Wolves in the Night

Hey, I just read your progress so far. I don't have much to say on the plot and lore yet except that I'm interested to see where it goes and what you have in store for us.  (Oh and belated congratulations on the one year anniversary of your visual novel!)

Especially William is interesting as a protagonist to me because he's just very different from me personally, so it's fun to see how he thinks. Things like sneaking out and worrying my parents (again) is something I would never do, but it's entirely in character for him. So you did that very well. You also properly characterize the parents because I have a pretty decent idea of what they're like, even with the relatively short playtime.

So in terms of what you're planning for the story, I think you're very well on track!

I couldn't help but notice that you didn't write a devlog for version 3.0, though. Maybe this was intentional, but you could be missing out on potential readers. Itch allows you to mark a blog as a major update, which will make your game appear in the most recent and new and popular tabs again. You might want to do that, assuming that 3.0 is indeed substantially different from what came before. Related to that: one of the images on this page is outdated. It still shows an image of a werewolf I assume is copied from somewhere when the game itself already has a proper sprite.

I also have a few points of improvement, but those are mostly technical things I wish I had discovered earlier myself. Hopefully they help you in some way.

It might seem like a lot, but don't worry. The length mostly comes from me wanting to explain myself properly.

Presentation:

-You probably want to look into changing the font and the interface because those are still the defaults. There's plenty of premade ones you can use for this purpose so long as you credit the creator. Like these, for example: https://itch.io/game-assets/tag-gui/tag-renpy. Even if they're premade, they still add some personality to your project. But do make sure to check what their requirements are in terms of credit and things like that, because that might vary. Same with the font. You can stick with something common like cambria or times new roman, but you should at least change it from the ren'py default. 

-There's nothing wrong with using real life pictures as backgrounds, but you should edit them a little first so it doesn't break immersion. The image of that village in the alps (I'm assuming it's from there, at least) is not cropped properly so there are black bars at the top and bottom. You want to make sure the aspect ratio of the image fits that of the game. Additionally, you might want to put some kind of artistic filter over it because that generally looks better for visual novels than an image without one. I personally use GIMP (https://www.gimp.org/downloads/) for both of these things, but most image editors should be able to do what I just described. Maybe it won't even matter because you're already working on getting artists, but I figured I'd mention it just in case.

-For the scene where William falls deeper into the cave, it would probably work better if you have the images directly transition into each other instead of having black in-between. It better captures the motion of falling (or maybe that's just my opinion)

Some programming things:

-You put "PROLOGUE" and other chapter titles in the text box, but it would probably be better to display it as text on the screen. Either directly with text 'prologue' xalign 0.5 yalign 0.5 or by making a cover for the chapter as an image separately and displaying that the way you would normal images

https://lemmasoft.renai.us/forums/viewtopic.php?t=39750

https://www.reddit.com/r/RenPy/comments/chr6te/putting_text_in_the_middle_of_the...

-You use two different images for a screen for day and night (the living room and village each have two variants), but this can needlessly inflate the size of your game's files. You could try changing the alpha property of an image to make it darker (more transparent, technically. But it has the practical effect of making background images darker because there's a black screen behind them). So

show background:

    alpha 0.2

You can also do this by adding a matrixcolor as an overlay to the image, which gives it a different shade. If you do this with a dark blue color, the image will appear darker.

show background:

    matrixcolor TintMatrix("[html color code]")

https://blog.argentgames.co/post/2021-03-22-renpy-layeredimage-colortint/

https://html-color.codes/

Obviously, this is only practical when all you need to change in the image is the brightness or add a filter.

Writing style:

-You typically don't want to front load your lore like you did. It's not that long and doesn't contain unnecessary details so it's not that bad here, but ideally you would introduce these details once they become relevant. Perhaps a better method would be to have William recall parts of this story as he's being chased by the werewolf? (Unless he's not supposed to know that piece of history, of course)

-You don't have to say "end of prologue" when you already give a chapter title immediately afterwards

-You could use something like Microsoft Word or Google Docs to write your text in first and then copy-paste it into ren'py. That way you have a spelling and grammar checker available. Because you can already write it in the format of w "..." and all that so you won't lose time translating it into code. I noticed a number of spelling errors and I won't list them here, so this is the best piece of advice I can give in this regard.

