- Sep 28, 2023
- 81
- 108
This needs a lot of work, both narratively and grammatically. Given that this is mostly a kinetic novel, those are both pretty problematic. Story wise, the first few minutes have you running into complete nonsense.
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That's not how that works. Being an early employee means fuck all if they didn't get any share of the company. Your shares in a company are what determine your percentage of the compensation in the event of a buyout, as they are functionally buying out your shares (your literal percentage of ownership) in the company. If you have shares, you'll get something. If not, you are just an employee (and almost certainly a non-unionized one with zero protections) and there is zero legal obligation to compensate you for anything.
Now does this turn out to be a mission critical story beat? No. But it belies an ignorance of the part of the author for something they're trying to write about; and it's the sort of gaff that breaks immersion.
Later when the MC comes home they hear a noise, and upon investigating it they hear their wife talking. When their wife calls out, this is the MC's response.
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I'm sorry, fucking what!? You are married to each other. You are both at home. You go looking for your wife, find her talking on her phone, and when she calls out to you THAT is your reaction? In what fucking universe? This is fucking moon logic. Or more accurately, the author is being real lazy here and having the characters operate with hidden knowledge. The author knows the wife is cheating (and the audience has been primed because of the title of the game itself), but at that moment in time the MC has ZERO clue that anything might be afoot. Why not just walk into the master bedroom you share with your wife, let her know you're home, and give her a quick 'I'll let you get back to your phone' then move on? Like a normal, sane, rational person would. Instead of behaving like either a neurotic whipped bitch-boy, or someone who would have a reason to both spy and try not to get caught spying on their spouse?
Besides that, the writing is distractingly bad. Almost every screen has one or more obvious grammatical mistakes. The most obvious are near constant missing capitalization and punctuation.
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Then you have the unintentionally funny use of the completely wrong word.
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What the hell is 'curries'? The plural form of 'curry'? Like, if you were being attacked by a wild flock of sentient spicy sauces with rice, they would be 'curries'? Clearly they meant 'curious', and you don't need to be an English Major to catch this stuff.
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Yep, 'better just play dump for now...'
Besides that, all of the writing is very wooden; and the dialogue doubly so. There is no real style or substance, outside of everything feeling off and wrong. Almost every line of dialogue feels unnatural and unnecessarily formal. This just isn't how people casually talk. I suspect this is a case of 'English as a second language', and the author has little to no experience talking with native speakers.
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Want to know who announces themselves when they come home like this? People purposely doing a bit and lampooning 50's sitcoms ironically, or human imposters (extra-terrestrials, robot terminators, lizard-people infiltrators) who don't know how alien it sounds.
That's not even the worst of it.
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This is an internal monologue. People don't think like this. Or at least, the MC shouldn't. Unless the MC is an early twenty-something always online, brain-rotted Zoomer, he shouldn't be thinking in 'OMG'. If their internal monologue truly is in the language of internet 1337 speech, I hate them and wish them nothing but pain and suffering.
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Oh come the fuck on! This isn't even internal monologue, this is spoken dialogue! Grammar mistakes aside, this is the game's author telling us that the MC's wife just says 'BTW' out loud. Is she also supposed to be a always online, brain-rotted Zoomer? Or is this just really lazy writing, with zero effort put in to distinguish casual texting shorthand from spoken dialogue? Either way, I hate her, but probably not for the reasons the author intended.
That's as far as I got, because clearly this was going to be nothing but a frustrating experience going forward. This game is in desperate need of a native English speaking editor. But I didn't see any AI slop, so it's not like the creator is being a grifter or anything. This is low-effort and oblivious, but not malicious. Hell, I'm not every really mad. Just kind of flabbergasted. Why are they working in such a text-heavy creative medium is this is the level of skill on display? I hope for their sake, and the sake of their audience, that their writing greatly improves. I cannot summon the will to continue enduring this level grammar myself, but I wish them the best of luck and hope they can turn things around.
EDIT: Out of morbid curiosity, I just held CTRL down to skip through the text just to see what (if any) of the sex scenes were like. The author repeatedly uses vertical video, in a horizontally formatted Ren'Py game for PC. I've been on PornHub. Horizontal video of Channel Preston is not hard to find. At all. But it does better illuminate the source of some of the game's other problems. Why do the characters talk like they have TikTok-Brain? Cause the author suffers from TikTok-Brain.
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Hi, thanks for the input.Great things I like:
- Those weird side characters like Shyla are my favorites in games like these. And I think Shyla is so far VERY well done, even though those characters are always extreme, this one doesn't seem nearly as unbelievable as some others, so I think it is nicely done.
- The intro scenes of the characters are great
- Footjob, thanks =p
- Mystery (is the wife cheating, is she not?)
- Voyeur ( not quite to this point, but feels close. Aka MC getting secret photos of wife.)
Things I think aren't amazing:
- I feel like that wife goes intense way too fast. Now i'm not saying there is no good reason for her to be where she is if we consider their life before the game starts, but just as a reader i'm being introduced to a wife that wants to take a break like 3 minutes into the game. This just feels less fun then if there was some more build up to that. Even though that obviously isn't the climax of this gamenovel.
- Maybe related to 1, but the MC whines just a tad bit too much imo
- As others said, the bug with hitting the back button after or during a phone text conversation.
