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!