VN Ren'Py Being a DIK [v0.10.1] [DrPinkCake]

[Rinbael]

I always find it interesting when people start suggesting that a dev start "working with a team" because they seem to think it's super easy to do this, but it isn't.

For starters, some devs like DPC are doing perfectly fine on their own. This game gets regular updates roughly every 4 months and the level of content is far beyond almost every other game that releases updates in the same timeframe, so it's not like he's struggling to get substantial updates out in a timely manner like some other devs I can think of.

Secondly, working with others means not only paying them out of your own pocket, but mainly it's about finding others who are on the same wavelength as you with regards to understanding not only your vision for the game, but how to produce content that is at the same level as the dev and at a similar pace. That's probably the hardest part of collaboration in this business because unlike in other lines of work, you can't really afford to be spending time essentially getting someone trained up to the proper level.

Lastly, even if you could find someone, there's no guarantee you'll find them living in the same area as you which means you might end up with someone in another country which makes communicating back and forth that much slower than if they were there with you in person. So really, all this would be a hassle to DPC right now and they don't have any reason to be working with others since the solo act is working fine for them right now.

The main reason why I think people want devs to work in teams is because if anything sudden were to happen to the dev, it might mean the game's future is put in jeopardy, but if they had a team then at least there would be others who could carry on. So it's less about wanting them to work with others to increase production times, and more about the worry of the game not being completed if something happened to the dev.



Which is good because voice acting in these kinds of things is overall pretty crummy because it's basically just a bunch of canned moans, groans, and fake orgasm noises that generally don't sync properly with the animated scenes they get attached to and generally sounds terrible.

I honestly dont get why people feel they need these noices anyway because if seeing these hot scenes isn't enough to get you off, then I don't think a few moans and groans are really going to help much.

I agree with you completely I think DPC is better on his own just look at Where the Heart is the dev lost contact with his renderer and the updates were delayed because of that as well as other things.

 

[zoyle]

Please don't quote opinion as fact. Please tell me how Sage's route is 'easier' being a dik, because it isn't. Still do everything with her, even still go to the movie night if not staying with her.

You do howewer get less RP with her. Whether DPC actually decides to use this current useless future properly in the future and whether it will affect Sages route or not is open to debate.

The Sage route is 'easier' because you can get a bunch of free relationship points with her in the first 2 encounters only if you have DIK status. As you mentioned, it doesn't make it impossible.

Sage's RP currently have no role in the game, it is true, though Maya's, Josy's, Isabella's and Jill's all do, so it seems a little odd to assume that Sage's will never be relevant.

 

[Holy Bacchus]

I agree with you completely I think DPC is better on his own just look at Where the Heart is the dev lost contact with his renderer and the updates were delayed because of that as well as other things.

WillTyler also lost contact with his coder for A Family Venture and that game took a big hit because of it.

So while collaboration may sound like a good idea, it ideally needs to be with people who are in the same area as you and to perhaps even rent/hire an office that you can all work out of like Inceton, because distance collaboration, especially with someone you rely heavily on, is much more risky than just making the game yourself. But finding people in your area with the necessary level of skill and hardware capabilities is also quite a difficult thing, so it's understandable that DPC doesn't want to waste time on this.

 

[zoyle]

I agree with you completely I think DPC is better on his own just look at Where the Heart is the dev lost contact with his renderer and the updates were delayed because of that as well as other things.

Yeah, that's what happens (or can happen) when you aren't actually hiring people on as their real job. With that said, there are some options Holy Bacchus doesn't mention, like bringing on a subsidiary programmer who works on stuff where it does't matter if they agree with the overall vision, like bugfixes, implementing the script into the scenes, and other such stuff. Bringing in someone to work with you does not mean making that person your peer or giving them any sort of creative control whatsoever. In fact, in most programming work, the typical developer has very little say in what the priorities are or how the features need to work - that information usually comes from management or from outside the development group (eg the business unit that will use the product and describes what they need it to do), and development leadership (lead dev, product owner, etc) make the decisions about how that will be implemented in a technical sense. Your typical developer is given a ticket of what something needs to do and how it needs to do it and told to get it done. But in order to have that kind of relationship with another programmer, you have to hire them as an employee and give them a stable salary and benefits - it doesn't work with a volunteer. And that is much more expensive and complicated.

