ValiDate - an upcoming (and unsurprisingly racist) visual novel made by SJW's, for SJW's. Currently MIA.

a major issue I’ve been thinking about was how they keep trying to present the game as “diverse“ and yet an overwhelming majority of the characters are black (with a couple ambiguously brown people).

if you don’t want any white characters that’s fine but where are the asians and Latinos??? No native Americans??? :/
Let's be honest, these chucklenuts give as much shit about Native Americans as they do about Cubans.
 
a major issue I’ve been thinking about was how they keep trying to present the game as “diverse“ and yet an overwhelming majority of the characters are black (with a couple ambiguously brown people).

if you don’t want any white characters that’s fine but where are the asians and Latinos??? No native Americans??? :/
"Diverse" literally just means less white people in most cases.
 
Just checked out their patreon. I found another screencap + they released the demo yesterday.
Screenshot_2020-06-26 ValiDate Struggling Singles in Your Area is creating games software Patr...png

Screenshot_2020-06-26 ValiDate Struggling Singles in Your Area is creating games software Patr...png

http://archive.md/qda9X
The text box looks like shit.
 
Just checked out their patreon. I found another screencap + they released the demo yesterday.
View attachment 1408368
View attachment 1408374
http://archive.md/qda9X
The text box looks like shit.

Immediately noticed so many errors with this. First, the text is too small. Already went over the backgrounds in another post but it needs to be said how much this is not working as a whole. The white text bubbles/dark text ultimately distracts from anything we can see (not that you'd want to anyways) and it doesn't lend itself to the a bright pastel photoshop filther mix-match. The art style simply does not work with what they're going for. It's like putting acrylics on wet paper-mache. It's not pleasing to the eyes and it's honestly a pain to look at. The key to good type design is varying hierarchy and we have such a lack of this here. San-serif fonts for outside speak (descriptions/choices) is fine, but it's also used for characters too? Even the main site for this game has better hierarchy than the game itself (though I'm not surprised if it's a template site).

We know it's supposed to be nighttime in this scene, but the text box doesn't reflect that in the slightest. Even visual novels when the protag goes to bed or if it's a nighttime scene, the boxes will usually change to reflect that in some way (whether it's a bg or text overlay) but here it makes it jarring because in other scenes, the color of the text boxes have changed. And while not every visual novel is REQUIRED to do this, keep in mind these developers have donation goals for voice acting/adding a white character, but not for fine-tuning their UI.

None of the negative space is being used in a valuable way. It feels less like text and more of a huge white blob near the bottom of the screen. I understand what they were going for as a more dialogue heavy game, but it's not executed well. They either need to reduce the size of the text bubble or make the text a bit bigger. There is just too much empty space, even for one line of dialogue. Traditional visual novels avoid this by usually having the text overlayed on top of a low opacity banner and removing it when necessary.
1593394280127.png


1593394300441.png


1593394354438.png

1593394452068.png

Notice how the opaque text boxes either:
A. Confine to the space of the page
or
B. Are unnoticeable enough not to be distracting.

The last one I linked? It was made from a small group of newbie developers (at the time) and even THEY were able to have a UI that wasn't as distracting despite it's age.

1593394141716.png


Okay, I understand they're trying to be humorous here but try to sell your game. We barely know anything about how this game works other than the diverse cast and that it's a visual novel set with the player in their 20s. Is it just a full on story? Do we have any additional gameplay? Multiple endings? How many routes? Secret routes? Your role as the player? We don't need direct answers to all of these, but show, don't tell.
 
I still think a Kiwifarms Dating Sim would be kick-ass. You get to date many of the very lolcows in the forums.
When I think of KiwiFarms dateing sim I think it be a mix of Half forumers,half loli cows.

Minor update: More demo info and a new (mini)screencap. I honestly think that the demo will be released in ~2-3 weeks.
View attachment 1406073View attachment 1406074
Yes Because The people making a game telling me the demo is "Good" It must be good.
Just makes them come off as Ass Huffer.

Just checked out their patreon. I found another screencap + they released the demo yesterday.
View attachment 1408368
View attachment 1408374
http://archive.md/qda9X
The text box looks like shit.
Are they expecting a Ant to be reading this? Replace book with VN.


I don't hate the backgrounds it just remind me of Low budget Horror VN i have lose memories of playing of many many years ago.
 
Back