Oriandu

Engaged Member
Sep 1, 2017
2,581
4,953
Long story: bad design + gameplay decisions, trying to write new War an Peace (or bore people to death), weird story pacing and jokes and amazing art - in conclusion first 3 years you can take as pre-production, where some people who did it were fired.

Now there is "new sheriff in town" - he took red marker and changed many things (reworked story, dialogues, quests, characters, new story lines, progress - still slow ...) But it is like buliding house - once you have walls it´s nearly impossible to change foundation.

From my point of view it would be better as nonlinear visual novel, or training simulator. I will make grinding, minigames and adventure elements optional (some of them are funny and rewarding, some are really annoying, counterintuitive and have really bad game design - daikatana level :cry: that part "John Romero is about to make you his bitch" ). But there are many people who love them.

So ... it is not milking, it could still be great game , but it will take at least 2-3 years (at this speed).
In what fucking universe does it make any sense at all to call the first three years pre-production? That's enough time to develop a video game with a budget of $100,000,000. Innocent Witches is most definitely milking patreon for all its worth. You'd have to be naive to the point of pure innocence to believe otherwise.
 

paragan

Newbie
Feb 18, 2018
60
62
In what fucking universe does it make any sense at all to call the first three years pre-production? That's enough time to develop a video game with a budget of $100,000,000. Innocent Witches is most definitely milking patreon for all its worth. You'd have to be naive to the point of pure innocence to believe otherwise.
I´m saying it from my point of view. Had own experience, when i was tasked by project which was completly fucked by its leader for years. And now what ? With nearly same team + resources - you can´t send it to garbage and start from scratch. You have to rework it and it is nightmare + you got bunch of depressed people, who wants just work enough to not been fired ...

Technical staff like programmer or artist are innocent, storywriter was fired ...
 

Oriandu

Engaged Member
Sep 1, 2017
2,581
4,953
I´m saying it from my point of view. Had own experience, when i was tasked by project which was completly fucked by its leader for years. And now what ? With nearly same team + resources - you can´t send it to garbage and start from scratch. You have to rework it and it is nightmare + you got bunch of depressed people, who wants just work enough to not been fired ...

Technical staff like programmer or artist are innocent, storywriter was fired ...
Yeah, uh, your point of view is completely wrong and you are a sucker.
 

Vinvega

New Member
Dec 19, 2017
12
2
I'm stuck with ginny, I'm inviting her unofficially to guess a word for her diary, a couple of images pop up in her head, I have guessed every image but still can't unlock it
 

t727

Well-Known Member
Jan 4, 2018
1,515
1,733
I sincerely don't get it!
How can someone draw this good?
I recognize the art from other games such as Witch Trainer, is it the same artist or is it a way of drawing (teaching)?

Not sure I'll bother downloading and playing as it has 3/5 with over 200 reviewers, but again. The art!
 

MaviusJones

Member
Mar 23, 2019
210
430
I sincerely don't get it!
How can someone draw this good?
I recognize the art from other games such as Witch Trainer, is it the same artist or is it a way of drawing (teaching)?

Not sure I'll bother downloading and playing as it has 3/5 with over 200 reviewers, but again. The art!
The art is amazing and the main reason I keep coming back. The game itself is enjoyable enough (for me) and I don't find it overly grindy.

The overwhelming negative reviews are due to a few issues. Mainly the fact that previous saves never work so every update the grind starts again (something they are rumored to have fixed with next update) and the fact that after so many literal years they are still choosing to blue ball us by not delivering full on sex with the main 4 stars.

This is slowly changing though, with each new update giving us at least something to satiate the desire that's been building up. Still, the feeling that they are dragging feet on purpose to milk donors continues to grow.
 

Oriandu

Engaged Member
Sep 1, 2017
2,581
4,953
Will there be an update this month then?
There's supposed to be one but with only a week left in the month and no word at all of an impending release it'll probably either be very last minute or slip to April.
 

buqlaw

Member
Jul 22, 2020
126
47
I gave up on this annoying ass game mainly because of a lack of actually good and ACCURATE walkthrough... It's virtually impossible without it. Which is too bad b/c the art is actually good.

Other persistent cons: 1- saves never work, and the grind is insane and unnecessary
 
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Rezol

Newbie
Jul 21, 2017
22
69
I guess I’ll start with the obvious: yes, this game takes unreasonable amount of time to make — even if you disregard all the time before the old writer finally bugged off. That said, I actually tried to help with remaking first chapters and failed miserably to do anything for real life reasons — so now I’m way less inclined to bitch about development speed as I know for a fact that I wouldn’t do it any faster. I would still be pissed if I was paying for it, but as someone who’s waiting for a few specific things before spending any money — no, I’m not about to critique the development speed. The faster guys work — the faster they’ll get my money — nothing more, nothing less.

