please, always keen to hear how to make things better.
Holding you to that!
Okay, so I am FINALLY getting into this.
Great game, love the various references I have seen thus far - Sword of Truth is great for that, among others - but I did spot an issue causing a legitimate bug.
Your scheduling system sucks.
I say that objectively, as in, it does have a great basis, but is missing one simple key function that would make it actually work WELL instead of only partially.
It is missing an if->then function.
For example, buying the swimsuit? According to your guide, is supposed to net you a date the following Wednesday. Something I realized only after checking the guide once I saw nothing ever happened.
Why did nothing happen? Because the week I bought the swimsuit, Wednesday was booked already for a plot event or other side quest of some kind. Or maybe it just already WAS Wednesday when I bought it. Could be either, or both. Point is, I had no way in-game of knowing I needed Wednesday free, I had no way of knowing I missed an event, and no way of knowing that I should buy it another week.
So, instead of the game verifying that Wednesday was actually free, seeing it wasn't and then moving the event to another "free" day that week, or to the first "free" Wednesday... I simply missed the event. Which meant I had to start all over. (Oh, also? The in-game links all point to the "old" wiki, not the updated one on Fandom.)
Why? Because the automated chapters (and the warp to day option) are saved ONCE and do NOT update if you have started a new playthrough.
See this was actually my SECOND playthrough - my first ended because of the same bug on a different event.
My time to take Katie to the Glade was fucked, because my time with Molly's becoming Chosen was somehow on the same day my first playthrough, which fucked progression in every possible way, making me have to restart.
I am now on my THIRD playthrough, in as many days, because your scheduling system has no means of ensuring that a day is actually free before making an appointment - worse, if you miss an appointment, you cannot manually initiate a reschedule of an event you somehow missed either.
This is CRUCIAL to the game, seeing as my first playthrough ended with me missing a major event and I had to start COMPLETELY over once already, now a second time, and I am already anticipating a third.
Also, there is no tutorial on the ability of the Japanese Seer chick. Sure, it sounds straightforward, but it simply says "order by suit" and what order is that? How are you ranking the suits? Do hearts come before or after clubs? Spade high? No way to know or practice until actual combat - the first time of which she is available is a boss type battle, where her ability can absolutely fuck you over if you use it not knowing how it actually works.
So to summarize:
1. Autosaves for days and Chapters need to be overwritten as you make new playthroughs, not kept as constants forever. Oh, they should also actually be DELETABLE in-game, just like any other save. No reason for us to be trying to hunt down save locations to figure out how manually remove them. That is a legitimately ridiculous problem to have.
Speaking of, where the hell IS all the data saved? I found the folder in AppData already and deleted it, but there is STILL persistent data and it can potentially screw up my start on the Steam version. Telling the debugger to delete achievements has done nothing, and now I worry my Steam version won't get them properly. This kind of "hide the save file" stuff is for AAA games that are afraid of cheaters and hackers, not indie games.
2. The calendar system NEEDS to verify that a day is free before scheduling an event. ANY event, story or otherwise. Story events can and should supplant side events - add some kind of priority system - but then there needs to be a function where the character can reschedule the side events. And two story events should NEVER be able occur on the same day.
Honestly, story events should be already programmed into the calendar, just "hidden" until you "activate" them in-game, and then the side quests can all happen on any "free" day, just automatically mapping to the first one you have available. This way you NEVER get a schedule conflict.
3. EVERY character's ability needs a quick "tutorial" moment when you get them, not just early characters. A chance to actually SEE the ability in use before you are using it in real combat. And Chloe's Joker ability should let you choose which card to discard. Far too often she discards a USEFUL card, ruining what could be a great hand otherwise. Hell, she once even discarded a Joker just to give me another Joker! And her ability to spawn a Joker to the board instead of your hand? It should be greyed out if the central card is already a Joker - just to avoid misclicks and wasting availability.
Fix those things, and you've got a real gem here. I actually just bought this on Steam even though I had it free from here - it's that good. Just needs a bit of bug testing/tweaking to the main system.
Oh and these ones aren't bugs, just QoL things:
1. We have so many different types of gems, there is no way that three sets is enough for the system. There should be at LEAST 5 or 6, but preferably 9 or more different "sets" we can have. One for each "type" at a minimum. Preferably more, so we can have full "one set" types, as well as "mixed set" types without having to rearrange our entire setup each time.
2. Monsters need variance. More stuff like Elemental strengths and weaknesses and so forth. Right now we have literally zero reason to swap between elements and status effects other than on a whim. Why use anything but Lightning when you can do a full staff of it and stop the enemy from taking a single turn? Stuff like that.
There needs to be some in-game balancing of the elements that actually incentivises playing with others. Fire Elementals should absorb fire, for example - making us swap to ice for extra damage, or just something OTHER than fire for normal damage.
3. We need to be able to swap gem sets mid battle. Not fully customize a set, no, leave that for out of battle, but there should be a button we can click to swap between presets to try different stuff. As it is now, the menu is covered when in the Elsewhere, so we cannot even change sets between battles. Leaving us shit out of luck if we need to adapt mid-trip for some reason. Which also needs fixing. The menu should never be blocked.
And that's all the issues I found (so far) in Book One, not sure how this was missed when you're already so far into Book Two but... there ya go.
Lots of things, but honestly, this is one of the best games I have found here. Hence why I gave enough of a shit to even write all this up instead of just moving onto the next game.
Excellent work, just needs some polish. All fixable stuff, you got the major stuff down, like writing, pacing, characterization, etc... the stuff that isn't easy to fix, because it's about your skill as an author. This stuff? This is simple grunt work you can pay some coder to do for ya to turn this into a damn near perfect game.
One Lore issue: We learn all about Elsewhere and Portals as we go - however Owyn never questions the most important thing of all... How did Emily show up in the alley in the very beginning with no Portal there? It seems like a question he should ask upon learning about Elsewhere and how to access it, and yet he never does.
It requires explanation in-game to stay consistent.