Heyo everyone!
Been interesting reading through your replies. Really, thank you a lot. It would love to be involved in discussing the game.
First thing first, some things that I'd like to immediately address though is:
A. What is available for upload here is just the demo of the full version. A sample to see if it runs well and that the core of the game is interesting for you.
B. Only the demo and the DLSite version are censored; the full version is not.
C. Although AI was used in our workflow, nothing in the game has been *purely* AI generated. A lot of the art is created ground up barely touching AI, other stuff used AI as a core foundation. However all of it have gone through plenty of work from our talented artist.
Working AI-use into our workflow was really a learning experience - some parts I believe we totally nailed, and others not so much. I get where some of you are coming from with your feedback. A bunch of those little quirks you're spotting are probably from the early days of the project, when we were just getting our heads around the tech. And yeah, we kinda jumped in at the deep end and took on more than we could handle at the start, which we then had to scale back. Would love to discuss people's opinion on it!
Also - what do you guys believe are the biggest strengths and weaknesses of the game? One thing that we really struggled with developing the game was figuring out exactly what people cared about - something we've had many heated arguments about. "Do people REALLY care about the stereo mixing of the ambience? Should we instead spend this time adding more environment pixel art? How about the UI? Or should we ONLY focus on the H-content?". This is the kind of thing that sounds really easy until you start working on something yourself for months and months.
// The Programmer
Just played 1.0.3 and it didn't really convince me, but still it's a game with massive potential and a lot of strengths. Unfortunately I also have to agree with the "anti-AI" train currently, there's something uncanny with the art and it was enough to completely ruin the game for me. The weird part is I've played tons of games on this site and have never been bothered by anime/pixel/unrealistic graphics, yet for this one I'm constantly feeling like something is off with what I'm watching, I'd say this is because the art is very close to realistic now, but still misses something, so exactly like in the "uncanny valley" effect.
For example, look at this preview picture. In most pictures she has elf ears, but in the CG on the right she has normal ears:
https://attachments.f95zone.to/2023/06/2733304_Fall_Of_Felixia_Sub_photo_2.png
This is the kind of details I would never notice normally, but knowing that the game has AI art I somehow become a lot more careful while playing and when I end up noticing this kind of things it breaks the immersion.
I have nothing against AI art but you would have to:
- massively increase the scene realism to the point where the whole picture must be indistinguishable from a human drawing (not a single detail must be off, even if it is in the background. Currently there are a lot of "weird" things in the CGs)
- significantly increase the consistency of the art style in different images, especially of the heroine body.
The game itself has many strengths. I thought the gameplay was great, it is simple yet effective. I like the variety in enemies attack patterns, the battle rape is rather well done, the fact you do not lose everything on game over is basic but many games don't get it right, so bonus points for that.
The amount of CGs and enemies available is mind-blowing and the biggest strength of the game, but that is thanks to the AI art, so it is both the biggest positive and negative at the same time.
The background sprites / pixel art were
uniquely beautiful (if it was made by AI then it is undistinguishable), it gives the game a strong charm and things like weather, ambience, music contributed to this impression. I don't know if it's worth he effort you spent into it but I clearly noticed it. I really enjoyed the village and environment of most levels. Unfortunately, it is also a shame that the levels don't have anything interactable other than enemies and chests, eg. you see this gorgeous oasis in the desert, the intriguing green stones in cave, of course the player wants to interact with them and it is disappointing to find out that these things are just cosmetics.
I will follow your next games and maybe support on Patreon, I feel bad about pirating when developers spend so much effort into their product, but I'm also really not enjoying the game in its current state, so I'm a bit reluctant. I really hope you will be able to improve the AI, because if you succeed this will eventually be a revolution.