First Demo Out! (Version 0.1)
Added 2017-02-14 17:25:52 +0000 UTCSo... yeah. First demo out and all. Here's a list of things that have already been included:
- Up to Day 3 available (Not much in terms of branching plot yet, most of it is character introduction).
- Two tennis matches (Hey, I won't kid myself but maybe, juuust maybe, someone will actually play this game for the tennis matches?!)
- One sprite for each character major character (3 total, that's all I could actually commision with my measly college student's salary).
The demo can be found at the top of the page. I'll try to link it to the posts when I can just understand how patreon works (urgh!).
Comments
Okay, I was able to finish that last day. As I was about to say "Gee, these tennis matches are fun, but it'd be so much better if I had some input over those". I'm gonna be very formal, like Shoichi would want me to be... .... HOLY FUCKING SHIT ! THAT LAST MATCH WITH THE TIMED CHOICE PROMPTS WAS AWESOME ! That, was amazing, granted it's a bit ruined by the ability to save or rollback, but this coupled with the tennis themes, you made those moments really stand out, I probably wouldn't play a VN just for that, but the tennis matches are great distractions. One thing though I have to complain about, is one music track in particular, it's a piano + drum track, and 90% of the melody is the same 3 notes repeated til the end of time, it's almost as bad as Joke's End from Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga, very aggravating, I wanted to turn off the music entirely at that point. That said the rest is appropriate. I also figured out why Jun looks a bit weird compared to the others ; checking your banner, your sprites have been downscaled for Renpy's base native resolution on your game (which is 800x600 I think, or 1024x768 ?), they all look blurrier, Jun definitely took a hit, cause he looks fine on the banner. Some VNs using Renpy are actually working using widescreen, without black bars on the side, like Sins & Paradise by Wolfstar, so you can definitely increase the resolution by changing some settings, although that might render the .RAR file bigger. The levels of insanity (the good kind though) and reactions are Asian Level without being too much (Jun is so adorable coupled with the MC's reactions), it's so much fun. I'd really hate if that VN ends up being completely scrapped, but I'd understand if you feel like giving up too, college is a priority and unfortunately there's not a whole lot of people knowing about your VN either, that last point really sucks because I truly believe it deserves attention. Best of luck, hoping to see more !
Vic Viper
2017-04-23 22:43:01 +0000 UTCHi, I've seen that VN pop-up on U18Chan, and looking at the state of that page, I tried to give it a bit of a plug through Discord on the Extracurricular Activities VN server, although I don't know if it'll amount to a lot. Gah, tried to push "enter" to skip a line and it posted the comment, I'll embellish my comment, especially since I'm making this comment as I'm playing the game. I really like the characters so far, although the idea of them living in Japan, speaking in perfect English, and have a professor "teaching English" (not even English classes, just teaching English) is kinda head scratching to me, but nothing alarming it's just a little thing I have to adapt to, by the way, languages and nationalities in the English language always begin with a capital letter ("Japanese" , not "japanese"). Since I'm not an English native, I mostly tend to shrug off mistakes that aren't blatant ones, so so far I haven't seen a lot ("paid attention" not "payed attention", "payed" is used as a nautical term). That said there was one mistake on the tennis court regarding one serve, the ball bounced in the wrong side, should've been counted as a fault serve : <a href="https://i58.servimg.com/u/f58/11/95/28/76/sans_t10.jpg" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">https://i58.servimg.com/u/f58/11/95/28/76/sans_t10.jpg</a> The UI needs some tweaking, it's not that bad since I can still read the text fairly easily, but it needs a black transparent background, so for some later scenes, we won't have problems reading the text. The main character seems well defined, I would've definitely not talked to the teacher that way. When a character is well defined, like Chase from Echo, it usually lead to having very few choices just for the sake of character consistency, the lack of choice doesn't appear like a problem then, but mind this if you want to add choices later, it could either screw or embellish the MC's personality. As for the artwork, apart from the tiger's face (from afar it looks like he has glasses, and he looks kinda derpy to me, though it grew on me), I really like it. Problem when I shared it with other people on the EA server is that when I got reactions, some people stated "they're too twinkish" or things like that, of course since EA is made by CursedMarked everything is muscular (though toned down in his VN it's still a little much). The art style is fine by me here though, and I can sometimes appreciate people with smaller body frame, there's a place for that, especially when their personality can shine through... and dammit I'VE BEEN HAD BY THE HUSKY/WOLF CHILDHOOD/BEST FRIEND AGAIN. (Kouya from Morenatsu, Spencer from Extracurricular Activities, Sousuke from Lagoon Lounge 1-3 [the least worst character from this series], and now Shoichi). The dialogue is mostly well written and got me to chuckle more than a few times. Shoichi : "You're already starting to smell kinda ripe." Vic : "Gee, thanks for the delicacy." Shoichi : "Okay, lemme rephrase that. Dude, you fucking stink. Don't you shower ? Vic : "Much better." That one was golden. I've only finished the first day so far though, maybe I'll come back to add a few comments as I'll make progress through your VN, but there's one last thing I wanna talk about... Your Patreon hasn't been generating any money, and this VN seems relatively unknown so far, it's been two months since the first demo. So far I haven't seen anything wrong about it, I know it's tough since you aren't well known and don't have a big name to back your VN up (Extracurricular Activities has Dyne, you could say Blackgate has Darkgem, and Project Aego and Echo are related to Blackgate's dev team), what you need is someone to advertise your VN, really, so far I don't see why your VN should still be doing that badly, when blatantly horny and badly written products like Lagoon Lounge are so successful they can get a sequel. Don't give up, it'll be slow, but eventually it should pick up the pace !
Vic Viper
2017-04-23 18:25:15 +0000 UTC
