The game looks like it has some legs to stand on but it needs some work.
I started the and managed to survive the 1st day. But because I felt like I understood how to play I restarted it. Now I can't survive the first day because Mom gets upset that no one ate, even with food on the fridge.
It doesn't matter if I'm being dumb, that shouldn't happen. You should not lose the game on the first day.
So I'd recommend streamlining the first few days, guide the players on what they should do. Don't expect them to find the NPC that tells them what to buy when they're not on the correct spot 100% of the time.
That's a bug.
I really
want to like this - I like the setting, the concept and the character models - but it's got some issues right now that don't fill me with enormous confidence in its future. And I'm not even talking about bugs!
- The "house management" stuff absolutely overwhelms your interactions with the other characters. There's no point trying to cheer them up in conversation when being cold for a couple hours and/or going hungry for one meal will have triple the impact of whatever the MC says to them. This isn't just a balance issue but a design issue; it's not visible right now but further down the line, having one stat (Happiness) that's strongly influenced by the state of the house and lightly influenced by character interactions is going to lead to situations where a MC who's an absolute asshole tyrant all the time - but has lots of money to keep the house well stocked and comfortable - gets treated exactly the same by the other characters as a character who's unfailingly attentive and sweet as an angel but is struggling to keep the lights on. One fix would be to break Happiness into two stats - their general Mood/Happiness, and their Affection/Love for [MC].
- The economics also seem to need some serious balancing, especially given how little money you're able to bring in (legitimately) at the beginning. Fixable, not even too surprising for an early release, but indicates the dev has a tendency towards grind-for-grind's sake. Anybody who's tried to play Superpowered can tell you how that can end up.
- There's also some RNG here, random rolls for various stat checks, which, again - see Superpowered (or worse yet, Superpowered 2) to know how poorly that can turn out. Always keep in mind that when you add RNG there's a bell curve of probability distribution - most folks will average out over time, but some unlucky fucker is going to get a ton of bad rolls and what is his experience of the game going to be like? Did you just make an already-grindy game 10x grindier for that poor bastard? What about somebody incredibly lucky, are they going to find the game pointlessly easy and cruise through stuff that was supposed to be challenging? And given it's Ren'Py: Are people just going to save-scum to get the right rolls, or are good rolls not that important? If the rolls aren't that important, are they really even necessary?
- There's continuity issues already. Your first convo with Stanley you literally *don't have the option* to tell him his favorite actress is your mom - you get the button, but choosing the option just makes the MC think "not a good idea, something something paparazzi" and takes you back to the same (fake) choice. But if you then trigger the Midnight_Data_Snack convo with Stanley *before* MeetingStanley_2 (which seems very easy to do!), then somehow Stanley already knows your Mom is an actress without you ever having told him. If we're already getting these kinds of issues cropping up when the game only has like, five events total, that doesn't bode well for a coherent narrative future.
- Likewise, if you UnRen it to see what's in there, you can find duplicates of the same Weather Forecast images in images/Misc/Miscest/Weather_forecast and in images/Scenes/Home/TV. Not a big deal to have a couple of duplicate images in there, but similar to the continuity issues - when the game is still this small, for the dev to already be losing track of little stuff like this, bodes poorly for the future.
Apologies to the dev if this comes across harshly. I'm not out to demoralize anybody. Like I said, I'd really like to see this become a good game, I think there's real potential here! That's why I'm disappointed to see structural issues emerging already.
I'll answer you last sentence first: don't worry about coming across as being too harsh. You're not being insulting, or even passive-agressive, so all that's left for me is to appreciate someone taking the time to produce such detailed feedback about my humble game
- I've always found "affection meters" a little weird. Take an imaginary setting of an incest porn game: You get a main character living with their relatives for 18 years, and suddenly the porn game kicks in and his relative's affection for him is at 0? I mean I understand this is made for balances purposes, and I'll get to that, but it always felt weird to me that you need to grind feelings to your relatives in a porn game setting, which is why I decided to ditch that affection meter and only leave the "mood" one. And that's something central in my game: what matters is being able to overcome the new challenges their situation makes them face, and that's all the mood bar represents. Are you able to heat yourself, feed yourself, etc... And once they're able to not think about the fact that they're in a crappy house in the middle of nowhere, then they're ready to get frisky. Now as you said, once you have the possibility of the main character either being an angel or a tyrant in the way they behave towards their relatives, there needs to be some reflection in the way the NPCs react towards the MC as a result, and that's where I think this is a non-issue, or something easily fixable on my part: I don't think I've made it possible for the MC to be an actual tyrant. If you take the "first breakfast" event the first "meaner" choice is to say that you didn't sleep well, and the second one, when you say Emily could eat her cereal with water, you end up saying you were kidding. Now for the balance part, yes, relationship between characters should be as important, or perhaps even more important than the gameplay itself. The effect the dialogue choices have on the characters should be way more represented on the tenant's mood, and the food, way less. My thought process was perhaps too simple when I came up with that. Basically, what I thought was "Whatever the situation is, if you don't manage to put food on your table, things are getting very dark." and that's why I made the food having so much importance in the game, and perhaps that was a mistake.
- I mean, honestly, the money isn't that important right now. You could play through all the events without working a single hour if you know where to go. Now obviously that's not every player, but if you *do* find Eve (which is there 2 hours every day btw, at 9AM and 10AM) she gives you a way to get food for 2 whole days for 17 dollars each time... Now I understand this is scary, grind sucks and all that, but in the future (the near future, as in it was supposed to come out on this update) horny scenes and money will get intertwined, basically nullifying the grind, or at least making the graphic design job secondary.
- Yep, absolutely, but the way I've made stat checks for scenes as of 0.3 is you just get a "different" outcome when losing/winning a stat check, not necessarily a good/bad one. For example for the dishwashing event, win the second stat check: you just get the bonus from winning the first one (which would have been an energy improvement, if I had the time to properly implement it), lose the second stat check: mood - for Angelina, but you get a silly/horny render. It's really a win-win. Now to really make that system less frustrating, I could easily implement a way to check if the check has been lost before, and make the chances a 100% for the next time...
- Yeah, that's things I've already talked about (and made people unhappy), but basically right now I have many other things to take care of, and writing has only like a third of the brain power I allocate to the game, so things like that get overlooked. Again, I've said that before, but once I'm done with all those basic management systems, (which is closed to happening with all those I've implemented in 0.3), I'll have way more time to build an interresting (and coherent) story. See for yourself, there is only one main story event in that update (midnight data snack) and several major new systems...
- Compare 0.2 to 0.3, and you'll see how many new lines of code/rewrote code/new images there are. What would have been surprising is that everything would have been squeaky clean, really.
I hope I'm making sense, thanks to my poor english, the fact that we're talking about technical subjects and me thinking rather fast as there are many things to cover, there is a big chance that I sound like a lunatic
