Shining Song Starnova: Chapter Two Beta Feedback

Hi there...

Hmm, I haven't finished Chapter Two right now. But so far:


Over all I'm a bit disappointed (that's too the case why I don't played through the whole beta). There were many good suggestions in the last chapter Feedbacks, but after all it feels that nothing was changed.

My own Feedback is thus nearly the sameas for Chapter 1. Butlet's start:

Technical:

Same as Chatper One. Worked great and smooth in Fullscreen and windowed mode on my desktop PC (win10, 1920x1080).


Music/Sound:

Same as Chatper One. Everything nice!


Grafic:

Same as Chatper One.
If I'm right the "bent-forward-and-have-one-hand-before-the-mouth" pose of Maryia is still used too much in the first chapter - was there even a Change after all? Anyway, in chapter two it feels that this pose isn't used this much, but after all there is too not really a situation where Maryia is the main Girl.


Scenario:

Yeah, Idol-industry, thats okay and I'm sure this will not Change


Content:

As mentioned before and before: User decisions!

....
The point I think needs much much more love are player decisions. As example on the Scene at the bar with Sasami and Mariya - okay, she offers me a cigarette. Why not give a decision "oh, thanks"/"no, i'm not Smoking"? Or (in the same Scene) "I take a beer"/"I take a gin"/"I take a coke (and get forced to drink alc)".
I think that would be add lot of deep/RP. And after all that shouldn't be a big thing 'cause such minor decisions doesn't alter the whole game but just a few word in the next dialog. And the community would love it - I think
....
....
And, another thing: there are that much good ideas for minigames/additional gameplay here in the Forum. atm it seems like there will be absolute no gameplay beside "casual"-VN-gameplay. Why? Wasn't that one of the main parts that made Sunrider succesfull?
....

Lot of people said the same in chapter 1.
Starnove = Kinetic novel? Disappointing: even if a lot of guys here suggest that some small user interaction would be great, we got absolute NONE. Maybe I'm paranoid, and don't get me false, I'm loyal to LiS. But it feels like community suggestions were just ignored through the devs. Give us at least ONE SMALL LITTLE USER DESICION! Sry to ask, but has LiS overworked chapter one based on our Feedback at all?

What about a mini-game? Do LiS Event hink about insert one? Yeah, we got a +X affection Point Screen, but a rather random one, and if I see it right more as a joke (+1000 affection Sasami)then as a real gameplay element.
Again. It feels like LiS has decided to create a kinetic hentai novel rather than a Sunrider like VN.



Fanservice:

Too much! Too much in chapter one, and TOO TOO TOO much in chapter two.
I repeat chatper one feedback:
"In the first 15 min two topless Scenes? Fan Service should be a kind of achievement, you play the game, and after hours of keep up with you're waifus you got finally your topless/naked Scene.
In the Beta I haven't any motivation to "hunt down" the Girls, they are cheaply jump at the Player."

I have around 15 minutes uninterrupted naked Girls on the Screen (-> hot spring). WTF? I wanna play a nice VN, not some random erotic game!


The Girls:

Julie's and Aki's fight for "which Girl is better/which one is more attactring the pres" is great!
It feels like the both are some kind of "main heroines" in chapter two, but exactly this feels very nice. Both characters are just epic. Thanks a lot for this
They fit together very fine

As mentioned in beta C.1, I like also the Nemu-Yandere-Mode.

The rest of the Girls are also fine, but at least I think it's completely enough to have as much screentime as possible for Aki and Julie




Hope this Feedback is not too negative... but after all I'm a little bit disappointed. The feeling of having no character interaction, that the Feedback was not taken seriously and that Starnova is drifting (compared to Sunrider) toward erotic/hentai... I just have not a really good Feeling.

Its entirely possible that certain saves are no longer valid due to the version change, there have been various script changes (for example transformations and dialogue).

I wanted to add in a shortcut button on the main menu to throw people straight into chapter 2 but as the build is already out I will just lend you my testing work around:

- Start a new game.
- Press 'shift + o' and type jump MAY42017 followed by pressing 'enter'.
- Type stop sound followed by pressing 'enter'.
- Type exit followed by pressing 'enter'.
- This marks the start of chapter 2.

At this time each character has between 4/5 poses (which then all span variants with the different costumes and zoom distances), Mariya is one of the characters that has five of these.

Keep in mind that in terms of changes there are things that are deliberately left out so that when it comes to the full release you are not just playing the beta again. We did add some nice ASCII art though for diversity sake.



I recommend you finish the chapter first.

