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Galactic Love Utopia: Arrival

A sci-fi alien monster girl romance visual novel · By Kaijoseisoft

Feedback & Ideas General Sticky

A topic by Kaijoseisoft created 92 days ago Views: 451 Replies: 11
Viewing posts 1 to 4
Developer (1 edit)

A general thread to post any ideas or feedback you might have for the game or story. Not meant for bugs or issues, there is a separate thread for that.

Keep in mind that we will not be able to include every idea we receive, we have to take things like how fitting it is and the scope of the project in mind as we have no intention of dragging development out to milk potential supporters. Feel free to mention your big ideas though, we can always keep things in mind for future projects.

Feedback

Any feedback is welcome, but we are currently interested in your thoughts on the following things specifically:

  • How much time did it take you to go through Galactic Love Utopia: Arrival?
  • Would you prefer the portraits of characters who are talking inside the text box to be static rather than move?
  • If you turned on adult content, did you feel like you the appearance of such content was too sudden/without warning?
  • What did you think of the default settings for music, sound effects, and voices? Did you change any of the settings such as lowering the volume of one of these types of sound or increasing them?
  • Who was your favorite character so far and why?

Ideas

All ideas are welcome, but for the most part the basic story is set in stone. We are mostly interested in ideas for the following things:

  • Bonus scenes you will be able to access through the map. Do you have any ideas for short encounters or events with side characters or a combination of characters?
  • Any ideas for interesting or unique assets such as the eye banners. This can be for assets such as voices/sound, art, special effects, etc.

Regardless whether you have feedback for us or not, thank you to anyone who spent the time to play through the game.

(2 edits)

Hi there! I'll answer some of your questions! Although I wasn't aware of these questions until now (after playing) so I may not be able to answer all of them!

  • How much time did it take you to go through Galactic Love Utopia: Arrival?
    I didn't time my session since I wasn't aware this would be a question. It didn't take very long, though. Maybe an hour or two at the most?
  • Would you prefer the portraits of characters who are talking inside the text box to be static rather than move
    Yes, I would prefer them to be static rather than move! Sometimes the animations of the images inside the text box move in a way which is distractingly out of sync with the on-screen sprites of the same character, so I think things would look better if the side images were static.
  • If you turned on adult content, did you feel like you the appearance of such content was too sudden/without warning?
    I didn't turn on adult content. However, I was impressed by how naturally the option was presented to the player. It felt quite organic, in my opinion. (As did choosing the name for the protagonist.)
  • What did you think of the default settings for music, sound effects, and voices? Did you change any of the settings such as lowering the volume of one of these types of sound or increasing them?
    I play with voices off, so I turned the voices off. I do recall, at some points, wondering if there was music playing and turning my computer speakers up to check.
  • Who was your favorite character so far and why?
    Other than Ai and Os (who I assume aren't real characters) I spent a considerable amount of time with Kyta, Sho, and Ando. Kyta was very "DOWN TO EARTH???" *cough*  Kyta was chill. Sho was cute but actually a bit hyper for me...! And Ando.... made me feel upset. Iroh ran off right away but is still a big cutie! To be honest, choosing which love-interest to pursue in a VN like this is often difficult for me. Iroh is probably my favorite because she's super cute, but I also like Kyta and Sho well enough.

Other than that, I have a few other things I'd like to say. I hope you don't mind:
(Lists are a little hard to do on here...!) ^^;

> I feel that the sprite animations could generally feel smoother and less rigid
There is no offence meant here. Time and effort has clearly gone into the sprite animations and I know working on them more would be more work. However, I do feel that things feel noticeably fast and rigid, and I feel that if more time was spent making the animations feel smoother and less rigid, you'd be very glad you took the time to improve them. It could make a big difference. :)

>An option to turn off sprite animations would be appreciated
This has nothing to do with the above point. I've just found that I, personally, have significant difficulty reading visual novels when there's a lot of movement on the screen. (I have no issue when it comes to lovely falling leaves or other similar particle effects, though.) A lot of animation can unfortunately distract me - or even give me headaches - when I'm trying to read. This is mainly an issue when there are multiple animated sprites (and/or side images) on the screen at a time. So, I hope you can understand why I'd appreciate the option. Still, I understand if you decide not to include this option.

>There's the very occasional typo or odd word choice
Not my intention to micromanage - each writer has their own style - I just noticed a few typos and odd word choices.
At a certain point, people are talking or thinking about how Ai and Os are fluent in various languages. However, the word "fluid" is accidentally used.
Other than that, at some points in the early section of the story, I noticed people using the word "that" rather than "who" when thinking or talking about people. For example... "I can't disappoint the people that are following me." could be... "I can't disappoint the people who are following me." and "You are not the only human that has been..." could be "You are not the only human who has been..." We each have our own writing styles, but I feel that switching "that" with "who" in those situations may feel more natural.

> I loved the greenhouse and the CG in it!
They were beautiful!

> Scrolling through the gallery seems a bit slow.
This is a very minor thing - I noticed that scrolling with the scroll bar takes a noticeably long amount of time before you can fully see the next image. A page system, rather than a scroll system, may be preferable here? But this is a very small nitpick.

That's it! Thank you for sharing an early version of your visual novel with us!
Good job!!!!

(I.... don't suppose Kyta showers or uses any saunas. Would... she die?)

Developer(+1)

Thank you very much for the extensive feedback!

