And by bonanza I mean “two things we could use your feedback on.”
We’re pondering two changes to the UI of the game, and wanted to run them by you, the backers and potential players. See what you think before we plow forward on them.
1. The Quick Menu. That’s this thing, to the right of the dialogue box.
Right now it’s just a series of text labels, which dark-gray themselves out if inapplicable. But we’re pondering making them into icons instead, to be a bit flashier. …or would icons be cumbersome and unclear? We could do pop-up labels when you hover over the icon, but that’s also cumbersome. …or is what we have too plain and functional and you’d like something more in keeping with the visual theme?
Basically, we’re not sure. What do you think?
2. Rollback. Right now, the game allows you to roll back in time with the mouse wheel, re-picking decisions after you’ve made them, etc. It’s handy for catching text or animations you accidentally clicked through, but cheapens the whole game concept that your decisions matter and you should stick to them. We added a “Difficulty Mode” setting, with Easy allowing rollback and Hard disallowing, but maybe we could do better there.
What if, instead of that system, we lock out rollback until you complete the game once? That unlocks rollback for all future playthroughs, and allows you to explore the game now that you already know what to expect. In your first playthrough you can still view text you missed via the History button, but you can’t deliberately turn back time. You can still save and load the game if you REALLY want to go back but you’ll have to manually do that.
We’ve researched a pile of visual novels, and determined half of them allow rollback, but half of them don’t. So there isn’t consensus on this. The Renpy community loathes people who block rollback with a burning passion and made it deliberately hard to implement, but… we’re not making a traditional VN. We have tons and tons of choices and those choices matter. And we’re concerned rollback cheapens that experience.
What do you think? Does unlimited rollback hurt the game, or are you okay with it? Is the current “Difficulty Setting” approach fine enough? What about unlocking it after one playthrough? Or something we haven’t thought of?
…
Okay, that’s all we need from you this week. And as proof we’re listening to feedback, here’s the results of the “how to address sexual orientation” poll we took recently.
- 13 – A quick token Iris explanation
- 4 – Don’t mention it at all
- 2 – Change alignments accordingly
The overwhelming majority were in favor of having Iris offer a quick and token explanation, a simple “Don’t worry, I wouldn’t be steering you to anyone who wasn’t into you.” To split the difference this explanation is behind a choice option, so you can simply choose not to hear the explanation if you’d rather it not be mentioned at all.
Your feedback helps keep us on track to make the best possible game we can. Thank you for all your support!