Lemma Soft Forums

Hello, everybody! Well, this is my first attempt on making a serious Visual Novel. It's still only a sample of what I intend to do, although when I tested it I found myself with something containing 30824 words already! I'm really getting fired up with this, it's surprisingly fun to create a story and develop the characters along it.
As for the theme, japanese school life, boy and some girls, nothing really original. I gave this game the title "Y ahora, a estudiar", which in English would be something like "And now, time to study".

I hope you enjoy this as much as I did writing it, and send me back your comments on what do you think of it. Remember, this is only an incomplete game, in fact it's still in its very early stage!

Greetings to all of you!

As of today, we have available the Spanish version 1.47 (which includes Acts 1 and 2 plus Naho and Yabuki routes in Act 3), and the English version 1.25, with eight days worth of story.

Link to download:

https://rasalaghe.itch.io/and-now-time-to-study

Enjoy!

As this thread introduces a demo, it fits better into the Demos forum.

Moved.

Taleweaver wrote:As this thread introduces a demo, it fits better into the Demos forum.

Moved.

Right, sorry about that

Ok i played it, and i didnt find the icon to play it, i had to play it as proyect with renpy XD
Other than that it was fun, hope you finish it! good luck!

Sorry for reviving a buried thread, Lemmasoft community, but when I saw there were virtually no reviews of this game I had to give one myself. And considering how the second act of the spanish version will apparently be released in some time too, this might actually draw the interest of some people who would like to see an English version as well.

So, my review;
I liked this game. Sure, it's a highschool romance but I never thought it to be a dime a dozen. And considering this is just a demo at this point, I'm quite interested in what the final version will look like.

I really like how the protagonist was introduced to the story. His personality wasn't just lazily introduced in an opening monologue, instead his shy and slightly more formal personality was brought up piece by piece nicely and more natural throughout the first few scenes than many other stories do. It actually being the first day at a new school meeting people who're already accustomed to the place really went well with his insecure behaviour, because pretty much everyone would feel that way even if they'd be more extravert in real life themselves.

Well, everyone except Akihiro off course! I really liked his character, the extravert and impulsive best friend is a preferred trope of mine as long as they're not exclusively for cheap laughs like some anime tend to do. But he really worked well, his positive attitude suited him and his misfortunes and bad luck felt natural rather than some comedy schtick. Second favourite would be Reiko, the wide variety of poses she has really highlight her extravert and cheery personality. And it even comes with an unexpected second plus: After playing the game, hold ctrl or set it to 'Begin skipping' and start skipping to see Reiko dance. Ah, I'm too easily amused.

And for me, Naoto (the protagonist) is even more relatable than he should be. I myself just started an internship at a place where people are unusually unformal (Calling a 50-year old woman by her first name is just weird, but she insists!). Its not like I'm a beta amongst athletes like in this story, but me being one of the few chemists amongst physicists and engineers is a similar experience as he's going through.

Oh, and the music is superb. That song with the guitar&violin in itself is already enough to like this VN. The only problem with it is that I tend to close my eyes whenever the violin started playing just to listen more, resulting in me not playing the game for a few minutes...

If I would have to give one piece of honest critism, (because praise is nice but not too useful,) it's to be wary with these (...). I know the feeling, my first drafts are littered with (...) everywhere I envision a pause in anyone's thoughts or speech, but unlike the writer the reader can quickly be oversaturated with this and start ignoring them completely. If you want the reader to take a real pause, ending the string or adding {w} works much better than... Only when it is used sparsely does it retain it's value. Using (...) without any other text in that string and the ........ in the protagonist's speech patterns did work, don't worry about those. In fact, the many dots in Naoto's text really highlighted his insecurity and hesitation in speaking up. But the (...) in his thoughts got a bit abundant.

Thanks for sharing your opinion, Mammon! I'm glad you liked it, and I'll take into account all of your comments and suggestions in my effort to improve the game.

Good point the Reiko-dance display XD Newer versions of the game have even more poses, despite being still in Spanish, and probably the other characters as well would be able to give a similar show.

