Ren'Py Are these Games Ever Going to End ?

[Elnasercaco]

Hello Fellows,

I was wondering Are these Games Ever Going to End ?

I am interested mostly on the ( V/N Ren'py ) and these games seems will take years to have an end to their stories ..

Each update is like a single drop or a few drops of water not a full or half full cup , is this the Patreon policy to gain more money or this is the system of the game that it must take a lot of time to make a little or medium content update ?

I am realy confused and pissed of from waiting each month or more for just a small not enough contents.

From your experience and because some of you has been here longer than me what is the nearest V/N Ren'py game to be completed ?

 

[PixelRepublic]

There are a few factors.

Using Daz3D to render images and animations at good quality, takes time. Also writing takes times. If they have an average gaming PC (which some seem to have), rendering 1 image could take about 20 minutes.

Some of these developers are only a 1 person team, with only 1 PC, so there is only so much they can do each month.

But also, some developers like to draw a story out, slowly progressing it, so that they receive funding each month.

 

[RAMW]

It also depends on how much time they dev has to themselves to spend on the project, some of them are working full time jobs while creating the game till their patreon can generate enough money for them to be able to be able to subsist off of the patreon revenue it's self.

 

[Draverik]

As long as there are people willing to throw their money at those devs, those things are never gonna end.
Just because there is a tag [Completed] on a game, doesn't mean the game is complete. The closest ones to be completed someday, in my opinion are Dual Family and Timestamps. Unconditional Love. Why? Because these developers had the balls to go back and fix their games before continuing with the storyline advancement.
That tells me that they care about their project more than they care about the people withdrawing their pledges.

 

[Ignazzio]

Most of them will end. Probably unfinished but they will end somehow. I'm sure some will finish their content in a decent fashion. Before we had Patreon, those few games we had were released once they were finished - usually 1,2 years of development. Monthly releases makes people impatient

 

[DarthSeduction]

I think, rather than making a fuss about whether a game ends, we should make a fuss over quality of an update. Depraved Awakening just had an update with several scenes all beautifully rendered and well written to advance all the characters. It happens to be one of the best games out there. Now, for devs working with less skill in art or lower powered machines, I'm gonna say this, your story is more important. If you have to have subpar art but you can provide me with character depth and an advancing plot, I don't care about your art, and as long as you can keep it interesting, I don't care if it ever ends.

These month to month releases allow some games, with the right premise, to take us on a journey who's destination doesn't matter. For instance, Good Girl Gone Bad. What's the end game? You're able to choose to abandon school, so it's not a game about trying to make it back into college. So what is it's end? It's end is whenever Ashley becomes boring. As long as there is more to her journey GGGB can keep going. DmD is a story about the taboo romance. As long as Dots can manage to make the characters struggle to keep their relationship a secret he has a game to make. I wish he'd realize that himself so that he can finally have actual sex, but whatever.

I currently have 2 games in dev. One has an endgame, but that endgame is amorphous, I could get away with like 90 months of releases and have the end of the game be the end of the 180 day school year. The game isn't about its end. It's about the journey and what happens to the MC in that time, similar to GGGB in that way. The other game I have a much closer end in sight, with the point being the dual MCs moving past their current state of will they wont they and into something more... however if it's successful I'll leave it open to do what DmD is failing to do, and hide their incestuous relationship from the world in spite of their growing celebrity status.

 

[The-real-Vastitas]

If a update of your favorite game fails to impress why not lean back wait 2 to 3 month and see what's in store for you by than? If it's back-end work you can't see or multiple branches that do take extra effort or limitations like the max number of graphics one can create within a month among many other things a plethora of reasons can be found why progress at times can slow down significantly...
I dare to say in most cases Patreon and it's business model has little to non to do with it at all...after all a book isn't written in a month either while one does not create graphics or code for it...a year or two is therefore not unreasonable.

