As many have stated, gameplay is kind of all over the place, what/when you can do things often seem to be timered and navigation is very difficult. For example:
When the quest objective updated to "get a birthday cake," in a sandbox game you'd normally get a "Bakery location unlocked" message to go with it. With no world map in this game, that's obviously not going to happen. Still, playing with a free roam mindset, I was thinking "so how tf am I going to get to the bakery, let me try this exit from the school and maybe I can WASD through assorted streets until I stumble into it." I walk out the door and, boom! I get locked into a conversation with James (w/o ever clicking on him) and force transported back home where there are two women who don't want to talk about anything and nothing to do but chop veggies for $2 until some timer runs out. This is not what I would call free roam. It's kind of a mish-mash that kind of springs at you randomly.
That said, you don't have to turn this into a VN unless you want to. You can also commit to free roam and allow the MC to walk around the streets all night until his energy level runs out if that's what he wants to do.
However, to go that route, I would suggest that a far better map and travel system should be implemented. The current single room map is useless as it doesn't help you with anything and can be axed. There should be two maps instead 1. A local map, showing all the rooms in that current local (house, school etc. ) location and the ability to move between them via click. This can be a cut-out doll house floor plan (e.g. Betrayed) or panels listing what rooms there are (e.g. Man of the House, The DeLuca Family and many others). 2. A world map showing whatever locations you'll be using in the game (Bakery, bar, barista, beach etc. - pretty much the usual suspects in a free roam).
Anyways, thanks for making the game and hope you continue improving upon it.
About the bakery location, the thing simply about that is that this is 0.1.0 Beta version of the game,
I had already spent a lot of time setting up the nav system, interaction system, map, calendar, phone, story events, the notification/achievement system (Now that really was a pain in the ass), etc and after that creating some fleshed out streets and stores as free roam for a beta version...it just would take so much time that I had to give up the sandbox aspect altogether.
Things will be added yes, but with time of course if I could implement everything I wanted to from the start I would have released it as a v1.0 xD
There are 2 ways to get the cake, if you leave the home at night you will be able to go to the market (Which I forgot to make clear in the game) and the other option will be unlocked after day 4 (Please use the time skip)
So, to sum it up...yeah its totally my fault, I totally forgot to add some sort of hint system so that players would know what to do xD. That was an oversight on my part, a lot of things had to be explained which I didn't.
The reason why freeroam is limited for now is because I could only add that much at this point, that's why when you leave the college you get locked in a conversation with James because for now there's no street to roam as of yet.
About characters who don't want to talk about anything, well that's why you have the skip button, only the first day is necessary, rest you can skip
There is I think only 1 days that doesn't have anything to do because the event on that day gets triggered at night after you go to sleep.
As for your few concerns, here's what I have planned for future -
A lot more freeroam locations like the class room (With some new classmates too), fleshed out streets and stores (Stores will not be freeroam, just static images), a few bases to explore (Future content), a fleshed out world map which also will be traversable so you can go to places just by clicking on it, also the map will show the location of the characters, and last and most importantly a hint system.
I hope this answers all your concerns and I hope you do enjoy the game despite its faults
Just one request though, please keep in mind that its the first version and that too a beta, I am not saying that as an excuse but as an apology that I can't add as many things as you'd like just yet, I will in time though.
So, thanks for checking the game out.
