@Corrupted the person that replied to you stated an opinion and it is echoed by many. I don't expect life simulation otherwise I'd get the Sims and I hate the sims. If it were a life sim it would not be two rich kids but it is more a fantasy visual choose your own novel. No one has to take your opinions apart and critique your words to disagree.
I don't think you understand what I was talking about, beginning with the word "Life Sim". "Life Sim" and "VN" are two different concepts of play when we're talking about H-Games. See, this is why you're not disagreeing with me. You don't even understand what I am saying. Do you walk up to chinese people talking in chinese and say "I disagree with you" and then leave them bewildered? No? Then why do you do it to me, when you understand so little of what I am saying that I might as well be speaking chinese.
In a Life Sim, you have a day cycle ("Morning" "Lunch" "Afternoon" "Evening") and certain activities forward that day cycle. You typically have some stats (Strength, Hotness, Moxie, Chutzpah etc), "Relationship scores", and/or money that you can/have to grind. You can "move about" the world with clicks, find characters standing around in the world and interact with them by clicking on them. That means the interactions are mostly player driven. To give you a couple examples of forum darlings: "Summertime Saga", "The Twist", and "Big Brother" are designed as "Life Sims".
In a (pure) VN, you don't have any of that. You have a linear series of events, that sometimes branches. You don't have a clock on the screen, and if you have choice at all, it's usually something like "Date Girl A at the Beach" vs "Date Girl B in the night club". Because the player is much more restrained in the order of interactions, you can have much more interesting stories in VNs, at the expense of perceived player freedom. You frequently don't have any "stats" or relationship points at all, and things are handled in a binary fashion - Did you go to the gym when the opportunity arrived? Did you read the book about artificial insemination or did you watch the TV cooking show? These things can have consequences, but they're handled as binary triggers, not stats. Examples of pure VNs are: "Dreams of Desire" and "Dating My Daughter" or "Good Girl Gone Bad"
This game here, "Dreaming Of Dana", is styled as a Life Sim. You have Daytime cycles, Weekdays, you have "busywork", you have a stats grind. You move around through a moderately open world through clicks and mostly initiate interactions. That doesn't mean a "Life Sim" is necessarily a Sims 3 clone. A Life Sim requires much more in the way of coding than a straightforward VN, as you have to program "AI" to model how characters behave and such, if you don't just have them sit in the same place all the time. A VN by comparison requiring basically no programming at all, all you do is purely story - which is what Ptolemy is obviously much better at than coding life sims.
"Life Sim" and "Straightforward VN" are completely different game styles. And my argument was that this game here would do much better if it was restructured as a VN, rather than as a life sim. It wouldn't even need much reworking, all you basically do is remove the life sim code and then select in what order you string together the individual scenes, which remain unchanged. Ptolemy could literally do that in under a day - And it'd save time in the long run, because he wouldn't have to spend many more days incorporating the scenes he's writing into a much more complex life sim. He'd just go "Ok, after this scene you get the choice for this or this scene" instead of having to juggle event triggers.
