Volleyball Heaven beta

A mature dating sim with optional volleyball simulation https://www.winterwolves.com/volleyballheaven.htm
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jack1974
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Re: Volleyball Heaven beta

Post by jack1974 »

Thanks glad you liked it!
eagle 917
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Re: Volleyball Heaven beta

Post by eagle 917 »

So I just finished 3 of the routes. Zoe, Jade, and Rika, thought I would offer a little feedback on the routes.

Rika: is just a sweetheart and I love her, highly enjoyed her route, no real issues. Thought she was a well written character with good, believable layers to her.

Jade: Really neat slow burn with her. She's an interesting character and I enjoyed her route lots. The friendship development was particularly well done as it felt quite natural.

Zoe: Interesting character, but she was a little...a bit over the top for me. But that's really personal taste more than anything.

Criticisms/suggestions: I REALLY do think that Jade's route should come with a trigger warning. The kidnapping scene gets pretty intense and there is a serious threat, or at least what appears to be a serious threat, of rape presented to the character and that can be deeply troubling for some people. It's quite a lengthy scene and it's is brought up multiple times. Just something to consider.

As for Zoe's route, I do wish her romance route had a bit more of a resolution, it felt like we were just left hanging. To just kind of casually mention that they broke up in exposition at the party and then have the kiss just felt a little rushed to me and didn't really make sense since they seemed to be on perfectly good terms at the hot spring scene.

I don't know if it's possible, but maybe add an option to select any character during the hangout scenes, regardless of affection level. Or maybe if your affection level is over 50 or something. Having it automatically select the highest can be a bit frustrating since it's so easy to max Zoe's affection out. I had to specifically pick options she wouldn't like to lower my affection level so I could get other characters.

I agree on maybe toning down the language. Not even for sensitivity issues, but mostly just because the speech sounds unbelievable at some points. Don't get me wrong, I love the word fuck, most versatile word in the english language, but it sounds a bit ridiculous at times.

All in all it was a fun little game, definitely different from your usual style. I wouldn't really like many more games written this way personally, but as a one off it was neat to see something different. I especially love me some College/University romance's and I always enjoy seeing more of those.
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jack1974
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Re: Volleyball Heaven beta

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Thanks for the feedback. The Zoe kiss scene at the end was added by me since there was this unused CG and I wanted to add some sort of vague possibility that maybe Zoe wasn't just using Kayla as "a sex toy" the whole time :lol: but it can be changed of course (the original writer is reviewing everything).
He's reading the forums so about your other concerns I think you might be right, I'll make sure in the game page to explain beside strong language also about the other trigger warnings.

About choosing who to hangout is not possible due to the way the game was written/coded, I am not going to TOUCH this again ever, I spent way too much time on it already, but I can tweak the relationship values for example, if you say that's too easy to max Zoe's relationship. But following Franka's guide in these forums, you should be able to get to the Halloween point and then from there choose a romance to pursue, and reload from there for each love interest without having missed much.
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Franka
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Re: Volleyball Heaven beta

Post by Franka »

About the relationship values, it's the old curse of wanting to choose the "best" answer (most points) for every choice. If you do that, you'll get Zoe Halloween and probably choose beteeen Zoe and Rika route. That happened in my first game anyway, which is what prompted me to see if I could equalize relationship values at Halloween.
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jack1974
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Re: Volleyball Heaven beta

Post by jack1974 »

In any case considering it's a plain VN, shouldn't be too much bothering to replay it right? with fast-skip an all that built-in ren'py functionality?
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Franka
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Re: Volleyball Heaven beta

Post by Franka »

It's super quick to replay with TAB key and rollback after choices to get +/- relationship. I don't see a real issue, but it's true that Zoe is heavily favored in points. In just one of her scenes before Halloween (the jogging scene), you can potentially get 25 points from 4 choices. Meanwhile, I think Jade can get a maximum of 25 points total before Halloween, and two of those choices will also boost Zoe by 15 points. It's certainly not designed around equal points, but I don't feel it has to be.
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jack1974
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Re: Volleyball Heaven beta

Post by jack1974 »

Ah yes the jogging scene! I'll tweak the values of that one when writer is done reviewing the texts. It doesn't need to be equal indeed, but I think I've exaggerated a bit in that scene :lol:
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jack1974
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Re: Volleyball Heaven beta

Post by jack1974 »

Today have done a big update and bumped the game version to 0.7.8 to reflect this. The story overall remains the same, but there have been various adjustments in particular for Lana, and also Zoe. The endings have been reviewed/edited to match better the story, etc.
Not sure if worth replaying for those who already played the first version. Remember that if you have set "seen text" you can just fast skip and the game will stop only to show the new texts :)
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Franka
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Re: Volleyball Heaven beta

Post by Franka »

I ran into a bug at the Christmas party. If you choose to see Rika, you get the scene with drugged Zoe afterwards, but you can then choose to see Zoe after that, and you'll get the same scene again.

Also, in this scene, characters look pretty funny for the next couple of lines:

Image
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jack1974
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Re: Volleyball Heaven beta

Post by jack1974 »

Do you have saves of both bugs? Thanks!
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