It needs a better release model with a group of girls added that works with just one download.
There is too much wonkiness with all the different girl packs...
There
is a basic girl pack linked next to the download, both in the OP here and on HHS. There is even a bloody bolded red warning plastered next to it!
Unfortunately, the pack is ancient, and the girls aren't very good. The best that can be said about it is that it's lightweight and the characters are relatively well-known.
The community tried to make a new one some time ago, but since nobody really wanted to take charge of the project, the project kinda died. Maybe someone will dust it off again.
A download bundle of multiple recommended girls that just works with the base game would be excellent. I have no interest in combing through a 300 page thread or a huge google doc to find some girls that work. And I suspect there are other people like me that just give up trying the game instead of doing that.
That's been a problem with girl packs since forever, and I don't think there's a really good solution. There's the basic girl pack, at least. We tried to make a 'community girl pack' and didn't get anywhere, because it's a lot of work and we all have other things we find more fun. Even BK-related things.
I guess the closest is to just download Leortha's full Mega folder and call it a day. Maybe prune the packs a little if your tastes are more demanding than his.
...and seems that the game has a lot of code to evaluate what you have in your girls directory. This code seems to break a lot.
Never played this game, have no packs or anything downloaded, and even navigating around the main menu is throwing constant errors
The code is working fine. You're just trying to play the game without any girl packs, which is
explicitly warned against. I suppose Goldo
could write exception handling in case another idiot tries this but personally, I'd rather he spent his extremely limited dev time on something more worthwhile.
It is a shame cause I remember playing the first iteration of this game ages ago and that worked a lot better. Things need to be tightened up.
Your memory fails you. There
is quite a bit of code that loads the girl packs, but it does so upon startup and doesn't fiddle with the files once the game is on. That's why the game can take a while to load on slower machines. It used to be the other way around, and you're the first person I see longing for the days when the game
did rummage through files a lot more.
Rollback won't be good for a battle, but casuals will love you if you let them rollback scum the last move when its that time of the month for the rng gods.
The most worthwhile thing you can rollback is the whole night. And that's
exactly where dictionaries get broken.

I think training probably also falls under that, since interactions do a lot of logging and storing data. Event challenge rolls and loot most likely
can be rolled back without problems, but I don't think a dev sabotaging his own work is something a player is entitled to
demand.
One of my pet peeves with bk when I played it quite a while back was the way a training choice could go horribly wrong right away and you had no way to undo it.
Quickload? It does have this horrible annoying confirmation popup, though.
...I fear this project will never be finished or stable.
BK has had a rather complete simbro part of the game since... 0.14, I think. And 0.15b was stable enough for well over a year.
For a game with so much state, Python is a terrible fit.
Python is a major language with a full range of applications. There are tradeoffs, of course, but Python is not something inherently 'anti-state'.
Where you're right is that
Ren'Py is a poor choice for a complex game like that, for several reasons. But it also provides several nice perks, and this is all water under the bridge anyway. Goldo is not going to rebuild BK again from the ground up.
The odds of any kind of meaningful save compatibility is practically non-existent.
It's very much possible. And I say that as someone with a personal fork of an older version of BK who's done crazy stupid shit with it while in the middle of a game and having to update stuff manually and semi-manually. And when I was still making a public spectacle of it, I did manage to keep new stuff relatively backwards compatible, at least code-wise.
It's a question of what's a better return on dev time spent, again. That, and the fact Goldo wasn't aware of the 'after_load' label until recently and has generally been very successful at resisting versioning.
My suggestion would be to start fresh in Unity, Godot, or hell, even GMS/RPGM would be a better fit. Ren'Py is the absolute worst choice given the context, and the odds of getting a completed, relatively stable game are not at all good.
Not going to happen if you want 0.3 and maybe even 0.4. Goldo has other, more... primal hobbies now. Like being a mini-boss and planting his seed in RL.

And in my experience, even full teams manage to fuck up with Unity or RPGM more often than not. YMMV.