this is the newest version, and i believe that it should work.
Game starts successfully, although it was unexpectedly slow considering the small size of the game.
The main menu is a modal dialog but it
isn't always-on-top, which is a weird choice. You can alt-tab to the splash screen, but then Windows will just make angry DING noises until you switch back.
Options button does nothing, as noted by xyzabc198.
Closing the main menu is equivalent to clicking "New Game". The close button should probably be mapped to "Exit" ... or it could simply be disabled altogether. It's kinda silly that pressing Alt-F4 at the main menu would begin a game session instead of ending it.
Clicking Load and then manually closing the dialog crashes the game (saves.txt file not found). Clicking Load and then Cancel works ok.
Framerate is high and stable.
Time seems to be formatted h:m. h:mm (or hh:mm) would be more familiar.
The schedule dialog uses Comboboxes. Restricted drop-down menus would be more appropriate, because you aren't expecting users to type in custom text.
Keyboard shortcuts (such as Spacebar to Pause/Unpause) would make the experience more convenient.
Maximizing the game window and then restoring it causes part of the UI to vanish. The buttons remain clickable, but most of them are permanently hidden.
Manual camera control might be a nice feature to include in the future, although the auto-tracking camera works well.
The basic gameplay activities (recruitment, assignment, income, payment) worked as expected. I haven't played long enough to comment on balance or difficulty. There doesn't seem to be anything for the player to
do at this stage; just setup a schedule and then fast-forward (unless you want to zoom in and watch the sex scenes).
The three colored squares under the character presumably mean something, but I don't know what it is.
Nitpick: characters' eyes should probably
close when they're asleep
If you haven't sunk
too much time into the project yet, then you might consider porting your assets and code onto a different platform, such as Unity. The DirectX and Visual C++ stuff has already caused some complications with deployment of your game, and it will tend to limit your userbase somewhat (e.g. mobile/tablet gamers are probably out of luck). Unity would accept much of your C# code as-is (although you'd need to reorganize the project files somewhat) and it would be fairly straightforward to create a scaleable UI with full support for windowed or fullscreen gameplay.
Even though the game runs without problems on my PC, I can make it crash on startup by specifying
Code:
<startup useLegacyV2RuntimeActivationPolicy="false">
in the config file. Similarly: if I delete the config file, then the game crashes on startup. My point is that you're currently working with a somewhat temperamental framework, and your project may still be young enough to be ported onto a more stable framework
without huge amounts of re-work. If you switch later on, then it's likely to be more painful.
