- Mar 26, 2018
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Well, it greatly depends on the backstory, but in general I'd try to make her mine if she's worth it, or at least help her in some ways. Or I'd just keep fudging her...
- Aug 19, 2019
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7. Impregnate young hottie, punishing douchebag with 18 years of child support if she doesn't leave him.
- Apr 30, 2020
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Or go with my route, DiK Brother: Harem and have many a bastards.
- Aug 19, 2019
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Unless Jane and Cassie are down for a long-term threesome, they're all going to be bastards.Or go with my route, DiK Brother: Harem and have many a bastards.
- Apr 30, 2020
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But I really like virgin shoes.
This one made me laugh when I was playing....and this was my first post >sigh<
Using the post to tag you.
DAST website typos
Website should be Https
Home
Happy Hour : (The subtext in the post should copy the size of rack' em, spotless, and man cave.)
2020-04-20 News
moment of a peace : (remove a)
house hold : household
and the over all : overall
2020-05-04 News
I'll chest deep : I'm chest deep
has been started to ease : (remove been)
2020-5-12 News
and makes not apology : no apology
But as happens : As it so happens
in previously releases : previous
felt needed tweaked : tweaking
What else is happening? : (missing entered space between it and paragraph)
I've completing : completed
About our Game
This an all : and
You decisions will : Your
Music: The comes : (missing word?)
Website Major Character.
Amanda
virgin shoe : virgin who's
hope to start. : start?
Emily
treaters her : treats
Lupita
every find someone : ever
Monica
has fun and like to mingle : likes
setting down : settling
rock relationships : rocky
Character Music
Cassie Harighnton : Harrington
Downloads
using the Ren'py Visual : Ren'Py
Technical Support
are in fact zipped : (you used the word compressed every other time, seems weird to call them zipped here)
to grow this FAQ : (saying grow also seems weird)
Contact Us
Should really be a page mentioning the email rather than a link that tries to open a mail program.
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2020-05-12 News
Well friends, time for a bit of news. Lot going on, good progress and all around good news. I've been splitting my attention up between a couple different parts of the game. So for this news brief I'm just kind of shooting from the hip. Forgive me if I start to skip around a bit.
50 Shades of Cassie!
Work on Cassie's renders are well underway. I've taken a few steps to simplify my art style a little bit to better facilitate speed. But this doesn't amount to any kind of reduction in quality. As always, I try not to ignore the little details, as perfectly demonstrated in the teaser images attached for Cassie's upcoming release.
In it, you have Cassie on the blue path. Sweet, innocent, dressed appropriately and above all wearing a bra. Then you have Cassie on the red path who may or may not be a little more influenced by the likes of Jane. Rocking the bra-less tank and just kind of letting herself hang out, she's comfortable with her sexuality and makes not apology for it.
I enjoy adding this kind of variation to the game because it only takes a matter of seconds to swap outfits and doesn't really add to the overnight render time. As time goes on, I'd like to add more and more little details like this based on your choices, but for now, I'll limit myself to red/blue varieties.
The Bad News...or is it Good? You Decide
So when working on the renders for Cassie's chapter, I got a little carried away as the story started to roll. Originally, it was supposed to be straight forward time with Cassie. A chance to talk, develop their plot line and eventually open the possibility of a romantic or lustful conclusion.
But as happens with me from time to time, the story snowballed and before I knew it the chapter encompassed optional sex with up to three different characters in a single play through. So now I'm triply excited to bring you Cassie's next chapter because it's going to be heavy in both story and sex. Oh yeah, speaking of sex...
The Sex Menu
As I began coding the first of said sex scenes, it became rapidly obvious just how cumbersome and unwieldy the programming for the sex menu was. I've been a programmer for a long time and one thing I've learned is that with a lot of coding, the first pass is just about getting it to work. The second pass is about debugging it and making it work without error. The third pass is about optimizing and trimming fat and shrinking down to four lines of code what previously took you ten.
Now that the story is rolling and things are getting to a point where I'm planning to have multiple sex scenes in a release, it was time to take that third pass and redesign the sex menu coding.
On the surface you'll see no change at all. It'll still work and function just like it did in previously releases. But on the back end, it does all the things it does with less lines of code, and more importantly, now instead of feeding it this oddly complex system of scene codes (I thought it was clever at the time), I can now just feed it a list of the labels for the sex scenes, and the menu will automatically break the labels apart and populate the menu accordingly.
So now, instead of managing all these funky jumps, returns and menu loops, I just hand it a list of scenes and off it goes. It takes me 1/50th of the time to program and I'm very happy about that.
The Awesome News
With the recoding of the sex menu I am getting closer and closer to completing the list of things that I felt needed tweaked on the back on end. With the exception of one or two minor things, I've about hit a point where 100% of my time will be devoted to story and renders.