I'm currently writing the final stages of Act 2, and hope to be able to release a new version sooner or later. Of course, I'll also devote myself in making an English translation of the story up to now if enough interest is boosted.

See you around!

Hi! For all of those interested, I just published my most recent versions of this visual novel, still in development. Go to the main post to find the link where you'll be able to download the English version (1.21) and the Spanish version (1.29).

Enjoy, and as always, your feedback is totally welcome.

This game is really cool, I'll look forward for more releases.

At first I thought commenting on the blog, but that only spoke about the spanish version. Oh well.
So I'll speak it here: Keep it up, I really enjoyed the game.

Given we're at Creator's Corner I'll give... well... more of a pessoal opinion and likings than a review. Sorry.

First, it seems you're trying to boost interest. Based on the above disclaimer, I personally believe you'll be able to boost more interest if you complete the Act 1 and release it, just like Katawa Shoujo. Pessoal opinion.
Reading the Forum Guidelines advised.

Second, and strongly based on my own experience while playing the game (profile - a young person who is not a native english speaker). Some "harder" words like "Entropy" are well explained, but some others, like "asymptotic", are not.
I advise to use the {a=label} resource if you believe explanations about that should not be in-context. It works like a normal link, but instead of linking a webpage, it links a script label. Might make more sense if you experiment using it. Pessoal opinion.
Reading the Manual advised.

(Sorry for any poor english or poor review - I liked the game and wanted to let you aware of that as requested ingame)

Hi, jesusalva! Thank you for sharing your opinion and sorry for the delay with my answer. Glad to know you enjoyed the game so far!

The Act 1 of my story is actually quite shorter than that of Katawa Shoujo (oh, mighty Katawa Shoujo!), only one more day of gameplay, so it shouldn't be too long before I make it. The original version of the game is the Spanish one and I tried to start an English translation in order to make it accessible to a more wide range of people, not a light task but worth it if I'm able to collect opinions like yours. I'll try my best to keep the game updated for all of you.

As for the hard words issue, you're right, maybe that can be a bit confusing at times. Those words are basically an attempt to emphasize the "nerd" nature of the main character and the world he's immersing into if he chooses the "scientific" route. They certainly aren't common use words, though I'm trying to explain them in-game as much as posible. When this is not the case, your advice of linking them to small explanations could be interesting indeed, and I'll take it into account for sure.

Again, thank you for your interest and for taking the time to post your opinion. I'll be doing my best to improve the game. See you!

Just came across this yesterday, so I downloaded it and played through twice. Found it to be an interesting story, however, since the last post here by the author was over three years ago, it appears that this effort is not likely to be completed. Too bad!

philip

Hi philip, thanks for trying the game and for your words. Turns out that the main activity regarding the progress of this visual novel switched to other sites like itch.io, and I very rarely come to lemma anymore (my last post here was around January 2017). I'm actively writing the game even now, and I certainly have all the intention to finish it, albeit this finishing date is still quite far away, more so regarding the English version. I'm not sure which version did you play, but the latest ones are 1.24 for English language and 1.4 for Spanish. Right now, I'm receiving the kind help of a volunteering translator, and I'm hoping to release the 1.25 English version within a reasonable amount of time.

If you want to keep a better track of "And now, time to study", and also take a look at my most recent project, please visit my itch.io page:

https://rasalaghe.itch.io

Greetings!

@rasalhague-

Thank you for your response. It seems to me that since you are using RenPy for your story that you should support the creator of that marvelous engine by supporting this forum. I am not going to search all over the internet to get updates on the progress of this story; if they don't get posted here, guess I won't see them.

philip

@ philip

I understand what you say, and I'm not going to stop supporting this forum. Inside the game itself, there's a link to this thread since the beginning. Also, the link in the opening post takes you directly to the latest releases, so no one coming here should miss them. It's not like I want to stop posting here, but I don't receive that much feedback as in other places, so my own activity here isn't that frequent.