itch.io

I'm probably in the minority, but I've never been a huge fan of drastic branching, or at least the way I'm used to it being done. My main problem is that characters and major scenes seem to drop off the face of the earth if you aren't on the correct branch. I want relevant characters to remain relevant regardless of whether they are the focus. Based on previous posts, though, I get the feeling that won't be much of a problem with this game.

A secondary, somewhat pettier problem I have with it is that I hate missing content or being forced to replay a game just because a small number of scenes were locked to a different path. Even in this demo, I edited the script so I could simultaneously follow all decision paths, especially when the only difference was the POV character of a scene. This is one of my personal mind goblins, though, so I understand that many people feel differently.

Everything I've said here aside, I'm really interested to see how your branching turns out. I like the idea of paths being a little fuzzy, with the ability to drop in and out of plotlines and character dynamics depending on your choices.

Regarding the inside vs outside choice, I think that in most eroge it serves no purpose besides catering to different fetishes. Either the NPC has no opinion on the matter (which makes them feel a little flatter as a character) or the choice is basically to do what they want and gain points or do the opposite and lose points. It's hard to add nuance to a decision like that, and if you can't I don't see any reason to have it.

I was really impressed by the granularity and level of detail in the demo sprites. It looked like you could independently change different facial features. Is that a custom system you made, or are most devs just not using Renpy's full feature set?

I've always disliked when the relationship causes everything else in the story to grind to a halt. When nothing else is happening the characters just interact in a static vacuum or, at best, a series of disconnected set pieces. I think it's more interesting to see a relationship develop in a dynamic and relevant context, especially because it's a chance to show how the characters handle external influences together.

In a similar vein, I dislike when characters become irrelevant when they aren't part of the main romantic plot. Just because two characters aren't actively trying to bone doesn't mean their interactions lack meaning. A lot of VNs fall prey to this, where characters effectively vanish if you aren't following their path.

I love what I've seen so far. Well-done, cute, wholesome stuff like this is unfortunately hard to come by. Very interested to see where this goes.

Not sure if you care about bug reports at this early stage, but I found two:

1. The "fishedwithalexa" variable is never set to True if you pick that option. Not too big a deal; you miss out on one line of text.
2. In Vani's version of the final scene, "scene hs1" and "show mas_full_first" are transposed, which means you only see the initial scene instead of the character image changes.