Thanks for criticism.
You are talking mostly about Henry I think.
He is serving in the military as literally a knight. It is a modern-day setting, but knighthood still requires rigorous training from childhood and lifelong active military service, along with the requirement of putting one's life on the line in case of war. The game takes place during a time when the kingdom is at war. The conflict occurs on the other side of the kingdom, and Henry's brother is serving there as mentioned in the game. According to nobility law, only one son can serve in the war at the same time from each house, and Henry served before the events of the game. His brother has recently taken his place. Once his brother returns to the house, Henry will go back to war. This pattern continues until the war is over.
The initial idea behind Henry was to create a negative impression on the player at first. The "dumb big musclehead" stereotype fits this purpose well. However, it is later revealed that this is not who he truly is. As the story unfolds, the player will learn more about Henry's true character. Unfortunately, revealing more information would spoil the game.
Initially, I experimented with a leaner guy (similar to Jack) with a different background, but I couldn't properly place him in the role and it didn't mesh well with Talia. When I began writing the lore for the game world, having Henry as "friend" of Talia instead of her husband worked much better and allowed me to explore more about world events through his perspective. As a result, he became a knight in active service and needed a more muscular appearance.
As I delved deeper into developing his character, I realized that the big guy body suited his character well with his character and couldn't change back to my initial plan. Meanwhile, Jack initially had a less attractive appearance but underwent a transformation to be leaner and more handsome, which was influenced by feedback from female member of a VAM forum who suggested that having an attractive protagonist would be important for her enjoyment of the game (if the protagonist wasn't female). This decision also had an impact on the dynamics between Talia and Jack in the story as if you played game you realize that Talia finds Jack handsome. That female member shown me what she finds "hot" and I later on contacted
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for his blessing to use of his character in my game with some modifications.
Thanks for input. I thought about removing slavery from premise (but still leaving it on in game) but I think that would be misleading. The complicated premise comes from my experiments in writing romance/swapping story. The slavery aspect gives interesting dynamic between characters vs just two normal couples and that was the reason why it was created in such way. The other dynamic was clash between more conservative commoners and high society that is more open about relationships (which actually comes from our own world history). So while this won't be abuse story, slavery on technical level has impact on relationship between characters that better grounds them in story and shape their behaviors.
As for NTR, Sharing etc. Naturally they will come later on. Prologue people can play is essentially long setup to story so that player can understand relationships between characters and their personalities. I believe longer setups have ability to better connect players to characters.
The look of the game is result of it being natively VAM game (VR game) that i converted to RenPy. I planned to make whole VN in VAM but VAM 1.x is just not suited to create VNs with whole host of issues ranging from poor performance to lack of text engine. Just to give an example. Initial scene with 3 characters and couple of lights makes my RTX3090 run it at 20ish fps in VR. I really hope VAM2.x will solve those issues and my next game (already in plans, way more ambitious) can be done in VAM2.x. That rendering choice has negatives (no raytracing which means worse lighting) but also has benefits (I can share VR scenes from game for people to see scene not just as 2D but being in room with characters) and way easier animation which means I plan most of erotic content to be animated.
