The game is absolutely amazing! What a story, absolutely great!!!
But: Could you perhaps use a little bit more shader and color range? In its current state the characters look very doll-like. Plus, with less colors the 3D potential is very limited. It doesn't have to be HDR or animated of course but a bit more rendering would surely double or triple the gameplay experience. I can only imagine there is mass of content you already creatted, but I really think it could it be worth the effort.
For example, let's take Noel's hair: it really look yellow like straw. I can't help myself but finding yellow very strange for 3D VNs - usually blonde, light-colored blonde, gold or something like this is used, or in other words, it ranges by reflection of light.
The game is unique, in it's very own way. For RenPy standards the horror effects are extremely heavy (still within limit for stable feeling adults, I would say). What I like most is the idea with the sound thing - creative, really.
Warning - spoilers ahead:
What I don't like very much is that the sexual harassment (tried rape) by Rupert is not taken serious enough in my opinion - the choices (if you can call them that) should be more exemplary. Like, the MC should really have the option to deny all Rupert's requests from the beginning without reaching a bad end. I think in real life every girl (rightly so) is told to refuse and run away, doing so shouldn't lead to Rupert winning. Whether this route might only get a quick good end (cause the main story will become pointless) or a complete other outcome, does not matter, as long as denying Ruperts ill behavior is rewarded.
And, there really, really should be a skipping possibillity in the game options, I know it can be turned off but its rather uncool if you are forced to re-read all seen text again for the x time you try to get another end.
The other thing - neutral - I just found out about existing parallels to other stories: For the range of horror effects you surely got inspired by DDLC a bit, didn't you? Nothing wrong about it (DDLC was my very first VN years ago - I thought it was a romance and mistook the content warning as some 3d illness stuff like the Wii console shows at every launch, surprise surprise). What makes me wonder more is whether you took some ideas by "Death Note" too. When the 'police officer' came into play it suddenly felt very familiar: I noticed how the name Lolite sounds similar to Lawliet and some phrases really make me think of Lolite as an altered Kira. Is my guess just coincidence or are there hidden allusions?
What is about the different content size now, since 0.8.2 the game is only half the size of 0.7 and 0.8 - it the quality loss noticable? If yes, could you provide the HQ as well?
The game is really cool. But in modern Windows with my High-End harware, only the XP-Version works - all others get frozen. Which means that the 2.0 version can't be launched since there is no XP-Version of it available.
Here on itch dont look at the tag but on the version instead, its unwritten term that programmers name their pre-releases with a leading zero, like 0.8.2. Thats way more reliable and applies to all plattforms and all software. That means, 1.0 would be a finished story (unless they add DLCs or more details and then call it e.g. 1.1).
But: Games from indie developers - and escpecially here on itch - rarely reach the state of 1.0, or to be specific: Developers don't like to set static ETAs or closed plots, instead a lot of them just vanish one day, the only indicator then is the lack of activity from them here for a long time.
Whether it's worth trying in general? Depends on. This game? Absolutely, it's one of the best I would say! In my opinion you'll find no other free hentai game in RenPy here which 3D anime content being that outstanding good (besides of Eternum maybe) without exaggerated proportions. Plus, I think the story awesome .
Thanks you for your fast response. Would be cool if the new size has the same quality, but honestly I doubt it. If you didn't use completely uncompressed bmps or pngs before and now changed that there is no chance pictures can be reduced in size that much without quality loss.
But on way or another: I am interested to hear the result of your inspection.
Never saw something like this here on itch before. Sure, some VNs are very good - and some are more interactive than others, but never there were such a big adventure game available here for what I know.
The atmosphere is the best. The decent horror effects alternated with calm places, combined with the music and retro-looking map create an atmosphere, extremely popular games reached about 10-20 years ago. Hell, some of the secret passages and endings are really difficult to find but give the game the extra spice. I can't believe it was done only by two people.
Please make sure the story continues. Never had such a good game for a very long time. As soon it will be released, I'll play it!
How comes version 0.8.2 (2.24GB) is so small in size compared to 0.7 (4.24GB)? Did the developer cut out material (or reduce the resolution quality) or is 0.8.2 only a patch and we need it along 0.8,... or should it be really a (much much) better algorithm/filetype efficiency?
Doubt the dev will answer here regularly. But maybe I can help you, it's always the same with Mega free download quota:
I heard some people say (wink) that VPN should allow you to 'reset' the daily limit. Just try enough connections to get an IP which quota is still full. I recommend ProtonVPN cause its free. Hide.me is very slow but also free - and no account needed.
