Hey, thanks for the review my friend :D
A lot of good points, some I noticed myself too amd tried to fix on this upcoming updoot, but a few are unfixable because they require changing everything, this was after all my first game, I was still learning hot to plan things back then.
But I will keep all those things in mind for my next one, this game is 2 or 3 updates from being finished now, for the next one I will really plan things and do a lot of playtests with the people on discord to make it perfect from the start and not just "glue stuff on the engine" and hope it works XD
Damn, I didn't realize the game takes so long to finish already, reports people send go from 8 hours to a month hehe.
Always a pleasure!
But be careful with community opinions or suggestions. You have to think like a developer and check whether things complement each other well or interfere with one another — and how they can technically be implemented together, depending on the engine, etc. (for your next game). Most players in the community don’t do that. They have a short flash of inspiration they think is cool: “I’d love it if we had a build menu where we could place furniture, recolor it, and add patterns!” But they have no idea that this mechanic, while theoretically possible, would in practice require an enormous amount of work — maybe even a completely different engine! Just a small warning ;) Not every mechanic makes sense within every type of game concept. As a developer, you have to weigh that carefully in terms of cost and benefit.
Your point that you’d basically have to rebuild the entire game for the changes I suggested is absolutely understandable — I get the amount of work behind that.
But let me tell you this: perfection is always partly in the eye of the beholder — and on the other hand, it’s entirely possible to rebuild a game from scratch in just a fraction of the original time. Because most of the hard work has already been done.
Refactoring should always be considered when core mechanics are causing issues — especially if you’re already on the home stretch and don’t plan to add any new mechanics or systems anymore. In that case, it’s worth at least thinking about it, and estimating the amount of work.
From a technical point of view, you could copy most of the existing content and just adjust the elements that stand in the player’s way or reduce the fun factor. All your scenes, text, and much more would remain exactly the same. Refactoring doesn’t mean you have to redo everything from zero — it means rebuilding the game while fixing or adjusting what doesn’t work as intended, or what was added later even though it didn’t really fit. ^^
As for the time it takes to finish the game:
I have to point out that I’m German! English isn’t my native language, so I read a bit slower, sometimes have to look up a word, or even a whole sentence. Secondly, I generally read slowly and like to enjoy the context. Your choice of words was wonderfully smooth, which made it pleasant to read overall. Still, these little pauses and thought breaks naturally add to the total playtime.
As I said: 5 days, about 12 hours each — roughly 60 hours of total playtime!
Minus about 20% for searching = around 48 hours.
With farming, milking, getting to know the characters, etc., I’d say roughly 75% of that time was spent reading.
So that’s around 36 hours of pure reading time.
Depending on reading speed, you can of course subtract a few hours. Non-native speakers, slow readers, or those who like to take their time — so most people will probably finish in about 15–30 hours. Unless they skip the text, but honestly, I don’t understand why anyone would play a VN-based game just to skip the writing. There’s plenty of adult content elsewhere!