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(+1)

After reading your announcement on r/furry_irl, and being an Ace Attorney and a HUGE Danganronpa fan myself, I finally got to check this out, and so far, I really REALLY enjoyed it!

Below is a dump of few of my thoughts, so warning: spoilers for the first case ahead!

Your art style and the way in which everything is presented is very unique! In many other FVNs, even my favorites, I've come to expect that all sprites for a character are often just one pose with several expressions pasted on top, but every character having multiple complete poses makes your game look really lively!

I also thought that your first case was really good! The characters are really well developed, and while I expected a typical tutorial case where the murderer is all but revealed during the first 10 seconds of the investigation, I was positively surprised by the complexity of the case. Regarding the difficulty, for the most part, I think it was handled well, everything was fair and reasonable, and if you didn't get something the first time, Chive's thoughts would usually point you in the right direction. I'd say these thoughts were a little too much at times (maybe wait with stronger hints until the player went through all testimonies for the first time without finding the right one), but for a first case that's fine.

A thing that I often don't like this genre is when I have figured out the idea behind something but fail to progress the case because it requires an exact match between a piece of evidence and one specific line of text in the testimony, when it would make sense in multiple spots. Luckily most of the time that was no problem at all, only at one point did I struggle with that. That was when the supplies were supposed to prove that the murderer neither planned to kill both victims nor have one as "backup" in case the other didn't show. Especially since it's hinted at that both Shallot and RJ are wrong, I thought it wouldn't matter which one of their testimonies I'd refute, since the evidence discredits both of their theories. After what would later turn out to be the right piece of evidence with RJ didn't work with Shallot's line, I thought I made a mistake, and was then dumbfounded when I tried my way through all pieces of evidence and probably like 3 game overs until I finally got it by chance and was left thinking "wasn't that literally the first thing I tried?" Maybe that's just me being not very smart but I'd say either allowing both statements to be refuted or phrasing the hint differently would work better in that instance.

One (maybe technical) issue I have right now is with the pacing of some of the automatically advancing dialogue. I'm not sure if the way it was for me is what you intended, if you know about this but haven't had the time to fix yet, or if it's just a problem with my computer, but in several scenes where the dialogue automatically advances, the unskippable pauses in between feel unnaturally long. For example, in the scene where Herb rejects the accusation that he's the murderer, and it cycles through all character's surprised faces, it stopped on each character for a good 8-10 seconds. Another time, I think it was right before the telephones started ringing, it paused for what felt like 20 seconds, to the point where I thought the game froze.

Also, two questions: Your Patreon says it comes with Discord benefits, so do you have a Discord server for this community? I couldn't find one.

And are you by any chance watching any scambaiters? Because the execution of Herb is so on point, it feels like he was written by someone who's listened to several hours of actual scammers before. Every time when he did his thing it had me on the floor, especially the use of scammerisms like "oversmart" was hilarious! ᴵ ᵏᶦⁿᵈᵃ ʰᵒᵖᵉ ʷᵉ ˢᵉᵉ ʰᶦᵐ ᵃᵍᵃᶦⁿ ʰᵉ ʷᵃˢ ᵐʸ ᶠᵃᵛᵒʳᶦᵗᵉ

Anyway, thanks for reading my wall of text. I'm really glad I found your game, and I'm excited for more ;)

(+1)

Hi! Thank you so much for your well-written and thoughtful reply. I absolutely lved reading your thoughts, and it was especially great that you have some background with the other murder-mystery VNs that inspired mine. You might be interested to know that my VN was actually originally slated to be a Danganronpa fangame, before I decided I’d rather do something that stands on its own a bit better. This case is actually very close to the first case I drafted out in that fangame stage of development, with just some minor tweaks.

I’m very pleased you enjoyed the characters and their poses- I was worried it might be a bit overkill giving them all between eight and ten full-body pictures, so I’m happy to hear you enjoyed that variety and motion in the characters’ “vocabulary” of poses. 

I’m glad that the plot pleasantly surprised you! It was not easy coming up with a mystery that was both complex but could also be presented in such a way where I’m not throwing new players immediately into the deep end. I also tend to agree with you on the hints from Chive- I did want to make sure that none of the gameplay stuff was missed (like presenting profiles, for instance,) but I did definitely go overboard in some places. 

The point you make about the supplies testimony makes a lot of sense, I think that even though the direct wording makes the supplies fit more with RJ’s statement, I 100% agree that the framing as a whole makes it seem like either statement would be valid to present the evidence to. There are a few moments in this case where multiple statements are potential answers for advancinng, but this particular section does not function like that, so I’ll have to go ahead and change that to better fit with the direction the writing implies you’re supposed to take. Thank you very much for the feedback on that part, by the way!

I’m sorry to say that in terms of the pauses, I’m totally stumped as to why that’d be happening. I tested out the build today after reading that, to see if I unwittingly messed up something with the game’s pauses when I was reworking the UI, but it ran as expected for me on both my Mac and my roommate’s Windows. If you don’t mind, would you be able to tell me if there were any other times when timings felt off? For instance, each “interjection” is supposed to last precisely three seconds before auto-advancing, which means there’s no downtime between the end of the shouting animation and the start of the next message- was this behaving as it was supposed to for you? I definitely want to get that fixed, at any rate- that issue sounds very awkward and frustrating, and could really take someone out of the moment.

As for the Patreon/Discord stuff, I didn’t realize exactly how it worked until now- I thought there’d be a link to join it on my page, which obviously ended up not being the case. I put a link up on this page, if you’re still interested. Sorry about that!

I do subscribe to a lot of scambaiters, I watch Kitboga religiously, in particular! So yes, you are exactly write when you say it seems like he was written by someone who’s listened to hours of actual scam calls. (His theme music actually contains a car insurance robo call, if you listen closely, too.) 

Thanks again for your thoughts! Hearing what people think about my VN, especially in such detail, is easily the most rewarding part of this whole venture. I’m very excited to keep working on it, and I’m looking forward to sharing more progress!

(1 edit)

There were actually a lot of instances where unskippable pauses happened that were definitely longer than three seconds. I recorded the scene I was talking about in my earlier comment. The interjection is actually immediately followed by Chive's surprised face, but then it pauses on every character for about 10 seconds:

During the entire video (including the part at the beginning) I was pressing the 'continue' button, and as you can see, it takes a really long time to advance. But it also happened in a lot of other scenes, for example, the two-sprite animation of RJ holding out the Amongus plushie and then hugging it would take like 10-15 seconds in total, every time it was used.

If nobody else complained so far, it's probably just a problem with my PC, although I never had a similar issue with other games. If you still want to try debugging this, I could help if you want me to test a new build or something, I'll join your Discord.

Also glad to have found another Kitboga fan in the wild ;) funny how instantly recognizable that is!