I started programming with this game and you can tell right now that it's not optimized and prepared for future stuff. It's laggy when you move and it's messy when I try to add stuff.
Appreciate you taking the time to optimize stuff in future builds. I don't know exactly what it is, but something about this game feels sluggish to play. If this really is your first go at programming it's an incredible achievement, though.
Maybe it's the accumulation of weird UX struggles that can sometimes leave me running in circles:
The arrow navigation in the town and the guild screens is unpleasant. It's impossible to follow where the arrows go without just memorizing it, because the camera angle changes every screen. A player-centric UX would make it so clicking an arrow on the left side of the screen, then clicking an arrow on the right side of the screen, would end up back at the start. This may exclude certain world layouts, because it's harder to express walking around in a circle, but I think the tradeoff is worth it.
Maybe the arrows are intentionally weird to make it seem like more of a relief when the 'fast travel' is unlocked later, but the fast travel is annoying too because you have to horizontally scroll back and forth. It would work better if all the destination were on the screen at all times.
The inventory opening animation seems unneeded.
There's no button on the map to return to your current location (in case you didn't mean to click the map)
The only way you can close a girl's card is by clicking the outside border. There's nothing useful to click in the center, so that may as well close it too.
On the positive side:
Pinning the 'quick view' to the right of the screen is actually great! The hints seem to work well, thought I'd hesitate to call them 'hints' because they feel required to progress through the game in a timely fashion unless you want to test out visiting every maxed-out girl at every time.
The #1 improvement in my view, and I know it's a lot of work, would be to show the girls location on the map(s). So much of the game is talking to each of the girls whenever they're available, which requires memorizing the schedule of who's where at what time. Maybe some people like keeping that in their head, but it's easier to move through the game more breezily if the game surfaces everyone's location directly. My gold standard for this is
A House In The Rift, which has hotspot navigation but also a quick map with everyone's location.
