VN Ren'Py Completed Instinct Unleashed [Final] [Kind Nightmares]

[Zumato]

You’re kind of contradicting yourself here. You say it’s not about the sex, yet your examples are exactly about the lack of sexual or romantic scenes — Sammy x Angie, Leticia, Stella, etc.

I’ve made it clear from the very beginning that Leticia was never meant to be a sexual or romantic interest. And there was never any hint that Sammy and Angie were supposed to end up in bed together.

In the end, it really comes down to expectations rather than execution. The ending only feels “rushed” because it didn’t match what some players expected to happen — not because something was actually missing.
Every character’s personal arc was concluded one way or another, and the main story was fully resolved.

Look man I really loved your game and disagree with the people insisting on the sex and stuff but I agree that ending was rushed. If you want a real story related reason look at the diagram from this guys comment

Obviously there's all sorts of simplifications in this, but ultimately what people are expressing I'd speculate boils down to the core idea about how a story is typically constructed:
View attachment 5425072
You build up, up, up, up, reach the climax of the plot, and then have an end to the story.
But Instinct Unleashed feels more like
View attachment 5425077

You got all the usual points. We got the initial setup, we slowly ramp up what's going on, we got incidents along the way that increase the tension leading up to the crisis; we then go to the climax (and not in the porn game sense) but ... the climax is the resolution, and then we are chopped right to the end. There's basically the entire 3rd act missing: chapter 1-13 are Act 1 and 2. Chapter 14 is the entirety of the 3rd act. It's wildly unbalanced.

This can applied to the subplots of various of the characters too, in my opinion. With a lot of them you get somewhere into "act 2" ... but then it's more or less just over.

Obviously, this is just one archetype of storytelling. There's many other ways, and not everyone will agree on how exactly this should look. But I'd certainly find it notable how many are of the same opinion, however precisely they come to it, that the "ending is rushed"; and for me this discrepancy here is the most likely culprit.

And yeah, obviously, you will also get some complaints about either the level of choices (which you really don't have) for the ending, the obscurity of how to get the endings, or just simply any one of not-enough-porn/harem-whatever.

And further yeah, you can complain again that this is kinda surface-level and not actually making very specific story suggestions, in the sense of "this is the exact sequence of events that should have happened". But writing is not paint-by-numbers (even if there's a paint-by-numbers graph up there). It's maybe 5% what you do, and 95% how you do it. So it's really just impossible to say in a vacuum; though probably it boils down to "mayor-was-the-bad-guy-all-along" being both the denouement and resolution in the exact same scene, and the whole futa-serum-whatever-research-center-real-estate-plus-murder-mystery-plus-abducted-futas-or-whatever plot just being ... I don't know, casually shoved to the side I suppose (but then also some of the character arcs, so it's not just a simple linear narrative problem anyway).

You jumped straight from the climax to the end. There was no cool down. I think you're a really good writer and know what we mean here. The criticism isn't a personal attack on you. You made a really amazing story and that's why it hit us so hard when the ending came at us so quick. It's not about the content of the ending it's about how quick it happened. Maybe you were burnt out and wanted to move on to your next project and that's okay! Just say that instead of taking it out on people who weren't the slightest bit rude to you but simply sad this ended the way it did.

 

[Kind Nightmares]

I will reply here one last time and then step away from this thread.

I have not “lashed out” at anyone. Sarcasm and dry humor have always been part of how I write, but I do take clear, argumented feedback seriously and have used a lot of it to improve my work.

Short comments like “ending felt rushed” or “anal pregnancy is weird” are not useful critique by themselves. They are personal feelings, which is fine, but if you want me to act on them I need specifics: what exactly did not work, what should be changed, and why. Very often, when I ask for that, it turns out the real issue is simply that character X did not get another sex scene at the end.

For the record: Instinct Unleashed has 15 chapters including the prologue, and there is at least one sex scene in every single chapter except the last one. Yet most of the anger I received was focused on that final chapter not having sex. That is why I have a hard time seeing it as anything other than frustration about unmet expectations, not about the story structure itself.

I did read the post with the diagrams and I understand the point about pacing between climax and resolution. The fact that I did not reply to it does not mean I ignored it.

In any case, I do not wish to continue this discussion. Please do not tag me in this thread anymore.