Davox One year later can we expect to get your opinion on the game evolution?
Honestly can't remember what it used to be like. Its seems pretty solid now. I upped my review from 2 to 3 *. I think a lot has changed but the underlying gameplay is still rinse and repeat with the hope that something new opens up.
Design work is great (4.5*) its up there among the best UI's for a HTML game, but the underlying game play still feels very stale, its not terrible but there is nothing new or exciting about it (3*)
The main issue I faced was lack of direction - too many girls, too many stats. I can see their stats, but I have no Idea how high any of them need to get to to trigger anything, or if they are high enough but I've just not visited them in the right location at the right time to trigger something. They all seem to have quests, so provide the criteria needed to start or advance them. As the game is very rinse and repeat people aren't going to read everything so if there are quest clues in conversations they are going to be missed sometimes. This still leaves it feeling like its a case of rinse and repeat the same actions and hope something new opens up. For me having to raise any stats much more than 5 times is way too much.
**EDIT***
I now realise the objectives are in the phone.
However I'd like to be able to see them all at once as there are so many and most require you to be in a specific place/time. Checking each one individually on the phone is chore.
Although the phone looks nice I think it hinders the UX. and takes up a lot of screen real estate (yes, i know it can be hidden but that not the point)
What I'd suggest is:
in the left pane getting rid of 'Girls location' as it easy to find girls going to the street and looking for their thumbnail. This frees up more space.
Put all the blue boxes into a phone icon and incorporate all the objectives you can currently see on the phone into the 'progress' screen. That way all objectives can been seen on one page.
End of Edit***
Its like an Ubisoft game where they make you climb a tower, clear 5 bases, find 10 of an item, then repeat this 5 times to get 1 new story mission. Resulting in a game they can claim has 50 hrs of content, but 45 hours of which are repetitive cut and paste busy work and 5 hours of which are actual story.
These bit feel fairly nit-pickingish:
Like the use of videos over gifs so I can see how long there is to play or skip through them ++
Quite a few images were missing, the guy who catches you at the glory hole earlier on, the hostess, When jade shows you her tits for the first time there's nothing. there's broken image icons on quite a ew of the sex app messages
Not using the default Twine UI and actually putting in a bit of design work ++
However there are small things like the background image on the left bar being too noisy and distracting from the info. I.e. white text showing the time date across the girls pink head is very hard to read.Tthe phone over the right pane? just realised I never saw anything on that or used it.
In the intro I don't think there is any guide to what the stats mean i.e poor family, bad at sports. I'd assume they mean less starting money and less starting fitness/strength. Why not just put that if that's what it does. I also thought there might be some benefit i.e. bad at sports means any nerds will like you more.
When you are picking the names of your family, show a portrait of them, gets the user more engaged. I'd just call them the name of the actual pornstar by default as its easier to remember (but that's just a personal opinion).
Carla is introduced as a blonde and the first image you see of here is of a blonde yet her thumbnail is of a brunette.
I wasn't sure if there was any penalty to not going to sleep and being forced into it. Not a fan if there is, due to the rinse repeat nature of the game, its hard to be focused, so a lot of time is wasted by the player.