[RELEASE][FEEDBACK] Midnight Veil (0.2.0)

[VanillaBean]

Hello everyone,

I have been a long time lurker and am now a first time poster / creator.
Over the years I've "experienced" many if not most of the webteases uploaded here.
& Many CH's

It has been a while now that I've wanted to both give creating a try and give back to this awesome community.
Indyc & Diogaoo's projects have given me great inspiration and I'd be remised if I didn't shout them out.
memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=110114
memberlist.php?mode=viewprofile&u=108372

I finally gotten around to it and am now indeed launching and continually developing a new project Midnight Veil.

Midnight Veil is hoping to be a noir mystery dating-sim RPG with roguelike elements built in Ren'Py. You play a detective arriving in Midnight Veil, a horny city in perpetual twilight. Solve procedurally generated cases by gathering clues and interacting with NPCs. Manage relationships: affection, trust, and suspicion. Improve yourself: Perception, Charisma, Intellect, Stamina, Influence. Visit locations (Velvet Lounge, Police Station, Gym, Park, etc.) to find NPCs and clues. Each Loop uncover a new hidden culprit; identify them before its too late but be careful!

Spoiler: show

I have big plans for this and it is currently missing core gameplay elements (Card/Deck / Turn based Battles, Gif inclusion, and deep story).
Therefore I am genuinely not super proud of it's current state but I feel I need to release something as releasing this and actively interacting with all of you wonderful people is going to be just as important as actual development.

Midnight Veil (v.0.2.0) is now officially available for free! Take a peak! Let me know what you think!:
Password to access the page is: Milovana
https://vanbeansgoongames.itch.io/midnight-veil

[VanillaBean]

Hello everyone again,

I have since added a whole bunch of stuff in v0.2.0.
See the change log at the itch.io link.

Unfortunately not much teasing or fleshing out of the scenes got done, and I will not be able to get around to anymore development until next week.

I would still like some feedback if anyone has any.

Thanks!

[diogaoo]

Hey Vanilla! Thank you so much for the shoutout, and congratulations on releasing your game!
Hitting that launch button is one of the hardest steps, so huge props to you. Hopefully you get to experience that same feeling many more times in the near future.

I’m definitely not skilled enough to judge anyone else’s work, but I’m happy to share a few things I’ve learned along the way:


Consider having an online demo! I’m sure a lot of people were curious about your project but might not feel ready to download a file. A quick browser demo can really help players get a feel for the basic mechanics and attract a lot more attention.

I love your location screen. It’s clean, organized, and visually appealing, having the small widget with at the top left with essential info is a clever idea.

You clearly put a lot of time into finding photos for the girls, and that effort really shows. However, it does feel like all the girls share the about the same set of options, as of those options lead to very similar scenes, with only small dialog/text differences.
I also noticed there's an attribute system, but I'm not entirely sure if it influences anything...?
Since you already have a solid system built, it might work even better if some menu options had specific requirements. This would help reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed by too many choices at once, and it would also create a sense of progression while giving more purpose to the attribute system you already implemented.

Again, huge congratulations on your release. Please keep working on it, your game have a lot of potential

[grelgen]

it's a neat idea, not a thing yet.
feedback so far:
- images of girls cycle too fast, but that's probably not how they're supposed to be displayed anyways
- missing space character in the opening dialog
- deck editor font is microscopic/lime green background is rough to look at, also probably not how it's going to eventually look
- are the interactable buildings going to be random as well? difficult to tell which locations are searchable (future UI elements)
- I couldn't find the button to look at my phone, again this is probably future development space