Six community suggestions/reports that were not flagged in internal testing were implemented and another seven led to internal discussions. We appreciate all feedback we get and one of the things that I do to ensure that everyone is heard is capture that data in a format that can be discussed, please though remember what I said in the first beta:

Feedback doesn't necessarily mean the product will change or that a change will be immediate but what it does allow though are conversations to happen on how we are going to address something or alternative methods of delivery.



Personally I'd like there to be gameplay but we are not there yet.

So you are telling me that you wouldn't want Ryder battles where instead of weapons you used a variety of musical notes and instrument backings? The goal being to throw off the enemy commander's tempo. Mad man, that is what you are.

Haha it is a fair point, at the end of the day this is just my personal musing rather than that of the company. If we found a way to integrate gameplay in a style that we liked and with a depth that enriched the experience it is still something I would like to experiment with.

The Nemunemu scene got retooled a bit. I'd still have done it a bit differently but it's a bit less grating now.

Not-Kayto needs to die in a fire along with his shrieking harpies.

Personally I'd like to see more in the way of choices once the actual waifu routes proper have started. No crashes or anything.

I cannot find this 15 minute thing being talked about reading normal reading speed (okay my normal is fast)...I'm guessing it was hyperbole.

I guess another feedback I have is....bad things happen to some girl and we gain affection??? I don't get it.

Another feedback: After you pick Mariya the dialogue when you reveal your choice the next day kind of feels like it was designed to be you letting her down gently (aka works well with picking other girls but not if you picked her). Eg you assure her first that she's still leading her kohai. I feel like specifically for choosing her the tone of that few lines shatters the 'illusion' of choice just a bit. Maybe remove a few of those lines if she is chosen or rework it somewhat. Just my two cents.
_____
I see there are some rough draft images for some of the scenes. There are quite a few new scenes. Also I don't know exactly how many chapters you plan the VN to be but it feels like we are a long ways off. Since the game show had some chibi scenes I would just like to say that I think using those in some more places if necessary to meet timelines would be acceptable for me as the chibi scenes were quite well done.  (Although from a presentation perspective it can't be all done later in the game because that gives the impression the VN is rushed, rather spread out across the VN).

_____

(I also checked starnovafan.moe for entertainment sakes lol. I know domains are expensive. Maybe you can use fan.starnova.moe and add a CNAME/A in your dns settings that points to the product page...or maybe the image of the ASCII text xD)

Haha yeah thanks harmtouch I'll slap it on my list, luckily I am a doctor of all things visual novel-ee.
Starts making a PhD in paint.net.

The bounce transformation required just too much energy for poor Nat, we'll make sure to let her do a more tame one. I believe there is another one at 1141 so this can be corrected in the same instance.

Just had a scan, there is some good feedback in here thank you.

I'll have a proper digest of it later in the week, I'll be out of office for a few days from the end of today so I will have sparse access to my computer until then.

I am going to move this into tech support for now, I do not think we have done any work on gamepad mapping at this time which is why it is not supported properly. I will have a dig and see what I can find out although I can't guarantee it will be something that will have a definitive answer on until later in development. Thanks for flag.


Haha technically it is my bedroom but I am hoping to have a proper office space when I move later in the year (one where I can actually decorate it without threats from the landlord).

(Sorry for double post, but this is in essence an answer to my previous question)

Intro:
So, I've been really bored over the past week or so while I've finished up midterms and papers and what-not for spring break (which I'm now on). I made a little test system for what something like "stat management" could be. It's pretty dumb and simple, but I mulled it over in my head for a long time while making it and prodded at the pros and cons of such a thing in this kind of story where too much interruption could heavily alter the pacing of the game. Also, I tried to take into account the prefaces of this "kinetic novel" and how it's meant to not really be another "Sunrider" model VN, but a little bit different. And I know that some of this stuff was intentionally left out (as per Mag's previous comment), but I'm impatient as fuck and my stupid grammar/English suggestions don't really help all that much I imagine. So, let me get into it a bit (no more covering my back!)

I'm going to preface the actual explanation of the system with why I even made this to begin with (instead of something more useful). One, I've never used Renpy before besides small personal projects (so I'm absolute garbage with it), and two, there's like a million different type of mini-games you could add into this that would be relevant and fun (a.k.a, I suck and I am not sure how to approach them yet). So, I wanted to make this to show that it doesn't actually disrupt the integrity of the story itself. We're already given the precedence for a system like this to exist because the Producer is seen constantly at the studio at night, and with how I built the system (context wise), it doesn't deviate from his responsibilities either.

