Slice of School's demo is out!

Hello everyone!

As promised, here's the release of Slice of School's demo. As always with beginning of games, there's a LOT to do and even if it wasn't SoV3 level, stuff piled up. Especially on the script side as we're not using third-parties scripts anymore but 100% Hime-created scripts.

Anyway, I'd like to make things clear in case they're not. This is a DEMO. It's not meant to be the v0.1. We're releasing that demo for two reasons:

1) So you can wait until v0.1 is ready.

2) To have something to share for free as a promotion tool once v0.1 is out.

So while it contains stuff, the fact it's a demo and the way the game is built can make it VERY quick (if I were to speedrun that demo by skipping all the text. I'd think I'd need roughly 2 to 3 minutes to complete it.) On your side, it's always a question of reading speed but I'd say it's a 30 minutes max demo.

Anyway, what's inside the demo?

- 5 H scenes

- 46 H pics in total

- An original title screen

- Fully customized elements (UI, Menu, tilesets, charsets, facesets, fonts... Spoiler: All those things are actually what took the most time overall)

- A scat mode you can activate/deactivate anytime in the options

- A fully fonctionnal gallery mode

And a couple more things that I need to detail more.

First of all, there's a roof system for inside the buildings. The goal of that system was to avoid making tons of TPs in and out of each room of the building. In a game where you'll check those room often, I thought it was a better idea to have everything on a single map. This saves you the loading time. You see what's inside the room as soon as you've opened the corresponding door and the door automatically close after you've left. The global benefits are important (time saving, more logical in the MC pov, easier to hide stuff the player has to find) there's one "con" to it: When you're inside the buildings, all the rooms are covered with a roof. As such, the map looks empty as only the corridors are visible. But we get used to it pretty quickly.

MZ has an autosave built-in feature. While it's deactivable, we kept it on for now. I'm not sure it's very relevant, though, as it auto-saves every time you change map so it's OFTEN. But I thought important to mention that it's there. We didn't do anything to it, so I don't know if it can bug or not. If it does, it's not our fault XD

As I mentionned above there's a scat mode. While you'll be asked about its activation at the very beginning of the game, it's also accessible in the menu's options in case you want to switch back and forth. On the 5 scenes in the game, only one has a scat variation (we add those only when it's relevant.)

We also took the liberty to script something else accessible in the option: a speed mode. When activating it, the original running speed becomes the base speed, and the running speed becomes x2. Inside the buildings it's a bit of an overkill, but considering I'm 100% sure at least one people would complain about the running speed, we added that. The fact it's deactivable at will allow you to customize your own choice.

One last thing I wanted to mention and far from the being the least important one: I changed my narrative style. Ever since VP I've been writing H scenes with people's dialogues only. The only exception was Naomi's Past because I could take the chance that the narration was done by Naomi herself so it was smooth to integrate her thinking. But this time, I've decided to do like actually all VNs do and add a whole narrative part in the H scenes. This way they're much longer and there won't be awkward lines where the character need to describe what they're doing for the sole purpose of informing the player. I hope you'll like it, cause this is something I've been reproached a couple of time so I tried to make it better.

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I think that's all I needed to cover. There are many things that need to be tweaked in that demo. The map filling, the color unconsistency between facesets and charsets... We're aware of that. But time was running out so we'll correct that for the next release. Oh yeah, by the way: no need to check background elements. There are no interactive elements outside doors :x Despite those small problems, this demo needed A LOT of work (much more than the impression it will leave you, trust me.) As such we're already December 5th. If I want to release v0.1 before Christmas it's going to be a hellish race. I think I won't have trouble implementing the story elements but when I see the huge amount of workload we still have on the graphical side, it's going to be tricky. You have to realize we have 30 facesets (which is huge) and each should have a set of 8 expressions. For now, we've focused on 3 characters: the MC, Karen and Seth. But we have to do the others. And among all that we ALSO have to add the future scenes. 20 days sounds like a very short amount of time for that :/ But we'll do our best.

As I mentionned in the past, the links are going to be accessible to all tiers above the 1000 Yens one starting today. And next week, this post will be accessible to the 600 Yens one. For the releases though, it'll only be PC and Mac as for some reason, Enterbrain seems to have given up providing Linux-compatible exports. Sorry for Linux users :/

As always feedbacks are welcome. Just keep in mind it's a demo. I KNOW it's short x)

Have fun!

PC Version:

https://mega.nz/file/1kVHzKrZ#34HIt9fNeNA32SDxwxtSgJqubcAhuhH9TnC65qkVFuk

Mac Version:

https://mega.nz/file/U8cDyKTT#Gn6DlbDmzvqTjtlApjeFxJk0uhkzYwtHJb7caYKsbz8