Lemma Soft Forums

Title Kiss From Cupid
Writer/TERRIBLE Programmer Agent-J
Art mao space and Kaikei Sozai Mise for background, navy for the doll set (that I'm hoping I was allowed to alter)
Genre Visual Novel -- Romance

Just a quick demo of what I've been working on.
It's definitely GxB, though there's some elements of BxG (from the perspective of the female character).
The art's all free resources (minus the splash and menu screens), so please excuse any issues with them.
The demo's just a short episode to see how the gameplay and script works for other people. The ending's also roughly plotted out, but the part in between might end up quite long.
None of the sprites are anything but pure static. I'll have to at least work up some with expressions soon. The sprites finally have expressions now!

The basic story is that the main character Freya's family was cursed centuries ago. They can't find their true love until they help an unspecified number of people find love. Freya at least starts helping people purely for selfish reasons, but she'll grow as a character and matchmaker over the course of the story.

CHARACTERS

Freya/MC: The protagonist of the game who's family has been cursed for generations. At the start, she's a selfish, unmotivated character, though she can be nice at times. Knows absolutely nothing about sports, but is an avid fan of classic movies.

Brent: Freya's neighbour, he gets rather annoyed by all her complaints about the curse and 'true love'. Can be helpful, but only on his own terms.

Izzy: The loud bubbly girl in the first 'chapter'. Has a large crush on Vince.

Vince: The soccer team's "star midfielder". Has only dated quiet girls in the past.

Statistics:

The game contains 301 screens of dialogue.
These screens contain a total of 2761 words,
for an average of 9.2 words per screen.
The game contains 4 menus.

DEMOS




Any feedback at all would be fantastic!

I just finished the demo, and thought it was very cute. It's definitely a decent idea, and has quite a bit of potential. The execution was just a little rough.

Since this demo seemed to be fairly solid, at least in comparison to some of the other demos that get posted here, I may as well touch on each aspect individually.

I love the art style. It's flat out adorable. On top of that, each of the characters was really distinct, and I could get a good idea of their personalities just by looking at them. The only complaint I have about the sprites is that they were far too small. They looked like small children when put up against the backgrounds. This fact increased their adorable levels even further, but somehow I doubt that's what you were going for.

I also liked the font you used, though the constantly changing position of it started to get a little distracting at times. I kind of understand the shift for the main character, since she has her face portrait in her window, but for everyone else (Such as the mom having her text all the way to the left without any padding, when no one else did), I'm not quite as certain about why you would make them any different.

It's a bit harder to judge the music, since I'm not sure if you were just using placeholders for the demo or not. Though, if they weren't, the selection at least seemed decent, and fit the rest of the mood fairly well. The main issue here is just how often the music suddenly just broke to silence. If you're going to stop the music for any reason, you should probably use a fade when you do so. The same applies to when one song changes to another.

I'm also not too sure what I think about stopping the music whenever a choice happens. It strikes me as a little unnecessary and jarring, but if you really want to keep it, using a fadeout will probably at least keep it from being a problem.

The writing was probably the roughest part, but not really because it was bad. The general writing quality was actually pretty good, both in narrative and dialogue. The problem here was probably more in the pacing. Everything seemed to go far too fast, and with very little transition from one event to the next, making it rather hard to follow at times. You may want to give the player a bit more time with each event and conversation, so that they can get to know the characters better, and understand exactly how they can get the relationships to work. Otherwise it's hard to feel involved in what's going on and become detached from the story.

This problem actually kind of transitions into the gameplay as well. Since everything happens so quickly, your decisions, or, what few of them you get in this demo, seem kind of meaningless. This seems especially weird considering you have a premise that has a lot of potential for player involvement. You're the one making the decisions that cause your friends relationships to fail or succeed, and your successes and failures can help determine how many people will want to go to you for matchmaking in the future. The fact that there seems to be almost no way to screw up, or at least stumble up a little, on the first job you're given is a bit strange, because of this.

It is entirely possible that you just intended the first case to pretty much solve itself, to give the player a basic idea for the system, but if that's the case, you might want to at least still throw a few more choices in, even if they don't do too much, so that it can at least feel tutorial-ish.

Another thing I found myself thinking while playing, was that the choice where you decide on what you're going to do with the rest of your day (Read, try to make friends, etc.) seemed more suited for a hub screen than a mid-scene decision. Perhaps you should decide on a place where the main character likes to go to think or rest, such as a classroom she eats lunch in, or her room, and have her go there once or twice a day to plan out her day. In case you're not quite sure what I mean, try looking at a few other dating sim style VNs (RE: Alistair is a good and easily accessible example), and see what they do when VN style scenes aren't happening.

The only other issue I saw with the demo was the lack of a fade in for backgrounds. Like with the music, have changes in scenes happen with a fade, rather than just making them pop in out of nowhere. It's less jarring that way.

I realize this was a rather long critique, but don't take it as the game being low quality. As I said at the beginning, I actually liked it quite a bit, and the only reason I'm able to be so thorough is that I can see how good it has the chance to be. With a few changes, we have a great game on our hands. Keep it up, and I'll probably be watching this.

