Hello!
Thanks for allowing us the opportunity to view your project - in - progress!
Your skill does show in certain areas of the games creation, to include features we, ourselves, don't even know how to build yet, such as the character portraits in the bottom left, or the animation movement you had on screen. Good work there!
We noticed a few periods missing at the end of sentences towards the beginning of the game.
What's needed most is sound for sure. Music in the main menu, in-game, and / or ambiance too. We've personally used pixabay.com for free music and sfx, perhaps you could find something there. Our pro-tip is seek out sounds that you find are most pleasing to the ear. Find sounds / music that don't get annoying for you to listen to on repeat.
You can put music in the main menu by using the following command at or near the top of your game:
-------
label before_main_menu:
$ renpy.music.play("audio/music/silent-waves-instrumental-333295 by I_Fisher.ogg", channel="music", loop=True,)
return
-------
You may not have the same folder paths that we do, if there are no separation folders, then just put the name of the soundtrack only. Be sure to change the name of the audio track to your own, too!
The writing of Sankakkei can be a little confusing at times, more specifically after arriving at, we believe it was the school or classroom? Later when you feel up for it, cruising through that and working on tightening up the writing should help. Just look for anything you don't need that you can cut out, anything that can be improved to write a little clearer, things such as that.
This is simply our opinion, but we found it a little much to read through every character's introduction practically at the same time. We understand that's because of the setting, but perhaps there's a neater way that it can be written in the future?
In our project, we focus on slow character introduction. We only ever introduce two at most at a time, (our goal is one at a time) and then we write something to give the player a reason to remember them, it could be something good, something bad, something intriguing. Give the player some time to get to know them. Then move the story along, and then introduce the next character after that.
Imagine though if we did that with every character at the same time - it can get a bit overwhelming and difficult to remember characters. In this particular setting of yours though, maybe there's a way the introductions can be shortened or otherwise spaced out throughout the story?
We're not asking or telling you to re-write what you have, but for future projects or parts, perhaps that's something you could experiment with.
We read that you were struggling a bit with fonts... it's not as difficult as you may think!
2. In Ren'py, create a font folder in your game folder, and put the font in
game/fonts/
3. Under the GUI option on the Ren'py Launcher screen, navigate to the gui and add this to the gui.rpy screen:
define gui.text_font = "fonts/YourFontHere.ttf"
4. Restart game.
It's nice to step out of that default ren'py font since it's used so much.
We like that this appears to be all hand-drawn! That is a very valuable and respectable skill to have, especially when creating visual novels. We hope you continue to pursue that talent! We're a bit jealous, as we have to commission all of our artwork!
You're on the right track, whatever you do, don't stop writing or pursuing this passion. You will gain experience overtime, just like we are.We hope that you find some of this feedback useful and wish you the best of luck with continuing your project!
Until next tale,
- Beastly Fables