Finished the update the other day. Great work as always Ward definitely really good.
Here's my takeaways:
1. I liked the increased density of 'stuff to do' - it feels like we're progressing as we get further away from 0000 and that's a good feeling.
2. I played both from old save and from the beginning and the changes to the minigames lends to a much smoother experience, the chasing the dot game is much easier to manage over the dodge the asteroids game, especially when like 90% of the game is played one-handed.
3. Story/vibes - I liked seeing more of your species and the mercenary/Juno quest. I think generally I quite enjoyed the every-few-planets getting an update scene. It was nice variety.
4. Quests - I am normally anti-AI art, but I do think the way your doing it - as an addition and a way to enable some backtracking, is good, I don't really love any of the art (yet) but I think its fun to sorta go and look around - and incentivizes actually sorta looking at the non-scene planets.
The only real negative I'd say is for a game with Zoo in the title, we kinda are leaning more into monster-creature and humanoid-monster over well, zoophilia. I think I'd still like to see more zoo content just generally across the game (Sadako planet was a good touch for instance). I think in terms of the lore maybe we just need a dedicated like, animal-trainer character to make it make sense, since our MC generally makes like super creatures? (I'm kinda thinking the scientist Lily from StudioFOW's Subverse - if you've not played it she makes monsters to fuck/fight - similar idea but more on the feral side). But yeah - maybe this is my own personal tastes bleeding in, if you continued on in the same trajectory scenes-wise I'd still play every update.
Now for the bugs/other stuff:
1. Sadako's 2nd and 3rd scenes seem to reference the same video. It's weird since I opened it up in twine and saw they seemed different - but I'm no Twine expert so idk really.
2. I found generally that loading up an old save let me 'kinda' play through the game, but clearly some variables either didnt initialize when I did that or whatever - because certain content got locked out, I think maybe just either you need some sorta variable-update thing on load, or just tell people to start from scratch each time (the load from new update was a good touch also btw - that alleviates the latter a lot)
3. I found for some reason, in the 'Press Space to stop the numbers/letters' minigames and a few of the 'spam space to escape' the speed of the events was super duper fast. I am unsure why - but it happens semi-regularly. I think for the minigames/etc I'm guessing there's just some weird creep on the State that builds up from maybe improperly finishing events or something. I think its not a code issue really but maybe you need to add a like, 'reset State/debuge minigame' button to let you 'fix' the minigames. Just something that resets the speed to the correct intended speed. I wasnt really able to regularly reproduce when it happens it just would happen eventually after xyz minutes of play.
4. I do periodically get a 'not found' error on specifically the rift/thief searching scenes, and am unsure why. This time around it didnt affect anything, but yeah. I think this might tie into the previous error somehow - it just might need some sorta debug thing to fix it.
5. Both playthroughs I couldnt sell the Minotaurina - even never fired, for some reason it just wasnt setting the flag correctly.
6. You can kinda bork your progress sometimes by re-entering planets that start event chains (returning the the city re-activates the shaman stuff, which resets ahri's progress, for instance). I think maybe just set any planet without further content as 'done' or like, you can't go back there. Might also help people with quest woes if you cut the decision space down.
What I'm looking forward to:
1. More crew (Maybe capturing the shaman finally?)
2. More crew events (Like the merc thing)
3. Using our creatures a bit more (including the base forms like the horse, dog, xeno, etc)
4. Maybe some incest scenes (We mind control related people on a planet etc)
I think thats everything - happy to elaborate more on anything but yeah really liked it!
