I honestly don't get what you mean with story flow. Could you elaborate?
What I meant was that someone could hate Max' guts on one path and the same character could have sex with him on another. That does not make sense at all. Lisa would be naked in bed or do anal lessons and be shy when it comes to other situations. That's what you get if you see all opportunities as separated storylines.
To make them interconnected to each other grants a more constant development. Lisa will only be topless while watching movies, if she got more comfortable being around Max in the presence of Olivia. She hearead from Alice that Max is good at giving massages and allows him to try. Alice accidently had her hand on Max' dick when she hid behind him from a spider, sees him a couple of times with something poking out of his pants, so she doesn't completely freak out when her feet touch his dick during the massage.
Why so? I haven't programmed in Ren'py, but shouldn't it just take an if statement checking if multiple variables were true?
Dead ends, the horror of every adventure style game programmer (even more so for the player). Dependencies require more planing and/or workarounds.
If you just put one image after another or only need to wait for the right moment to click something ... that's basics, everyone can do that. About Ren'Py in general ... it's a script engine, and as such very vulnerable to typing errors. I stay the hell away from such languages, I prefer to find my errors before my software gests shipped to the customer (who payed good money for it and hopefully earns a lot more by using it).
That part isn't about the game gaining something it needs, it's about it losing some bloat it doesn't need.
Again ... you don't gain anything. Quite early after the start, money won't be much of a problem. At the beginning it is
supposed to be a problem, part of the story even. That's why Max decides to get a loan. From that story telling point of view the game would even lose something, if Max got more money so early in the game.
Did you ever play Monkey Island 2? You should. It's a masterpiece of adventure design. The developers made sure that for every major riddle you had to visit all 4 islands more than once. You could not just focus on finding one piece of the map, that was impossible. You had to look for events and items on each island, talk to characters, find out what to do next. Sometimes you got an item that you had to use for a riddle that was not connected at all to the situation where you got the item.
I would
love to see more adult adventures, but for some reason everyone thinks that adult games have to be RPGs with money, stats, influence, relationship, corruption or whatever other bollocks they can come up with.
The other half of the developers makes visual novels where all you need to do is clicking.
Hardly anyone goes the adventure route. One of the few games that do so is House Party. There
are stats in the game, but they have no meaning, basically only tell you how far you are in the story (ok, you
can fuck up with a girl so she won't talk to you anymore which ends her story). Also FILF and MotH mostly have only informal stats (Moth was rewritten at some point) except for the money.
There are a few purely event base games, BBAS isn't one of them. The sooner one can accept that, the more he can enjoy it.
About that last content statement: What you described is exactly what we would get if we strp away the part of the game where you have to figure out what to do next. That's part of the game, that little adventure element that this game has. If you don't want that, you better 'play' visual novels.
. My pile of shame is higher than the Everest.
