Hello, this is my first time posting on here and I don’t know if this is right spot or if everything in this post will work so let me know if you encounter any problems!
Bio:
In Sweet Home you play as a recent college graduate returning to your hometown to celebrate your recent engagement. But something seems…off. Your ex-best friend is spouting conspiracy theories, your mostly absent father has turned over a new leaf, you’ve been having strange dreams every time you close your eyes and a string of disappearances have lured a detective to your sleepy town. Will you help unravel this mystery? Or is it in your best interest to hide the truth in knots?
Features:
Customizable MC (Play as male, female or nonbinary)
Four RO’s all of whom are romanceable by any gender
Surrealistic dreams
Shenanigans
Mother issues
A large mystery to unravel with smaller mysteries along the way
Hi! I actually found your game on Tumblr a while ago, and I’ve been looking forwards to it. I really enjoy most of it, but I do have a couple of suggestions. I normally don’t sandwich, but if you need me to I can.
A few things on your code.
So, I have this bad habit of peaking into people’s codes after my first play-through, and I’m not sure if you know this or not, but instead of using *line_break twice, you could just add an extra blank line between lines of text for a new paragraph. Along those lines, you don’t need to have so many labels and gotos, most of those choices could’ve been made into fake choices and you can just put the text in the body of the choice itself.
*choice
#A calm blue
*goto eye1
*set Eyes “Blueâ€
#A gentle brown
*goto eye2
*set Eyes “Brownâ€
*label eye1
*set Eyes "Blue"
There are certainly no shortage of poetic comparisons to the sky and ocean you could make.
*line_break
*line_break
You and your dad have the same eye color and the two of you used to laugh as he read aloud bad poetry sent to him from admirers throughout the years. One had used the word deep as a descriptor six times.
*line_break
*line_break
“I hope the poor thing didn’t drown!†He’d howled.
*page_break Next
*goto hairtoday
*label eye2
*set Eyes "Brown"
You used to feel that your eyes were nothing special or even ugly at times but one day your dad had taken you into the kitchen and shown you an old portrait of your mother he’d found.
*line_break
*line_break
Her eyes were brown, the same as yours, and looking into the color filled you with a sweetness so rich you tasted honey on your tongue for an hour afterwards.
*page_break Next
*goto hairtoday
Can get made into:
*fake_choice
#A calm blue
*set Eyes "Blue"
There are certainly no shortage of poetic comparisons to the sky and ocean you could make.
You and your dad have the same eye color and the two of you used to laugh as he read aloud bad poetry sent to him from admirers throughout the years. One had used the word deep as a descriptor six times.
“I hope the poor thing didn’t drown!†He’d howled.
... the rest of the choices...
*page_break
A few things on your writing.
This comes out of a place of wanting you to get better, not trying to be offensive in any way, shape, or form. I know my own writing often suffers from similar issues and I’m also not a native speaker, and you can ignore any of the points I make here.
Watch your tenses. It happened way too much for me to keep track of, but an example would be: Kelly lead you around and introduced you to people. The talking was nice and after a while you felt yourself beginning to get into the groove of the group you’re a part of. You spent the next few hours laughing and having fun. First of all, Kelly either led you or leads you, and second of all, I would put everything in present tense and then go through and do so for most of your other lines that vary.
A smile slowly forms on your lips. he’s perfect. There’s nothing to worry about. There’s supposed to be a capital letter for the “he”. There’s other places the capitalization is weird, although I only have * in some way; Drinking on the lawn, laughing in packs and ducking* as one I remember.
This might be personal preference, but sometimes I feel like you’re trying too hard to add too much description. For example, I picked brown hair, and it went into some monologue about this girl in front of me having gold flecks in her hair or something. And that kind of takes away of the point of having brown hair for me, because if I wanted gold flecks, I would’ve chosen blonde. Also, for the eyes, why would the dad have poetry describing his eyes? Like is he famous or something that I missed?
I… didn’t feel like my choices made anything happen. Like the story was incredibly linear, which is okay for a prologue/intro, but there really was no variation except a few lines after every choice, which is something I want past chapter one. For example, I raised my charm stat pretty much as high as I could, and yet Taylor could charm my Aunt. Great, he can be more charming than me, but it would be nice to reference my own charm. Like “Even though I had gotten good at charming people, Taylor somehow always knew better.” or something to add some semblance of choice. Also, I chose to have a good relationship with my father, and yet my options for his change seemed too negative, somehow. Like why in the world would I feel cheated if we were already best friends. So, I clicked on the choice to see if it said something to reference my previous choice, and yet it said our fights were getting worse. When did I ever say we fought or that our fights were bad? Never. Also, why was my dad transforming a surprise? I was happy to see him transform, so maybe to my “relief” would make more sense in that context? Although, I will admit that I didn’t read past chapter one so I haven’t seen the rest yet.
