Post by narcoleptic in Distant Travels comments

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I liked the update, just as I like the whole plot and cast so far. I do want to ask about what you said some time ago, though. You said you wanted to slow down the romance by a lot, and playing the update made me think that the romance got even more rushed somehow. From cuddling with alien badgers in a separate room to zero-gravity making out with kissing and hard-ons, kinda makes me feel like a galactic hooker rather than network engineer.

Also, at least for me, there were some visual glitches in the last update, where the sprite in the bottom left wasn't synced with the sprite in the center, with Rex's sprite popping in in-between the dialogue lines. And some grammar mistakes here and there ("nagivation" from the top of my head), but nothing serious.

Thanks for the update, keep it up. I really dig the visual effects and backgrounds btw.

GruntSteel3 years ago (3 edits) (+4)

Hi,

The romance scenes for chapter 2 have been slowed down and essentially moved some of the more intense parts forward. It was too much all at once, and far too forward for that point of the story.

As for chapter 3, it's where it breaks and essentially moves to that point for Mike's route. He's a very PDA person.
However, I am debating changing it and giving the player an option to pursue the romance as quickly, or have it be a much smaller thing. If so, it'll be something I add at the same time I launch Charles' & John's routes for Ch. 3. This, and the underlaying "affection point" system will be more present going forward, as the romance really starts flowing.

As for the pacing, I don't intend Distant Travels to be a story that drags on forever in search for patreon money or similar, there's a set timeframe to the story, and while there are ups and downs in terms of action, I don't intend to have the story slow down once it's picked up properly to extend it.

Thanks for the feedback, and I'll try and keep it in mind going forward to reach a better balance.

/Grunt

P.S: The error with Rex's side image should hopefully be fixed in the next update, I believe I've found what causes it but it requires a lot of code rehaul to manage.

P.P.S: Obligatory pregnancy by kissing joke.

narcoleptic3 years ago(+2)

I see, that's insightful. The idea of giving the player options in regards to romance is a nice one, though I don't know whether it's worth your while, given how you planned the timeframes for the project. Either way, I'm now looking forward to John's and Charles' routes to see what kind of development they will receive compared to Mike.

On a side note, would you mind sharing what tools you use for coding with ren'py? Asking simply out of curiocity.

GruntSteel3 years ago (1 edit)

I'm fairly inefficient since I used to just do my LUA stuff in notepad++ before I started ren'py & python.

Right now I use Atom Text Editor with a few plugins:

- language-renpy

- custom-folds

- renpy-dialogue-plus

And the whopping 81 base packages Ren'py adds on if you let it. The reason I prefer atom is simply the layout (Multiple panes is a godsent when editing script), since indentation matters in python and ren'py, and the ability to tree any type of file etc, which makes it very organized.

Realistically, Visual Code Studio is what most people use, afaik and it's probably superior, but I'm used to Atom by now.

Other than that, ren'py itself is fairly powerful in the developer mode, since you can type script or code directly into the console and run it live, as well as giving you pretty accurate debug errors in real time, with most issues. It has LINT integration, TODO integration and a ton of useful tools to be found, even if the documentation on them is generally lackluster.

For art edits I use Clip Studio Paint, which I believe most of the team also uses (There's that one guy who uses Photoshop...)

If you're interested in VN Development there's a discord server with a lot of resources set up for it that I'd be happy to link you to, and I'd be happy to give you any input or help on discord.

narcoleptic3 years ago(+1)

Thanks for sharing, I like reading devlogs and technical details. The reason I was interested is because I saw the ren'py extension for VS Code the other day (I've been using VS Code for all my programming for about a year now), and immediately thought that it would be interesting to know what the workflow with ren'py looks like. With grammar checker and great python support (snippets, debugger, etc.) it feels like a potentially nice tool to compliment whatever ren'py development suite offers. I guess Atom is similar in that regard, I remember it having tons of extensions too, though I'm never touching that piece of software again in the near future, not after having to manually clean appdata folders and even registry for it to completely uninstall ))

I've heard about the discord server, but I'm not looking into actual development right now (it's an interesting idea, but the lack of time and writing/drawing skills make me lose interest), I just wanted to hear your take, since I think you implemented some cool visuals compared to some more barebones VNs out there. Either way, thanks for taking your time to satisfy my curiosity )

itch.io

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