But, for all we know, DPC already has someone or someones doing that sort of work for him, and it isn't what causes production bottlenecks.

Heck, we don't even know that DPC is a single person. It could easily be a nom de plume for a partnership or team that speak under a single name in the interest of building a profile.

 

[ename144]

There's a big difference between paying folks as contractors or just one-off, under the table stuff and having actual full time employees.

For my part, I really wonder how much he spends on the music licenses and whether that is a wise expenditure of money.

FWIW I think it's apparent that DPC is a gifted creator in certain regards, as he seems to be able to create characters and stories that have an emotional impact on most users, which is something that is pretty rare in the VN space. That doesn't necessarily mean he's gifted at any number of other things, though. In particular, being a gifted creator/storyteller/artist and being a gifted manager of a business have pretty much zero overlapping skills.

Indeed. Doing X and running a company that does X are very different things and it is a mistake to conflate the two.

I'd like faster updates as much as the next guy, but hiring employees would be a such massive change for DPC that I think it would actually slow down updates in the short term. If he picked the right employees things could start to pick up after the teething period. But if he picked the wrong employees, the game might never recover. Given that, AFAIK, DPC has no experience as a hiring manager, that's just not worth the risk IMHO.

As for music licenses, I can't say for certain without knowing just how much he spends but my gut says it's worth it. The game's soundtrack is one of its best assets. It really helps set the tone of the game and is often just fun to listen to. Given that a lost of the music is freely available, I suspect the amount he spends on the rest is justified.

 

[zoyle]

Indeed. Doing X and running a company that does X are very different things and it is a mistake to conflate the two.

I'd like faster updates as much as the next guy, but hiring employees would be a such massive change for DPC that I think it would actually slow down updates in the short term. If he picked the right employees things could start to pick up after the teething period. But if he picked the wrong employees, the game might never recover. Given that, AFAIK, DPC has no experience as a hiring manager, that's just not worth the risk IMHO.

As for music licenses, I can't say for certain without knowing just how much he spends but my gut says it's worth it. The game's soundtrack is one of its best assets. It really helps set the tone of the game and is often just fun to listen to. Given that a lost of the music is freely available, I suspect the amount he spends on the rest is justified.

If DPC wanted to do that, what he should actually do is hire someone not as a programmer but as a manager to handle that entire process, someone who shares and/or accepts his overall vision for the product and the roles of the secondary programmers, and then let that person handle it. Managing people is pretty much a full time job, and most modern development teams use fairly unique strategies and divisions of responsibility to allow programmers who are technical leads to also continue to generate work product, because they would otherwise never have time.

When I was finishing my programming curriculum, I was the top student in my class, and so my classmates chose me as the technical lead for our final project, which was a 2 week group app development from scratch. I wrote literally like 20 lines of code for the first week of the project, because I spent all my time assisting the members of my team with their problems. 80% of my work output came in the last 36 hours, where I knew what difficult tasks remained in the project and I could assign the simpler/secondary tasks to everyone else and focus on taking care of the biggest remaining challenges myself. I still wrote over half the code in the final application.

I have not occupied a tech lead position in the workplace yet, but my conversations with people who do suggest that isn't an uncommon experience when standing up a new team and people aren't used to working together yet. I was fortunate, because I am a career change person - I had another career before I switched to programming - and in that career I was a hiring manager for 8 years. So I had the experience in communication and feedback and task delegation to handle the requests I got from my classmates. Most programmers lack that kind of experience, and management roles in the programming world are often the hardest jobs to fill, because it's very difficult for them to find people who are both capable coders and have management experience. Consequently, they end up with a lot of people overqualified on one side and underqualified on the other.

