Nice game, I enjoyed it so far. I mostly like the visuals in general, an almost all the character models specifically. Thanks for not giving each and every one of the females huge boobs. The Sarah model I just hate. That's not limited to this game, though. No matter what you do with it, it looks like plastic surgery gone wrong to me. Just urgh. The main college building exterior seemed a little weird. That's just not a building I would expect to house a college. Probably a matter of what assets are available, I guess.
Huge fan of how the naughty scenes are done. They feel like spicy little interludes and I mean that in the best way possibly. Many creators fill naughty scenes with lots of (porn) dialogue that just makes it so frigging weird. How the cat must feel who sees their human masturbating weird.
Dialogue (in English, my French isn't good enough to rate the original) felt a little wooden sometimes, especially in the beginning, but improved in the later chapters. Might be worth it to revisit that at some point.
Some characters felt really ... trope-y. Jake, Grace and Chloé come to mind. I can't even fault you for Grace and Chloé, because we all got weak spots for characters like that. Jake is so overtorqued, he actually feels out of place, though. BTW: You may want to change the biography text about Julie to highlight she's a high school senior. That confused me for a second or ten.
Elephant in the room: Getting really strong "Being a DIK" vibes here. That's not necessarily a bad thing and it's not like e.g. all these awful teenie high school tv series are terribly unique. Feels unnecessary, though. E.g. the way this game does the first party and the panty raid is already unique and arguably better than Being a DIK does it, so it feels like it would only need a little bit more to make the whole story more unique.
Finally, would be nice to get some sort of indicator for the free roam rewards you can find, i.e. how many are there in the current event and how many are still to be found. Hard to tell where you missed them right now. Also phone messages are a bit too easy to miss IMHO.
Hopefully that didn't sound too negative. To put things into perspective, I'm gonna head over to Patreo now to drop some financial appreciation and pick up the latest version.
Viewing post in University of Choices comments
Thanks a lot for the detailed feedback, genuinely appreciated, this kind of thing helps me improve.
On the assets: yeah, unfortunately I don't do 3D modeling myself, so I work with what's available and adapt as best I can. The campus building exterior is a good example of that.
For the "trope-y" characters, that's actually intentional to some extent. I like starting from familiar archetypes and then twisting them to try to bring something new to it. Glad it works for some and not for others, that's kind of the game with tropes.
The Sarah model is funny, it really seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it thing, I get very split reactions on her specifically.
On the dialogue feeling a bit wooden early on, that's fair, and I think it's actually a combination of two things: my writing itself improving over time, but also the early translations just not being as good as the more recent ones. I'll probably end up redoing those earlier translations at some point.
On the Being a DIK comparison: makes total sense honestly, I think the creator and I probably grew up with the same love for 2000s teen movies, so some overlap is bound to happen. One thing that always bugged me in BaD though was that the parties never quite felt like real parties. I put a lot of effort into making the party scenes actually feel like a student party, with the extra spice you'd expect from an AVN on top of that. If you liked Chapter 2, you should be in for a treat with Chapter 6 then.
For the smaller stuff (Julie's bio, the free roam indicator, phone messages being easy to miss), I'll take a look at improving the user experience there.
Really appreciate you taking the time to write all this out, and thank you for the support on Patreon too.
You didn't oversell chapter 6. That party is a thing of beauty. You really nailed the big party feeling. I also really liked how the different sections have completely different vibes. Also obviously a ton of character progression that felt very natural. Yeah, I really enjoyed that one.
Am I right to assume you're planning two ways to follow the Grace route? So far I only tried to annoy the living fuck out of her, expecting exactly what happened at the end of chaper 6. (Trying not to spoil for others here.) If there's a non-antagonistic way, it's probably more of a slow burn, I guess.
In my last playthrough I took a more conscious look at the minigames. I mostly like them. Exception is the treadmill minigame. That one stinks, sorry. Also you need to progress towards it with the mouse button and then switch to the keyboard when the timer starts. Meh.
Block Breaker would benefit from a different background while actually playing. Something more uniform with more contrast against the ball. As it is I sometimes lose focus of the ball, especially with the portal blocks. Feels a little unfair.
The Beer Pong game feels harder than probably intended. I have a really fast computer, but it seems like there's still some input lag that makes it harder. I guess it's not exactly what Ren'Py was made for. Making the "hit boxes" just a smidge bigger might already alleviate it and make it feel more skill based.
I really like the general idea and implementation of the Blackjack game. Something about the end condition seems rather weird, though. I must have played it dozens of times now, because I wanted to see how specific endings play out like mc wins or Molly wins etc. Almost every time when I expect the game to end, there's a tie and two or three characters roll back. That happens about ten times in a row until the game ends which makes it somewhat annoying. Also in the end it feels almost random who wins.
The tests have two broken/misleading questions:
1st test 12th question "Who invented the steam engine?" There's no single person who invented the steam engine and when James Watt came around it was already well invented.
3rd (?) test 1st question "What is the most spoken language in the world?" Asked like that the correct answer is English. To match the current answer the question would have to be "What language has the most native speakers?"
Thanks a lot, really glad Chapter 6 landed the way I hoped, that party was a lot of work so it's nice to hear it paid off.
On the minigames, yeah they're not perfect, I'll go back over the older ones at some point to improve them.
For Beer Pong specifically, the hitboxes are actually already enlarged. The real issue is that Ren'Py's tick system is tied to FPS, so if I use a timer other than Ren'Py's own, it starts lagging instead. I've set different speeds for 30 and 60 FPS to compensate, but I'd need to do that for every possible screen/refresh rate combination, which isn't really feasible right now. Still looking for a better solution, but I don't have one yet.
For Blackjack, it's just a pretty random game by nature, some rounds are quick, some drag on for a while, that's mostly luck of the draw rather than a bug. Early on I hadn't added the mechanic where you can come back in with a blackjack, and rounds ended up being way too quick, so this is actually an improvement over that.
You're right about the tests too, I'll fix the wording on those questions.
To answer your question without spoiling anything, yes, there will be two ways to go with Grace.