Hey, so i'm a long time lurker on this forum but your game seemed so promising i had to come out to give you some (hopefully useful) feedback. To start it off i want to say i love the art, it has that simplistic cartoonish appeal to it that i personally prefer over the more detailed style we usually see from eastern games. Also aside from few minor spelling mistakes, your writing and character design is really good. I was intrigued by the description and the screenshots, but when i played through the demo and the bartender minigame i was pretty much hooked. It's really refreshing to have some interesting mechanics within the game instead of the usual "talk to people and hope you eventually unlock some scenes" approach lot of devs take. So yeah, looking very good so far in my opinion! But to address some of your points:
1) The pace feels fine, if anything it was a little bit too fast, but that's not something most people complain about (that is, i was expecting more introductions and backstory at the beginning). The length of the lewd events was fine as well. The one thing that worries me is that it quickly fell into a pattern of "do work stuff at day, do investigations that lead to lewd events at night". While it's fine in the demo, it might get repetitive and predictable after a while. I think it's good to keep the frequency of the lewd events a bit unpredictable as the story progresses (maybe some evenings there are no lewd events, maybe some pop up during daytime), but i'm sure you already have a plan for how the story will progress.
2) The corruption was a bit weird in my opinion. You go from "Naive" to "Curious" and then already to "Horny"? To me horny is a temporary state you are in, but then again i'm not sure what you would replace it as
. I guess meaningless semantics aside, the corruption felt maybe a little too fast in the demo. I'm hoping there is a way for the player to control the rate of corruption, but i'm guessing the main progression of this game after completing the main quests will be to make May more corrupt? At least that's how i understand it from your flowchart, and the whole premise of the game not being a traditional "hero defeats evil demon" kind of game. I hope you consider adding multiple endings, from good ends to "bad ends" to validate the corruption as a secondary stat, because if increasing it is the main way to progress the game it might lose its meaning.
3) The pseudo-animations are short, but they add soo much despite their simplicity. Personally i love them, and i'm guessing they are relatively easy to animate relative to "proper" animations?
4) It seems like you are going for a "naive inexperienced girl" when it comes to May, and i have to say so far you are doing a great job. I don't really have much to say about her character, other than curious to see how she develops. I guess one thing that i like about her is how assertive she is, as opposed to the usual pushover female main-character.
5) For me it wasn't annoying finding out what you have to do next. I got stuck for maybe 2 minutes at the start trying to figure out why she is still saying she should get dressed when i was already wearing everything i could, only to find out that you have to switch out panties with shorts, but that was mostly due to my own stupidity i guess and the only instance where i got "stuck". I think it's important to remember that it shouldn't be super obvious what you have to do next either, as part of the fun is exploring and trying things out. If it gets too linear it can start to feel like you are just doing chores and you are being bounced around by the game telling you what to do, so definitely a balance to be struck.
6) As i mentioned before, the part time minigames are really refreshing for an RPG-maker game, and i hope there will be more of them. They are not too grindy or boring in my opinion, but i would like to see more randomised responses by the NPC's. I can understand that they can be challenging to implement, but i'm hoping the other minigames will be different than the bartender one. More variation means less repetitiveness which means more fun for the player to explore. And also quantity < quality, i would rather you only have two part time minigames that are unique than five copies of the same bartender minigame.
So i guess all in all you have a very good thing going, and you should just keep heading in the same direction. If you are able implement all that you have planned you should have a really good product that plenty of people will be eager to throw money at. I guess one last thing i could do is point out the slight spelling errors:
When doing the bartender part-timer, after taking an order and delivering it, the customer NPC replies "Why it took you so long?!", maybe correct it to "Why did it take so long?!"
The first request you can take at the notice board is called "unStable" with a capital S. To me it first looked like a character was out of bounds of the window or something, should be easy to fix this so it says "Unstable".
I think i spotted some more but i forgot to take note of where they were. Anyway, personally i'm already impressed with what you have to show and i know ill be following your work closely, so i'll be able to point them out later maybe
. Best of luck with the development process!
