There are some things I liked, some more things I disliked. But the main thing that made me stop playing was the writing style. It does not fit the medium you picked, because it is written like a book.
Why are all these things and actions so extensively described to us when you can show us?
(Small thing as well, the tags list "2D" but the animation is clearly 3D.)
When you look at the visuals, this game clearly has a lot of effort and care behind it, and there certainly is potential here.
But it has one massive downside: the dialogue. It is often really on the nose and clunky.
There are issues like exposition that feels forced (especially the introduction suffers from this). But most of the problems stem from the fact that the writer clearly isn't entirely comfortable writing in English: Sentences can be weirdly worded, characters speak with little subtlety, informal language is used where it doesn't fit, and every few minutes there was a word so obscure I had to look up what it meant.
The world seems interesting, the sound is very well done, and the minigames do give more variety. But the dialogue is a dealbreaker for me.
If you ever find the time, I think it would really help with new player retention if you polished up the first hour or so.
The game noticably improves with each chapter, but new players like me might stop before the game reaches that extremely high level of quality later chapters have.
Speaking as someone who really warmed up to the story after getting through those early parts, it would be a shame for people to miss out on this amazing game just because of that.
Personally, iDEAL. While it is very widely used in my home country of the Netherlands, I am unsure if it is used anywhere else.
But as long as there is any type that does not require a credit card it's all good. Over here credit cards are not standard to have, so around 50% of us do not have one. That percentage only gets higher the younger the age group.
Yes, but slowly. Let me shorten the 2 Patreon posts he made:
17-7
"I've been working on finishing up the next update for Bloom War, but honestly, I'm not happy with it and I'd like to share my thoughts on it. With the amount of different routes that have been added, the content for each update is getting spread thinner and thinner between them. Even after the extra time I wanted to spend on this update, it still feels shallow. And this problem will likely continue to get worse if I continue doing updates this way."
"With all that being said, I don't intend to give up on Bloom War. But I do need to change how I've been going about it."
2-8
"For August, I'm going to work on the next update for The Expanding Alchemist."
"I've also found a way to go about future Bloom War updates to make them easier, but again, it will still be a while until it's in a state I'm happy with."
For people interested in the full version, I payed for the Patreon 3 days ago and I have been having a blast with it.
I started playing because of the tags, I kept playing because the gameplay was very solid (and because of the tags). In it's core this game is a very solid deck-builder where you can focus on crafting and piloting your deck. You don't have to worry about the actions of an opposing player like in Hearthstone, and you do not have to learn attack patterns like in Slay the Spire.
The UI can be a bit clunky, for instance when you try to use the mouse to add or remove cards from your deck. But that is the only complaint I have.
The amount of cards, the types of packs, and the random nature of what you get at what point made playing through it multiple times real fun. I never picked the same type of deck twice across my playthroughs and even after more than 20 hours I still haven't played over half the pack types.
I tend to agree with you on the cost for saving. I do not feel like the first version of the second game is hard at all (the other skilled based ones are also not that hard to get the hang off, at least in my opinion). So I do not feel like the game has a high skill floor preventing players from surviving possible bad luck with the RNG elements (and even then you can always restart if you lose the first 5 coin tosses at the start).
So keeping a small cost for saving to prevent players from ruining the tension left in the game feels like a good idea.
I'm quite late to the party here, but I'm guessing you mean the banner image displayed on top?
The reason that image is used is because it is a rendition of "The creation of Adam" by Michelangelo. The women here are being portrayed as the MC's angels and themes of godhood and granted powers play a big role in the story. If there is a deeper meaning as to why the MC is placed in the position of god while the actual 'god' in the story (the man on the bottom left) takes the place of Adam I do not know.
But no, I haven't seen anything in the game that would suggest the MC is gay or 'ignoring' the women.
I really like the game, but I haven't been able to find a link to this game anywhere on Deviantart. These types of games can get some nice boosts in traffic that way. Would you be okay with me making a post on my account to promote this game and your patreon? I could even repeat it for every new update if you wanted to.
I've done this for 1 other game before and even with my very small page the post got over 1.7k views. The author later told me the link to Itch.io I had included in the post was used by more than 150 people.
Just let me know if you think it could help.
Please, I beg you, simplify all these packs and titles and links and codes and subscriptions. You are making it impossible for people who are new to your game to figure out what we are supposed to do to buy it.
I saw the game through a post from someone I follow on Patreon. It linked to your Patreon page and it has taken me 40 minutes to figure out what you are selling, where to buy it, and at what price. The Patreon showed me 14 tiers with so many version numbers, and exceptions, and emojis, and exclamation points that I just gave and and went to the other links to try and figure it out.
Then I clicked the link to this in the hopes of finding a price; Only to find a disclaimer which said that I can't buy the game here because of an issue that is being worked on. Which, judging from the comments, has apparently been here for 3 months already. Followed by a list of multiple packs that are available which took me another 5 minutes to read. Then followed by a detailed guide telling me you can't actually buy the game here. You can buy a code that you then have to use on Gumroad for a 100% discount.
Then I went to your Gumroad and saw literally 322 separate products. With no clear indications which ones were complete or up to date or what most of them even where. After trying to figure that out for 10 minutes, I finally noticed these Episodes are also split into multiple parts that you can buy independently. Why are those still there if the Episode is complete? Who tihinks: "Oh yes, please give me only the first 30 minutes of a Visual Novel". You are selling a game, not a cable package. I almost bought 1 part because I thought it was the entire first episode.
And after all that, I finally found what I think is the price for the full game (untill Episode 3 comes out I guess), almost $50 dollars if you include tax (which you should).
