...I'm confused, is this game alleging that corn cob/jellyfish/fox dreams are not normal? I have those every Thursday.
In all seriousness, I'm glad you stuck with it, and I'm excited to see where this goes.
Regarding the changes to the intro, it's not exactly where I would have gone, but I wonder if part of that is because some changes were intended for the overall dynamic between Chris and Sam as well. I was envisioning changes to the prologue as something like what we have in this version until Chris reaches the bus stop, at which point we meet Sam, there's an interaction like we have in this version after Chris swaps realities, and then Sam starts getting to know Chris, taking advantage of his loneliness and isolation to lead him into the other dimension without giving him full context.
With that said, it seems like the dynamic is changed here. Instead of Sam being scummy and leading Chris into the Jellyfish Dimension, Sam isn't part of that process at all now. Given that this version of the story seems to be stamping down on the accelerator to get the romance going, I might guess this was done to make this more palatable, as it's much less believable to fall madly in love with someone who effectively kidnapped you than it is someone you just happened upon in a stressful situation. There's Stockholm Syndrome I guess, but that wouldn't be very fun played straight. So I'm onboard with the changes, and I certainly don't think you need to make any other sweeping edits to that section (or else we'd never move forward).
With that said, why does Sam keep talking in the first house about how he feels responsible for Chris being there? If it's a spoiler (like if the foxes secretly created the Jellyfish Dimension and Sam isn't being entirely transparent about that), you don't have to say, but I'm wondering if these lines are holdovers from the first draft that should be removed.
The goat house was decently creepy and unnerving, though I definitely enjoyed the "beer" route more. The visuals of the dream sequence and monster in the hallway the next morning were some of the highlights of this update for me.
Other thoughts on the goat house:
- I accidentally initially skipped past the dream sequence, then went back when I felt like I missed something. It may help to put in a pause here, at least for a few seconds, to make sure readers know that there's a video there and don't just skip past it thinking it's regular dialogue. I think something like " $ renpy.pause(delay=5, hard=True) " would prevent readers from clicking out for 5 seconds so they at least see part of it.
- The compass seemed much more natural in the "wine" route where Goat gave it to Sam. Given Sam's other actions in the "beer" route, I found it hard to believe that he would've let Chris take it for any reason.
- I found Sam's actions overall less believable in the "wine" route. Since Sam has been the more rational character up to that point, I was hoping more that the "wine" route would involve both characters staying sober instead of Sam breaking and getting drugged.
- I absolutely hated the Goat/Chris SA scene, which I at least hope was part of the point. I wonder if a "skip scene" option would be appropriate for that, or at the very least a disclaimer at the beginning of the game or something that the VN contains graphic depictions of sexual violence.
- Not sure why we're treating the goat serving lamb as "cannibalism"? Lamb is sheep, not goat, so not sure if this was more intended just to indicate suspicion of an herbivore eating meat?
- When looking at Goat's balls: "the amount of semen they might contain". Chris may need to review his reproductive anatomy and physiology.
- Yes I saw the jellyfish in the chair.
I felt like the writing overall in this version was an improvement - your style can still be a bit on the verbose side but I thought it was much clearer this go around.
Miscellaneous comments:
- Some proofreading errors throughout. Might just want to do another run to check for incorrect capitalization, typos, missing tags for characters speaking, etc.
- Italicization for Chris' internal thoughts is inconsistent. Sometimes it's there, sometimes it's not.
- When Chris throws his phone and it hits Sam, Chris says "it hits Sam on the side of his maw" even though we don't know Sam's name yet.
- I'm not sure why we don't learn Sam's name yet to begin with? It's only a couple lines of interaction at the start of Day 2 so I don't know why the name exchange can't happen way sooner. Like the first time Chris calls him "fox".
- Not sure what the point of the little face image in the dialogue screen is or why it only appears after we learn Sam's name. The expression doesn't change, so it's not conveying that, and there are only like three characters so far so we don't really need it to distinguish who's who.
- On the wine route, before Chris leaves the table to go to the restroom, Sam's sitting sprite is at like eye level with the table and it looks kinda awkward.
- Also on wine route, when getting into bed with Sam, Sam's sprite disappears and there's super tiny text on the screen that looks like it might be an error message.
- After leaving the house on the beer route, there's kind of a comical disconnect between Sam's words and the closeup sprite chosen where it looks like:
Sam: "NO. NEVER. Never have I seen anything like that before."
Also Sam: :)
- Kinda wish you had turned Chris' "horny" setting down just a notch or two. Like I know it's half romance half horror and we all want to get the fox's pants off at some point and all but it was just a bit distracting at times.
- "I AM A GOOFY FUCKING IDIOT AND I HATE MYSELF" I felt this line on a deeply spiritual level. -_-
As before, please don't take anything in this comment as discouraging you from continuing - any criticisms I have are intended to be solely constructive. I think the level of effort you're putting into this project is both impressive and self-evident, and I really hope you see this through to the end.
Keep up the good work <3