 

[Phynix]

Incorrect again. The only time RP comes into play is once, during the picnic scene. No other time. Again, please explain to me how it is 'easier'.

I can do all Sages content just as 'easy' on Chick as I can Dik. No difference, what so ever. Zilch, Nada, nuffing. Just the RP that is not gained (and that's only a few points at that).

You say RP comes only into play during the picnic scene. I don't use the walkthrough nor have i seen that scene. Care to explain it a bit more? Do you need a certain amount of RP for an option?

 

[zoyle]

Incorrect again. The only time RP comes into play is once, during the picnic scene. No other time. Again, please explain to me how it is 'easier'.

I can do all Sages content just as 'easy' on Chick as I can Dik. No difference, what so ever. Zilch, Nada, nuffing. Just the RP that is not gained (and that's only a few points at that).

There are some other situations where RP comes into play and changes scenes, including the Ep 5 sex scene with Josy (in the dorm room), where the scene is extended with new options if you have more than 10 RP, and at the end of Ep 3 you gain additional interactions during the near-sex scene with Maya if you have at least 14 RP with her.

And then, of course, there's the fairly complicated Isabella favor points system, which is not the same as Isabella's RP but interacts with it both ways: A lot of the actions that help you get Isabella's approval to date Jill also increase Isabella's RP, most of the actions that hurt her approval also reduce her RP, and you get additional credit with her if your RP with her are positive (or lose credit if they are negative), and then gaining or losing that approval ALSO gives or costs you more RP with Isabella. That entire system is needlessly complex, but winning her approval is largely synonymous with improving her RP score.

I'd agree the system's a bit under-used overall (it seems a little inconsistent where the system goes back and forth between using a girl's specific RP and using your DIK/CHICK status to unlock interaction), but it's not irrelevant, and seems to be used increasingly frequently later in the game (which makes sense, as something that's been accumulating over the whole game, whereas DIK/CHICK is something you can swing pretty rapidly from side to side if you try to).

The RP thresholds overall also have been pretty easy to meet: having 11+ RP with Josy or 21+ RP with Maya in Episode 5 is not very hard to do. Having 14 with Maya at the end of Ep 3 is somewhat easier to miss (the option was locked out for me on my first playthrough), which makes sense given the nature of the situation.

Sage's RP don't yet play a role in the story, but I'd be very surprised if they weren't all relevant in the long run.

 

[zoyle]

You say RP comes only into play during the picnic scene. I don't use the walkthrough nor have i seen that scene. Care to explain it a bit more? Do you need a certain amount of RP for an option?

During the picnic scene where you lay with the girls, you have interaction options with them and one of them is caress. If you choose to caress Maya's cheek and have more than 20 RP with her, she'll kiss the MC instead of just staring into his eyes. If you have at least 11 RP with Josy and caress her thigh, MC will play with her panties as well.

Having adequate RP also unlocks some options in other sex scenes with each girl (Josy in Ep 5, Maya at the end of Ep 3). In the Maya scene, there are different scenes/options based on your DIK/CHICK score, or if you have the requisite RP with Maya you simply get both.

 

[Meushi]

Are people still banging on about DPC hiring others, when he's flat out said he won't do it? How do we get off this merry-go-round, it's making me dizzy.

But, for all we know, DPC already has someone or someones doing that sort of work for him, and it isn't what causes production bottlenecks.

Heck, we don't even know that DPC is a single person. It could easily be a nom de plume for a partnership or team that speak under a single name in the interest of building a profile.

We don't know DPC isn't a Russian hacking crew either... He's a Swedish sole developer until some evidence to contradict this emerges.

These are some great ideas, but it's optional content, so i don't see him being in a hurry to do any of this. I do recall him mentioning voice acting for the complete game if i'm not mistaken

After seeing the results of the patron survey regarding voice acting in Being a DIK, I have decided to postpone voice acting until I can afford it.
When and if that time comes, I will likely add it all at once for the entire game. But until then, I need to save up funding.

