My general thoughts on the latest version, broken up into sections:
More immediate things to work on
Navigation from the office to Patrizia’s office requires too many clicks, making this stage of the game a little more tedious than necessary. A small improvement here would be to not have to go through Wanda’s office to get to Patrizia’s office.
The difference between dating a girl and not dating them feels very minimal. I would love to see the dialogue shift some to make it really feel like you are more in a relationship at that point. Otherwise you don’t have much of a distinction between the different girls in the game.
Future things to work on
Dates are fun and provide a nice semblance of different things to do, but they probably need a little bit more dialogue to them over time. The dialogue can feel recycled at times, especially in Patrizia’s route where you have to gain more weight to get to the next scene
There are times where there is just nothing to do other than kill time at home because the girl you are dating is not available then. I like having girls not always available at all times, but at some point you will want to develop other things to do if that is the case
Money will need reworking at some point if you want it to be meaningful, but nothing to focus on right now
The date page is really cool and well done, but it does break a little bit of immersion for me personally to see weight, BMI, and affection broken out that way. It feels a little odd with the way the rest of the game is presented. That doesn’t mean you can’t have it, but it would be nice to have it a little more gradual (like I only get to know a girl’s updated weight after I ask or similar)
Neat features of this update
Having different characters like different types of foods made for an interesting and fun dynamic
As mentioned, the date page is extremely well presented and the navigation in general is super smooth and clean
As usual, the weight gain scenes are amazing. Sakura’s was insanely good artwork, and both hers and Patrizia’s felt very immersive in character
The characters all have their own unique personalities that shine through the dialogue, which makes this a lot of fun to play through different characters.
I like the current content reached addition. It makes it much easier to know when you can stop playing for this path
I agree with what you said, @Krodmandoon and @jcc309 . Georgina’s update was closer to what I’d like updates to be: plenty of small dialogue variations to show progress, new unlockable conversations and fragments of her story, etc.
I know what you mean and I definitively don’t wanna leave incomplete bits and pieces, then move on to the new flashy thing. Although, as you mention, I reckon there is an expectation from most players to have the game expand on WG content rather than on story alone. On that line, I think is best to strike a balance. And I will hit the brakes if necessary (notifying supporters beforehand, of course) if later in the development I need to sit down and structurally rework things for the better.
That aside, I appreciate the positive comments, suggestions, and feedback. For future reference (and to keep you guys in the loop):
A quicker way to get to the PR office: that, and hiding the phone after time has passed, was already on my task list before v.0.3. launched. It’s not as prioritary as other stuff (e.g. dialogue, renders, etc.) but its there
Random encounters: Also on the list. It might not be as visible, but this month I took care of coding the girls’ schedules, which should look like this:
The idea, on the long run, is to use those “voids” to create random encounters; but I know coding and testing will be a headache, so I don’t know if it will make the cut until at least the very end of the year.
Difference between dating and not: Honestly, I had not considered that angle. I conceived the distinction to flag way in advance potential conflict between romantic interests. The original idea, actually, was to have the mc move from acquaintance to non-exclusive dating, to dating, to in-a-relationship.
Dating: Dates were supposed to have more dialogue and show a wider variety of sprites, but I had to postpone writing. They’ll definitively be different in the next updates.
@JoeyVee lol I wish I had thought of it as an EarthBound reference, but I just chose a cool filter. (Having said that: nevermind, I’m sure I can retcon it given that that’s Saku’s whole deal.)
It’s exciting to see the plans you have for the game. It’s really well thought out, and that makes me excited for the future potential here. I very much imagine that certain pieces (such as random encounters and more varied dialogue) will be fleshed out as you go, so I definitely understand them not being immediately in the early stages of development. I try to point them out more to keep them on your mind so you think about them and have plenty of time to think about what makes the most sense.
In terms of dating in particular, I think some of that will take care of itself as you add more content. As someone who believes dialogue is really important to the success of a game like this, my only main concern is making sure that I feel like I’m actually dating someone if I am, and that it isn’t just a flag that randomly pops up one time that doesn’t mean anything.
this hound must ask but is anyone having trouble with edie, more specifically using the gift option after she says she’s on a diet? may have encountered an error
edit correction it seems the office ladies got some goofs in the gift command, don’t know about boss but i’ll check only recently started the game after all, be warned edie is a game crasher
It’s possible you are going to get an error which you can report to the dev. The only girls that actually have content associated with them are Sakura and Georgina in 0.2 and then those two plus Patrizia in 0.3. Giving gifts and interacting with other girls won’t have anything beyond some small dialogue. So it’s likely bugs and other things might be present in the less tested areas of the game for girls who don’t really have content yet.
I checked the code and after two days of her telling you about her diet and you telling her she doesn’t need to diet it’s supposed to end because 7+7+7>14
But every day I mention the diet her value is reset to 0, somewhere that I cannot find in the code.
Are you at the end of her content? I think she gets on a permanent diet at the end and I don’t believe there was a you’ve seen all the content flag like with the other two. I might be mistaken but that was how it was for me. Any other time she was on a diet earlier in the game she would get off it with the correct response to her immediately. With all or most of her content seen after her two weight stage scenes she was just on a permanent diet for me which I assume it related to the route being unfinished beyond that point.
I ran into this same issue as well, and it happened well before the end of her content. Using the debugger tool I can confirm I also was seeing her diet value reset to 0 at the beginning of each day. It seemed like some math combination where her goal weight was too low. That said, I simply updated the diet value in the console manually and things worked well from then on, so I’m not sure what the issue was.
Yeah, nah, there’s straight up a bug, one I cannot find, that makes it impossible to escape dieting between upgradescene1 and upgradescene2 for PR.
The easiest solution for me was to just change 14 to 2 in the check to see if she’d been nagged enough to stop dieting so that unrelated minor fluxuations in the variable would fire it off.
It’s the sort of bug that’d be kind of hard to track down because the variable is doing a double duty stat gain tracker and binary flag.
Also PR-upgradescene2 is like the best scene in the update, so it’d be a shame if anyone missed out on it.
I had some initial issues with Patrizia’s diet during development, but I thought it had been sorted out. I honestly had no idea this could still happen. Thanks for the heads up!
Now that I know it’s an issue, I’ll recalibrate the code for v0.4. and see if, in the meantime, I can add a debugger patch for players without knowledge of the console.
Sorry . Aside from Joiplay, I personally don’t know of another program that would work. At the moment, because I’m focused on other development tasks, I can’t commit to making an Android release for v.0.2 or v.0.3. However, given that Ren’Py allows to create Android builds, that may change for future releases.
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. Aside from Joiplay, I personally don’t know of another program that would work. At the moment, because I’m focused on other development tasks, I can’t commit to making an Android release for v.0.2 or v.0.3. However, given that Ren’Py allows to create Android builds, that may change for future releases.