Ren'Py - Automaton Story [v0.1.3] [AngryFur]

Review for 0.0.13b

I honestly really like this game. It's original with great art in a slight steampunk aspect. Also, it's nice to have a furry game that isn't just gay stuff.

The story is very simple and so is the dialogue. It's not bad or anything like that, but the dialogue failed to capture genuine or interesting opinions and emotions among the few differents dialogues options. There isn't that much of it tho so it's not like to have walls of exposure to deal with.

The characters could use some better work, there is a potential for them that isn't reached yet. Right now, most just want to bang you or give you a blowjob out of nowhere simply because you look nice and they have weird lust drive that you usually see in the MC of lewd games.

At the time of this review, there isn't that many lewd scenes and most of them are one-offs spread throughout the current characters. But they have excellent quality and animation.

The gameplay aspect is typical. You move around different places, making a bit of money to buy what you need (You can cheat to skip that, but it's not like you have to grind the hell out of it, you don't need much) to trigger scenes and advance the story.

My main concern about the game really is the pacing of the updates, as the hand-drawn aspect of it all seems to obviously drastically reduce the possible amount of content in the game in the long term. There is many rough unfinished sketches and it's a game that has been out for almost a year now, with the content being done in a single hour.

Perhaps for the dev the best approach would be to look into more efficient work ethics that could enable a faster pace for updates as well as to be able to provide more substantial updates in the future.

This is a game with loads of great potential and I wish the best to AngryFur

I really like it, I haven't seen many furry games that aren't gay on this site so that is definitely a plus and I love the character designs and the story, I've always had a weak spot to steampunk games that includ automatons because I just find it super interging and for it to be a furry games just peaks my interest even more, I'm really excited for this game to be finished to see how the story progresses, As of right now there isn't alot of story but i still liked it.

The art is cute, little sketchy in places but keep the updates coming and it'll all be swell, no complaints here.

Writing is solid enough to follow along, but lets be honest I skipped through it.

Cute roomate has a crush, go get her, connect the dots.
scenes with a wide cast of characters, most of them one off,
repeatable ones are good, maybe have scenes that start the same but end at different paces.

Be interested to see your plotline and plan of scenes, whether it's linear or has some pathing. (Skip pathing, it's wide but usually shallow)

Curious to see what the automaton's deal is, obviously there's gonna be some sort of drama about the previous owner and stuff, but don't worry too much about building huge lore here, play it as something that colors the story not shaping it.

In terms of criticism I only want to say it's really important you focus on character interaction, who's reacting to what and what they feel. Doesn't have to be a major element, but it's that little bit of shine that makes a story feel good. So far you've done that pretty well, but as they get into heavy stuff, it's important. It's the most interesting thing about anything really. So give them some agency as they go through the motions.
Think about what Roommate 2 is choosing to do watching Automaton or PC, that sort of thing.
Anyway I mostly wrote this to get your 5/5, keep it up.

So far I've played through about everything in the story as of yet and I would say that overall, considering this is a relatively newer game, it is pretty good. The story so far is well written (though some of the sex scenes seem to be hamfisted in, I don't mind myself but you do find some situations going from 0-60 quicker than a Ferrari). It isn't necessarily a typical story set piece, where you have a mom, two or three sisters, and other blood relatives but you do have a sister. If I were to compare this to another game, it reminds me of the earlier versions of Summertime Saga which is probably why I'm drawn to it. Additionally, the creator AngyFur has done a great job with the art and animations, adding extra frames to the animations to make scenes "smoother". If you're curious about this game, I would recommend checking it out.

So I've pledged as of 1.0.0 and have a decent feel for where the project is at now.

Pro's

• Great Animations
• Great Art
• Great Character Designs
• Great Setting
• Very Little Grinding

Okay / On Verge

• Plot is interesting, but vague
• Characters interesting, but some exceptions
• Fast lewd content, but weird pacing

Cons

• Writing level is a bit rough.
• Some characters are... grating.
• UI is a little clunky
• Reliance on RNG for some events
• Not enough "daily" gameplay

Artwork
The Good: The art is gosh darn awesome in this game so far. Someone complained below about the lewd scenes being a "sketch" vs the normal scenes... but these scenes are frame by frame animation. I'm not about to complain about a lewd game that has FRAME by FRAME animation. This is rare in VNs and it still looks very good.

I am more than willing to accept a faster sketch-like style if it means more variety, scenes, and faster pace of development. The art outside of these scenes is very crisp and sharp! If the sketched animations had sketched/roughly painted backgrounds to replicate the world around you... this would both speed up the pace of making scenes while giving it an actual style to the animations.

The design of the world is a fairly interesting victorian steampunk era setting, and the characters all have very interesting and unique designs... without clashing in the setting with the minor exception of a purple-ish character named Sasha and a blue wolf dude called the Lead Engineer. But it's not the worst, it's still cohesive enough it doesn't draw you out from the world.

Story & Writing
The world is a very cool steampunk adventure in a world that has "automatons" aka androids, with victorian but at the same time industrial era architecture. It makes an incredibly unique steampunk setting to see some sanity and reality in the world. That's pretty cool in my opinion.

