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!
I honestly like the menu as it is, it looks fine and it’s easier to quickly find an option when you’re new to the game.
As to rollback, unlocking after the first playthrough seems reasonable.
Keep doing what you’re doing, the game looks like it’ll be amazing!
I think I’ll like more Rollback enabled after first play-though.
Also the quick menu is more classic/nostalgic as text labels otherwise icons with a separate help screen; on hover popups can be distracting!
My 0.02€
Thanks for the feedback! It’s worth far more than 0.02€, believe me.
Whatever you do for the choices that matter, please allow rollback on the dialog with no choices! I hate when I accidentally click through a bit of dialog and have to either load a save or do without knowing what was just said.
With regard to the choices that matter – if you don’t want players rolling back through all their choices, you’ll have to alleviate the desire to explore all the content in exhaustive fashion. Alleviating the desire to use the button is more important than removing the button.
Unfortunately Renpy (apparently by design) doesn’t have “rollback without choices,” only “rollback with choices” or “no rollback.” Anything else requires tons of manual coding.
HOWEVER! There’s a button on the menu there reading “History” which pops up the last few dozen things that were just said. So we’ve got that and would have that regardless. You won’t have to worry about clickthrough.
“Love is Strange” (a “Life is Strange” fan VN, http://loveisstrange-vn.tumblr.com/ ) allows rollback but locks in the choices you made. So when you made a choice, and roll back to that choice, the only thing you can select is the choice you made earlier.
I haven’t looked at how they implement it, though (in case you want to and you’re stumped by the archive.rpa, there is an easily googlable tool called unrpa to extract the archive).
Personally, I hate it when rollback is disabled (and/or choices locked in, or when there’s only one saveslot, or similar), so I will probably hack your game to re-enable it. Just a heads up ;)
Thanks for the tip. I decompiled it to check, and yep, they’re using the clunky manual method I described. We’d really prefer not to do that; it requires a LOT of retrofitting.
Currently our plan is to have rollback fully unlocked after one playthrough, and for Patreon backers to get a cheat code to use it from the get go (since they’ve already played the game in earlier builds). I understand the desire for full rollback but since choice is such a critical part of our gameplay loop we feel it’s important not to make it TOO easy to just skip what little challenge the game offers. (Save/Load is still there, but that’s tradition.)