Ah, I'm glad it's worth critiquing. Especially to the degree you did. It makes taking the demo and reworking it much easier when you know what issues other people are seeing. I owe you a million more thanks than I can actually post here.

I only wish I could take credit for the sprites. They're from a doll set I've been tinkering with for a few months, so making them ended up only taking a short amount of time. The set definitely has some issues, both with the size of the sprites and the general androgyny of the set. That the characters ended up being fairly distinct is a relief though.

The coding issues are still going to be a problem for me. I think I've figured out most of the padding issue now at least, so the font shouldn't be quite as distracting. The main issue was simply forgetting to edit parts of the script.

As for the music, it is just being used as unobtrusive placeholders. I'd completely forgotten how to do fadeins and fadeouts, so it shouldn't be quite as rough once the rewrite is finished.

Fixing up the pacing is taking some time. Still, it's interesting to look back on the older parts of the script and expand on them.

The choices have so far ended up being at least mostly restructured. (Mostly thanks to my essay class being replaced by play RE:Alistair). I'm working to create some semblance of a dayplanner, though mostly I've just looked at it in terror. It wouldn't get more than one usage in the demo anyways, so I've been working on just setting up a basic choice as a placeholder while I try figuring that out. I'm trying to de-tutorialize it a bit, but I think I'm leaning towards more of a struggle to finish the first job rather than having a failure option.

It might be a little while before the remaining kinks get worked out of the first chapter entirely, but hopefully it'll be a more enjoyable game to play then!

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Kiss from Cupid -- Current Project

You know, it was funny, and entertaining, I like the personality of the characters, XDD. I hope you continue working in this game ^^.
There are some things but mysterialize already pointed them, so I don't think is necessary I write almost the same thing again.

One thing I really loved was the background music, the most of all was the one with almost a solo guitar. I loved it ^^

And I think you will say that this game is a VN, you read and select options, I think....

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I'm glad it entertained you ^.^.
Still working on the issues mysterialize mentioned, slowly but surely.

It's great the music choice works for you. I keep leaving it on scenes with the guitar solo when I'm editing, just to enjoy it~

At this point, the game's definitely just a VN. The next version of the demo should have a few more dating sim elements. The big question is how many guys to have available to pursue.

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Kiss from Cupid -- Current Project

I see that I'm not the only one that likes that solo ^^.

About the guys, the amount of guys who you want to put on the game depends on how you want the game to be, how long or short, and the story itself, if it will be too long and will make it too boring ,if al use too much will affect the argument...and other factors that you need to consider when having more or less guys availabe ^^.

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It's what I get for taking my placeholders so seriously. There's a character I created purely for the sake of using one song.

As for the number of obtainable guys, I've been playing with possible storylines and character ideas and decided that one is more than enough. As it is, there's nearly thirty sprites showing up over the course of the whole game. Adding more, plus full plotlines would just be murderous.

Plus, seeing I'm going to have to beg CGs off of people as it is, more than the four endings already being toyed with would be cruel.

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Kiss from Cupid -- Current Project

XDDDD

Well I don't know if it's your first game or not, but if it is, take it slowly and do it not really long and complicated, to see that you really can do it and to have fun in the process. If after that you plan on making a more complex story of this game with more plot etc, or another new game, then make all those difficult and other things you wished to do first. At least is what I think ^^

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It's the first game I've tried to make beyond one test scene.
I'll definitely try to keep it simple for the meantime though.
Of course, if I can figure out the event code and get the main storyline finished, I'm not promising there won't be a dozen side stories and arcs twisted into it~

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Kiss from Cupid -- Current Project

Then good luck, I'll be waiting for the full release ^^

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Hurray! You have picture up now. Hopefully that will help pull people in to play the demo. It's kind of sad that this hasn't gotten more attention.

It probably won't hurt to ask around for programming help, especially for the day planner. As far as I can tell, most people around here are willing to help if you at least ask.

As for the portraits being from a doll set, I'm surprised. I've never seen them before. I even tried looking them up to see if I could find them, and still came up with nothing. I have to at least give you credit for finding something obscure. XD

I haven't played it yet, but I like the doll set a lot, yeah! It looks like you made good use of it, I also would've thought that they had been drawn for your game specifically.

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Notions: First Movement - a J-channel game
A simple love story that began with a suicide note.
(an old early version of a much bigger WIP - stay tuned!)

When it comes to asking for help, I'm not too keen on doing it until I know what exactly my issue with it is. I'm past wanting to throw a tantrum every time I go to open it though, so I should be able to figure it out/know enough to ask questions in a few days.

I'm glad the doll set blends in well enough to look deliberate~ They're originally from http://navy.if.land.to/, but the site seems to have moved around a few months ago, so I'm not sure where you could still find them.

The new demo should be up in a few hours- provided condition switches are as simple as they look- so I wouldn't recommend downloading the old version just now.

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Kiss from Cupid -- Current Project

Yay, proper update~!
Demo's been re-released. At least 80% of the pacing problems are gone, the sprites have different expressions, if not poses, and the coding's tidied up a bit.
Anyone who's played the first demo, please let me know which parts were improved and possibly, which were better left alone, so I can do the appropriate edits.

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Kiss from Cupid -- Current Project

I like how the pictures are simple. There needs to be more games with simple drawings that everyone can relate to.