Some responses:

> I feel that the sprite animations could generally feel smoother and less rigid
I fully agree and the sprite animations used to be smoother actually, but we had to cut a ton of frames due to Ren'Py's  limitations. Regardless of your computer's strength including more than about 20 frames for the animation turned out to make the game extremely laggy. In some cases we had to cut the number of frames down from over 200 frames, so you can imagine how much of a difference that makes in the final product. Unfortunately leaving these frames in would have made the game close to unplayable in some parts, so we had little choice. A sprite that still has a little more frames would be Maaku, the demon girl you briefly see at the start, and you can still notice some performance issues during her brief appearance.

> An option to turn off sprite animations would be appreciated
I can definitely understand this point since the idle animations are ongoing and it's part of the reason why I asked whether the side portraits would be better as static images as well. It's not as easy as just having the game show only a single frame unfortunately, so it will require quite some development time to create and include/match what's currently there as an animated version with a non-animated version. So any extra user options like that might have to wait depending on how we spend our limited time.

> There's the very occasional typo or odd word choice
I am the writer and English is not my first language. I have a proofreader, but am a little reluctant to accept big changes to the meaning of sentences so I might have accidentally ignored some fixes that were required. I will have a look at them.

> I loved the greenhouse and the CG in it!
Thank you! The artist for this and similar illustrations in the future is: https://x.com/KaruheYKH

> Scrolling through the gallery seems a bit slow
Since the gallery is not yet functional I will have a look at this once we can properly test it as it is intended to work.

Hi there :) I heard what you said about the animation issue. If you're using images which display individual frame image files from your image folder one at a time in quick succession, you may want to look at movie sprites, instead? I'm still learning, but I'm interested in movie sprites myself and found the Ren'Py Tutorial game's Quickstart -> Video Playback section to be helpful. In that section, they talk about how movies can be displayed just like any other image (IE, like a sprite) and they touch on the fact that videos can have masks to make them transparent. They only mention that briefly in the tutorial, but there is a section of documentation which a kind person on Lemmasoft Forums pointed me to, which covers movie masking in more detail: https://renpy.org/doc/html/movie.html#Movie So, it seems like it's possible to make movie sprites which have transparency, and as far as I understand, playing movies is easier on Ren'Py than the manually-displaying-individual-frame-images method. (I think the movies should be .webm files, though.) I hope this may help. Regardless, I wish you well! :)

Can there be any futa/gynomorph stuff in a future update?

Developer(+1)

No such characters are planned at the moment. I'm not against it, but we have to be careful to not increase the scope so much the game never gets finished.

Then you can have an intergalactic HAREM, with all those girls???

And is the content forced or can it be avoided? By this I mean some fetishes or tags that sometimes appear in the game that are not to everyone's liking, especially lesbians, NTR, femdom, etc.

Developer

A harem mode was planned but is such an enormous task that it has been put on hold for now for the same reason as above. If the game is received well enough to warrant extra content after it has been completed it is high on the list of stuff we want to add in then.

I don't think there will be a lot of content that isn't pretty vanilla, but I can add some choices before optional sex scenes anyway. That might mean you are cut off from sexual content with certain characters though. Demon girl Maaku is dominant in bed for example so if you don't like (very light) femdom there will be no replacement scenes that don't fit her personality as well.

Scenes with the main characters are of course mandatory if you enter their exclusive romance routes unless you turn of adult content altogether. Overall those sex scenes will be more romantic, but if you don't like the idea of having sex with Kyta you probably shouldn't pursue her if you have adult content turned on.

Ok thanks for answer, so to be clear, there will be a Harem ending, but will it be until the end for reasons that entail doing so?  Well, it would be ugly to have to choose one of all of them, because both the main and secondary ones look good and if it is light femdom, it is acceptable,Although I personally like to turn around these types of situations, but if there is no option, we will have to settle for this.

(+1)

I'd also be interested in this type of content. An alien space station seems like the perfect setting for it as well. Since adding new characters probably wouldn't fit the scope, maybe Kyta or the slime girl could morph themselves for a single scene?

(1 edit)

I just tried the steam demo today and I really enjoyed it even though I was disappointed that I didn't get to meet Maaku since she's the character that interests me the most.

To answer your list in order:

-I took my time playing whilst doing other things but I finished the game in about 2.5/3 hours

-im fine with the way it currently is but, generally, idle animations seem choppy and too fast/exaggerated.

-I did, I like the ludo-narrative implementation of this setting. I'd be nice to have to option to change it later on, maybe by talking to Os again. The scene with Os was expected and did not bother me but the next one was very unexpected.

-The volume was fine but I was annoyed that the music occasionally stopped for long periods of time.

-Even though you barely get a glance of her in the demo, Maaku is the character I'm most interested in. I guess it's partly because of her appearance and what I expect her to be like because of it. (confident, bold, adventurous, proud, playful, kinky, dominant) I'm sad that she seems to be a side character, I hope she'll have a good amount of content.

From the characters I was able to meet long enough to form an opinion, Kyta was my favorite. I enjoyed her playful mischief and she really felt like an alien being. Sho also seemed interesting but I don't care much about the other 2 main characters so far.

To end on a good note, the game has potential, keep up the good work!

Developer

Thank you for taking the time to give extensive feedback!

I'm open to eventually "upgrading" a side character to main heroine if they prove to be particularly popular, but (almost) any side character is likely to have some fans. Making a complete game is the goal rather than trying to keep adding to it endlessly, so 12 full romance routes for every character would be unrealistic. After the game is complete I might go the DLC route for the most popular side character based on a poll or something, but that's still a far off future.