As for the characters, I find the majority of them to be well written, and with great character. Ally asks interesting but... odd questions, making me more and more curious about her. Your Journeyman who is training you seems to be a really nice dude in general and isn't your typical twat boss or overly preachy mentor. Your totally roommate not sister is fun and plucky, kind of bratty... feels like a real person. But her relationship seems too fast-paced. I might be alone in that, but it would be more interesting if there was more dialogue and talking between the two of you and when you start "cuddling" with her. But my first negative comments will be that some of the characters are odd or annoying. Namely one, your "friend" Karl. I want to hit him with a bag of doorknobs, steampunk doorknobs. But his mother is quite lovely! Can't wait till I nail her to stick it to that bugger. The bleu engineer is just, oddly colours, but has a good character... Sasha is much the same but she suffers from extremely fast pacing to her character! I'd like more build-up!

The world is a bit too quiet with not many dialogues outside of the story bits. But that's understandable! It's 1.0.0 right now. I will either remove this later as more content comes in, or bumped own the star to a 4/5. What's there is fun to read... but it suffers from some odd wordage and grammar. I'd recommend just running the game dialogue through Hemmingway. I know I'm not one to talk tbh haha, but yeah it seems like the text needs some editing to make it flow a bit nicer and add in some slang/idioms etc. It's VERY interesting with VERY good content, but its execution and delivery needs a lot of work. But don't get me wrong I don't want to sound overly negative, they may just be waiting to edit their text later in the project and the person is making a very cool story!

Gameplay
Pfft, it's just a visual novel... what gameplay!? Haha, I'm kidding, don't hurt me, please! Visual novels do lack on the gameplay typically but some of them end up adding in hellish fricken grind mechanics to pad them out and such. Some great visual novels with good writing, good scenes, just ruin the whole experience by doing this. Automaton does not have grindy as heck mechanics! There's a little section where you need to work a few days to buy some parts while you are collecting other parts... but it's fine. You can do it in like 30 seconds. Super awesome. But it also lacks things to do from time to time and I would like to see some minigames or some sort of content to occupy your time instead of just taking a nap to move time forward for certain scenes.

A reliance of RNG elements for some scenes can be frustrating. Your sis-roommate for instance showers from time to time and that can be required to progress. Sometimes you will miss the pre-progression funny scene where you peek in on her and get in trouble completely and progress over it! Some more reliability or something to ensure you don't get drawn out into sleeping day after day to get her in the shower would be great.

The UI is a little eh. It's functional, but it doesn't feel good. Having to right-click out of every closed-off area is annoying, it would be nice if we couldn't click them at all until their content is ready.

Sound
Uhhhmm... well there is none! I would love some BGM or something. But it at least means you don't have to suffer from some guy slamming a 4kg wet fish against a countertop to "simulate the sounds of sex" with that RPG maker SPLGRTCH SPLGRTCH SPLGTCH god awful ear rape that some games have. So... no opinion haha. I would like some background music and maybe a nice xylophone noise when you mouse over things you can interact with. Make a different sound for characters than objects though, just different xylophone notes. You could honestly just download a sound pack and do it! Little things like that can go a big way to make players feel satisfied while navigating the world and game. AngryFur, iif you want to contact me I can get you in touch with some composers! Hit me up if you read this, I'm a fellow NSFW dev and would love to help you out.

In Conclusion

I hope you all enjoyed my review as much as I enjoyed seeing the potential that this game has in it. It really could go to places... I very much want to see more from AngryFur. The story is a little on the vague side right now so it could either get REALLY good or not... but so far the set up is good. Very good. They set a mystery up really well and give you enough information to make you intrigued to learn more without spilling too, too much. I fear they might pace the story too fast though. All the relationships right now move lightning fast... so I am hoping they draw it out appropriately.

I'd recommend it a pledge. For now, I will leave it at a 5/5, for all the potential I see in the project. I would like to see writing beefed up a but. I would like to see more gameplay elements to it. Time wasters basically. But mostly, I just want to see more of this game!

the game is still in early stages of dev it seems but it looks like it has a lot of good potential so far, there are a few scenes that seem unfinished/ unrefined for sure but thats just how it goes.

artwork looks pretty good and story is decent too, as it stands the objective locations are a bit unclear so theres a bit of blind clicking around but im sure that will be fixed later on with in game dialogue or something.

in other words i would recommend giving this a watch for sure, interested to see how the story develops!

This game has an interesting story, I love the animation and the drawings are just so beautiful it renders so well. The story and game play looks very promising i hope this game gets updated regularly, it would suck if it got abandoned. I cannot wait for the next update.

After playing this for a spell what I can say is that this game is still very much cooking, needs a bit longer in the oven. A game with potential but really not there yet. The art is solid (where it's complete) but the UI needs tweaking. In the first scene you've to make your way to the "Master's office" (oh my!) but there's very little hints as to where this is. I ended up having to click on houses randomly on the world map until I triggered the scene I want (and given that 90% of the locations on the mini map bring a pop up saying it's not finished yet then it can get annoying).

But that's really small gripes to be fair and certainly not something that should put you off. Interesting story, good visuals, few annoyances here and there which is pretty standard for a new game. Certainly worth a watch

at the beginning but interesting story

the drawings are to be improved, but the characters are quite tantalizing, especially the bunny

I hope the developer brings out better animations and constant updates

Good Points
+ You can think ''Oh wow art style looks pretty good'' for screnshoots but dont get fooled, there is two different art style for this game and one of them is pretty bad.
+ Plot looks interesting...

Bad Points
- I dont know what we should call this thing but its like our game trys to deceive us... Everyting looks good, you are playing your game and when you are about to see some animates sex scene game art style changes someting pretty shitty... Is this some kind of joke i dont know? And oddly DEV's name is ''AngryFur'' yeah... Right now yeah I'm to. I'm AngryFur -_- (Look picture for details...)

For The End
This could be good if DEV make whole game like first art stlye and dont try to deceive his players...