What in the name of all spanking gods have you done to the girl's right hand?! Is she's going to be punished for excessive mastrubation with amputation?
Jokes aside, here's my little feedback based on what I've played so far.
I appreciate the theme and the safe, sane, consensual meta-approach, but the Narrator should really take a sit back and shut up. Fourth wall breaking is fine, but only in tiny doses. The same goes for the overall text content. I know you might be struggling with creating really sexy and expressive graphics as this requires a lot of drawing talent, while pretty much everyone knows how to write, but with so much amount of repetitive tasks, the seven-paragraphs long descriptions of pretty much the same scene, with only slight changes in tone, based on levels of lust or masochism get stale quickly. I suggest finding a way of introducing more concise, and still sexually arousing versions of those. Or even better, reducing grind, which is a plague of most H-games these days. I really see no point revisiting the same scenes for more than 3 times, just so you can raise a stat by half a point out of 35 needed to reach the next level of sexual kink. Less is more.
Till this very day, the golden standard of Ren'Py naughty trainers is 'The Witch Trainer' (the original, short version, not the Silver Edition, or others), where all the sex scenes / tasks have max 4 variants reflecting progression of sexual corruption of the titular young witch and once you unlock those scenes there is no reason to revisit them, unless the player finds them funny or hot or otherwise worth a replay. Thus you can finish the game, from naive, innocent and uptight young lady to a totally sex-addicted cumwhore in just a few hours of extremely satisfying gameplay. No amount of increasing playtime through grind which does not open new options/scenes is going to make a game more engaging to play, quite the contrary. I know your work is the early stage of development and hopefully there will be more events filling out the empty spaces between the same gym training and tutoring sessions, but save yourself and the players some time and try to make the game as brief and to the point as possible, without taking away any hot stuff... Unless you're planning to write and depict scenes for every micro level of progress and possible combinations of the two main statuses (0% masochism/0% trust, 1% masochism, 0% trust, and so on and so on); in which case, with only these two parametres, each scaling from 0 to 100, there would be 10,201 variations to consider... writing. If you're not planning to write them, what is the reason for the microgrind? Excitement derived from impatience has its limits too. Players get bored after hours of pointless clicking just to see the same scenes.
And what is the reason behind skipping Saturday and Sunday? I hope this is WIP and there will be some weekend-related scenes.
Graphic's-wise, I think the game would benefit a lot with more of it, which could reduce the aforementioned verbiage. But it has to be consistent style-wise, coz from what I've seen so far, your little painslut in the making wears at least 4 variants of her top in one scene, not to mention her face changing all the time and I don't mean just the expressions. If you've decided to conceal the key stats and have the player take cues from her faces, the expressions, gestures and body responses should be easy to read. You could save so much time by simply showing, not telling the girls changing reactions to punishments and rewards. A well drawn butt adorned with fresh angry welts juxtaposed with discreet yet undeniable wetness between the legs and glossy, unfocused eyes and half-opened mouth which stopped crying out in pain midway through the punishment and now just grunt, hiss and sigh will convey so much more than the words I've just used. The players eyes will be thankful.
Thank you for taking the time to leave feedback, it's always appreciated.
A lot of the stuff you're noting comes from this being not even the finished Demo yet. There are plans for the weekends and mornings, for example.
All of the "demo level" content bar her being up for hotdogging without a little extra persuasion should unlock by 25% in each invisible stat.
But it really shouldn't take many interactions to get Ruby to the thresholds where she's up for more erotic interactions, you only have to be consistently nice to her for a couple of days and her trust will hit that first threshold.
Although I may have to look at rebalancing her masochism gain, that feels slow compared.
The only "grind" in this version would be unlocking the highest level Reward interactions, her most depraved reactions to being punished, and her getting super horny, which if I'm honest probably don't belong in the demo but I got into a real groove writing.
But even if you try to get all 20-30 different reward choices, and all the variations on her hotdogging, there's not hours of content to find right now TBH.
Likewise the Narrator, much like Glynda, is mostly there for the tutorial sections etc. right now.
But long-term they're intended to be an interactable characters (mornings and weekends baby), so this roughly 20% of Ruby's content is going to seem more heavily permeated with it than it will do in the completed version.
You're not wrong about the art, from the quality to it forcing the writing to do the heavy lifting.
It's free service prompt-gen and suffers from all the issues you'd expect with that, hence the funding drive.
Bear in mind this isn't a business, I'm making this with MAYBE one day's coding a week in my spare time and zero budget to speak of. All the coding and writing and prompt-gen is done by me with those time constraints, and testing is done by me, my very tolerant wife, and some lovely folks on this site.
I want to pay real artists to make good art that'll help us all feel more when we play.
In fact I've dipped into my own bank account to pay for concept art from the
LeraMor team, in the hope of getting more people interested in funding things (it'll be just shy of $700USD for all of the core art assets to handle the main area backgrounds, basic interactions with Ruby, and the skits with Ruby) which will be dead easy to raise with lots of donors I'm sure.
VA would also pare back a lot of the need for text, as a good VA can convey Ruby's emotional state without the need for description, but we'll work on art first because that's how the people voted.
I'm not sure I'm personally with you on the "4 interactions, no repeats" for a trainer, especially a single-character one.
I liked Witch Trainer sure, but definitely preferred Something Unlimited, Headmaster, or Rogue-Like, for a greater variety of interactions and a slower burn.
This isn't about brief, just like establishing a sane and sensible framework of trust and consent up front is a real life BDSM approach, this game is trying to make the interactions about a more realistic exploration and gradual expansions of limits.
Within the limits if the medium obviously.
There are a dozen and more games on here that fulfil the desire you're expressing for easy gratification (and I enjoy that too), but the idea here was a more natural experience.
As someone who enjoys that process themselves, working Ruby to her limits in the gym, making her watch you eat her treats while she sits still like a good girl and looks upset, or berating her for failure and forcing her to dress in an ice cold shower at full go are just as much the 'hot stuff' as sex or spanking.
But maybe we need an option for short and long versions of the actions, that way for those who're looking to repeat actions in detail and have a more leisurely trip to depraved Ruby, do more non-sexual Domming, or just bully Ruby in the arena (or chill somewhere inbetween) can; and those who're looking to break her quickly can make these scenes a button press to really focus on the NSFW interactions instead.
I'm never going to be able to please everyone, but offering 2 options is definitely better than offering one.
You've given me some ideas to integrate into updates going forwards, so thank you.
Have a butt
She's got human arms and everything!
