Lemma Soft Forums

Looking at the screenshots, one thing I might suggest is changing to a non-script font. The one you have got is kind of difficult to read.

Wow, this is very impressive and ambitious, also all the features sound super cool. Good luck on getting everything ready for the demo C:.

I also think the text is a little hard to read, especially in the menu choices. I think that might be because the text is white and the choice button is also light. It's easier to read in the textbox, since the textbox is darker.

Hi wererat and Googaboga!

The text is harder to read in the screenshots than it is in game, for instance, while playing when you hover over menu choices, the color of the text changes. So hopefully it won't be a problem in the game itself!

But if after people play the demo and people are still having a hard time reading it, I will definitely look into a new font (It's kind of hard to find ones that have the right feel and are affordable to low budget people to license, so I'm hoping it reads better in game)

Thanks for the feedback! I really do appreciate it!

Very soon has arrived~ The demo is out! Please check the second post and our new demo thread: http://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewto ... 45&t=29621 for details.

I’m so nervous and excited! I hope you all have as much fun playing the game as we have had making it!

(And in case anyone misses it, just bumping the questions I hope people are willing to answer for me!)

What backgrounds did you unlock your first playthrough? Which did you pick?

Did you have any success getting invitations your first try?

What characters are you liking?

How are the Challenges and the hosting events? Are you having any luck getting great success/perfect success? Or is it too hard? Has anyone been able to get a perfect success hosting a tea the first week?

DEMO? *crashes through the door*

I'll have to wait until after work to play, but I'm excited to see how it turned out.

What a complex game! I'm really enjoying all the choices, and got good laugh off of some of them aha.

What backgrounds did you unlock your first playthrough? Which did you pick?
The daughter of a notorious pirate! Though the tomyboy countess was a clooose second aha.

Did you have any success getting invitations your first try?
My first week I got 3 out of 5 attendees. I was a bit sad that I got the headcount after some bad events with the other two.

What characters are you liking?
I like Lyon though he didn't like me at the end aha.
I oddly like Princess Cordelia a lot more than I thought I would, she's so nice and polite, and that's not usually the personality I find drawn to the most aha!
Ana's awesome, her speech and boldness is too much ! <3
And Penelope is so sweet!
And Earl Emmet what a cutie oh geeze!

How are the Challenges and the hosting events? Are you having any luck getting great success/perfect success? Or is it too hard? Has anyone been able to get a perfect success hosting a tea the first week?
I was an average hostess haha! I hope I do better irl though pft. I find them them pretty tough, though I've always been bad at this part of games aha.

And let's see, some comments that might be helpful!
It might get a bit overwhelming on the menus, like when the choices fulled up the entire screen. It'd be great if there was a cleaner or neater way to show all the choices!
There were some misspellings and missing periods, the fonts were pretty hard to read. Outlines on the text might help out some too if you'd like those, but this just might lie solely with the text. I personally dislike most the textures. Are these final backgrounds? Some off details, like examining the Grand Duke it mentions a beard while the sprite has none, the matchingmakers "lilac eyes" while the sprite had green.
Also, sometimes the text format felt odd, where there was a character speaking, narrative and the character speaking again.
But all the characters backgrounds and world and little stories throw in, ugh I loved this a lot! The kingdom of Skalt callsss to me! I'll be playing the game over again to see what it's like to come from the different backgrounds for sure though!
Great demo and I cannot wait to see how this all turns out!

So I can't say much yet, I've only just created my character, but I've got a bit of critique anyway.

The text is pretty hard to read, though I'm not sure whether that's because of the font or gui or simply because the default window size is too small. On that note, have you thought about turning the game size to 1280x720 or something along these lines? Basically, make it bigger and maybe widescreen. It's a rather small detail, but it provides a certain sense of professionalism. (Plus, y'know, it's pretty.)
The other thing I remember negatively are the backgrounds. I'm guessing they're stock images or found on google, or that's what I gathered from that photograph of the Brandenburger Tor in the beginning of the game.
Maybe you should attempt to find someone to draw some backgrounds for you? The backgrounds as they are now feel kind of out of place, to be honest, and there are so many swirls and lines that it a) distracts from the important stuff (namely the characters) and b) strain the eyes something awful. Backgrounds profit from being simple and clean, I think.

