitions and voice acting of the characters... but sadly it chose to have too much of a comedy tone that makes it difficult to take the plot or the characters seriously).
I've seen that most VNs are $5 there, others that offer more mechanics like being mixed with a card game or a kind of environment exploration/interaction like RPG maker style or a bit of 3D are around $10.