Thank you for the reply!
I will try to comment most of the response in a single reply, so there will be relevant stuff not quoted.
Hey, thanks for sharing your opinion. I'll try to explain why we implemented some of our design choices.
We tried to keep all the main locations within one-two clicks from each other. For example, to reach each of girls' rooms from MC's room you just need two clicks. The same goes for the Bar. One click to reach Living room. Could you share what route seemed tedious to you and required too much clicks?
The issue for me seems to be that I don't KNOW where to look, except if there was a hint (as you described with new event button). This means that in order to feel that I have checked everything and to actually "stumble upon things", as you wrote, I have to actually *check* everywhere, which means lots of extra clicks leading to 90% of time nothing. This is especially true, if you do want me to stumble on something by accident (not via hint) -- that means I will have to repeatedly click on things just to see, if there is anything new.
There are games, which make it easier for player -- for example, small girls' icons atop room names indicate which girl is currently in which room, and a ! next to it means there is new content with her.
The location-based hint system trades usability for some semi-resemblance to realism, which is superfluous to a player, at least in my opinion. You do you, of course, but it is much more comfortable for a player to check all hints (and in a sandbox, there will be lots of individual paths after all!) in a single place, rather than clicking on every girl's door to get a single hint about a single girl.
As it is, you wake up in morning, you have to go out of the bedroom (1 click), correct corridor (2nd click) and click on the hint (3d click), all just to see a hint about one of them. Worse than that, you don't KNOW if there will be a hint unless you actually enter the corridor and click on the room. So you spend 2 clicks on every girl just to learn if there was anything to learn in the first place.
If you ask me for games, which have done it (imo) right, have a look at
Cure My Addiction for something resembling ideal (with the event ribbons and stars), or
The Regional Manager (much simpler example, but doing essential things right). There is a single screen with progress indication for all paths in the sandbox.
As it is nobody minds clicking for fun stuff to happen. But it can feel very tedious to just click to move around and check things with no reward.
I do admit that I was influenced by the fact that I wasn't as immersed in story as you might wish, and wanted to check out how much and what kind H content is there. Dunno why. There is not a wall of text, so it is kinda OK, the level of realism is somewhat acceptable. The MC dick is, of course, completely ridiculous, but that's a given for so many games that it shouldn't influence the feeling. Perhaps it was due to fact that I was trying to unlock Yuki to maximum and wanted my pace to be accordingly fast. Will look at future versions to check more.
Thanks! We are working on removing "potentially" from this sentence
From what's in game, it looks like you will do it. The first release has a good emount of content, it's really done quite well.
Will cross my fingers and hope you succeed in continuing, especially if you manage to keep at least 2 paths open (good/evil) for people to follow (I mean, you can go to girls' rooms while they are sleeping, so one would expect you could do more than look at them later on
). I will certainly look forward to whether this goes at least reasonably significantly into actual moral choices and different outcomes (slave tag is not there just for Yuki, right?
).