Ren'Py Under Your Spell [v0.4.0p] [Shady Characters]

[Illustrivity]

How did I only JUST find peak

Shut the fuck up, paid actor.

 

[Percipere0]

What peak? 2 years of development, and there is absolutely no lewd content. That is peak for you? Lol)

This one is still peak. There's tons of other games to whet one's appetites in the meanwhile, so impatience in this case is generally uncalled for. I've seen other games that went longer without making significant ground, and still ended up delivering, eventually. Two years is nothing, in the grand scheme of things, especially when there's so much to consume elsewhere.

 

[Percipere0]

Do you still have to focus on a single stat without any explanations or hints on what to do or is the gameplay somewhat corrected now?
I don't want to play stat simulator.

It could probably become a less tedious mechanic if they made a trade-off where the stats rise somewhat slowly, but there's no decay. My main gripe with that would be the decay, especially with how it sets in so quickly. More hints would work, too.

 

[tortlll]

Okay, so I started playing this thinking that perhaps all the complaints about stat growth being limited/grindy were just perhaps overblown, but after getting absolutely nowhere in the first Cup event (I got to room 4!) despite having 39 (a decent number, I thought) in knowledge, and multiple other stats in the 30s... No, it's an extremely valid complaint about the gameplay.
And I LIKE this kind of grindy gameplay, so long as it's actually somewhat transparent or fair.

From what I'm seeing, if you want to do well in both the first test and the first cup event, you have to seriously grind one specific stat, and you don't have much room for error.
If I'd have to compare this gameplay/stat system to any, it'd be to Pokemon Academy Life Forever (which is amazing), which has a similar system of time management, especially with Level caps for types based on the classes you go to, where you initially should focus on 3 classes.
However, that game gives you a TON more agency in what you can do than this game, and because of that, the gameplay is much fairer. I'll explain, in depth, below.

Spoiler: More in depth reasoning

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If Spell took some of PALF's design philosophies, I think it could be an absolute 5/5 game. But with the current gameplay, I really can't put it higher than 1/5, which is so enraging to me.
I don't tend to write comments to this length very often, but this game, man.
I think the absolute highest priority for this dev should be to fix the gameplay, before doing ANYTHING else, because in the current state, it is an unacceptable base, and when he inevitably needs to change it, all existing save files would need to be invalidated. This should be done sooner than later, in my opinion, because it will be far more painful to do down the line, rather than immediately addressing and getting the castle built on something that isn't sand.

 

[FineUser123]

This one is still peak. There's tons of other games to whet one's appetites in the meanwhile, so impatience in this case is generally uncalled for. I've seen other games that went longer without making significant ground, and still ended up delivering, eventually. Two years is nothing, in the grand scheme of things, especially when there's so much to consume elsewhere.

 

[Karnewarrior]

This one is still peak. There's tons of other games to whet one's appetites in the meanwhile, so impatience in this case is generally uncalled for. I've seen other games that went longer without making significant ground, and still ended up delivering, eventually. Two years is nothing, in the grand scheme of things, especially when there's so much to consume elsewhere.

There's "patience" and then there's "2 years into development of the porn game there's precisely 1 scene of porn". That's not taking their time, that's making a SFW VN and then mislabelling it to fool people. It's scummy, and should be called out.

2 years should be about half the game's development time for a project of this scale, maybe a little under if you're expecting a 5 or 6 year development cycle, which is on the longer side. This would be fine, if we had half the game present. But we don't. Instead we have an early alpha that, given the tags, wouldn't be acceptable even if it was the first release!
Again, if you mark your game as porn, put porn in it!

People have been saying this since the game came out, and while the art is spectacular and this WOULD BE peak were it to include what people are clicking on the thread for, the fact of the matter is it just doesn't have what it needs. Imagine a game advertised as a First Person Shooter that had one gun and spent 2 years developing the in-game farming and crafting mechanics. Sure, it could be awesome later, but after 2 years the fucking CORE SYSTEMS are still not implemented. That is not a healthy way to develop a game, and it's scummy to advertise a game without porn as a pornographic game.