-The writing style can get a little repetitive because sentences tend to have a similar structure. Most of them go something like "I go into the living room, waving at my parents." There's nothing wrong with writing like that, but you could consider mixing your sentence structure up a bit more because I started to notice that most sentences had a structure of "I do x, y-ing as I do it." So, going back to my example, you could also say "I wave at my parents as I enter the living room." or "I walk into the living room. My parents turn to me when I enter, so I wave at them." All of these sentences are grammatically correct, but it helps with the flow of your story when you vary them like this. Most of this was in chapter one, though. It already gets better in later chapters, so I'm assuming it will be okay. Maybe you're not a native English speaker either, so then it might not be reasonable to expect you to notice these things. In that case you can just ignore it because it's not that big of a deal overall. I just figured I'd bring it up because sometimes it's harder to notice these things when reading one's own writing.

-You switch back and forth between past and present tense. "And with that I book it." is present tense and is immediately followed by "I wanted to break the line of sight...", which is past tense. You mostly use past tense in your story so I'm assuming that's the intended one. So be careful not to add present tense by accident.

-You generally don't want to write a setting note like "back in William's home". I understand that you want to transition the scene there, but this looks like you didn't know how to do that properly and just gave up trying, which can turn some people off. So, instead, you could write it as a transition. Something like "While William was facing a danger not yet known by his parents, the mood in the living room grew heavier and heavier in his absence", and then you move on to the scene like you did. You did this correctly when switching back to William, though. So I'm guessing that first time was an exception.

-It doesn't make much sense that William can't see the spear while he's outside, but can see it inside the cave. Why are you only introducing that detail now instead of earlier? (Really specific, I know.)

-You might want to be careful with how often you use exclamation points. They can be very effective, but they can also lose their effectiveness when you overuse them. https://www.tckpublishing.com/3-mistakes-when-writing-emphasis/. You don't use them that much, so it's still okay, but you sometimes use them for internal monologues when you don't really need them: "just live my life in unknowing bliss  moving forward as if nothing has ever changed at all!", "I wanted to never let it out, lock it away where it would never be seen again!", "Maybe nothing has changed!". If you do want to add extra emphasis to these lines you could also describe how William feels a sudden surge of relief, realization, horror, or whatever else is appropriate in that case.

The reason you want to avoid this is because using an emphasis like that can come off as insecure to some readers, as if you feel the need to clarify that something is exciting or important. I get that you want to show how William is frustrated and confused, but you already convey that with the way you write the sentence (which you did well in most cases, by the way). This is a very minor point of course, so there's no need to get hung up over it or remove all of them everywhere. I would just advise you to use them a little more sparingly in the future. I should also mention that you used the exclamation points properly for dialogue, so no need to worry about that. I was mostly talking about internal monologues.

-Another technical writing thing is something called a comma splice. You might have heard of this one before as it's a common occurrence. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/maybe-you-like-comma-splices-maybe-you-dont. Basically, you want to make sure that complete sentences are never separated by commas (formally, this means they have a verb and a subject). You do it here, for example: "Don't be sad Alex, there will be a time when you will be able to go in the forest on your own aswell." This comma should have been either a period or a semicolon since it's connecting two full sentences.

Having said all that, I should clarify that these points aren't meant to tear down your work. Like I said, the story itself is good. It's mostly the presentation and how you convey things that could be improved. 

I also want to add that some of my points with regards to writing can also be seen as subjective or stylistic choices. You don't have to follow every rule perfectly all the time. What I'm mostly trying to say is that you should consider how these things might impact the flow and impact of your story.

:D

YYYAAAAAYYY cant wait till the update comes out!!!