Just a note regarding some of the recent comments and reviews, from my perspective.
1) Some people have commented on the quality of the renders. As
JJsworld has pointed out, he's new to all this, and he is on a lower end machine. So rendering at a higher resolution isn't really a viable option for him for several reasons.
No post work is being done on the renders (not his talent), and when you are rendering multiple (4+) characters in Daz Studio in the same scene, you quickly hit the Iray VRAM wall at higher resolutions, and high resolution renders take considerably longer to do. When you are trying to crank out 150+ renders a month on your spare time on lower end hardware, render time is definitely a factor.
As someone that works with multiple characters regularly on a higher end machine in my own 3D comic, I am well aware of this issue, so I understand the tradeoff that was made here.
Anyways, that's why this story is rendered and set up for a 720P presentation, and not a higher resolution.
2) I need to put this in large caps:
THIS IS A VISUAL (KINETIC) NOVEL, NOT A GAME!
Note the Kinetic Novel tag, and also note that Ren'Py at it's heart is a Visual Novel engine, that while it is incidentally often adapted to certain types of games, that is not the case here...
I still really think this belongs in the Comics section, so that people don't go downloading this expecting an actual game, but that ship has sailed. On the flipside, people check out the Games section a lot more often than they check out the Comics section of this forum, so a least it gets more visibility.
3) This story is being offered completely for free, and is essentially
JJsworld 's passion project, and is his first foray into this space. Also, English isn't his native language, hence the grammar issues.
All that being said, I will say that a number of the criticisms are valid ones, particularly with the grammar issues. I'm just trying to provide some context from my own perspective here for people. I did note that in Chapter 7 we saw a bit more facial expressiveness from the gals, which was one of the criticisms I had raised earlier, and that others have commented on. I'd personally like to see more close-ups in Chapter 8, so that we can better admire the gal's features.
On that note:
It might be helpful to add a note to the OP about the 'native resolution' being 1280 x 720p (the actual story pictures are only 981 pixels wide). That way people that are hung up on wanting no less than say 1080P or even 4K will know in advance what the 'target resolution' is.
If anyone has compiled a list of typos and misspellings, feel free to share in the meantime so that they can be fixed. I'll probably do a quick story runthrough myself and maybe release a 'mod patch' or something that corrects the typos and misspellings between now and when Chapter 8 is released, and of course share the corrections with
JJsworld .
When I helped
JJsworld set up the current package for download (in response to a few requests in this thread), with the new 'combined chapters' thing, I did spend a bit of time with the Chapter 7 coding correcting a few grammatical things, like spelling out numbers (where it looked more natural) and fixing a few typos and contraction issues.
Note that I didn't spent a lot of time here coding wise, I just set up the chapter coding framework and renumerated the pics, which took a few hours, and maybe less than an hour to add Chapter 7 to the framework, and then explained the new coding framework to
JJsworld so that he could run with it going forward.
As for why I felt the need to help out, I just like the harem theme in this story, and I think the gals are cute!
JJsworld has put a lot of hours in here, when not at the 'day job', something that people may not fully appreciate sometimes.
I just think that being more supportive of new developers is helpful, particularly ones that are offering their stories for free.
T
his is JJsworld 's baby, but as they say 'you can't please everyone'.