Thanks for the detailed answer.
If your game needs a thorough tutorial of 30 minutes, something is absolutely wrong with that approach. Player is horny, I don't want to have to take notes, I don't have that much memory to start with, and after 10 minutes of reading, yeah I started to fast forward a bit, because you are asking too much time investment to a horny consumer that don't even know if the game will be worth it. I don't even invest that much time to learn about Adobe Acrobat pro ffs.
All I can really do is put it into perspective for you because you're not wrong that the tutorial/prologue is long.
The perspective is this: right now players report that the current route take up to 6-8 hours to get to the current content.
Assuming there's 4-5 routes, that'll be a gameplay time of 30 hours. Now you're thinking why the fuck should a h game be that long and my answer is I can only tell you that's the cost for slow burn and making something with depth (something not superficial and forgettable).
Breaking down the tutorial/prologue for you:
Section 1 (5-8 minutes) is the establishing of the protagonist and the girl's relationship, you *need* that in NTR game. I can't shorten that shit any longer man. Some visual novels take an entire day to read through that foundation building.
Section 2: the Old Mayor guy coming in and yapping on and on is necessary because you have to understand that that he's there to
tell you what the main goal(s) of the game is and point you to places. He's also a character on his own so the time given there is also towards him when he gets his route. Point is, there's places where the route progresses and he points you there. I've already moved to using images to make it less wordy but I can't cut that down any further without it being shallow and robotic.
I mean I'm sure some people would like two textboxes of: hey you can go to places 1,2,3,4 and ok pay debt bye.
Then I'll get complains about where the fuck is places 1,2,3,4? Why should I care about paying the debt?
Putting images and him explaining *where* and how they work makes it so you have a reason to give a shit about going there and be cucked. It's more interactive that way.
This game has, by all intentions, a main character that is slightly different from your usual h game. He cannot be a cardboard cutout even if he feels that way at times.
Which, you can see, why the word count just increased as he actually replies and speaks his own thoughts back instead of staring into space.
Section 3: When you wake up and stuff is told to you.
Phone and its functions have to be explained, right? And the player has to know the Quest journal exist or he gets lost.
The player, I don't know if you skipped the text here,
also gets control of where the female lead is so that her location isn't left up to chance. Otherwise, can you imagine how frustrating progression is? So you can control of where to put her every morning so you can lock in on who you want to be the bull and cuck you instead of rolling a dice every single day and leaving it up to luck.
Everything can be learned from just pressing the menu button (x) and then exploring the menus, yes but if I don't explain it before hand, I'll also get criticism for leaving them out. But the point is the explanation exists and
you can skip it the next loop.
About the mini games, I was randomly doing things around and got some fruits to get. Arrows, letters.. already hate it. I have no clue why it fails after 1-2 attempts, maybe a keyboard key binding that isn't right? I am standard qwerty! Arrows were easier. I have my dick in hand man, I want dopamine, I am not doing that fruit thing more than once or twice if I can't get it right off the bat, it needs to be dumbed down to the target audience.
You can fail it and still get the goodies. The game is currently designed in a way that if you play the minigame (Bakery) or even the night bar, you get paid enough you can buy stuff without grinding the farmlands. But even if you still grind the farmlands, you'll take like 2-3 times of failing and you'll get what your quest needs.
The original intent was for you to
plant seeds, water them and harvest. Yeah, I know, that sounds like a pain. that has now been simplified to quick-time buttons that guarantee you an item even with failure.
Now, for the Beach bar. I was presented with recipes of all sorts, there is no way in hell I am going to remember any of this. You say they might be irrelevant? Then it's just overwhelming if that is the case and as a player I just want to disengage because it adds up to everything else in the game, meaning: a lot.
Taking orders: like... 6 or more orders? NO WAY I am going to remember that. I am not here to study., I am here, again, dick in hand. Use the very common and wide principle of the 3 in games. 3 phases to bosses, 3 orders, 3 choices. Thats it.
Does the top images not show up for you? I've added new QoL into the beach bar minigame so that the recipe shows up on your left and the orders on your right? Let me know if no images show up on top, it could be a bug but as far as I recall, it works for me.
Once again, like with all minigames, you can fail/get a bunch of them wrong and still get rewarded. The timer is also intentionally long
for the sake of future h content that runs while you do the minigame.
Talk to some people that sells stuff, list is 20 items long. Overwhelming.
I uh, don't really know what to say to that. Except when you have quests that involves a Bakery, a Beach Bar, a Rural Village, I really can't shorten the list to like 5.
Unless the preferred approach here is a scene collector.
Some map borders have triggers, some dont and need manual input.
I'll look through this but I swear I fixed a lot of it. Might have missed some but if you know where to go/go back to and isn't stuck for prolonged time, then I'm at least glad it isn't that massive a frustration.
Why the one way warp in the beach house? Useless frustration.
Because I don't want the player to walk up the house every single night. I thought about not putting it but there's no reason not to.
The reason why there isn't a wrap
in your room is a good argument to make but I guess it is part ritual and part because the beach house itself is a prime spot for future h content that I won't want the player to miss. Hard to find a middle ground so my middle ground is to teleport you back up but not down.
Warp zones should be in the phone. This will save time in the game, you already ask the player to spend a lot of time in it so you can cut on that.
I agree but I'm also only slightly better than a blindfolded monkey at coding. I try but it's not my profession. It's not an excuse per say as much as an explanation that tries to be transparent with you.
That and doing so now will BREAK A FUCK TON OF SCENES DOWN THE ROAD I'LL PULL MY FUCKING HAIR OUT AAAHHHHH.
yeah, that's really it.
After a while I only wanted to progress to some lewd stuff so I tried to pass the time on the phone, denied: service not available inside, try outside.
Okay I've spent an unhealthy amount of time thinking about this so that decision is deliberate.
Think about it: you're in a room that you know, on the dot, 1-2 hours later the girl will undress and have fun time with the man. Now you spend time 1-2 hours in the room and voila, you're now in the room with them and I have to pretend that you didn't just catch them.
It's a design so that the main character or you doesn't camp in a place that has a sprite event happening in a few minutes and you're like, is this guy fucking blind? the two of them just appeared in front of him and is now going at it like monkeys.
Alternatively, I can teleport you out every single time but this is a lot less work and
future proof.
Sure it looks simple for you, but take account on who is the target audience here. This aint Zelda, it's a porn game, dumb it down, simplify the mental load. I have a career that uses my brain quite a bit, but when I am on me time, I get lazy and dumb as hell. I don't have 40 hours to put in a game (some do, I understand) because there are a lot of other games that are well paced in here.
I mean you have your point but I'm also aiming for a story rich game here which kind of makes it hard to dumb down all aspects of the game. It's not for everyone and does require some initial work/patience to get to the good, juicy parts. I've already simplified and reduced the friction for the initial work so I don't know how much more I can cut.
There's no banner/poster yelling at you in the game that says "hey it'll be worth it, collect that blueberry again! woo!" so I get that but you have to understand the nature of NTR is that you go from a slow, idyllic slice of life to uh what the hell is happening, oh is this for real, oh shit.
Which is why it has to start off a little slow.
If it still bothers you, you can focus 100% on the Bakery and only walk from your house to there for the entire early game and you'll get rewarded pretty fucking soon. Beach Bar, Farmlands are there (in the current version) for an open world feel and for future routes. E.g: each route content will center around those locations. But it is still "open world" because it'll involve other locations.
This place has to feel alive, simplifying it any further makes it a copy and paste town from the dozens of RPGmaker games you've played before.
I can't do that.