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This game had some really promising artworks, so I decided to try it out.

And I have to say, I wasn't disappointed. The backgrounds have a vibrant and really pleasant art style, especially for skies and space. The character artworks are also great and I really liked the textbox with the star constellations. Although they don't make their appearance yet, Cygnus and Scorpius would be my favorites.

The story has an interesting premise and I would like to find out more about the lore. The characters are written a bit weird...most notably Stephanie. I don't want to spoil anything, but let's just say that her later appearances do fit into how the story evolves, but still seem a bit forced, even more than what may be justified. The "Stephanie ending" also decreases the immersion and seems more like a fourth-wall break that wasn't thought through.

There are still a few grammar and spelling errors, although they're all rather small and don't distract from the messages themselves too much.

In the "About" section and afair in a part of the game, the numbers only show up as rectangles on my PC. I guess I'm missing a font?


However, I can't deny that something was really distracting me from all that interesting art and lore: the soundtrack. Full disclaimer: I'm a bit sensitive when it comes to that, so others may not share my experience.

The compositions themselves (i.e. what the songs would look like if written as sheet music) have some real potential, but the actual audio that played didn't live up to that. Especially the guitar (recorded by yourself?) was a bit sloppy - noisy recording, out of tune on some notes, notes that are missed/inaudible or even too loud and timing issues. The noise is something you probably can't do much about right now without changing your setup, so I'll leave that be. But the other parts are mostly based on the players themselves. From my early days of playing guitar, I know that it can be difficult to keep time with tracks that don't use percussion/drums to guide, but since some kind of guiding track was also audible on some guitar recordings (probably bleeding from your headphones), I'm not sure if suggesting a metronome would be that much help.

More practicing, recording multiple takes and then picking the best one or even editing the best parts together is usually a good idea . But for the time being, you might find this free software guitar plugin useful. It's a pretty well sampled guitar and - like every VSTi - can take MIDI, so you can play it like a piano. Besides replacing your real guitar, you could also use it as a guiding track by programming your compositions with perfect timing and then playing and recording along to it to see how good your timing is. After that, you can still mute the virtual guitar track and only include your real one - the result would probably be a better timed recording that is still your own performance.

Apart from the guitar, the piano and mallet instrument timing is not perfect, but decent enough. However, the drums that play upon returning home after finding Leo are pretty jarring. I would really recommend hard quantization of that MIDI track and, if that doesn't help, arranging the single notes manually so that they align with the grid. That type of drum machine (808) doesn't need the "live" feel of playing them manually and is traditionally programmed in a pretty mechanic way. If the drum track is tighter, the guitar recordings would probably benefit from it a lot.

The mixes could use some more reverb, I think that would suit the rather dreamy compositions pretty well and is pretty much a given in a space setting. The loop points could be a bit smoother, but they're not too distracting - given that many hobby composers tend to ignore that issue, you did a decent job on that!

Out of curiosity: what kind of hardware/software did you use for the soundtrack?


Overall, judging by the artwork and premise as presented on this page, it would definitely be a 5/5. But the other issues are definitely something that should be adressed, since the difference in quality is unfortunately noticeable and takes a lot away from what could have been a pretty amazing experience.

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Mmm I think the characters being "elongated triangles" in the menu, isn't an issue of the font not being on your pc. Since Renpy (I assume this is what you used,  RainbowJellie, to create Starcrossed) "bakes" the fonts into the project. I suspect its because whatever font is used, it doesn't actually contain the character glyphs for numerals.

As for the music, the only thing that bothered me about it was the long instances of there being absolutely no music whatsoever. 

In general though, I did enjoy the demo so far RainbowJellie! I found it very lighthearted despite the seriousness of earthly destruction and bodily injury. I don't know if that was intentional or not, but I think  it's because the tone was very cartoony...I even got alil Sailor Moon vibe to the entire thing (That's a GOOD THING! imo anyways ^_^ ). Cute!