Hey Fouzi, can you show me the WAV source file that you used in Happiness 2 at the end (Radwimps なんでもないや piano theme)? It's not a question about copyright, but I like this alteration even more then the original song and just want to know whether there is a WAV/FLAC version of it anywhere. I cannot find it by just searching for it online (there is only the original guitar version I don't need that one).
BTW: I played tons of games on itch now (Renpy) and I've to say your are definitely one of the best. Unique story and almost no one has such great art with such rendering and good amount of 3D effect.
Addition: Found another bug (at least seems like a real one): After chapter 3 "ends" (dont want to spoiler anything), I got asked to continue (pressed that button), but the next scene (you know what I mean) is not interactive anymore - you cannot progress by left clicking (so far it could have been done by intention). But when I try to rewind one frame and re-do, there happens an fatal error with the typical real RenPy error screen. That's why I know this to be a real bug. Of course, I could call the unlocked part of chapter 3 from main menu instead from saving point, I want to let you know about this.
Playing chapter 3 makes it appear in the loading slot from chapter 1 too (probably they were meant to be separated so that only saves from the current chapter are shown in the load-menu of chapter 1,2 and 3).
Mostly, RenPy can only loads save data that made by the same game version. If you update the game version (which you do to get the latest chapters), it's not guaranteed the old ones can be loaded. It's a function the dev has to implement carefully and only few devs get this done without any problems.
[Little Spoiler of "DDLC" and" Historia"]:
Other games, like "DDLC" or "Historia" have a intended self-destroying mechanism that destroys your progress when you hit a bad end, but in this game it shouldn't be the case.
Wow, absolutely stunning!!! Never I played a game which such a great "interactive" talk to the player (just finished Happiness 1 and Happiness 2 - those two and Null which I started with, like so many others how I know now). How you anticipate the readers thoughts, rejecting certain choices and give every character a deeper meaning, divine! You definitely have great abilities in reflecting your own creations like an "observer" (haha) - no honestly, perfect empathy!
Plus, the story is exciting. Yeah, it was Null which attracted me originally - but now I am eager to learn the whole metaverse of Happiness.
Sometimes I am sad about the stories not being longer or lack of simple black-and-white vision so that I can blame only one characters as the evil and being proud the MC never makes bad choices on his own. But that's how real life is working, isn't it? I can only assume that every person in the game (even the butterfly entity) maybe have honorable or at least reasonable motives - to make it more difficult for us to pick one solely mastermind that is responsible for all that trouble.
I also have to praise you for a healthy mix of good and bad events in the games, at least until now (cant say for the games I still have to play).
Some of the music could be better sometimes (speakig of the electronic ones), but maybe its just because of me being spoiled by great companys infinite budget set. And then there are unexpected welcome surprises again, like Radwimps variation theme at the end of Happiness 2 - nobody of us would dare to draw a line towards Kimi no Na wa here, absolutely not! It took a minute or so to verifying me not imaging things. Powerful timetravel vibes, for sure!
Okay, now I'll continue playing, just wanted to let you know about my positive experiences.
I spent some more time in it and found my Avast ransomware protection to be the culprit. Like it seems it does not allow alteration to games sav files once the process was not the one who created it, which is all but the first time od starting the game.
That means you dont need to investigate time. I have to make an exclusion for Avast here. But thanks.
I have to report a heavy bug in this game. Every new PC restart the engine in "Happiness 2 remastered" shows a blackscreen (windowed) only. I have to delete/rename/move "Happiness_2_sf.sav" to make it start again but then my save slots can not be overriden anymore. To reenable saving I have to delete both SAV files and start over. This happens every day. I don't know about the next versions but Happiness 1 did not have this problem.
Hey Komisari, I just want to inform you that Cloudflare DNS servers started to blocking your entire profile here on itch. Which is strange, because no other NSFW site here on itch is blocked.
Maybe you want to tell Cloudflare to stop that? I mean, for myself I can switch to another DNS but other people might think that your page would be shut down completely...
I bought the full bundle a few years ago. But the later versions are not included - do I have to pay each time again for the latest versions of the bundle?
Yeah, no rush - its a free project and most people do it in their spare time. I really appreciate your work. But sometimes a serious time schedule helps.
E.g. how should we know which August you mean? Last year it said August too...
The third episode was anounced last year. Then before 7 months testing was initiated. Debugging for 7 months is a bit hard to believe, so for the time being there is no update.
Will definitely try. Might take a while cause I have lots of games to test before but I was really fond of Inciting Incident and the story ended with a cliffhanger, so I am interested :)
Yes, I know. But this was not Defender but Avast. A good indicator might be VirusTotal, for my programs there are false positives too lots of times. Then I have to contact the AV vendors to make them whitelist the file.
Fix: Reinstall your complete GPU suite (AMD/Nvidia/Intel) which causes the driver to being repaired as well.