The Music Controller. The Sound Effect Controller. The Character Data Objects. The Sex Menu. The Relationship Screen. The Custom Name Feature (For Every Single Character!). The Journal. The Modifiable Character Sheet (For Cheating your Ass off without the need for a console). Backward Save Compatibility.
These are all things that have been completed in the last two months and mark the near completion of the list of features.
I know it's been a lot of work and I can't thank you enough for your patience. But in the end I think it will lead to a better playing experience all around. And these are all things that I can carry forward into future games. So it's an exciting benchmark to finally hit!
What else is happening?
Still working on Monica, Lupita and Jane at the moment. Within the next week or two I'm hoping to start posting up regular play tests as the scenes hit completion.
I've completing the v1.1.6 patch which has a ton of fixes and shit in it. But so far I have not heard one thing regarding bugs or errors. So either I let it loose and it's worked flawlessly, or no one bothered to download it because it was all features and no content. Either way, I'll be doing a public release of that soon.
It was necessary to get it done first as much of the new content I'm producing relies on features and code included in that patch.
In any case, I think that's all I have at the moment. In the meantime I'm going to keep chugging along and hopefully get a live stream in sometime this week. I miss doing those and would like to put another together soon.
In the meantime, salute and thank you for playing! Cheers!
- Apr 3, 2020
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- Jan 20, 2020
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No, Lola is a cover of Yoda
No, no, no, it is a 'parody' of Yoda! ...wait.No, Lola is a cover of Yoda
- Sep 12, 2018
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huh. yo. saw your review. wanted you to know-many share your feelings on it. working with a modder to deal with those issues-particularly in regards to choices, romance, drama and overall story. i plan on flushing out nikki a bit-others noticed her vulnerabilities and self-conscious issues and agree that it's not explained-i will, however-her past will be the center plot. you'll influence her by your choices. the story is about a brother realizing how he failed his sister-will he turn things around or push her away? i have the nikki path mapped-art is the main obstacle, now.
- Jan 20, 2020
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I think you're in the wrong thread?
- Sep 12, 2018
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I know-but as I said-I saw him here and I figured he he might be interested. Nothing more. Though, I'm sure I'll be penalized by a giddy mod for it-doesn't take much-from my experience.
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So you reply to a two years old post about another game instead of just talking to the guy directly on his profile or in said game thread... Makes sense.
- Sep 12, 2018
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I was scrolling out of boredom. A while after I tried to pm him-he has it to where only few could. So I figured "why not?" Didn't expect a conversation over it-figured everyone else would ignore it.
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News 2020-05-20
Where have you been Roman, we haven't heard from you for a few days! What's with the silence? Well, I've been battling depression with SCIENCE! or something. Maybe it was technology. I don't know.
Anyway. Let's talk candidly about where we're at and the challenges of making a game.
To make a game like Doctor Amana requires three very different jobs with three very different skill sets.
1. Writer - You have to build a story and tie it together and make it worth reading. I do this in Scrivener because it has excellent tools for tracking notes, characters, and assembling different parts of your story in different sequences to test the "flow" of the read.
2. Artwork - You have make pretty visuals to enhance the story and bring to life all the characters and scenarios you worked so hard to develop in the writing process. I use Daz at the moment because the models are ready made, it's quick to implement, and it's become a bit of a standard.
3. Coding - You have to turn all that into a playable product. In a game like mine, this means coding the art, the story, and tracking hundreds of variables to mark the difference choices a player makes and ensures that the story unfolds in predefined sequence.
Each one of these can be a full time task and as a lone developer trying to tackle all of these alone for a game as ambitious as Doctor Amana has been daunting. When all this started I was just a writer, and slowly I've been spread out to handle all three of these tasks simultaneously.
One of my biggest reoccurring challenges is evolving script. I write in Scrivener, I export to Renpy, As I make the art, sometimes the script changes or the dialogue morphs a bit while because the ideas continue to flow. Then before I know it, my Scrivener files and my actual game are out of sync. The next time I sit to write, I have to jump back and forth between renpy and scrivener to make sure things work and make sense.
But in renpy, my script has now been poisoned with lines and lines of code that interrupt the flow of the read (which is why I don't write exclusively in renpy). This turns the task of writing the next scene into a challenge as I jump back and forth between three or and four files to make sure things make sense and flow together. Often those files don't agree with each other and I write hoping it'll make sense on the back end.
I have over the last year sought help with art and coding from other parties with mixed success, but never to the degree of personal preference I have for the project. It's hard working with artists remotely because the communication is so limited and you can't give real time feedback during development, making the process of outsourcing almost as time consuming and laborious as doing it yourself.