And I still have not figured out if there is a demo, because the things that are labeled as "DEMO" on the Gumroad are paid content.
All the information needed seems to be there but is is so jumbled and unorganized that it is nearly impossible to understand. Please simplify all of this, I do not want to look at 322 products, 4 websites, 14 patreon tiers and mutiple pages of text and explanations just so I can know the price of a game I want to buy.
I've had the same problem, the speed options in neither the downloaded nor browser version seem to work. The example text in the menu does change speed but the actual dialogue does not.
While clicking does speed it up somewhat, having to click mutiple times if a piece of text contains more than 1 sentence is rather annoying. Especially since you have to wait for the character movements to finish first before you can click to show text.
The game seems nice, so I hope it gets fixed.
I do feel like there are certain scenes and characters that are well written. Which makes me feel even worse when I get confronted again with the large part of the script that is so incredibly sub par and non sensical.
Teacher: Oh this druid has a lot of history with the academy, it will be almost impossible to convince her!
MC just walks into her house and almost demands she helps without even knowing what is going on with her.
Druid: Why should I help you when you are being so rude to me? Anyways, if you answer my riddle I will give you the information you seek!
I'm sorry... what?
I still like the game and at times it does capture the same magic the first season had, but the quality of the writing varies wildly between scenes.
Sometimes it consists of heartfelt dialogue and truely believable characters, and sometimes reactions make no sense and the script feels like it was pulled through Google translate. It really feels like there are multiple writers with extremely different skill levels working on the game.
And please get more music tracks, there are multiple instances where the music does not line up at all with what is happening on screen.
Thanks for the quick reply and great game btw.
Crow, wooden bridge, onion, lightning, town map, whip, river, fish, book, sky, (Meredith answers wheel), echo, coffin, surname, time, (Ignore Meredith's advice), well, reflection, envelope, pinch of salt, ant kingdom, one, waterfall, courage, tongue, sunshine, castle, nothing, shadow, vowels, plant, played music, (Meredith finishes).
I've looked up all of them online to be sure. But I got 29 points again when I went through it a third time to get this list. The weird thing is that it seems like I'm only getting 33 questions. Which would explain how I could even get 29 out of 34 points even when I didn't skip a single question. Not skipping anything should make an uneven number impossible since wrong questions deduct a point and thus move you 2 points away from the maximum amount (1 deduction and 1 missed point).
So , I need to know for the sake of my sanity. Is the game you play with the riddlemaster just capped at 29 points? I was pretty sure I got all of them right and then I got 29 out of 34 points. Then I restarted and looked them up one by one to find which ones I did wrong, but I did not find a single mistake. Even when I misclicked a wrong answer and kept going after, I once again landed on 29 points when by the game's logic it should have gone down to 27. Is there something I'm missing here or is the guy just fudging the numbers if you get 30 or higher so you can never win all the prices?
The quality and the amount of invested effort this game shows when compared to most things on here, it's really good stuff. Unique-looking models and locations, strong writing, no long buildup, some music, a good title screen.
If you continue with this the way you seem to have started, you'll surely make something great.
Smoke Mob Games is creating Adult Games | Patreon
It should also have a Discord but can't find a link just now
The first 5 minutes were boring to get through with stiff and static models and I was seriously considering how long I should give it before I gave up on the game.
But thank god I didn't: The characters, the world, the mystery, the dialogue. This is one of the best VN's I have seen and I'm pretty sure I'm reaching around 100 in total now. Played through the first 3 chapters in one go just now and pledged on Patreon not even 60 seconds after finishing it.
I could name dozens of things that make this better than most things you could download here or anywhere else, and this game is free. Great job.
If I could give one tip: please expand your itch.io page for the game, the lack of information and any links to discord and Patreon give this game a less polished feel than the product itself. It feels to me like you are underselling it.
A review based on the first 30 minutes of playtime
The game has a very interesting premise and the world it all happens in seems well flashed out. But I can't recommend it unless you read Spanish.
My only problem with it is that the English translation is functional but far from good. It makes it hard for me to actually immerse myself in the story and the characters. I was pretty surprised by this because the summary of the game on this page doesn't share any of its problems
For example, sentence structure can be weird, all characters are referred to as 'he' even if they are women, and nicknames are never translated. But the problem isn't just the English skill of the writer, but also that it doesn't feel like the English version has been given a lot of time or effort. Even in the first 20 minutes, there are quite a few sentences that are repeated multiple times and some still have the Spanish preceding them. So there are also proofreading issues.
I do have to commend the creator of the game on their way of handling Ren'py graphics. A lot of the backgrounds and none human models in the game are clearly low resolution. But by the way the shots are framed, it almost makes it unnoticeable and feel like it's part of the art style. In general, it makes it feel retro instead of low quality to me.
TL;DR: The game is worth checking out if you can play it in Spanish.
Thanks for the quick answer, I figured it out. In case someone has the same problem:
I've found through the task manager that there were 2 programs running with the name "nwjs" that didn't open a window. Once I manually ended those 2 programs I could start the game. So I think the error came from the software in which the game was made and not your game itself.
I liked the demo, but if you want to fund this through Patreon I do think you need to give people a bit more to work with than 3 minutes of story. As you yourself state on your Patreon page, there are a lot of VN's on the market. And while it does seem to be good quality stuff you are making here, the demo is just not long enough to get people invested in the story, the characters, or the world you are building.
I do really hope you continue though, I got strong 'City of Broken Dreamers' vibes from this and I'm digging it.