So now that we got the negative stuff out of the way, on to the good things.
I love the amount of choices and I love being able to customize my character so much. (Especially choosing a body type. That is so awesome.) I also like the story so far and while I've only met three characters yet, I'm eager to find out more about them. As a final tip, there's a lot fo text in the beginning that explains the world's history, which isn't bad in itself, but I suggest breaking it up in smaller blocks of text.
Having the lower 1/3 of the screen taken up entirely by text tends to make my brain go from 'yay historical game background' to 'oh god history text book', which leads to a lot of skimming on my part.

And now I'm gonna go and finish the demo.

I've just started playing the demo, and the first thing that hit me was the block text. Like bellice said, the fact that it all showed up at once led to a lot of skimming (I'm ashamed to say). You should try breaking it up, so that each click shows more dialogue. Also there were a few errors that a proofreader might need to change. For example, lack of punctuation.
The sprite of the butler seems out of proportion, the head being tiny in comparison to the body, and his neck not really existing . They're still good, but it was quite off-putting because I kept thinking it looked wrong, yet couldn't tell why.
The backgrounds are distracting too, again, like bellice said - you might want to make them simpler.
The text type was also quite hard to read, and when you partner that with it being one massive block of story I almost stopped playing (sorry, I just couldn't take it. >_<).
That being said, I loved the character design, and all the options that came with it.

Sorry for being so negative, just giving my initial feedback! I'll continue playing now!

EDIT: It's also really hard to see the different options for what you want to do with your day. The background is a bit too...intense there.
I'm sure if you put a post up in the free recruitment forum someone would happily offer to draw a few backgrounds for you. This project seems really well planned and interesting often that's enough to get people on board.

EDIT 2: Okay, so I completely played through the demo (several times), and completely failed at everything. The dates I did successfully, but everything else...*facepalm*
I found it very frustrating that whatever I did I couldn't seem to do well at stuff, nor have I managed to find this journal that the MC is supposed to have been writing in (it might be because I can barely see the options on the screen). The plot itself is great though, and I thoroughly look forward to playing more. But the backgrounds do need to be...lighter, and a bit more unique. Otherwise it doesn't seem to do the brilliant plot (not to mention the character art) justice.

Downloading it now!!

Hi guys! Thank you so much for the feedback! I really appreciate it, (Even the negative, I absolutely want to make this the best game it can be!)

Font
I hear you, I hear you! Just because I got attached to the font after a long search doesn't mean it should stay. I'm already looking into alternatives! Since readability is a big issue, I'll try and update this soon!

Blocks of text/weird text
This game was originally started as a text game (before I realized that the complexity was going to make saving and loading a total necessity.) While most of the later game was written with Ren'Py and the visual novel style in mind, the beginning was all written in another style. I did adapt it to some degree, but it looks like some of it stuck around! Any lines you find weird in terms of description style etc, please point them out in the demo thread!

As for the blocks of text, I do tend to be lengthy to begin with! I'll keep your advice in mind and try to break up some of the bigger blocks.

Mismatched descriptions
The text descriptions were written way before we got any art. (See above re: text game) our artist was awesome and had some creative ideas that I loved, I just missed updating all the descriptive text. Thanks for pointing it out! I will fix this right away.

Typos/Misspellings/The case of the missing punctuation
We have edited and gone through the game a bunch of times, but I'm positive there's still a lot of stuff we missed! If you find anything, please point it out in the demo thread!

Resolution/Size
I chose this resolution after some research and in attempt to keep the huge game smaller in terms of file size. We've tested it out a lot of different sized monitors, if you play full screen, or click the edge and drag so the game gets bigger, you should be able to play it much larger without much quality loss. If this isn't the case for you, let us know!

