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Hello! That's quite a passionate comment. Can I ask what parts of the game glitched on you? Please keep in mind this was a 2 week project I didn't have time to really fine-tune the game. But if it got in the way of your experience, I can look into the problem!

Hello! I've been following this game's development for a while, and I finally got to play the demo today. Overall, you guys did an amazing job with such a small team and it really is a quality visual novel!

I do have some feedback, which you're by no means obligated to respond to. I would love to see this game improve and grow so these are just my personal feelings based on when I played through the demo:

1. As many have said, the UI and backgrounds are brilliant! I really loved the vibrant colors in the game; it really fleshed out the world. The art was already pretty nice, but I'll be even more excited when the character portraits get redrawn. One thing about the UI, the home screen icons on the top did confuse me at first because they were cut off  (until you hover over them) and I had thought there was a bug with my screen resolution.

2. I also very much liked the article writing minigame! It's a good way for players to read a large amount of text that can summarize important events of the day so that they don't get lost in the plot later on.

3. Personally, I think the biggest weak point to the game is currently the writing. Visual novels rely heavily on well-written text to make up for the lack of gameplay. While Zodiac Axis has an interesting premise and colorful cast of characters, I feel like the writing was incredibly... fluffy. There was a lot of repetition and redundant sentences (if you need examples, I can happily provide).

I couldn't get a strong grasp of Alison's character other than she's "normal" but also judges a lot of other characters based on their "normality". I'm not sure if it was on purpose or not, but the fixation on "normal/ordinary" feels odd to me, especially because being "normal" is not a choice. People can choose to be complacent to their situation or apathetic to change, but normality is a state. The demo dialogue (through Alison) constantly rates characters on some sort of normal scale, which ends up rubbing me a bit in the wrong way kind of as like "how much of a special snowflake are you?" Yes, the characters that belong to the Zodiac have special powers, but most people who go into playing this game would expect that. Stating the obvious might make the writing feel condescending. There are other ways to create tension in writing rather than rewording the same type of foreshadowing after every character introduction in an edgy tone.

It might also help to write in more subtext. Having characters say lines without needing to explain what they (or what Alison thought) meant would make the dialogue feel a lot more natural. It also gives the players more room to make their own deductions and engage with the text. 

I'm by no means an expert on video games or visual novels, so you can take my comment with a grain of salt. I really only wrote this because I wanted to support this game with feedback! Anyways, the demo was ultimately still a fun play, and I look forward to the full release!

That sounds like you found a bug! Can you let me know around which day did that start happening for you? (And also which cases did you finish?)

Hello! Thanks for playing and the comment! Yeah the bullet hell minigame can be pretty brutal especially for people who aren't too familiar with the game. Here's some suggestions!

- Hold SHIFT to go slower during heavier sections of the bullet hell game, that also allows you to see Locke's hitbox better

- Try not to get stuck in the corners of the game! It's hard to escape when that happens and you also end up wasting a lot of time since your bullets then no longer reach the boss.

- Start the Ribbitter case early! I think players on average take 4-5 days on the frog case so you're recommended to accept the case duuring the first week! (Crow case takes on average 2-3 days, but its also possible to finish it in 1)

- When the clones are spawned during the Ribbitter case, try to defeat the ones furthest away from the big boss first! That way you can prevent getting stuck in corners.

- The Ribbitter Case is really what stumps a lot of players, we gave unlimited time for the final route cases so once you can beat the darn frog, the game gets a lot easier!

- If you're sick of watching the same cutscenes over and over again, you can press ENTER to skip them!

I hope this helps!! I completely understand that the game might feel pretty hard though since this was created under a time restraint and we didn't have the time to balance it out (and a big shoutout to DevRanger Red for programming most of the AI in 2-3 days.)