 

[Philly_Games]

I think a lot of devs have an idea of what they want to do but are not sure how to get there so you sometimes get filler in an update. I am not knocking devs for this, I can totally see why that happens, writers block, lack of inspiration that current month. It's typically just one person doing it so I cut them slack. I have a checklist of things that need to happen in my outline and make sure I check off at least one or two of those per release. Eventually they will all be ticked off and the game will be done The shit takes time. Someone said typically 20 minutes a render. If every scene is outdoors for me that would be the case but in my latest update there is a scene inside at the MC's apartment. Each of those renders cooked for 5 hours. I think there was 22 of them. Basically a full week of none stop rendering during the night and while at work.

 

[Elnasercaco]

Thanks guys i am honored by your presence and i must state that i am not attacking the Devs here or mocking there efforts but i just wanted to know and learn from you. i had to say that before replying to each of your posts here because they deserve that.

 

[Elnasercaco]

There are a few factors.

Using Daz3D to render images and animations at good quality, takes time. Also writing takes times. If they have an average gaming PC (which some seem to have), rendering 1 image could take about 20 minutes.

Some of these developers are only a 1 person team, with only 1 PC, so there is only so much they can do each month.

But also, some developers like to draw a story out, slowly progressing it, so that they receive funding each month.

TBH i didn't know that .. you see my friend you are talking to a man who has 0 knowledge about how to make a game like these thanks for the info i thought it is a team work : one for the drawing, one or more for the story and such.

 

[Philly_Games]

Don't worry @Elnasercaco it didn't come off that way.

Btw this took 5 hours

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[DarthSeduction]

TBH i didn't know that .. you see my friend you are talking to a man who has 0 knowledge about how to make a game like these thanks for the info i thought it is a team work : one for the drawing, one or more for the story and such.

That depends. I'm writing and programming one game, with an artist doing my renders. On another I'm just writing, and we have both an artist and a programmer.

Teamwork is important in all of these, and I've been really lucky so far to have team members who take constructive criticism well. However to put things in perspective, in my first game, it took days to build certain scenes, because of scope and hardware limitations. Rendering in those scenes is going to take a lot of time and require some tricky camerawork, because it's simply too much for the hardware we have available and is going to require that we remove parts of it to run.

 

[DarthSeduction]

Don't worry @Elnasercaco it didn't come off that way.

Btw this took 5 hours

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Well worth the effort. Seriously, I was never more attracted to her than that specific render.

 

[Elnasercaco]

It also depends on how much time they dev has to themselves to spend on the project, some of them are working full time jobs while creating the game till their patreon can generate enough money for them to be able to be able to subsist off of the patreon revenue it's self.

The same previous answer to you m8 besides i don't know really how patreon works.

As long as there are people willing to throw their money at those devs, those things are never gonna end.
Just because there is a tag [Completed] on a game, doesn't mean the game is complete. The closest ones to be completed someday, in my opinion are Dual Family and Timestamps. Unconditional Love. Why? Because these developers had the balls to go back and fix their games before continuing with the storyline advancement.
That tells me that they care about their project more than they care about the people withdrawing their pledges.

I had that feeling too and i still .. but now i can understand some points too about making the games . it is not that easy though.

Most of them will end. Probably unfinished but they will end somehow. I'm sure some will finish their content in a decent fashion. Before we had Patreon, those few games we had were released once they were finished - usually 1,2 years of development. Monthly releases makes people impatient

Well, you are right indeed .. some of them ended for me like :
Au-pair Innocenc
it was a very good game but last update had a huge blow on me and most of the fans.

I think, rather than making a fuss about whether a game ends, we should make a fuss over quality of an update. Depraved Awakening just had an update with several scenes all beautifully rendered and well written to advance all the characters. It happens to be one of the best games out there. Now, for devs working with less skill in art or lower powered machines, I'm gonna say this, your story is more important. If you have to have subpar art but you can provide me with character depth and an advancing plot, I don't care about your art, and as long as you can keep it interesting, I don't care if it ever ends.


These month to month releases allow some games, with the right premise, to take us on a journey who's destination doesn't matter. For instance, Good Girl Gone Bad. What's the end game? You're able to choose to abandon school, so it's not a game about trying to make it back into college. So what is it's end? It's end is whenever Ashley becomes boring. As long as there is more to her journey GGGB can keep going. DmD is a story about the taboo romance. As long as Dots can manage to make the characters struggle to keep their relationship a secret he has a game to make. I wish he'd realize that himself so that he can finally have actual sex, but whatever.

