So, I'm a bit conflicted. This is good. Really good, except for a few experimental things that ended up just terrible. However it's showing so many warning signs with no indications that they are aware they may be heading off a cliff or three.
The main terrible thing - the way the types of choices are indicated. I get wanting to keep things sleek and a bit more cinematic, but there are better options than flashing lights. Unskippable flashing lights. Just no. It's terrible. It's so bad it's worth doing the work to replace it entirely. A subtle image in a corner of the screen or something would work. It's also a bit easier to form an association with an image than it is the color of the awful flashing that you're so distracted by you hardly process what color it is. And which color relates to what, again?
As for the warning signs... way too many girls. Way too many story threads. New girls are coming in at least as fast as scenes with the major girls. Then there are one or two other story threads already in addition to all the girls. And they show no signs of stopping, only growing.
These sorts of games die when all the options and all the goings-on get to be too much. Updates for any particular path get super short or even don't exist. Quality goes down as paths get messily merged and major things don't get referenced because not all players would have had it happen. Mistakes get made as things get referenced that not all players had happen.
And managing all of this complexity gets to be too much. There's too many routes, too many scenes that too many people don't see, and nobody gets enough of the things they really like the most and they have to put up with an increasing amount of the stuff they don't care about so much.
These games do best when they are kept tight and focused. This game still seems to be getting bigger faster. It's still really good now. Maybe this will be the first game to pull it off. I doubt it though.
And seriously, get rid of the flashing. Fucking flashing.
The main terrible thing - the way the types of choices are indicated. I get wanting to keep things sleek and a bit more cinematic, but there are better options than flashing lights. Unskippable flashing lights. Just no. It's terrible. It's so bad it's worth doing the work to replace it entirely. A subtle image in a corner of the screen or something would work. It's also a bit easier to form an association with an image than it is the color of the awful flashing that you're so distracted by you hardly process what color it is. And which color relates to what, again?
As for the warning signs... way too many girls. Way too many story threads. New girls are coming in at least as fast as scenes with the major girls. Then there are one or two other story threads already in addition to all the girls. And they show no signs of stopping, only growing.
These sorts of games die when all the options and all the goings-on get to be too much. Updates for any particular path get super short or even don't exist. Quality goes down as paths get messily merged and major things don't get referenced because not all players would have had it happen. Mistakes get made as things get referenced that not all players had happen.
And managing all of this complexity gets to be too much. There's too many routes, too many scenes that too many people don't see, and nobody gets enough of the things they really like the most and they have to put up with an increasing amount of the stuff they don't care about so much.
These games do best when they are kept tight and focused. This game still seems to be getting bigger faster. It's still really good now. Maybe this will be the first game to pull it off. I doubt it though.
And seriously, get rid of the flashing. Fucking flashing.