Hey there To&Fro. Cheers for the detailed feedback indeed. It's good to get some player input on this kind of stuff from a variety of sources and we take it seriously indeed. Somethings to think on here for sure.
If you don't mind, I'll give a few points of rebuttable for the sake of explanation (not argument) and maybe we'll talk our way into interesting specific points/ideas to take away as we work on this month's new version. Let me jump in:
Okay, I have some feedback for you. The gameplay is... odd; even for a Ren'py style game. I eventually got it figured out how to move the girls around for optimal effect, got through how to handle the 'random' sabotage stuff, but the story-line sabotage stuff is somewhat frustrating with the choices given.
There is little sexual content in the game no matter how hard I push things one way or another. You get some topless shots, the secretary scene with the competition and the major sabotage scene (which only cursorily engages the main character) and that's about it. Lots of tease shots with the main characters, nothing significant though. This looks more like a game that is attempting to be mainstream rather than erotic by using dialog and action as the most risque content.
I'll keep trying different variations of choices to see if I can unlock something I'm missing but I've gone through 4 times now in the public version and not seeing much adult content, so if that was supposed to be in the game, it's really difficult to get to.
As a game, it was definitely challenging to figure out how the system worked (thus my odd comment) but by the end of the first time through, I got it. The second time and on it wasn't all that difficult but still fun to see if I could optimize the results. Suggestion here would be to tie the reputation closer to income. I had Noemi's joint at max 5 stars and the competition with a tiny sliver of 1 star. That would mean lots of customers and an increased menu value for Noemi, the other guy would have to be laying off staff, especially with poor food.
Another suggestion, when doing "team building" stuff, both the team member AND Noemi should get the +bonus to the cited area; I wouldn't reduce the rest much more, you should encourage the team building over the individual building. Along the improvement vectors, sections should be there to improve all the team members stats. The instructions say you need to increase nerve which can apparently only be done by making ballsy (sometimes stupid) decisions. I get that but things like poker or even the car wash could also provide opportunities for nerve increase, with consequences of course. These are set to be repeatable (couldn't get to Stage 2 of any of them no matter how high the stat got) but that seems like more of a flaw than an advantage after a point. This is actually the best place to let you do your character personality change and customization, but we get the same scenes over and over.
While the main story-line is important to keep pushing forward, the side stories actually are where the game is at and what makes it the most fun.
So, you're doing a lot of stuff very well but the game does need some improvement. Maybe this is still 'early days' in the game and I'm expecting too much but being $90K+ in the hole and 90+ days into the game, I'm not sure what the play horizon is supposed to be... 2 years? Not sure here, so maybe I'm expecting it to be faster moving when you don't intend it to be. I'm all for a slower moving game, I just am not getting a good feel for the pacing, sorry if this is all my mistake in mis-reading the pacing.
Okay, I'm going to amend my above comment slightly but not edit it.
Going through on the 5th time I was able to uncover something higher than an "R" rating, however, it was working in a counter intuitive fashion from the 'norm' of these games. That was a bit refreshing in and of itself, but it was by making choices that didn't quite live up to the initials Nice Time for Roo the game has built into it! LOL!
So I'm going to try out some other unintuitive combinations and see if I can find out other interesting scenes.
I'm now thinking this first 4 months is 'early days' of the game, it just seems to spin that way to me at the time being. It doesn't seem to have as much development time put into it as Agent Romanova does, and it moves slower with a more methodical nature. So, if you like double-thinking yourself "Is this a good choice?" this is a clever game. It doesn't actually turn out exactly how you think given the selection options. That could be good or bad. Bioware is famous for this kind of "Hey, that's not the direction I thought this would go!" kind of stuff, which makes it interesting.
