I've been following this thread for ages and finally got around to playing. In the beginning I was worried there were so many names being introduced... but honestly I guess that's what it feels when you start college anyway and it created this really believable atmosphere. I like how each character feels different, not all of them want to jump on the MC immediately, and how there are paths for all types of players to indulge. I can see someone really going all in on Alice or Ellie for instance, whereas I am not that interested in them.
It also really felt like choices mattered. There were so many of them and so many different little paths. It reminded me of another famous college-themed AVN except I somehow liked this one better. Kudos to the dev for creating such a believable little environment, for the beautiful models and chill MC.
On the constructive side, it would be nice to see more animations but I'm sure those are hard to get right and probably super time consuming. It would also be nice to have a few more wide angle shots or third-person view of some of the scenes. But 5 stars either way!
Thank you for the review! I'm glad you enjoyed the game!
It's nice to see that the first chapter or so can create the kind of effect I'd envisioned; you're exactly right that it's a lot of characters, a lot of names, being thrown around right at the start to create a sense of instability (and the believable atmosphere. For instance, there's characters you meet in the game who might feel initially important, but who only appear briefly going forward, if at all, because that felt like an important aspect of this time in life to capture). I wanted you to be in some way immersed in the main character. And, since I knew I wasn't going to divulge the intricacies of what's happened in his past immediately, I needed to convey how he's feeling in other ways.
(A lot of people self insert with these games, and you still can here insofar as choices are concerned etc. but there's is a certain degree to which I wanted everyone to understand the MC. This'll make more sense in the future, but it's not a character everyone would be able to self insert for because the story necessitated him not exactly being a blank slate).
Along these lines, seeing as I wasn't giving the player exact autonomy over the MC (his story, his history, to an extent his personality, is what it is) I knew I wanted to give a fair amount of choice, and have them actually matter, even if in just small ways. Some choices are just flavor text, for lack of a better term. This is kinda for the roleplaying side of things. But a lot of choices will impact something, be it future dialogue, how much a character likes you, or even whether or not you see whole scenes. But I also wanted it to feel intuitive - I never wanted anyone to feel lost with regard to pursuing LIs in particular. So while the choices are important, I'm not going to throw many, if any, trick questions at the player. The obvious answer is normally right.
(Thank you for that praise, too, by the way. Like a lot of devs who make college games, I have my main inspiration(s), so when people make favorable comparisons to those games it really means a lot to me)
On animations, I experimented a bit with them while making ch2, and, to be honest a) I'm bad at them. Just didn't look great. Even working with premade animations required a lot of small changes to make it all work properly and b) yeah, they're very time consuming. It really isn't worth it to me to add animations because they would increase dev time considerably. Rendering is already my bottleneck to getting updates out, I'm slow enough as it is, so adding animations just isn't viable.
That being said, obviously I'd love to add animations, because well done animations do make a game better. But right now, to me, adding animations would probably make the game worse, because they'd be bad, on top of increasing dev time.
For ch3 I'm experimenting a little with camera shots etc. to make the game more visually interesting all around. I think it's a big improvement, so hopefully I'm already on the way to addressing that second bit of advice.
Again, thanks for playing the game. And thanks for posting a review. I always love reading what people have to say about the game. It's half the reason I'm making it, to see what people think of it all. Hopefully you'll continue to enjoy the future chapters as well!
