Post by Skadus_1701 in Straight!? comments

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And I thought the original dialog was a nice blend of posturing, bantering and d*ckish behavior as the two got to know each other. It's one of the things that stood out to me because typically in these VNs, everyone is almost an insta-friend so we can get to the sex. (aside: I'm finding that it helps me in doing my writing to read the dialog out loud.)

To be more specific about the shower scene, Braden has just caught this stranger named Zack, who "told" him that he was bi, checking him out in the shower. I find the new version takes the fact that they're strangers still into account whereas the older version really didn't.

And the floor numbering thing wasn't really a complaint (none of this is really, just feedback) but a Slumdog Millionaire moment.

Anyway, keep up the great work.

Just out of curiosity, how far out is the poker game?

Aaryn2 years ago

no worries. I didn't take offense or anything. I'm pretty chill. I definitely agree with you on the insta-friend stuff. I wanted the bulk of the story to be how they grow closer and to make that worth it, I wanted a slow burn and highs and lows.

The poker game is a ways out and in terms of how long in real time it's gonna take to get there is up in the air. The rewrites at the beginning are very slow to try and organize the code that was split all over the place into more of a streamlined design. It's just frustratingly slow right now. However, once we get to chapter 2 or 3, that should speed up significantly because I won't have to organize anymore, I'll just be looking at the writing and doing some polishing so i anticipate that updates will happen much faster or be much larger. Just bare with me for the first couple chapters to straighten (no pun intended) this mess out.

Skadus_17012 years ago (1 edit)

Cool. I read in one of you're replies to someone that you had wanted the poker sequence to be more interactive Being and old CompSci guy, I have been dinking around with that using this decision tree:

https://imgur.com/A5nSGh8

-movement is top to bottom

-The numbers are clothing layers (4 for Zack, 4 for Braden to begin)

-The yellow nodes are hands (and separate renpy labels) and each row of yellow is a round.

-The black lines are renpy jump commands.

-The player decides who wins in a menu.

-I'm using a variable to track who was the previous winner for those nodes that have two entry points and an if-then test to provide the appropriate dialog.

-The nodes with zeroes on them represent the strip scenes.

-What is not on the diagram is the four labels you would need for the post-Braden-win strip that Braden does.

-In my version, Zack's wins move down and left, Braden's down and right.

Aaryn2 years ago(+1)

Yeah, so (and your diagram starts to show this pretty quickly) it doesn't take very long for that process to get out of hand. Granted, I have better hardware now than I did back when I was trying to construct that stuff before-- and I'm a tad faster with image creation (all while focusing more on other details); even creating a scene like that with that many choices by yourself can quickly balloon. My old choice was to only give a couple options and play to my strengths-- the writing and story versus spending time on added images and coding, which I was very poor at. It would be fun to have something like that have a lot of routes but even though the game is free, some people get pretty impatient about updates and they don't usually understand how long it takes to create that stuff by yourself. Sure, I could hire other people to help me but when you start breaking the math down to an hourly wage, I only make a few dollars an hour so that can get pretty rough to hire more help. IDK, we'll see what the future holds with that scene in particular. I may add a few new features or I just may keep it the same just for the sake of simplicity. I don't plan many of those things in advance, I sorta just feel it out when the time comes. I've had better results that way from a storyline perspective.

Skadus_17012 years ago

This was just a side project on my part, a chance to learn something about renpy that I'm not currently using myself. I only shared it because it turned out to be a bit simpler in renpy than I initially thought and I thought it might help you out.

Whether having the poker be interactive adds anything to the story...? Definitely not my call.

One thing to note is that the majority of my diagram is in the VN.

Zack's flawless victory is 44,43,42,41,40

Braden's flawless is 44,34,24,14,04

The nail-biter is 44,43,33,32,22,21,11, 10 or 01

Not there: hands 23,13,12,31 strip 30,20,03,02

So of the 24 nodes, 16 were represented in the VN.

And you have almost all the image assets already done and in the game. The only noticeable miss is Zack watching with just his shirt off (I think there are a couple of 'no shoes' needed as well).

And of course all of the poker game's branching doesn't matter, because everything should flow back to the scene where Braden towels up, declares he's 'done playing' and heads off to shower.

Anyway, good luck with however you do it.

Aaryn2 years ago

oh for sure. we'll see what happens when I get to that point. that scene was definitely one that i underestimated back in the day. honestly, i think it's still sort of an allegory to why so many of these games get abandoned. people start creating a story then they create 5 or 6 different love interests and by the 3rd or 4th update realize how quickly things have expanded. if you have a large team working on things, it's probably not that bad but I could easily see me including 5 routes in the story and going 6 or 7 game updates before I actually included a route that someone was interested in. Which makes the development take ages. Hell, I only have really one or two routes depending on how you interpret this project and it still took me 4.5 years to get the story out.

itch.io

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