- I had to install a new font on my computer in order for phone texts to not crash the game with some emoji error
Things I hope for:
- If this ends up being more gamelike that it is now, then a characters panel that I can look at and remember who all the characters are since there are kind of a lot right off the bat. Might be awkward to do that in a pure novel format though
- Mystery images sent to MC are one of my favorite things, (who is that girl, is that my wife? it can't be, why is her face redacted)
- more feet stuff =p
Honest, forthcoming, and taking criticism rather than defecting. Doesn't change how rough the game is, but you absolutely have your head in the right place, so kudos for that. Keep it up.Hi, thanks for the input. Well, English is not my first language and I think that is one of the biggest problems. I am still trying to find my voice and the pace of the dialogue. I am very positive that I will get a better flow in the next updates.
My aim is to make the project fun
It should feel a bit slapsticky. I have no intention of writing in a very serious style.
If anyone is interested in editing and proofreading, please send me a massage.
I am happy for any help.
Ps: Next update will only have vertical videos and I do not have Tic Toc, just to be clear
Thanks again for your tips. I am not sure if I can implement everything until the next update but I will try to implement at least some parts.Honest, forthcoming, and taking criticism rather than defecting. Doesn't change how rough the game is, but you absolutely have your head in the right place, so kudos for that. Keep it up.
I will say this however. 'Style' is kind of a higher order writing problem. I would focus on getting your basic grammar in order first, then try to explore a style. Any basic writing program should be able to catch they very basic, and very obvious, grammatical mistakes on display. I don't know Spanish, but if I were to try to translate my writing and release something in Spanish and I'm forgetting to capitalize the start of sentences and missing punctuation? That isn't a translation error, just a lack of diligence.
You should absolutely be running your script through a word processor before putting it into Ren'Py. There's really no good excuse to be missing things this basic. It just takes time, thought, and a little effort. Plus, you really should do this with your entire existing script. Don't just wait to make improvements until later. The writing at the start of the game is what people encounter first, and no amount of 'It get's better later, just keep going!' is going to make up for a poor first impression the current writing leaves.
The game doesn't need to be serious per se, but there is a large distinction between how people talk both formally and casually, both of which are different than how people text message. Your writing should be different when writing a character's phone messages versus their inner thoughts or their spoken dialogue. Simply put, there are things that work or are acceptable in a casual text message, that just don't work when spoken or written professionally.
Just out of curiosity, do you text novels back and forth with your friends? I certainly don't, but maybe that's a generational thing as I'm an elder millennial. Seeing the phone message sections with walls and walls of back and forth texting, which would have taken in inordinate amount of time to type out (and waiting for the other person to do the same), just seems weird and forced? For the sheer volume of information the characters are conveying, I'd just fucking talk to the person. Typing that all out on a phone, and waiting for them to do the same, just seems exhausting. Maybe you can rebalance the narrative to convey more of the pertinent information through dialogue, or make the texting shorter and more to the point? Not just a cavalcade of back and forth that would have each person glued to their phones for seemingly hours at a time?
Also, fair warning, but comedy is one of the hardest things to do right (and rarely translates well across language barriers, especially in writing). So ignoring my own skepticism at doing an NTR focused game in a slapstick theme, even pulling that off successfully would be difficult for someone with a much better grasp on the language. Again, I'd recommend first to focus on fixing the basics and getting your fundamentals in order. Maybe save the slapstick for a 2nd game later down the line, once you have more experience under your belt.
Either way, best of luck and I hope you improve your craft with experience.
we'll seegood update. i chose to have mc fuck Holly as well as the other non choice with the wife's slutty sister. i see this as the mc starting to gain some confidence in himself after being shit on by the wife early in the game. we see she wants him to become an alpha by what she says to him. i don't have a problem with her really even if she did cheat while in Cabo. mc gets to fuck 2 hotties and i see Rachel probably being on the menu too. the new job whatever it is will potentially put some significant income in his pocket and ignite his drive to become more successful in his financial life, again ticking off one of the boxes in his wife's list of things she is bothered about by him. once she sees the alpha she wants, she will become the women he wants her to be..potentially. anyway, i see potential here for this mc to go from being rather a pathetic simp to an alpha male. hope that path gets alot more development. would be nice if the trip was the wife stringing along the hubby's former boss who stole his ideas. she perhaps could be trying to help her hubby gets his revenge on that asshole. hence why we haven't seen who the new client is yet. just my theory.
Hi Devwe'll see
yeah but she made it that way and didnt comunicate which this is the relationship breaker right there. he been trying to reach out she didnt give chance?????!!!!Well...his wife is right. The MC's whining is SO bad that it even made ME start to feel suffocated in their relationship.
I was carried back in time to my tween years when I pulled something like this myself, twice. And let me tell you, brother, it made things a hell of a lot worse each time. Once a man starts talking like that, women lose all respect for him, regardless of their relationship status.
It's like Brendan Fraser in this Bedazzled scene -You must be registered to see the links
If him sleeping with at least one other woman doesn't fix his attitude and give him a cool and detached, even cold attitude towards this whole thing, I don't know what will.
All he needs to do now is find out if his wife actually went to Cabo without telling him. The "why" and "with whom" really don't matter. What sane person would put up with that??? And then he needs to get a divorce. The end.
I have the story planned out to the end, but some aspects of it will be directly driven by the community. However, there will be no more than 2 paths. For my first game, I don't want to push myself too far.Hi Dev
How many paths are there for the wife in this game?
NTR ?
NTS ?
Vanilla ?