Edit: Good news everyone... It seems he's swapped back to RenPy for Chapter 3 onwards. Huzzah.
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I can sort of excuse the change of engine. It's clear the author got a little overwhelmed by RenPy as SSS went on. I'm guessing the change of engine is a reaction to that. So far, the engine's restrictions seem to be working out better for him. I guess only time will tell.
Which isn't to say I haven't spend an hour or so trying to google for a VNM unpacking tool to see if it's possible to get at the underlying scripting. Then wondering if the RPGMaker MV unpack tools might work, since it's by the same company.
Edit: @xj47 was kind enough to effectively write one for me. Huzzah!
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The UI needs a lot of tweaking. The dialogue window only shows about 2 lines and it's obvious that a lot of the dialogue is a lot longer than 2 lines. The end result is a lot
of broken
sentences across
multiple pages. Sometimes
resulting
in some really awful mid
sentence splits.
The font isn't helping. Though again... artistic licence... it's his game... he can make his own choices. I've seen worse and it plays into his "school setting" motif.
The dialogue box transparency setting is too low in my opinion... or too high... or something. I've come across a few occasions where I'm already struggling to read some of the text because it's too heavily obscured/merged with the image behind it.
The current character name box is also really difficult to see most of the time. Though a change of font color might fix that.
Leigh would like to remind people that...
Uhhhh...no! She's eighteen and a half, fuckface!
... and she is hoping people will stop treating her like a fucking baby now she's in college!
I actually thought the rendering quality had improved... at least to some degree. Although the lighting of overlaid character images is often inconsistent. Again, I've seen worse... and overall, I still think it's an improvement over SSS's images sometimes. If he can keep on top of the story, I think I can forgive the odd bit of shadowing or white background showing through from time to time.
All that said, a lot of my enjoyment of a game is looking under the hood. The new engine makes that impossible for me so far. The lack of a [back] button is going to irk me too. Having played and messed with SSS a lot, I know a lot of choices by this author can take a long time to figure out (if they are working as intended at all)... not knowing either might mean I end up avoiding this game in the same way I avoid the majority of RPGM and HTML games.
But since I'm not actually a Patreon supporter... bugger me if I can't take a joke. My zero financial support entitles me to zero percent of his attention. If I don't like it... I'll find another game. It's not like there's a shortage.
I'm already struggling to play through the introduction. Though I'll try to give it a couple of chapters before I make my mind up one way or the other.