Strange, I remember playing the very beginning of this game but apparently I stopped very early because all the rest, including graphics looked very new to me (yet they were already in the Early Demo from 2021).
There was no Once Upon a Time VN jam at the time, but it’s interesting that a full tale is narrated at the beginning… and I recognized that Gardner boy character in my own Once Upon a Time (2023, the first one) entry. Maybe a classic tale pattern I unconsciously introduced (also stories goes on very differently). Anyway, the initial tale is as if telling us “OK, here is a simple story - but our own will be more complex - but there may be a little of that tale inside anyway”. As in the beginning of Shrek, but with more poetry and less All Star.
I’ve only played the first scene and eager to see the rest. I see the project is on hiatus, so not sure how much my feedback will help, but:
- UI: the main menu has a pretty layout, but I cannot navigate in circle with the keyboard navigation (I had the same issue in my game where buttons were not aligned, I think the trick is to tell Renpy to move to the next button when you press right/down but not sure how to do it)
- UI: the big snowflag to the left of the dialogue box seems to shake as it’s rotating. It’s surprising if the rotation is done via Renpy directly. Even if pivot wasn’t exactly centered, motion should be smooth…
- nice text with outline and inverted black/white colors to replace bold. I usually avoid too much outlined text but this one looks OK.
- Aster’s sprite facing the camera looked off compared to Lumine’s sprite. But maybe that’s a trick for future scenes with future scenes feature 3 characters where they can’t all face every other one.
- Aster’s voice acting really conveys his character! I didn’t feel as much with Lumine, but maybe it’s her current state where she’s more passive and her expressions will unlock with time
- I know it’s just a matter of budget but I feel a few expressions would deserve some arm movement, esp. Lumine who has this hesitating hand gesture, but sometimes she’s vexed and it fells like she would rather put her hands on her waist or something (hm, I’m myself working on a VN and we have this discussion on layered characters, and it looks quite complicated to setup a combination of arm gestures, outfits, clothes following the arms, etc. but we’ll see how it works out)