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?"
brutalbuzzler
Recent community posts
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.
You may have a different view on it, because you know the mechanics and can say that's how it objectively works. Players have to make assumptions based on the effects, so until they have figured out the mechanics (if ever) their reaction is more emotional than rational. First time I encountered skill degradation I already knew it might take multiple days to increase a skill and I couldn't tell what the actual degradation value was, because I didn't remember what the previous skill value was. At that point I may or may not have succumbed to the temptation to look at the source code. ;)
Now obviously(?) I'm not saying I've got it all figured out. That people might consider an indicator "threatening" is a valid point and something that didn't occur to me, so there's that. I'm just offering my perspective, but at the same time I encourage you to keep making the game you want. I'd rather have a game with a couple things I'd consider flaws than a game with all the edges filed off.
My main issue with the skill degradation is that it feels unfair. 1. The game doesn't tell me where it's gonna hit and it shouldn't require me to remember something like that. At least give me an indicator which skill(s) I didn't train for the longest time to give me a chance to counter the effect. 2. Since classes and training have (pseudo)random variants (which is a good thing btw), there's no sure way to counter the effect of skill degradation even if I did knew which skill to train. That makes it objectively unfair in my book.
IMHO that's really what it boils down to. It's perfectly fine to make something (somewhat) challenging, but even with random aspects the player should stay in control or rather NOT feel like it's out of their control.
Tbh The Entrepeneur left me pretty disappointed, so I was a bit wary. This is a much better game, though. Better dialog, better characters and better story so far. Again some parts of the story are pretty weak bordering on bizarre, though. Where TE had the silly "fulfilling your dad's dream" thing this one has "you totally need to get into the library after 10pm and the alternative is to get your own hourse". Yeah, right.
My first major criticism would be that the altruistic/neutral/selfish paths are unbalanced; you essentially need to act like a raging asshole to get into the selfish path and even neutral already requires a lot of asshole behavior. The other criticism is that decisions are very opaque. In many cases you need to quicksave and then try the different options to see what path you just selected.
Also to be willing to defend "guilty" people is not a selfish decision. That's just emphatically false. "Guilty" is already the wrong word to begin with, because that's just one possible result of a trial and that doesn't even begin to touch the question of "guilty of what exactly?" And even when it's pretty clear that the accused has done what they're accused of, it's still critically important that a defense attorney makes sure the government stays within the boundaries of the law. None of that means the defense attorney has any sort of personal affiliation to the defendant or that they somehow condone the defendant's acts.
So is this NTR or poly? I've seen people use both words, but we all agree those are two different things, right?
@Whispering Eye Games: Please please please add an info page or something to your Patreon page that explains what this even is and maybe an unblocked post now and then that gives new people a chance to see if there's actually something going on and to ask questions (some people keep posting on dead projects to keep at least some cash flowing). As it is, I just see a bunch of blocked posts and no way to get any info when I look at your Patreon.
Sorry for the necro, but truer words and such. I wouldn't even call it a pet peeve, because that would imply a reaction that's at least somewhat excessive and I would argue that it's not. It's just calling things as they are.
"No, MC! We cannot! You're my roommate!"
and I'm like
"Look, I don't wanna sound dismissive, but I'm gonna need a little more context to understand your concerns."
Good game. I like it. Both the art and the gameplay are different in a good way. I like the story so far as well. The current ending of the Gwen storyline is frigging mean, though. ;)
What I find difficult is that there's basically no feedback on whether you're moving the MC stats in the right direction or not. Not until the first event of the cup and to a lesser degree the exams. I was thinking about it and maybe something like rankings? Three rankings that give a rough idea if the MC is in a good state for each tier of the event. Not too transparent of course. The DeLuxe version would have mini-versions of the cup events that you can do against other students. Instead of the sections of the mind thing, you could have challenges like balance a vase on your head while standing on one leg and magically solving a puzzle box.
PS: Not a huge fan of the GUI restrictions. No rollback, no quicksave and maybe the worst, no right-click to save. Meh.
Will you keep the version here updated to the same as on Patreon? I'd be more than willing to show some "financial appreciation", but many creators seem to treat itch.io as an afterthought. I'm not a huge fan of Patreon subscriptions, or rather leaving them running, so I'd prefer paying here.
Love the oldschool adventure vibe btw. Dunno if that's what you're actually aiming for, but that's what it's doing for me and it works. ;)
Nice update. Me likes. Dunno if you like feedback. If you do, novel incoming. ;)
- Uncle Buck's letter (when you first enter the lobby) has Riley running the diner and Jade running the coffeeshop.
- The new time of day system is simple and elegant. I like it. You should probably remove all explicit calls to advance_time (except for sleep and wait), though, especially if they're called after use_energy which seems to be always. As it is e.g. doing repair work in the motel in the morning pushes you right into the evening, even though there's still 60 energy left.
- Giving gifts to Summer or Diana is broken. The related section is missing the jumps to the gift labels and the gifted_today flags aren't set either. The actual gift sections are all black.
- After the first time Biscuit isn't shown in the player_room anymore.
- In the evening/night Biscuit doesn't line up with the counter in the lobby.
- Buck's floormat inventory item isn't protected as well as some of the new items.
- There's some duplicate dialogue when entering the coffeeshop.
- The tiered dialogue system is pretty nice. Would be even nicer to have a generic talk as a repeatable option at the end of the tiers if the relationship isn't high enough to advance into the next tier or if you're in the last tier already. Also with the gifts system - which I like - and other options to improve relationsships it's easy to advance to the next tier and miss dialogue. Would be nice if the system showed all dialogue first, before advancing to the next tier. Just something like 'if rel_lou < 15 or lou_t1_seen < 3' in the nav conditions.
- Drinking coffee gives a Riley relationship boost and raises the risk to miss Riley dialogue. Would be better if that only gave energy. Unless you change something so you can't miss dialogue anymore.
- Would be nice if all the gift options in the grocery menu had 'and not has_item("...")' conditions. As it is, you can't tell what items you already have and possibly waste money while not actually buying things. Also buying something should jump back into the item selection and not the main store menu.
- Would be nice if the Sleep action on the map screen would switch to showing the player_room instead of just a black screen.
- The V2 barista minigame adds the ingredients in the wrong order, at least I'd expect to fill a cup from the bottom, not the top. Would also be cool if the ingredients snapped back to their grid after use. Or actually, I'd prefer if the ingredients were just buttons tbh. Also labels or hover effects would be nice on V2 btw. Dunno if people who didn't play V1 and/or aren't in the know about coffee stuffs could e.g. tell milk foam and whipped cream apart. It is a nice minigame in any case, though, beats any of those frigging match 3 games by a mile.
- The Velvet Curtain visits are counted every time when you enter the menu, so entering once, using the available non-naughty options and leaving already counts as 3 visits. Really makes more sense to count in loc_gloryhole instead. Might make sense to differentiate between visiting and actually participating btw.
- A couple type guest checking in with a single name is a bit weird. I've replaced line 303 in the motel_guests file with this snippet. Makes it a little nicer. ;)
$ _partner = ""
if _new['type'] == 'couple':
$ _partner = _(" and [_random.choice(GUEST_FIRST_NAMES)]")
"Checking in: [_new['name']][_partner!i], [_new['desc']]."