I currently have 2 games in dev. One has an endgame, but that endgame is amorphous, I could get away with like 90 months of releases and have the end of the game be the end of the 180 day school year. The game isn't about its end. It's about the journey and what happens to the MC in that time, similar to GGGB in that way. The other game I have a much closer end in sight, with the point being the dual MCs moving past their current state of will they wont they and into something more... however if it's successful I'll leave it open to do what DmD is failing to do, and hide their incestuous relationship from the world in spite of their growing celebrity status.

Depraved Awakening is a very good game and one of my favorites .. good to know the last update was worth it
As for the story i agree .. when we play these games we are in it and into it with our minds not for just the sex scenes but for it's depth .. and a clever Dev who lets you to choose your hero name to suck you into the game.

As for DMD i like it because of Georgina i wish Mr.dots leaves the poor girl to study and concentrate on Georgina

If a update of your favorite game fails to impress why not lean back wait 2 to 3 month and see what's in store for you by than? If it's back-end work you can't see or multiple branches that do take extra effort or limitations like the max number of graphics one can create within a month among many other things a plethora of reasons can be found why progress at times can slow down significantly...
I dare to say in most cases Patreon and it's business model has little to non to do with it at all...after all a book isn't written in a month either while one does not create graphics or code for it...a year or two is therefore not unreasonable.

You are right my friend .. but i can't wait that long ( and that's what makes the game good ) the game is too good that you can't wait for the next update that is way i am pissed off .

I think a lot of devs have an idea of what they want to do but are not sure how to get there so you sometimes get filler in an update. I am not knocking devs for this, I can totally see why that happens, writers block, lack of inspiration that current month. It's typically just one person doing it so I cut them slack. I have a checklist of things that need to happen in my outline and make sure I check off at least one or two of those per release. Eventually they will all be ticked off and the game will be done The shit takes time. Someone said typically 20 minutes a render. If every scene is outdoors for me that would be the case but in my latest update there is a scene inside at the MC's apartment. Each of those renders cooked for 5 hours. I think there was 22 of them. Basically a full week of none stop rendering during the night and while at work.

I don't know about how the process is going but i thinks some of the Devs already had the story written like : A Wife And A Mother . i think that is much better to have a story completed then you make the game on it .

 

[Elnasercaco]

Don't worry @Elnasercaco it didn't come off that way.

Btw this took 5 hours

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I feel like an Ass now

 

[Elnasercaco]

That depends. I'm writing and programming one game, with an artist doing my renders. On another I'm just writing, and we have both an artist and a programmer.

Teamwork is important in all of these, and I've been really lucky so far to have team members who take constructive criticism well. However to put things in perspective, in my first game, it took days to build certain scenes, because of scope and hardware limitations. Rendering in those scenes is going to take a lot of time and require some tricky camerawork, because it's simply too much for the hardware we have available and is going to require that we remove parts of it to run.

I hope to see your work here my friend i am still new in this site and i am still trying to find my way in it ..

Oh shit when i played my first game here i thought it looks easy enough to make a game myself .. i didn't know all of that :FeelsGoodMan: .

 

[DarthSeduction]

and a clever Dev who lets you to choose your hero name to suck you into the game

It works on certain games, but makes it hard to talk about them, first off, and is limiting in a way. For instance, we juggled the idea of letting you name the MC in our game with the female MC, however my biggest problem with that is that I had named her in the initial story to fit the story. Since the game has a corruption element I named her Evelyn, or Eve for short. That added some biblical symbolism.

Similarly, in my other game, the characters are twins, as a result I named them something similar but masculine and feminine with Alexander and Alexis. The kind of shit that parents do with twins just to make them more annoyingly hard to tell apart. (My cousins are James and Jayden.)

 

[User_10739]

Don't worry @Elnasercaco it didn't come off that way.

Btw this took 5 hours

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And it was 5 hours well spent, mind you maybe if you didn't have to render the panties it might have only taken you 4 hours, 50 min. (just trying to help )

 

[Zippity]

Hello Fellows,

I was wondering Are these Games Ever Going to End ?

I am interested mostly on the ( V/N Ren'py ) and these games seems will take years to have an end to their stories ..

