Thank you for playing. I really appreciate the honest feedback.
It's engine specific for the loading screens and the requirements. There isn't much I can do to optimize it as much as I would like either. Most of the complexity for the walking around stuff is done, it's mostly stuff regulated to specific scenes that needs to be made. I've made a 2.5D game in the same engine and it has the same problem, but not as impactful for requirements. Without 3D models it requires 2GB of VRAM and with it's 4 GBs. But it running at all takes a bit of resources, and part of that is the engine is still in development. It will have the ability to port directly into Unity which should hopefully fix many quirks of the engine and do more directly with C++. But that's a couple of months away, and if the feature doesn't get delayed.
The UI is something I took heavy inspiration from those games. I'm not sure the best way to proceed with it to make it stylish but unique. I made Bianca have a Unique text box for more a more impactful/controlling feeling. It's going to require a bit of experimentation.
I like the full 3D since many things can be handled with code compared to a VN for showcasing facial expressions and animations automatically based on other factors, which allows for more dynamic responses. That's a major reason to why I don't want to remove the full 3D aspects. Maybe I should make everything a little faster for the walking, since that might remove some of the impact it has for the need to walk. For a forced top down perspective that is fixed, maybe it could work. I'm not sure the best way to do it in the engine I'm using, since it would send up involving needing to move to what you want to talk to anyways. I might experiment with it, but I don't want to remove from the feeling of what protag choice the player has made, since the goal is they will be all unique. Along with being able to see the character expressions. There is a way to call a 3D model to the middle of the screen like a VN, but the problem is that it doesn't showcase the dynamic choices without rewriting everything with multiple versions of every piece of dialogue which would be worse for performance due to more needing to be loaded in with each character.
I do want you to rank the designs so far. Which I put in a different comment, but I'll repost the strawpolls here. Mainly to see what strengths there are in the designs and what flaws there are. I'm holding off on most of the character writing aspects until after Demo Day to see what I need to do and fix before doing it, since it requires a lot of time and effort to get right. But the models I'm mostly going to keep unless I really have to change them up with editing them further.
Guy ranking:
https://strawpoll.com/e2naXRbqAyB
Girl ranking:
https://strawpoll.com/XOgOV6o4an3
Visible Pantsu ranking (to view them you will probably need to choose each girl for being the protag selection outside of Bianca's pantsu)