Alright, I'll bite. I've already addressed the vast majority of these across a bunch of places but let me do it here as well I guess...
I'm going to preface this by saying Lost in You was originally a very different game (I've talked about it a couple of times in the Discord before, so you can go check the receipts) that I started work on in October 2022. Much of that concept got retooled for the early parts of Lost in You after I found LiL in December 2022, which I played up until I believe the end of the first beach trip before I wrote the outline for Lost in You. Pretty much the only thing that didn't make it over was Yokubo's old name (Shiori, at the time) and some minigames that were cut because minigames are dumb and I have no idea why I decided to make Step Mania in Ren'Py for the sake of a stupid minigame. (Yes, that is actually something I wasted my time on. If anyone wants to see what that crap looked like, I can post a clip from an old dev build I have lying around.) So what
is new compared to that old concept then? Ikari, Kodoku, and the gods (and with those, much of the actual plot). That's it. Oh, and I guess the game got slightly darker. But not by much (and not nearly to the extent of LiL).
1. Music.
Yeah, it's royalte-free, but it left a bad taste anyway. You listen this music and immediately have thoughts like "meh, already used by another creator". Be creative! You don't need to repeat after Sel.
How to acquire "LiL songs" 101:
- Browse to
You must be registered to see the links
- Sort by most downloads
- ???
- Profit
On a less facetious note: We share a
small portion of tracks, yes (the majority of which being from one of the most popular artists on Dova: Sharou). And Selebus and I are
far from the only people to have used those songs (because, again, almost every track we do share is literally near the top of most downloads). The overwhelming majority of songs I use are
not present in LiL (and my method of picking music has changed drastically over the year+ I've been working on this game). There is a jukebox in the main menu of both games, you are free to go have a look through them yourself if you want/care.
2. Characters.
Sara Hina is a bar owner and this bar is not popular.
Sana Yokubo is a girl with speaking problems and stuttering.
A strange godlike being called Sekai.
A cute geek girl promoting Raid? With even a similar event name?
You can be better than this. Add more unique traits, don't use same names. Be creative!
Like I said, characters are largely brought over from a game I was working on before I even knew what LiL (or Koikatsu, for that matter) was. That goes for both Hina and Yokubo. Now to address the other two:
Sekai: Japanese for "World". A very on-the-nose name for a god. And also one I picked before I even knew there was a Sekai in LiL, as per the first part of this post (yay, coincidences!).
Tomori/Raid:
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If you've been around on the internet for longer than a couple years, you should know how big of a meme that game is. It is used
once. We immediately move over to the next meme game in her next equivalent event (Goddess of
Ass Victory: Nikke). Could I have picked a different game? Sure. But Tomori's memes are stale, as is today's sponsor: RAID: Shadow Le-
3. Plot concepts
Resets? Seriously? Why not use a different plot twist?
A person asks MC to not pursue a girl before beach episode? And you can break this promise? (also, broken in your case cause you can kiss Yokubo before Shuu even asks you about this promise).
DnD game sessions in any event chain? Be creative, you're just reusing another one's plot concept.
Resets: There is one. There will also only ever
be one. And it functions
very differently from a LiL reset (though, admittedly, we know very little about them in LiL, so who the fuck actually knows). And this is where I pull out Selebus' favourite game: Doki Doki Literature Club (insert "DDLC is a great game" copypasta). Conceptually, the LiY reset is much closer to that than a LiL reset. But that's all the details I'm willing to share about that for the time being.
A person asks MC to not pursue a girl before beach episode: A valid point. And one I did indeed "copy" from LiL to a certain degree. But also not exactly a unique scenario. Nonetheless, fair criticism.
D&D: Aside from the fact that they do
not, in fact, appear in every chain: D&D in AVNs is not exactly new, and definitely not something Selebus came up with. LiY's implementation of it also aligns much more with (I'm gonna hate myself for saying this, but...) Being A DIK's D&D event and some other DAZ game I followed for a short while (sorry, name's completely escaping me, it's been a few years since I dropped it) that had an entire quest chain of D&D sessions in a very similar vein to LiY's.
4. Other
"buried beneath your feet" - you don't need to steal phrases even as allusions or references
God god - you don't need to steal phrases even as allusions or references
lust and love points - be creative, in your case these points aren't even used properly, why steal a system and don't use it?
"Buried beneath your feet": I had to go look through LiL's code (ew) because I genuinely had no clue what you're talking about. The closest thing I can find is this line which seems to occur a handful of times: "There is something buried underneath your feet." Which is pretty close to the "There's something here, buried beneath your feet." from LiY, I guess. I don't know, I'm gonna chalk this up to coincidence? I don't really know what else to say about this, not gonna lie.
"
God god": I guess that's fair. I was going to explain my reasoning, but decided to backspace that paragraph since I feel this isn't the place to rant about religion and I try not to focus too much on it in the game either.
"Affection and lust points": I... what? Stats like that are kinda a core dating sim concept. Though, admittedly, I did a shit job of using them in chapter 1 after I reworked them for 0.2 to make them less grindy (and went the complete opposite direction in underutilising them). That's something I'm seeking to rectify with chapter 2, however.
I can find a lot more, but I suppose this is already enough to point which parts are bad. You can do better. You don't need to take all these parts from Sel to write a good novel. You're already doing a great job in original parts. And yeah, events need to be at least twice longer, some of them are extremely short.
I don't know. I may sound defensive with this post, but I really don't see most of the things some of you see. I have a long history of playing a wide array of both adult and non-adult story-driven games and while LiL is certainly a big inspiration for Lost in You, it's far from the only one.
As for event length... It's my first serious foray into writing and it's something I still struggle with a bit. I would
love to make events longer, honestly, but I don't feel I can keep them engaging enough for the time being. The average word count per event has definitely gone up since the start of the game's development though, so some progress is being made in that area. It's something I want to (and will) continue working on as I grow as a writer.
I rewrote parts of this a couple times because it came off as mildly aggressive, and that is not my intention. If it still reads like that, my apologies.
Edit: I was honestly expecting the more obvious comparisons I've seen floating around a few times, like the smiley face logo and Ikari looking similar to Rin. The latter of which is again, a fair point, as her design was actually inspired by Rin (god how you have dropped in my rankings girl...)