Backgrounds
For the most part, the backgrounds are actual historical art (mostly black and white) placed over textures, with some of my own photos and in a few cases, images photographers and artists put into the public domain. The intent was to make a kind of dreamy, but realistic fantasyish feel. Obviously intent and reality don't always match up! While I like their effect, that doesn't mean they aren't distracting!

As for hiring a background artist, with the vast number of backgrounds required commissioning any skilled background artist would require much more money than is in our budget. If this is something that is really important to people, it's a feature we could potentially add with a kickstarter.

For now are there any backgrounds you find especially distracting? I might be able to change the textures and tone them down? (Although I warn you, I'm especially attached to the your room background, it would take convincing to get me to de-purple it )

I feel like I'm missing something, but I can't think of it! Please let me know if you have any more suggestions/questions/concerns

And seriously thank you so much for taking the time to play and give feedback, it really means a lot!

edit
Ah! I remember what it was I was missing! (Of course three seconds after I already hit post)
Menus
Ah, menus, how I have bonked my head against the desk over you. Honestly, I'm not that great a programmer, so the only solution I've been able to find is break up the big menus into multiple linked menus (like when you are sending out invitations) which is not ideal. The big top to bottom menu during the conversation screen should only be for the first conversation during the welcome feast section and keep shrinking to more manageable size after that. Hopefully this is a workable solution!

If any of you are genius programmers with a better idea, I would totally welcome it!

Difficulty
This is one of the hardest things for me to know how it goes without lots of feedback. It's supposed to be challenging without being totally frustrating. So please keep me updated with your experiences~

Special Evil Note
~There are actually 9 invitations you can get in the first week~

alylt wrote:
For now are there any backgrounds you find especially distracting? I might be able to change the textures and tone them down?

Well, I-

(Although I warn you, I'm especially attached to the your room background, it would take convincing to get me to de-purple it )

...Nevermind, then.

(But honestly, that was the first thing that made me go all squinty-eyed. There's just so much swirly line stuff going on in there, I keep feeling like the room is trying to squash the characters. It's not the purple that bothers me, just the overall...BAM I AM HERE feel. It might just be me, though. I prefer...'in the moment' backgrounds, so to speak. Images that help me immerse myself in the world, but if you say it was your intention to make the whole thing feel sort of fantasy-dreamy, you succeeded. It's just not the kind of atmosphere I prefer. Other people will feel different, I'm sure.)

I get what you're saying about backgrounds and budgets, especially if you don't want to settle for mediocre stuff. Of course you could always try to limit the locations a bit, but I also think a Kickstarter might be a good idea. Games about politics and in-depth roleplaying tend to get a lot of attention (for a visual novel, anyway).

PS: Now that I played more of the game...I officially claim Ana for myself. None of you can have her. She's mine and I am hers and we will have beautiful warrior children. Just wanted to make that clear.

Ana is way more likely to claim you as hers than sit around and allow the reverse to happen

Doing the semi-abstract backgrounds isn't my favorite option, but considering the ability/resource limitations, it was the best I could come up with. I totally do appreciate you pointing out what does and doesn't work!

I've been thinking about what you said, and I think I understand the big problem with some of the screens. The fact that I was using wallpapers as a texture (which to me, had some cool effects) makes it seem like there are two space differences in the picture, since I'm not a very visual person this didn't really occur to me until now.

So I made some alternates of the two biggest offenders, tell me if this at least helps the problem:





As for a kickstarter, there are so many things I want to do that I just don't have the ability to do myself (like pretty stats screens!) but I'm not sure there will be enough interest, if there is I will totally do one!

Edit And now I have some options for new fonts, please tell me which one you like the best/is easiest to read!

Font 1:

Font 2:

Font 3:

Definitely font 2.

I'm currently trying to get through the demo but the font is extremely difficult to read on my laptop >_< Otherwise I really like the story outline and am definitely looking forward to playing once you update the font!

Thanks for your answer kyrie! Glad you are liking the game so far!

I've actually found a way to make it so people can choose their font in the preferences page, yay~ so now everyone can have their choice of fonts.

I'll try and get the new version up sometime tomorrow, after I fix a few more things that were pointed out.

Thanks again everyone, you are seriously the best!