Voice acting in indie-porn games are universally poor in my experience, so happy voice acting is out.

 

[zoyle]

Are people still banging on about DPC hiring others, when he's flat out said he won't do it? How do we get off this merry-go-round, it's making me dizzy.


We don't know DPC isn't a Russian hacking crew either... He's a Swedish sole developer until some evidence to contradict this emerges.



Voice acting in indie-porn games are universally poor in my experience, so happy voice acting is out.

I think people just click on the Patreon link, see 7000+ Patrons and what the donation thresholds are and assume he's banking 6 figures monthly even though it almost certainly doesn't work that way.

 

[felicemastronzo]

Are people still banging on about DPC hiring others, when he's flat out said he won't do it? How do we get off this merry-go-round, it's making me dizzy.


We don't know DPC isn't a Russian hacking crew either... He's a Swedish sole developer until some evidence to contradict this emerges.



Voice acting in indie-porn games are universally poor in my experience, so happy voice acting is out.

true.

theoretically having voice acting would seem a great improvement, but to the test of the facts they always brought mediocre results (perhaps the best was on Awakening)

 

[felicemastronzo]

I forgot the Josy sex scene, good call. As for Sage and her RP, it's a few points at most. Given the req's for the others, I really can't see it making any differnce personally. as you don't lose a lot of points.

As a side-note, this will annoy the dik lovers, but have you noticed a pattern yet? Bella does 'prefer' a chick, Jill's content is behind Chick affinity, Maya&Josy are Chick/Neutral....all of Sages content be got by Chick also....there is no LI (yet) where content is purely needs Dik. Just the side girls.



Well to be fair, at min payments, thats 6k a month....not a bad living eh?

sooner or later they will surrender to the evidence that MC is a thoroughbred CHICK

 

[Holy Bacchus]

Incorrect again. The only time RP comes into play is once, during the picnic scene. No other time. Again, please explain to me how it is 'easier'.

I can do all Sages content just as 'easy' on Chick as I can Dik. No difference, what so ever. Zilch, Nada, nuffing. Just the RP that is not gained (and that's only a few points at that). If I had to jump through hoops, swallow swords and dance naked in the cafeteria (as a Chick) to get her content, then yes being dik would be easier. But you don't.

I think the word you're after is perhaps 'beneficial'....but again, that remains to be seen in the long-term as to what DPC does with RP's

RP with Josy and Maya actually comes into play a few times so far. In ep 3, you need 14RP with Maya to unlock the full scene, in ep 5 you need >10RP with Josy to unlock her full scene, and then in the picnic scene you need >20RP with Maya to kiss her and >10RP with Josy to touch her panties.

 

[Phynix]

I forgot the Josy sex scene, good call. As for Sage and her RP, it's a few points at most. Given the req's for the others, I really can't see it making any differnce personally. as you don't lose a lot of points.

As a side-note, this will annoy the dik lovers, but have you noticed a pattern yet? Bella does 'prefer' a chick, Jill's content is behind Chick affinity, Maya&Josy are Chick/Neutral....all of Sages content be got by Chick also....there is no LI (yet) where content is purely needs Dik. Just the side girls.

Until DPC decides to cut off the majority of Jill and Bella content on DIK path, i'm not starting a new playthrough.

 

[AvatarStormBringer]

Please don't quote opinion as fact. Please tell me how Sage's route is 'easier' being a dik, because it isn't. Still do everything with her, even still go to the movie night if not staying with her.

Sage route is easy, PERIOD?

The only reason I care about RP now is because I don't want to have to restart the game again IF DPC decided to open a can of whoop ass on us and take RP into account. I care about Sage.

 

[Ragnar]

I have three routes
DIK = Sage and the bitches
Neutral = Josy and Maya
Chick = Jill and Bella
Some routes exclude others, for example if you make out with Sage at the DIKs party you can't go to see a movie with Maya.

