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

[ename144]

Why America does the MM/DD/YYYY format, I'll never know, because the whole rest of the world does DD/MM/YYYY which makes so much more sense.

It's not hard to work out, Bacchus. We typically describe the date as February 26, 2021; therefore we abbreviate the date as 2/26/21.

It's only when you step back to consider the abbreviation in its own right (or recognize that our typical convention is itself a shorthand) that you might suspect we Americans are a bit silly. Fortunately, we live exciting, fast-paced lives that permit no time for such troublesome introspection.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I need to work out whether I'm using pound as a unit of mass or weight.

 

[Holy Bacchus]

It's not hard to work out, Bacchus. We typically describe the date as February 26, 2021; therefore we abbreviate the date as 2/26/21.

It's only when you step back to consider the abbreviation in its own right (or recognize that our typical convention is itself a shorthand) that you might suspect we Americans are a bit silly. Fortunately, we live exciting, fast-paced lives that permit no time for such troublesome introspection.

Now, if you'll pardon me, I need to work out whether I'm using pound as a unit of mass or weight.

Well, you might do that, but here we would say 26th of February 2021, so even when we speak it, we do it the right way.

 

[Holy Bacchus]

Well it looks like Pink lost few Supporters because of this Drama, 8653 now .... But hey it´s still an awesome titel and enough support.

They always lose a chunk of supporters at the start of each month but then gain the lost numbers back over the course of the month. Check their

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page and you'll see it dip then climb every month.

 

[Johnyboie]

DPC was clearly not idle over the holidays. He went into the break with 37 animations in the render queue, but came out of the break with a whopping 55 shiny, new animations added. That suggests he was rendering nearly 27.5 animations a week, way above his previous average of ~17/week. His overall rate is now around 18.6 animations/week. We even got an update on static renders, though it only works out to ~83/ week since his last datapoint. That gives him far less impressive 167.5/week overall average on statics. To put it in graphic form:

Spoiler: New Year, Same Charts!

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As you can see, his progress on animations is quite literally off the charts; he could easily blow past Episode 6's total by next week if he has more in the queue. Static renders, on the other hand, are still months away from matching Episode 6. Obviously that's a result of where he's been devoting his time more than a render limit on the statics; he often esceeded 200 statics a week back in Episode 6, and the new GPUs can only help that (though the benefits are probably hard capped by the time it takes him to pose). If he returns to a 200 static/week pace, he could match Episode 6's static count by around March 12.

To that end, DPC also mentioned he thinks Episode 7 is between 30 and 50% complete. It's been 8 weeks since Episode 6 launched, so that means we have between 8 and 18.7 weeks left. 8 weeks would correspond to February 26; 19 more weeks would be May 14. (If you're curious, my March 12 hypothetical would indicate we are 44% complete.) It's unclear if DPC was including time to debug and playtest or purely time to write the episode, so we could potentially need to add two weeks to that time table.

So, for those who were wondering when the next update will be, you have the answer: sometime between 2/26/21 and 5/28/21. Mark your calendars now!

I hate math stuff

 

[SirDawcio]

Well it looks like Pink lost few Supporters because of this Drama, 8653 now .... But hey it´s still an awesome titel and enough support.

What drama?

 

[shazba]

I was being serious haha. the pixel-hunting is a bit annoying, but the freeroams can be skipped if you dont like them.
I usually just check my phone for rooster and texts, then I explore around to interact with characters and eventually progress through the freeroam. I don't particularly care if i miss one or two minor scenes.

The story is definitely progressing though, A lot of backstory of the DIKs was added, about Rusty, Tommy and the other guys. New events surrounding cathy, your new leadership-ish role in the DIKs, power conflicts, and the new direction of trying to save the future of DIK. Almost everyone's story progressed in a significant way. Sage is single, Quinn is dealing drugs, Bella has the hots for you, a little of Jill's backstory was revealed, and the first real romance scene with her got added in.

The episode is centered around picking up the pieces after everything that went down with Hell Week, and I imagine that this sets things up nicely for next episode. Tying up many loose ends.

I'm looking forward to where the story goes next. Only DrPinkCake knows, and if Acting Lessons is anything to go by, he isn't afraid to create some massive drama.

When you say the free roams can be skipped, does that include the free roams in the DIK mansion? On replays I find myself still having to track down each DIK brother before being able to progress beyond the free roam - maybe I'm missing something.

 

[Tserriednich'sNen]

When you say the free roams can be skipped, does that include the free roams in the DIK mansion? On replays I find myself still having to track down each DIK brother before being able to progress beyond the free roam - maybe I'm missing something.

Episode 6 introduced a new feature to allow you to automatically go to every accessible room to help avoid any confusion during free roams. The button is on the bottom right corner of your screen.

 

[_V_-_]

can you tell me your account picture from /game?

 

[Tserriednich'sNen]

can you tell me your account picture from /game?

It's from the beach render set he did of all the girls.

 

[felicemastronzo]

You can skip the books for Bella.

are you sure?
I don't trust my memory 100% but I seem to remember that in a run made by skipping the minigames I still had to put the books in place for Bella

 

[Plaguerave]

Why America does the MM/DD/YYYY format, I'll never know, because the whole rest of the world does DD/MM/YYYY which makes so much more sense.

If it makes you feel any better when I filled out reports at 2 different hospitals I worked at it was always DD/MM/YYYY same went with reports when I was volunteer fire fighter.

That shit took me forever to get used to tbh.

 

[Plaguerave]

are you sure?
I don't trust my memory 100% but I seem to remember that in a run made by skipping the minigames I still had to put the books in place for Bella

I skipped Bellas book thing and she called me out on it in my first play though.

 

[felicemastronzo]

I skipped Bellas book thing and she called me out on it in my first play though.

what do you mean?

you haven't completed it but she asked you anyway?

