- Jun 30, 2018
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it's hard to put it all together - there are many details.Beyond what you say, which are technical aspects that dented the production and therefore the final quality, on a personal level as a story and as a game itself, why do you find SL worse than Melody and DMD?
I always find it important to highlight intellectual honesty, for me it is a rare attribute and I wanted to congratulate you for it.
So for example the facial expressions. As there are so many different girls in there in SL we basically didn't new facials for every scene but used the same basic few ones for different scenes again, and used "average" expressions which could be used in more than one situation. That worked for the first games. But after time those facials are well known and the game visuals feel like worn out and already known/seen.
What worked fine in Melody and also particulary in DMD 6 years ago, is outdated today as circumstances have changed. We kinda missed to adjust much earlier i guess.
In the new game we try to get rid of them.
Another topic has been the textwalls. So for example the "cooking lecture" in SL. Some people just get bored reading such stuff. Better focus on the core of the story rather than fleshing out non-story related stuff.
Another example: We often let the character "think about stuff" visibly like "hmm... do i really want to peek - it's immoral to peek on your sister ...". It's the player who plays the game - we should let the player have his own thoughts about why he should do the one choice or the other. Like we did it has been like lecturing the player how he has to think - and that's wrong.
Third point we need to change: In all 3 games, we had MC being kind of insecure at first - which made players angry. Even the MC changed his insecurity later on, the players were already upset.
In the new game this has to be different - also because of the story plot we need a player with spine and willpower right from the start, or the whole story will not work (can't say more than that right now).
There are also some changes in workflow, which player will not notice, but which will lead to a better quality overall as we guess.
I hope that answers at least partial your questions.
EDIT:
One other point why SL hasn't been the quality of DMD or Melody is, that the creative member who had the whole story arcs in mind, and who is responsible for the main story plot at all and brought that story up, had to leave the team right after release of the first updates due to personal reason. So to be honest it was close to stop SL at all at that point, but we decided to continue and had to improvise here and there - that might be the reason why SL especially after some updates felt kind of "weird".
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