 

[zoyle]

I forgot the Josy sec scene, good call. As for Sage and her Rp, it's a few points at most. Given the req's for the others, I really can't see it making any differnce personally. As a side-niote, this will annoy the dik lovers, but have you noticed a pattern yet? Bella does prefer a chick, Jill's content is behind Chick affinity, Maya&Josy are chick/Neutral....all of Sages content be got by cchick also....

Maya and Josy content is really weird and contradictory. The Ep 1 Josy scene has extra scenes for DIK chars, not chick. The ep 3 Maya scene is different for MASSIVE DIK -or- MASSIVE CHICK vs any other status, or you get everything based on the RP threshold.

As a whole, it makes a lot of sense that early interactions and impressions and willingness to do stuff, or stuff with people who don't know MC well, is governed primarily by DIK/CHICK status, and that long-term interactions are governed by RP. But then you have Maya in particular oscillating around between all of them. I guess you could say that's due to her emotional turmoil or something, but it's probably just due to DPC trying different stuff out. Overall it seems like in Season 1, Maya/Josy were intended to reward 'neutral' affinity characters (with Isabella/Jill for Chick and Sage/all the casual sex encounters for DIK), but in Episode 5, Maya and Josy are definitely also in the chick column.

I think with a system like RP, it makes sense to use it more later in the game to reward consistent behavior. The early thresholds have mostly been easy to reach (Ch 3 Maya probably the most difficult? and still not hard), but the things they've changed have also been pretty minor - tweaks to sex scenes, a kiss, etc. If the decisions/options using RP are more pivotal down the road (and you'd think that's the reason of tracking how much various people like the MC), you would probably expect the thresholds to rise.

Honestly I think this is pretty good as a development plan. I recently played City of Broken Dreamers, which is really excellent! But one thing that really stood out to me is that there are so few opportunities to interact with many characters that achieving certain thresholds ends up coming down to one very specific decision or another. In Being a DIK, those kinds of options are usually governed by DIK/CHICK status, which you get a lot of opportunities to modify. Waiting for RP to accumulate to significant levels before utilizing it in a significant way makes sense, because it prevents situations from boiling down to "Did you choose option A or option B 4 chapters ago? If you chose yes, you can see scene X. If you did not, nope." Stuff makes more sense in storytelling and is more rewarding when it's a reward for consistency - CHICK/DIK works because you're constantly given the option to influence the score, and then you constantly get feedback based on what the score does for you. It works a lot better than individual-character affinity system until you have a LOT of history with a given character, when it starts to make more sense for that character to judge the protagonist based on their personal history rather than your recent public behaviors.

Just for example, imagine if there's some kind of scene where MC is trying to tell Sage what's going on with Quinn. It would make a lot more sense for how much Sage personally likes and trusts MC (her RP) to govern whether she chooses to trust him than his DIK/CHICK status. It's not hard to imagine hypotheticals for the others of similar impact where having RP be the governing factor simply makes more sense. There have not, thusfar, been very many situations where that is appropriate. As characters know each other longer, RP makes more and more sense as a game mechanic. You can also particularly imagine situations that use RP but where the RP threshold differs depending on DIK or CHICK status. A DIK character might need a higher proportion of available RP to convince Jil than a CHICK one, whether that be from reputation or a reflection of the way that MC's dialogue is different based on their DIK/CHICK score.

 

[AvatarStormBringer]

true.

theoretically having voice acting would seem a great improvement, but to the test of the facts they always brought mediocre results (perhaps the best was on Awakening)

He already deactivated the voices of Jill and Bella from chapter one no? If anyone is still interested in finding out, just unren the voice files or replay the warning scenes.

 

[felicemastronzo]

He already deactivated the voices of Jill and Bella from chapter one no? If anyone is still interested in finding out, just unren the voice files or replay the warning scenes.

Were there any scenes being played?
or are you referring to the prologue?