Note: Also, keep in mind I'm no artist, so the only assets I used to make this was what was already shipped with the game. So, a lot of stuff just serves as placeholders, which I'll explain later.


The System:
Ok, so the actual system is built upon the basic idea of event planning and management. That's essentially what this game revolves around so far, and since we're not really going to get much more than that until future beta releases, that's what I went with (but I made it expandable so that it can fit into different themes).



So, you'll probably recognize this from the part where you choose your center. I wanted to use the chibis for this system, but they're superimposed onto the CGs and don't come with their own little nifty png's, so I just settled to use these easy-to-manipulate poses. Ignoring the background, my main idea was for this entire system to exist within the realm of a computer screen. It's 2017 or whatever, and this dude doesn't strike me as someone who lives in the stone age, so it makes sense for all of this management to be modernized. You could probably use a complicated combination of frames, boxes, and imagemaps to make something that actually looks like an OS while maintaining the ability to easily use the live compositing (of the characters, less art assets you have to make) on screens (I suggest this because it makes the delineation of tasks between multiple screens cleaner). But, if this were to be a continual system that players use, you don't want it to be tedious or long-winded, so just using one-click areas is probably enough to navigate through it to one screen that is essentially a vertical list of the seven girls. Then, you could do something like show the week horizontally to setup their schedules (or just make it a one-character-per-screen type deal and make it more involved). This is essentially what I've made in my example (the one-character style thing): you just choose between the girls, setup the activities, and then click on them to go back to the selection, and hit the menu button to leave it.



So, this is a pretty shitty demo of what I was talking about, but shrug. So, as you can see, the different "events" correspond to the different stats that each girl can have. I hope I don't have to further explain the waterfall-esque effect that comes from this (the different affection events that can occur statically or randomly from doing certain events, etc.) Small side-note, I did figure out a sure-fire way of calculating the correct height to place the girls' images at so they don't look like they're floating or something, but that doesn't really apply here. In my example here, the buttons (the yoga-ball images) just increase the stats because I was lazy and didn't want to make an actual story event, but that's easily changeable so that it manages different events that play out once you finish the schedule. I made it relatively compartmentalized as well so that each girl has her own character object that manages the different stats using a dictionary (so that it's easy to add/remove stats). You could probably combine these with the live compositing functions so that you can manipulate everything from individual objects (which just makes it a little bit cleaner).



This is just a really simple example of how you could attach another menu type deal to the main game so you can see the girls' stats without having to go into the mess of the other setup. It's not really anything special or anything you'd actually want to put in a finished product, but hopefully it at least serves as an idea.

I'm not really sure if I need to say anything else about this garbo I created, and I do realize that this is a beta for a reason, so I'm not making this out of spite or anything. I really just wanted to try and help a little bit more by giving an actual example of a type of system you could implement. This, in conjunction with actual dialogue options and what-not, can play into who becomes the center, how well the group does on their first PV, etc. It adds that little bit of difficulty/management that some people might be looking for from the Sunrider games.

Minigames:
Since this seems to be something that people think is a good idea to include, I figured I'd just address it in relation to my system real quick. It's pretty obvious where you can put some of these (like the game show: when you're doing the course make it like a button-reaction sequence or something to progress as a selected girl). How well you do in these games can affect how much stats or affection you get or whatever, stuff like that.

Um, I think that's it. This all kinda came out of no where, so, hope you like-it-please-don't-ban-me-for-doing-this-magpie-thanks. I can include my edited files as well in case you want to look at what I made more closely.

Thanks for all the feedback so far everyone there has been some really good material both on the forum and externally sent to me, Nemu's route and our 'to do list' are progressing nicely. emoticon_kayto_small

Just wanted to say just in case it is seen as though I am giving mixed messages is that the way of looking at gameplay as a possibility in Starnova is that there currently isn't a system for it and we are not currently working on one. While we do tinker every now and again with possibilities the focus will be on the visual novel side of things before anything else. This is not to shoot down anyone who has been in contact about gameplay (including our lovely resident harmtouch with the above post) as I have quite enjoyed reading through what people would like to see. This is more so you understand where the focus currently is, Starnova is going to be our longest piece yet in terms of writing and therefore we want to nail the story first before anything else is considered.

Sorry for a moment there I thought you were my sound block.

It depends on how you view the night out with Julie, but other than that, no. But, there aren't really any choices in the game yet (other than a couple that have nothing to do with the question).

The event with Julie doesn't seem like it would lead into any forced routes. Nothing major happens, I think it's more of an event that just sort of helps you to get introduced with the character while still in the common route.
It is a required scene but I wouldn't say it feels like a forced romance.