I think the main issue here is that this was told, not shown. It makes sense, it was the start of the game, but it makes it a bit harder to sense a connection with her.
I know they've known each other for awhile . While yes they did know each other to some degree through darci I wouldnt say they knew each other super well either since they went an whole year without hanging out cause of no Darci. Even if they did felt a bit quick for my taste but that's just me. I still like the character but nothing more than friends.
Nothing is getting logged, we just started a week back on this project in hope of changing how we play VN Games. Being a developer and a player myself, I know the pain to distribute builds and downloading huge files on users end. We just tried something as a project and we are getting good response.
I wanted to make more Halloween renders, but I didn't get much time.
The new update, Episode 6, is in the proofreading and testing stage right now and release dates will be announced soon.
The videos seem to use a lot of CPU on decode/playback. Free up more CPU by closing your browser in particular plus anything else that's eating up cycles. Of course if your CPU is shitty enough, like mine, that won't be enough.
You can try a custom built ffmpeg MMX enabled Ren'Py lib/ for either Linux or Windows. Caveat is I built it without any of the SDKs. It did have a seg fault with Jessica's poke video (worked 2nd time), but it seemed fine otherwise. I did not replay the entire game with it. YYMV.
Linux users may need to rename Ripples-0.4.5-pc/lib/py3-linux-x86_64/renpy to Ripples-0.4.5-pc/lib/py3-linux-x86_64/Ripples.
Windows users do nothing or possibly rename & move Ripples-0.4.5-pc/lib/py3-windows-x86_64/renpy.exe to Ripples-0.4.5-pc/Ripples.exe.