From what I read, I am looking forwards to see how it goes, and I’ll have to finish playing sometime when I can. Good luck with the rest of it!
I really like how MC was introduced but I felt like the story plot is a bit too straight to the point especially after the interaction with Taylor (why are they our significant other? did something happened?) Overall, I like the demo, it’s pretty interesting.
I hope that going forward there’ll be some twists in your expectations since this is mostly setup! If you still feel the same way (That it’s too obvious) after the story gets rolling please let me know again so I can try to brainstorm ways to make things more mysterious! Thank you for your comment~
Demo looks really promising so far! I already have trouble choosing who to romance, but that is just the curse of playing any good game I guess. I am getting a very Ready or not feeling from this town and will definitely be checking in on this wip.
Thank you for your comments! Thank you for telling me about the coding thing, I didn’t know you could do that since is the first time I’ve coded anything using choicescript and was just going off the wiki!
Pertaining to the writing;
The tense in the prologue is supposed to be all past tense since it happens before the main events of the game but I definitely probably slipped into present tense by mistake or just made a few spelling errors over the course of writing the entire game (Please keep letting me know about any spelling errors)
Yeah I think a lot of the errors you might catch will be pertaining to pronouns or other things that are like…code? Like I put {taylor_he} which makes it lowercase instead of !{taylor_he} which makes it uppercase. Please let me know about this kind of thing as well as it’s hard to catch sometimes as the writer!
Are there any other places you felt there was too much description or just that hair/the hair section? I was trying to give hints of the main character’s life in the descriptions but maybe it was too haha~
Yeah that’s pretty much true for this! I’m currently going back and working on stats to make myself more able to change things and get a view of the main character’s personality’s like some sort of mean/nice stat? Since I was running into a conundrum where charm&intimidation were starting to stand in for mean/nice which I don’t want since it’d be much more interesting if you could be a bad charming person or vise versa…So your criticism of that is valid and I’ll be trying to work on improving it in the future, especially scenes where you have to lie and stuff!
Now this is interesting How much is my family involved in this I think… As I’m more on the side of justice and truth, I think that I would have to sacrifice some good relationship with my family if I want to get to the bottom of everything.
Really interesting premise! I’m excited to see where this goes
The mc was acting pretty suspicions when talking to the detective. Makes me wonder if we are completely innocent in the disappearance
“That sounds rough.” Her tugs on her ear slightly as her thinks. “Well, you can’t do much about it now so I guess you’ll just have to avoid her as much as you can.
I think it’s supposed to say ‘She tugs on her ear’.
Ceclia walks down a road.
The road loops like the background of an old cartoon.
I think it’s supposed to say ‘Cecelia’.
“When I heard you were getting married I was actually happy for you, you know that?” She whispers
Not really a spelling mistake but I think there’s a period missing here.
This is really interesting! I already love Taylor and Emerson.
One error I noticed: when you’re talking to Emerson he says “Sorry to drag you away from your parents” it would make more sense for him to say “Sorry to drag you away from your family.”
Wow, I really enjoyed this WIP! It’s very vague in the beginning and that’s to be expected of course, so I’m eagerly awaiting updates. But please, please tell us exactly HOW our/our family’s name is coming up! When our ex-bestie started going on about their conspiracy theories, I nearly had a heart attack thinking of my sweet, innocent Taylor. Also is it just me or are Michael and Jennifer Fletcher related?
This is a continuation of what @danny_a said. It should be family, not parents?
Speaking of family in general, does the dad live with Aunt, Uncle and our cousin? Have we always lived with them? If we have, why was there ever an issue of the fridge not being stocked? I’m sorry if I missed something! :-(( Also speaking of living, I LOVED how you described Greenwood, both its geography and its affairs.
Me too. Honestly, I’m feeling a bit conflicted about this. I mean Taylor is our fiancee, and if I start hanging out with other ROs (in romantic way), doesn’t it literally mean that I’m cheating on Taylor? I’m confused about how this works. Even though other ROs are intriguing, I wouldn’t want to cheat on Taylor. So yeah, I’m a bit unsure about other options other than Taylor.
How much is my family involved in this I think… As I’m more on the side of justice and truth, I think that I would have to sacrifice some good relationship with my family if I want to get to the bottom of everything.