Story/Pacing/Development Points:
- I get the impression you are playing the Public version, which would be v0.8, yeah? I think that's a little bit of the problem you are facing, and the early weakness in our development. Our early versions were focused on getting the main story to the point all the girls were present and strengthen the base of the gameplay. That took us to v0.7 to do. Now we are focused on Character arcs with each Build (Beck was v08-v0.9, Damon v0.10), so we can get into the sex and the side stories. We would have liked to get there sooner, but we go at our current max pace as it is. I'd like to think some of the pacing and other points are alleviated some by v0.10 and getting better. Still, we have more to do, that's true. Lots of sex to ramp up to and add, good times to enjoy in both story and kink indeed.
- The game's scope grew pretty big, so yeah, it is still in early days I would say. About 25%ish done, especially in the gameplay area (see below). The early days still have content to get as well as more of the side arcs waitresses get their content added passed Scene 1-2 of their arc, so as we build it up, we aim for it to be easier to find content too. In regards to AoH getting more focus, it's not really the case, they get about the same, it's just Noe is on a different scale now.
- Also, yes, we do think we are doing something a bit different tot eh regular kind of "Make the girl fail to get the lewds" kind of game. We do hope that comes off as good thing rather than a bad one, even it its not expected for all players. If we can make it clearer though, that would make it better for all, right?
Gameplay Points:
- The gameplay is a little different yeah, but we are trying to make something more than just a visual novel, break a little new ground and be engaging too. That said, for sure we like to know when people find it tricky to grasp. We don't want to go overexplaining things to players, instead trying to be simple but clear enough and make it feel like it's part of the game (like on the Tutorial boards), but we know how the game is supposed to work from the inside out, rather than a players experience. It's hard to get people to nail down what it is they actually do find it hard to grapple with when it starts, so it's very helpful to get those details to improve on.
- The pacing of the debt reduction, and by extension the scene unlocks, picks up between versions and as we add more outcomes. For example, now in v0.11 (upcoming) you can get enough Nerve to unlock Lv3 outcomes, so we will be adding Waitress ones to start. You'll be able to bring in up to $100 (plus Cooking bonus, plus Rep bonus multipliers) from $50, and the daily average will be up from about $30ish to $50ish when Noe unlocks them. It's this kind of incremental content increase that each game adds, that we would like to do more of / do better with, but these kinds of things should help make the point you make about the Rep/Earnings interplay more prominent. Exponentials and all that.
- If you are playing a version less than v0.10, then yeah you'll have seen a lot of repeat scenes in the Day Off. We added a batch to up it by 70% content last time so now there is more than 1 for most of the activites (Yoga and Poker are up to 4, Car Wash 3 for example). That section has been out most undeserved so far, it's true, but sadly Gameplay CGs come at a premium at the expense of story scenes... you know? Anyway, we do agree, it needs more to do and find for sure.
- The team building point is a good one particularly. I do see why Noe would be ripe for a bonus in some ways, but this is more of a structural and balancing issue than a intuitive one. At the moment the game works with the idea that 20 is the cap for all the stats, it may increase as time/need dictates, but for now it's 20. Increasing Noe in line with the other girls makes her too much of being head and shoulders above, and takes away the need to work her up or work up her team (which will be more of an impactful time choice when they have more content to find, and so will need to be waitressing more and having Noe fill in on other jobs). I feel if you get +1 Open Mind to Noe for sitting in the park with Kriem, who also gets a bonus, then Noe alone would need to get 2 Open Mind to balance things so it's not pointless to do, which halves the room we have to play with stat building, or drives up the stat cap a lot, and the derived game-play values (having 40 Romance would mean 2000% Tips earns when doing cooking proactively with max rep... gets crazy fast, right?). Honestly though, while it's small changed with big effects, things like this are where I am most curious as to how the game couple be improved, so I am open to things, just have to think them out carefully, you know?
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Anyways... Sorry for the bit of a ramble. Like I said, we do appreciate the feedback and the time you took to put it all down. We just got off of a very long release Crunch and are moving back to Noemi, so I'm a little cloudy in the head right now, so forgive me if I missed some points or went astray. Untimely I'm pumped you played it as many as 5 times and liked it that much to do so. Here's hoping that improvement efforts, more versions and time make it even better for you and for all. Lets see if we can't tease out some of these points a bit more and make it so!