I finally reached a point where I think I have to throw in the towel and say, "I'm going to be doing this alone for a long, long time." And at first, this realization was a bit dejecting. But I'm not a defeatist and with a bourbon in my hand, I sat down and focused on the real problem .
"How can a single developer create a quality game with a complex narrative by himself, and maintain a regular update schedule that doesn't span months at a time?"
At this point I want to add that professionally, my background is in business analytics and data science. I've made a better than average living for years selling process improvements and last week I decided I needed to start hardcore applying that experience to this project.
I realized the solution to my problem is the same solution I've sold to many companies over the years: Computer Automation.
But where to implement it? Obviously I can't automate the writing because it requires too much creative input. The same goes for the artwork. But then I thought about the coding.
Coding the Doctor Amana game requires many, many lines of code. For example, when there is a choice to make in the game, you typically have an image, the choice, a few lines of following dialogue, another image, and some code that records your choice.
So at times, 1 Choice + 1 Line of Dialogue + 2 Images = 18 Lines of Image Definitions + 5 Lines of Script
One choice plus a line of dialogue and two images can often take up to 20 lines of code all said and done.
Could I trim this by making a simpler game? Of course I could. I could trim it down to four lines easy, but in doing so would lose some of that dynamism that your choices have and reduce the game to a more simple, linear narrative. But I don't want to do that. I like the complexity introduced in my choice system and I couldn't dream of giving it up.
So if I wanted to reduce my workload, I needed to apply some automation to my coding. And if I went about it smart and did it right, I could cut out a complete third of my workload. I've automated tasks for years, but I've never automated coding and I didn't know how much of a challenge that would be.
But as I looked over the code I began to see all the places where method calls arise and in the way my definitions are set up and the patterns were very clear. I already had patterns I used to reference my images and name my files. Much of the information I'd need to automate the coding was already embedded in the short hand I used for file names.
Well it turns out that all you need to automate the coding process is a strong understanding of string manipulation, which I already had. Once I realized that, all that was left was to develop a bit of a shorthand for more variable things like choices that could be isolated in the script and turned into meaningful code. Seemed simple enough.
Alright, well, I had an idea for a potential solution, all that was left was to sit down and build it, and then pray it worked. Guess what, it fucking did.
In only 150 lines of code I now have a renpy generator that will take my raw .txt output from Scrivener and convert it to a usable renpy file that I can plug straight into the game.
It takes the Windows 1252 encoding from Scrivener, converts it to UTF8, fixes indentations, adds the python code for the menu choices, formats the menu choices and adds the python code for the scene variables.
But what saves the most time is that it takes a simple notation, and generates a sequence of image names following my existing convention and places them in the code. It then takes these references and in a separate file writes all my layeredimage code, complete with paths and variants for different game modes that it generates using the file name of the renpy script file.
Image definition files can consist of 300+ lines of code that I have type manually or copy and paste and make changes to the individual lines. And each scene needs one of these files. Manually typing, and copy and pasting can and have sometimes lead to errors in the code that I later have to go back and fix.
This file is now automatically generated using a file name, and a list of images. And the list of images it needs is also generated automatically. It's a massive time saver not just in time spent coding, but in time spent debugging images.
Basically, it turns the first image (a single txt file), into the second and third images (1 Renpy Script File and 1 Renpy Image Definitions File) in the blink of an eye. The only one I had to touch was the .txt file. The rest was created automatically on export.
What's it all mean?
It means that 95% of the coding job is handled automatically. I don't have to do it anymore! And when I make changes to certain implementations, I just tweak my code generator and in seconds the entire script is updated with the new implementation.
No more jumping between files. As I make art, if the script changes, I can just change it in Scrivener, export, convert and in a fraction of a second it's done. My core script is now always up to date and editing of the story can be done exclusively in Scrivener. The problem with files being out of sync between Scrivener and the game is eliminated and the story is no longer a fragmented mess.
Best of all, when I sit to work on the game, my time is split between writing an art. No more coding. The way I like it!
No doubt there will be some tweaking and adjustment required to fine tune the operation. But already I'm seeing time saved in the encoding of images into the game. And not having to sit and do the tedious code work is a real morale booster.
I know this post got a little windy, but I wanted to paint a complete picture for you. Not just so that you'd understand my silence these last couple of weeks, but so that you'd understand just what a victory this is for the project. Now, onwards!
I'll have some more art and news coming soon. I figure that's probably about enough for one day.
Salute mates! And thank you for your support!
- Oct 24, 2018
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Sounds awesome. As someone who knows nothing about coding (to the point where most of this post reads fdgnb,kj ghuk hjkgkjg dfhdg dghhdth to me) I'm curious as to whether that 150 lines of code you wrote is something that could be turned into a tool for other devs to use. I appreciate that you may feel a sense of ownership of your work and don't wish to give it away; the flipside would be more games for you to play