Lunch with Lancer

Congrats on your first VN release! It’s a short, sweet little story that doesn’t try to overreach, and it totally nails the cute boyfriend vibe. Really charming stuff. These are just some friendly notes I wrote down while playing - mostly polish, future expansion ideas, and general feedback to help take things even further. Take all this with a grain of salt and feel free to ignore anything that doesn’t fit the style you’re going for. I see you’re trying to make more of these games, so hopefully this just comes across as friendly banter from a fellow in the industry who wants to see others flourish.

Writing & Dialogue:

• The slice-of-life tone works really well. It’s adorable, and the dynamic between the characters is super endearing.
• Grammar is mostly fine, but could use a quick polish pass - stuff like sentence structure and punctuation consistency.
• A small nit-pick, but a few lines don’t end with any punctuation. Ideally all sentences should end with some form of punctuation mark (‘.’, ‘?’, ‘!’). Similarly, some lines (like thoughts) don’t start with a capital letter. It’s all still readable, but tightening those up helps it feel more complete and intentional.

Text Presentation:

• Text speed defaults to instant, which can be a bit jarring (perhaps a leftover from rapid iteration during development). Normally for Visual Novels I would recommended to have the text speed set to some medium rate that matches the average reading speed, and the user can choose to set it to max speed/instant if they find it too slow, or slow it down if its too fast in the settings. Just helps the pacing feel more natural on first playthrough.
• All the text - dialogue, narration, player thoughts - shares the same font and color, so it’s not always clear who’s “talking.” The only distinction that something is a player thought comes from the fact there is no nameplate - something as simple as italics, or a slightly greyed-out text colour, would make this more distinct.

Visuals & Sprite Stuff:

• The graphite-style outlines are nice, but it looks like the background was removed using a magic wand tool or similar? There’s a faint white fringe behind the exterior outlines. Exporting images with a transparent background (instead of removing it after the fact) would clean that up (assuming you didn’t draw directly on the default background layer and first created a new empty one. I’ve done that a few times haha.)
• Lancer’s shocked face has a visible seam at the neck, where the head was presumably swapped - just a layering/tweaking issue, but thought I’d mention it in case it slipped through.
• The sudden stomach expansion is fun, but feels a bit too quick since only the stomach changes and the face stays the same. A short fade‑to‑black or 1 or 2 interim belly sizes spread across a few preleading lines would smooth the reveal to help it land better.
• There’s a line of text that mentions “blush on face,” but there’s no visible blush on the sprite. Might be worth popping one on there for consistency (/comedic timing + cute factor).
• Backgrounds are a bit bold and high-contrast, which can sometimes make the character art blend in. Softening them slightly - either by desaturating, blurring, or white-washing - would help the characters stand out more in the foreground.

Audio & Atmosphere:

• The ambient diner chatter is a great touch - it gives the scene some life. That said, the volume balancing is a little off. Some sounds (like the gulp) are way louder than the rest, so adjusting the mix would make everything feel more cohesive.
• Adding a background music track would really bring the mood together. Even a single loop can go a long way in setting the tone and improving immersion. Doesn’t have to be a paid or even attributed track if you don’t want it to be - royalty free and even public domain generic tracks exist for this reason, and are a great quick addition.

UI:

• The game uses the default Ren’Py main menu. Totally fine for a first release, but even something as simple as a custom background image or some music would help give it a personal touch.
• The credits are great to have, especially for attribution, but it might be worth hiding Lancer during them and swapping to a neutral or dedicated credits background - just to make it feel like the story has properly wrapped up.
• Since you’ve got players’ attention at that moment, it could also be a good time to drop your social links (itch, Twitter/X, Bluesky, etc.). It’s a natural call-to-action right when players are most likely to want to see more from you.

Design/Future:

• The story is linear, which totally works here - but if you ever feel like expanding it or making more VNs, even just small branching choices that loop back into the main story can help players feel more involved. They don’t need to change the plot - even just the illusion of choice that changes a single response helps with player engagement since they feel like they have some degree of agency and aren’t just watching everything unfold with zero input.
• You’ve clearly got the Ren’Py basics down really solidly. With a bit of extra polish and these kinds of enhancements, I could easily see future projects going even bigger (pun intended hehe).

Hope this feedback is helpful and not discouraging - Really looking forward to what you make next, fluffball 💖