[ANN] Summer Session demo preview

[Jack Norton]

Hello,
I'm proud to present the result of the collaboration between Tycoon Games and Hanako Games: Summer Session is a dating-sim game with cool manga art, with 5 different endings and a simple goal: date out one of the girl you'll met at your summer session!

Some Screenshots:


Direct Downloads:
http://www.tycoongames.eu/downloadga...ssionTrial.exe (Pc)
http://www.tycoongames.eu/downloadga...ssionTrial.zip (Mac Intel only)
http://www.tycoongames.eu/downloadga...nTrial.tar.bz2 (Linux)

Game page:
http://www.tycoongames.eu/adventures/summersession.php

We're mostly interested to hear if anyone has problems with interface or other usability issues, since the game should be (hopefully) bugfree already!

[Grey Alien]

I read your thread title as Ann Summers and thought "what sort of game is this!?"

[Emmanuel]

I played it yesterday and liked it. It's a good intersection of your skills (Georgina's storytelling and structure, and your production skills/successful niche of games). I finished the demo and wanted to see what happened with that French guy

Best regards,
Emmanuel

[Nexic]

I did the same thing as Grey Alien expecting a porn game. Well this is at least in a similar genre

This feels like the kind of game that will appeal mainly to girls, but I play a boy which feels odd. Do girls like playing as males? Do girls like dating girls? Seems like I'm getting out of my depth here ^.^

[Jack Norton]

You guys have really a perverted brain!
well maybe the ambiguity of the title is intentional... my original title was Summer Love (very romantic, eh!) but Hanako suggested to change it

It's true what Nexic says, but I know many people that play that game (boys). I must confess I played some hentai games too when was younger (even if this game is definitely not hentai, just funny)

[Maupin]

On the surface, and to my untrained eye, this looks exactly like those Japanese interactive story hentai games where a guy tries to get with as many girls as possible.

I feel the same as Nexic.

A very interactive (and innocent) dating sim game for girls could make a lot of money. I have a searchbox prominently displayed on every page of my portal site, and some of the top searches are "boyfriend games" "games where you have a boyfriend" "wedding" etc. They're only topped by "virtual baby" and "babysitting games."

[Grey Alien]

Interesting searchbox stats.

Given the proportion of male homosexuals vs female homosexuals you'd be better off making a dating game from a female perspective and letting gay/bi men pick a male character and date other men.

[Musenik]

This is the kind of game I would like to like, but after about five minutes I have the following feedback:

The gameplay feels very constrained. I am given options, but they feel fed to me.

The intro listed four or five things about the interface which I promptly forgot after reading them and dismissing the screen. Othewise I seemed to be effective at controlling the game.

The buttons in the preferences screen knocked me for a loop when I first saw them. The aqua hilite color was glaring, and the grouping art looked like big buttons with little buttons in them. (they're all round rects)

I enjoyed the bit of dialog I read, but one piece described what the art work animated. It felt redundant and distracting. I would prefer to let the art/animation tell me as much as possible and read less. (that does not mean I don't enjoy interesting, complex text) This specific incident happened upon meeting the first boy who 'slumped his shoulders forward' while the art slumped its shoulders forward.

I still do not understand the gender I'm playing. That might be very cool, except gender identification is the first question when one human encounters another. I feel I could play this het or hom, and that's why I think it's cool, but I worry a lot of people will feel displaced from their self-identities.

The art looked like std fare manga/anime, but that's okay I've got a lot of pent up fantasies regarding a glasses girl...

The music started out nice, but within the five minutes I had to turn it off. But that true for me with most games.

In final, the only thing that would keep me from buying this is the spoon-fedness. I'll play a little more to see if it opens up to more exploration.

[papillon]

Given the proportion of male homosexuals vs female homosexuals you'd be better off making a dating game from a female perspective and letting gay/bi men pick a male character and date other men.

... I'm not sure what gay proportions have to do with anything? Straight men (often young and lonely but not always) do play these sorts of games as well, and as far as I know I'd expect more male players for this.

And yes, a GxB dating sim is in my list of things to do, when I have the time. But not a BxB - there's a market for it (largely played by girls!) but I'm not part of that market myself and wouldn't know how to write it.

[angie1313]

I thought the same thing about this being one of those hentai games. The gameplay is interesting and fun but marketing it may be a bit difficult.

[Cray]

Nice seeing one of these type of games that isn't about ...that other stuff.

Quick comments:

• Game started with only half the window shown, had to move it.
• Intro has "roommate" typoed.
• Took me a minute to figure out how to get past secret diary screen.

Good way of ending it instead of the usual 1 hour trial.
Might get a purchase from me later.

[Bad Sector]

Dating sims are not (always) hentai, but for some reason most dating sims translated to english are hentai. So the misconception :-).

I'm downloading this. I've just installed Ubuntu on my big laptop after a hard day of tries (my DVD drive is busted and the only other computer is a EeePC, so i had to do netinstall with net forwarding from the EeePC with a 3G/GPRS connection using a cross cable and suffice to say that the whole setup was very slow and very painful to get it working) i prefer to enjoy the system a bit before rebooting to Windows. So i can't commend on this right now, but i will :-).

Probably its also a nice opportunity to introduce my column's readers to dating sims :-).

[Jack Norton]

Forgot to mention, there is also a linux version incoming, just need to put the right buy url in it (I'll ask the programmer since I know nothing of linux).

[Grey Alien]

.. I'm not sure what gay proportions have to do with anything? Straight men (often young and lonely but not always) do play these sorts of games as well, and as far as I know I'd expect more male players for this.

What I meant by "female perspective" was make a game entirely about dating MEN. So therefore it would appeal to women, homosexual men and maybe some other interested parties (I presume a young and lonely straight male would not be that into playing a game about dating men, but I could be wrong). Whereas if the game is about dating WOMEN then your audience is men, homosexual women (of which there are many less of that homosexual men) and other interested parties. That was my numbers logic...

[Jack Norton]

Added the linux version, if anyone want to test. I had a friend try it and said worked fine. This python is really a nice language, probably would look at it if I hadn't already build lot of custom dev tools with PTK

[Bad Sector]

I assume the second "Mac Intel" is the Linux version?

[Jack Norton]

Today there was an article of Emily Short (well known in the IF world) about Summer Session in gamasutra:
http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/new...hp?story=21944

so congrats to me and Hanako!

...and if you want to help spread the word please digg:
http://digg.com/pc_games/Summer_Sess...into_Narrative

[Bmc]

Less text, more sex