As someone who came to this demo off of Our Life, i gotta say, this project is looking great, and I'm really looking forward to it.
I like most of the characters, and the characters I don't like aren't because They're badly written, it's just personal preference.
And because i enjoyed this demo so much, I wanted to share my thoughts in the form of constructive (I hope) criticisms of some things I noticed.
Sorry if this sounds like me demanding things be a certain way, or something, I'm not trying to, I've just never given constructive criticism before and am generally socially inept. Likewise, I'm coning off of Our Life, which I feel is very similar to this VN and as such will be my closest comparison.
Spoilers ahead
So, my main criticism would probably be the game kind of.. Contradicting my choices? If that makes sense? There were sometimes where the game would either disregard/forget a previous choice. I'll give two examples. The first being early on, you're allowed to say you avoid touching people, even your close friends, but later, when you go to the diner, you're offered a hug, and the only option to refuse is to say "not this time" implying that you usually allow them to hug you, which completely contradicts a character boundary I set in the first act.
The second example is the Coop scene, where Percy can give up his shirt, and Elio his very important hat. There are unique sprites for these, and Percy even says something along the lines of "you won't be seeing the items again until after exams" yet, in the very next event, not only does Percy have His shirt back, which could be explained by him having multiple, but Elio has his hat back as well, which just feels like the game completely forgot they left them in the Coop.
My second criticism would be, and may possibly just be me misunderstanding the system, but the way the personality stat system works, and the portrayal of the MC in general.
For the Stat thing, its a super cool idea, I love it. Having a visual representation of your personality takes out part of the guesswork involved in making sure my character is who I want them to be, my complaint comes from however, me not understanding how my choices effect those stats.
For example, I started with a Fall personality. High compassion, minimal Confidence, low Composure and Charisma. Great! I like playing my chatacter as a kind, dorkish, socially anxious klutz. And i loved how i could portray that klutziness by failing QTE's (another system i love) however.. While it was obvious what choices would increase my compassion, i found my characters charisma and composure increasing, and Confidence going into the negatives.. And i had no idea what caused that. I found i didn't know how to lower composure or charisma, since I wanted them low, or how I lowered confidence, so i could keep it low. A comparison from Our Life would be the option color system, where certain choices were given certain "moods", like calm, confident, anxious, sad, in the form of the choice selection being a corresponding color, adding an easy to understand, but not blatent, layer of understanding of how the option would effect my characters personality.
As for the MC's personality.. I will admit this is simply a personal nitpick, but I found it kind of.. How to word this right.. Locked you in? into being a perfectly socially adjusted extrovert. As someone who likes to play a socially anxious/awkward introvert, even the Fall personality, what feels like should be the most introveted personality, felt squarely extroverted. And there were no choices to not be "normal", or to be more of a passive, or.. "troubled/anxious/awkward" person.
Even the options to refrain from commenting were framed more like "Eh, too lazy to talk" rather than "I prefer to keep quiet if possible"
(Or maybe there was and I just had too high composure/charisma to get them? But that again leads to the first thing of not knowing how my choices were effecting things)
The first time (and honestly, the most egregious time) I felt this was in Percy's introduction where, in a situation where my character would feel flustered, or awkward, my options were, what felt to me like "Get mad and judgemental" (something out of character for a "kind/anxious" character) "Flirt back" (something wildly out of character for a socially anxious character) and "flirt back a little differently" (same problem as option 2)
Which surprised me when later, my character would automatically get flustered by him in scenes where I would have absolutely have decided to have her get flustered by him.
Again, comparing to Our Life, where my character was free to be an absolute nervous wreck of a person who barely spoke and had multiple chances to let my character have anxiety attacks.
Another nitpick with the Main Character I had was.. Again, a nitpick, but no option to choose whether our character swore or not.
It was.. Incredibly jarring to choose for my character, who at this point, has negative Confidence and Compassion so high it's literally off the charts, to join in The Big One challenge, and exclaim "Mama didn't raise no B*tch!" (A word that I personally find INCREDIBILY offensive), prompting me to immediately reload a save to undo what was previously an in character choice (I like to think of my character as a big eater), yet with one line immediately turned into a horribly out of character choice.
But.. Hey.. maybe that's just how it's supposed to be? Maybe the MC is supposed to be a normal, extroverted person and I'm expecting far, far, too much, or expecting something that's against the Devs vision for the game.
Thats fine by me. I'm not the one making the game, I'm not the one putting my blood, sweat, and tears into this game.
Our Life is Our Life, and Keyframes is Keyframes.
And it's not my place to demand it be one way or another.
I just figure, demos exist to not only show progress of a game but for a dev to gather constructive criticism and apply it to the game.
So I figured i'd try to lay mine out there, just in case.
Regardless, even if the full release doesn't change anything and remains the same as this Demo, It'll still be an incredibly high quality VN at the top of my recommendations, and I'll still love it and replay it probably like 100 times.
Heck if I had money I would throw it at this game SO hard.
What you're doing is amazing and i understand it's a ton of work.
I look forward to following it's development and can't wait for more!
Sorry for the long winded post, lol.