So now with this out of the way. I honestly think that 0.6 version deserves more praise than it gets. Mainly for reworking the HORRIBLE opening chapters. I understand that people here don’t care about this game as a whole and want new content they didn’t see yet (understandable), but making it a cohesive experience from start to finish is really important in the long run. And rewriting fixed some of the main problems I’ve had:

- Prologue chapters are way faster now, only important stuff remains;

- That includes «gameplay» stuff since you don’t have to repeat every little thing 4 times anymore;

- MC is not a pathetic useless drunk anymore. He does have an unlucky moment with having to talk to students while hangover, but he is rather adequate most of the time. And people aren’t nearly as into hating him as they were in original version. I’ll never understand why original writer wanted MC to be a useless bitch with no social skills, but I’m very happy to see this gone.

Sadly, it did create some problems in the process — mainly that reworked chapters clearly do not flow into later non-reworked ones, but that is a great start and it’s obvious that this will be fixed later.

As for new content... Well, yes, there is not a whole lot of it. But I have to say that both playing and reading with Hermione here gets to me more than most big content updates with XXXX NEW RENDERS for other games on this site (and I’m not saying I don’t like those — I do). Both writing and art are succeeding in making this situations hot as fuck AND it doesn’t feel like Hermione got brainless all of a sudden. She isn’t, however, written as a complete stuck-up bitch anymore (mostly) and has actual chemistry with MC. Awesome.

Oh, and other girls are fine too. Whatever (just kidding, but Hermione is Best Girl).

That said, there are a lot of things I still think this game needs to do:

- More content. «Duh, you think?». Yes, but allow me to be more specific, since I’m not just talking about the art. For example, old Hermione’s puzzle minigame still needs better rewards (or at least for it to go back to 3 levels it had previously instead of 9 it has now) — and good dialog can be a reward if done correctly, but instead you just have multiple repeats of the same shit.

- The same goes for old minigames with other characters, honestly.

- And the same goes for the new word guessing minigame... I guess. I didn’t play the latest patch (no way I’m playing every version till we have save transfer between versions), so I’m sorry if it’s already fixed, but: if content you are getting is random than at least make sure that all content you are getting is NEW, otherwise it’s getting tedious even on easy. I honestly think that any option for witch you’ve seen all the content should just be excluded from play — either inside the code or by Hermione saying something like «Enough kisses» or «I don’t really have more secrets to share» or «Sorry, I’m not sure I can drink anymore» and removing the respected pic from roulette. Still, just removing all those after a couple scenes is not optimal. It would be much better to simply have more content. More secrets from Hermione in different states of drunkenness. More kisses with some steady progression of their passion. More drinking and talking about said drinks. Different dialogs for when you ask her to repeatedly do stuff. I’m not saying that writing is easy, but it certainly is faster that drawing, so that is some content that can be added while waiting for great, but slow art (or for coding, or for whatever is the main bottleneck now).

- That said, I do believe that this game needs more art as well. And in that regard I kinda feel like there is too much emphasis on making huge scenes with a lot of changing parts. Obviously it’s easier to make one art with 10 revisions than 10 totally different pieces of art, but it would still be great to have a single pic to show up here and there — things like an early nude photo of a mysterious somebody from slytherin. For example, it would be great to have an actual new art for a sexy photo of your chosen waifu instead of her simple sprite you’ve seen a million times. And to see MC and Hermy kissing instead of a black screen — simple small pic zoomed on their faced would be enough. And to see girls during their discussions in swimsuits. You know, more things like CGs from visual novels — single-time art pieces for the most important (and/or sexy) scenes.

- I hope we’ll get an option to jump to a chosen day instead of being forced to wait till evening and then getting to sleep if we have to skip a day. Right now the amount of clicks around the time management part of gameplay is ridiculous and not fun at all. And I honestly don’t think that Sad_Crab needs to pad the game’s runtime in that way — there is enough actual content (not necessarily sexual) for it not to become short.

...I guess I’ll stop now. Not that it’s impossible to continue, but the length of this post already got out of hand. Sorry.

TL;DR: Innocent Witches got a lot better with v0.6. If v0.7 continues to deliver new content (especially for Hermione) while finishing reworking of the earlier chapters — I might actually pay for it finally. And I’ll surely do it if saves stop breaking between versions.
 

Clobbertime

Member
Jan 10, 2021
260
417
MC is not a pathetic useless drunk anymore. He does have an unlucky moment with having to talk to students while hangover, but he is rather adequate most of the time. And people aren’t nearly as into hating him as they were in original version. I’ll never understand why original writer wanted MC to be a useless bitch with no social skills, but I’m very happy to see this gone.
Actually it seems to me that it's all too common for the MC in these types of games to be a complete and total jerkwad. I find it very off putting to be expected to play that sort of role so I've tried and deleted a lot of games just for that reason.
 
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Oriandu

Engaged Member
Sep 1, 2017
2,581
4,953
Actually it seems to me that it's all too common for the MC in these types of games to be a complete and total jerkwad. I find it very off putting to be expected to play that sort of role so I've tried and deleted a lot of games just for that reason.
At the very least he's not a rapist. So many of the games you find on this site involve the player character either sexually assaulting or straight up raping his friends and family in their sleep. The pieces of a great game exist in Innocent Witches, the team just does not have what it takes to pull it off. As a result the art will always be held back by the game.
 
3.00 star(s) 324 Votes