Well, I decided to give this game a look after hearing about it as a clone of LiL, and after playing through the current version, I can say:
1) it's not bad - better than a lot of games on this site and better than I expected, and it has potential, but
2) if you claim that it is not a fairly obvious ripoff of LiL, all I can say is, "Bruh". Yes, you can point to any one item where this game and LiL are alike, and hand-wave it away ("lots of VNs have a role-playing game in them" or "there's a pool of free music that a lot of developers pull from") - that's not the point. It's the whole list taken together (D&D, school setting, horror elements, shy stuttering girl whose mom owns a bar (which looks exactly like Sara's bar), the music, the dorm visits, the big events (i.e., Christmas parties), the pet names with responses to specific ones, etc...) that makes it pretty clear. Just because you've changed the hair colors around doesn't mean that Selebus doesn't have a point. Personally, I don't care - it's not my game you are copying. But your defense of it as not a copy is just silly. It's like writing a folk song about an iron ore ship on the Great Lakes that gets sunk in a storm and then claiming it's not a copy of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" because Gordon Lightfoot didn't invent the D chord and your song is set on Lake Huron.
Just own it. There's obviously an audience of some size for "LiL but with a less-assholish MC and lighter horror elements", so run with it. But it's clearly far beyond just a "partly inspired by" thing.
1) it's not bad - better than a lot of games on this site and better than I expected, and it has potential, but
2) if you claim that it is not a fairly obvious ripoff of LiL, all I can say is, "Bruh". Yes, you can point to any one item where this game and LiL are alike, and hand-wave it away ("lots of VNs have a role-playing game in them" or "there's a pool of free music that a lot of developers pull from") - that's not the point. It's the whole list taken together (D&D, school setting, horror elements, shy stuttering girl whose mom owns a bar (which looks exactly like Sara's bar), the music, the dorm visits, the big events (i.e., Christmas parties), the pet names with responses to specific ones, etc...) that makes it pretty clear. Just because you've changed the hair colors around doesn't mean that Selebus doesn't have a point. Personally, I don't care - it's not my game you are copying. But your defense of it as not a copy is just silly. It's like writing a folk song about an iron ore ship on the Great Lakes that gets sunk in a storm and then claiming it's not a copy of "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" because Gordon Lightfoot didn't invent the D chord and your song is set on Lake Huron.
Just own it. There's obviously an audience of some size for "LiL but with a less-assholish MC and lighter horror elements", so run with it. But it's clearly far beyond just a "partly inspired by" thing.
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