itch.io

this is a really nice gift to have this Christmas for such a rough year

I know most people here are commenting on the guys or the main character but can I just point out how great your GUI is? Your transitions and extra animations added in are also very eye catching and pleasant. Don't get me wrong, I'm also looking forward to your full release and have fun with the story but I just really appreciate the extra effort put in with the presentation. Really, it's such a good job lol

So, I'm not sure if you realize this, but there's sort of a way to glitch the game into getting perpetual energy/currency. If you catch a 'fully fledged forest' habit on fire, it will regrow while it's still on fire and give the player currency while continuously burning, regrowing, and burning again in a perpetual cycle.

You can do this by having a flower patch by a forest and catching the flower patch on fire. The fire will spread to the forest and then be in an endless loop of burning, growing, and earning energy.

I'm also one of the people that made an account just to leave a (lengthy) comment.

===My comment will possibly have SPOILERS, please avoid reading if you dislike them===

So I want to start off with just saying that unlike almost everyone else here, I came into this game completely blind. I never knew about your project and just happened to stumble across it from englishotomegames.com on the 17th of November. The concept seemed interesting and the art looked good. (I'm one of those shallow players that even if the story is good I can't really enjoy the VN if the art is bad.)

Hoo boy was I in for a treat. Like I said, I went in 100% blind so I had NO idea who was supposed to be the "bad guy", who were the love interests, how many love interests there were, what type of choices (or the fact that there would be choices at all), NOTHING. On my initial play through I thought Lacey was going to be the throw away lackey character, Rylen was going to be a LI, Ernol I suspected to be a villian, Haron the guy who betrays you (but regrets it later and comes back to the light side), and Duliae the supportive but still underhanded background character. The only one I actually managed to get right was Vadeyn as the noble sacrifice guy.

I think because of my misconceptions about most of the cast I was really able to enjoy Ebon Light as a unique experience that was much different from other visual novels or otome games. There was a lot of stuff I wasn't expecting - Haron "rescuing" the MC (is this guy serious...?), the "flirting" between Lacey and MC (attempting to agitate him and failing, multiple times, only for him to believe I'm flirting with him and being ok(?) with it), Vadeyn's sisters and (possibly Cali) shipping the MC with him and him getting embarrassed, were some things on my first play through that jumped out.

There's actually a lot of other stuff I wanted to point out that I really enjoyed but I fear my post was way too long and just rambled. I had to go back and delete it just so I could try to remain more focused. I have to say that it's very impressive you did this all on your own, and I think it really shows in the world of Ebon Light that you as a dev had a lot of limitations and worked with them. It's a shame because I think honestly, your world building is superb and with more resources you would have a really immersive world right up there with some of the bigger gaming companies. 

I know you said you are done with EL for now and are eager to move on to other projects since you've worked on this one for so long, but I hope in the future you will revisit this game and expand on it a little further. There is a lot that was teased or briefly mentioned and I found myself wondering about it. I do wish there was an dictionary of some sort for all the elven language we come across in the game. I thought Lacey's pet name for the MC was him being mean/teasing the same way he called her rabbit. I tried googling it to see what it meant but I didn't get any results. It wasn't until I saw Haron and Ernol use it on their routes that I saw it was actually affectionate. There was some other questions about characters back stories or general lore I also had questions about that I wish were expanded upon. There's actually a lot of details I found about EL outside of the game from looking at old comments and posts from a few years back. Not sure if it the case of things changing to fit a better narrative for the story or if things got cut in order to control the scope of the game.

Overall, I was pleasantly surprised and wasn't expecting myself to become this addicted to an indy game. For two weeks now I've been playing this game for hours every day and googling whatever I can trying to learn more. Really, it's too generous of you to have this game for free and I hope anyone that says they are a fan will support you with a donation. Between your storytelling and your art, I think its easy to say you have a gift. If you do decide to make anymore games, I'm sure they will just as good or better than EL, and I'm sure there are plenty of people that would really enjoy the games you make. You did a great job.