 

[shazba]

are you sure?
I don't trust my memory 100% but I seem to remember that in a run made by skipping the minigames I still had to put the books in place for Bella

You definitely don't have to do the pixel hunt in either the library or the DIK mansion, however you get an extra $2 for the mansion repairs/cleanup if you do the library pixel hunt. If you don't do it, Bella messages you, "Did you want to work extra at the library? I noticed you didn't put the books back, so I wasn't sure."

It's probably been mentioned before, but on a side note, you get $3 mansion money for going to the old folks home, and $10 if you trade in your Pink Rose VIP pass.

Why America does the MM/DD/YYYY format, I'll never know, because the whole rest of the world does DD/MM/YYYY which makes so much more sense.

In Japan (not sure about other Asian countries) they go YYYY/MM/DD. They do the same reverse order for street addressing too. Each to their own.

 

[felicemastronzo]

You definitely don't have to do the pixel hunt in either the library or the DIK mansion, however you get an extra $2 for the mansion repairs/cleanup if you do the library pixel hunt. If you don't do it it, Bella messages you, "Did you want to work extra at the library? I noticed you didn't put the books back, so I wasn't sure."

In Japan (not sure about other Asian countries) they go YYYY/MM/DD. They do the same reverse order for street addressing too. Each to their own.

Ah OK

but you decide not to complete it, it is not a skippable minigame anyway. the task is assigned to you and you can choose to fail
considering MC needs $$, I'd say you should do it.
the pixel hunt in the DIKs home instead only impacts the renders so it has absolutely no importance in history



the Japanese system makes more sense anyway .. from the largest to the smallest is an equally logical choice as opposed to it

 

[shazba]

Ah OK

but you decide not to complete it, it is not a skippable minigame anyway. the task is assigned to you and you can choose to fail
considering MC needs $$, I'd say you should do it.
the pixel hunt in the DIKs home instead only impacts the renders so it has absolutely no importance in history



the Japanese system makes more sense anyway .. from the largest to the smallest is an equally logical choice as opposed to it

The pixel hunt is my least favorite aspect of the entire game. To me there is zero fun involved, just tedium. If finding each location of the book had some quirky interaction with some of the minor characters, that would have been better. I can imagine that if each time you find the right spot, KRJ just happens to be there and she gets more and more concerned that the mc is stalking her, that'd be pretty funny. And maybe if she was wearing something like this (you know to be realistic and all):

Spoiler

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[felicemastronzo]

The pixel hunt is my least favorite aspect of the entire game. To me there is zero fun involved, just tedium. If finding each location of the book had some quirky interaction with some of the minor characters, that would have been better. I can imagine that if each time you find the right spot, KRJ just happens to be there and she gets more and more concerned that the mc is stalking her, that'd be pretty funny. And maybe if she was wearing something like this (you know to be realistic and all):

Spoiler

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I don't know ... I don't know if associating the pixel hunt with KRJ makes it more appreciable ....



Coriolan is the only one that makes KRJ "edible"

 

[phill_leotardo]

are you sure?
I don't trust my memory 100% but I seem to remember that in a run made by skipping the minigames I still had to put the books in place for Bella

I think you can skip the books for Bella, i always skipped her dialogs since they were cringy, therefore i didn't even know you could grab books for her until this point lmao.

 

[Paapi]

Expected release date of next update ??

 

[shazba]

Expected release date of next update ??

Just three pages back there was a status update from the developer (after reading this you'll know as much as the rest of us):

Happy new year!

I hope you're feeling well today and that 2021 brings good things for all of us.

Let's kick off the new year with a status update!

It's been two weeks since the previous one and there's been considerable progress. I did take a few days off, but I've been working a lot as well.

PCs have mostly been rendering animations but also some static renders.

I've been doing bits of everything, and I will have to focus on writing and coding in the near future.

I've reached a point in the development where the PCs will intermittently be idle and not rendering.

Earlier, I've mentioned how manual labor will be the new bottleneck, as I've upgraded my GPUs, and that's exactly where we are right now.

It's a good thing, really. It means that I can produce the content I want without having to worry too much about rendering time.

I haven't posed every animation in the update yet, so the PCs will soon be working hard again, but I need to write more of the script before I know for sure what remains in terms of animations.

So, the current state of the development is that:

149 animations and 1340 static renders have been produced.

9 licensed songs, 2 CC0 songs, and 7 sound effects are added thus far.



Despite the high animation and render count, I have a lot of manual work left on this update.

As you can see, I have been focusing hard on posing animations, which means that other areas of the development have been left for later.

Writing, coding, and posing static renders will be the time-consuming tasks for development starting now.

I cannot accurately estimate how far along I am with the script, but the main script has 6125 lines of code, best compared to episode 6 with ~11000 lines of code.

I have also made good progress on an updated feature that I vaguely mentioned in the past and will reveal it a bit later in the development.

This week I started on a huge and fairly complex free roam event, and it will take a long time to fully code and complete it.

All in all, great progress has been made and the episode will be a meaty one once it's completed.

I estimate that the overall progress for the update is early to mid-development (30-50% complete); I can't estimate it better than that.

I have some other good news for today.

I'm not sure how many of you have noticed this, but there's been an increasing amount of lag in the game as it is growing in size.

It's been most noticeable during animations with choices.

After spending some time debugging this and even getting insight from RenPy Tom, I'm really happy to announce that I've fixed it for the entire game.

This fix will roll out together with the next update.



Poll news
There was a poll for 2D art that ended during Christmas and the winning combination was a frontal shot of Sage in lingerie + nude. I have ordered this art piece for episode 7.

There will be more polls to come during January.



Have a nice weekend and a great start to 2021!

Dr PinkCake