Each update is like a single drop or a few drops of water not a full or half full cup , is this the Patreon policy to gain more money or this is the system of the game that it must take a lot of time to make a little or medium content update ?

I am realy confused and pissed of from waiting each month or more for just a small not enough contents.

From your experience and because some of you has been here longer than me what is the nearest V/N Ren'py game to be completed ?

You have to take into account several factors of why these things, regardless if Ren'py engine is used or not, sometimes take a long time to develop...

1 - A majority of them are being developed by amateurs or smaller professional development groups, with a huge number of those also being first time developers... And not being a corporation or LLC with the kind of funding needed to hire qualified professional personnel and buy the necessary equipment and software needed to craft the material at a faster pace, means you get some slower development... Nature of this niche industry... Especially if you expect High Quality work, both in visuals, story writing, and VN/Game mechanics...

2 - There are some developers who are out to make money more so then being a high quality developer... So for them, taking a long time to develop a VN/Game, means they can milk and tease money out of paying fans over a very lengthy development period... Regardless if it's a high quality project or not... And not all paying fans may catch on, right away, that they are either being milked or scammed... They may be so enticed by the promise of more to come, that they are willing to keep dishing out money to a milking/scamming developer because they are just so darn hopeful... It's not the main reason for slow development, but it definitely happens more then you think... There are developers who are not always above board and/or honest about how they conduct the business of handling incoming donations... I've seen it many times, where a developer claims they went on a vacation or had real life problems to contend with for a lengthy period of time, or other excuses that caused development to pause, but they still accept donations during those lengthy pauses... There is a function on Patreon (the site used the most for receiving donations) to Temporarily Pause donation money from being auto-paid at the beginning of each month from subscribing donators... And yet not all developers use this function, during lengthy break periods... They may not even tell anyone they even took weeks or months off of development, but they are still receiving donations from uninformed fans...

3 - The number of folks working on a project may be so few, that it just naturally takes longer to get a decent amount of content done in a timely manner...

4 - The VN/Game developers may be doing a project as a side hobby rather then it being their primary job, along with perhaps also juggling family and real life responsibilities... So of course, in these cases, it's gonna take a while...

And I'm sure it could be a mix of those and probably even other reasons for why some developers just take a while to get the work pushed out... If it was a corporation developing a VN/Game, like with many Japanese Hentai Visual Novels/Games, then of course content can be pushed to the market faster and usually completed already... But as many folks probably realize, you don't always get original or high quality stuff from a corporate made VN/Game... As they usually deal in bulk output at low costs, to increase overall income... It also happens in the normal game market sometimes...

You do have some developers who push high quality updates a lot quicker then the average speed... But again, so many factors come into play for why that is the case over how most take a lengthier approach to development...

We all wish it wouldn't take so long to get a finished product... And yes, the majority of VN/Games out there, at the moment, are not completed or may never even finish being made... If I had to best guess, it's probably around 75 to 85 percent of the current western market style VN/Games available fit into that category, as still in development or have been abandoned... And I did not include Japanese Hentai VN's in that estimation, because they are in a league of their own, for the most part...

Zip

 

[Domiek]

As others mentioned, it takes time. Just setting up a single render can take 10 to 30 mins on average, then another 15 to 30 mins to render. Some people like Philly show that they can take 5 hours to render an image just to make it perfect.

Then if you want to actually improve the quality of your work, a portion of development time will be spent on learning new software, coding or techniques. As we get more funding, we buy better hardware that decreases render time. In my case, this update I've tripled my render time by going from 1000 iterations to 3000 in order to increase image quality and reduce noise/grain.

Then of course most devs have a day job/career on top of making these games. The hardest thing to juggle is personal relationships. I just spent most of saturday seeing my best friend because I haven't seen him in 5 months. The dude lives 30mins away but I'm always saying "Sorry, can't come out I'm really busy". Personal relationships start crumbling since we're so busy making these games but it's not socially accepted to just tell everyone "Hey, I'm making adult sex games and have a commitment to the fans so I can't make it to your kids 2nd birthday. He's too little to remember it anyways!"

It's always a juggling game of career/relationship/game development and all of this takes up time.