VN Ren'Py Abandoned Broken Hearts Club [Ep. 1-2 v0.2.1] [PsychIntent]

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Grimtown

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Alas, I finally find a game with some emotional depth and it's on hold. Woe is me! Lol. I sure hope to see an update sometime, I was really liking this one.
Way to get my hopes up. :mad:
Nah, just kidding. <3
But when this thread popped up in my alerts I had hoped it would be seamanq with a surprise update.

By the way, how are you Seamanq?
 

seamanq

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Doing ok. Work is getting quite busy again so I just don't have the time to develop the game that I wish I had. Unlike many others, I have to make a living while trying to create something that is interesting. I haven't given up on this completely, however. The story is still bouncing around in my head and I am trying to figure out how to write and produce it while keeping up with my other family responsibilities, which is challenging.
 

seamanq

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Alas, I finally find a game with some emotional depth and it's on hold. Woe is me! Lol. I sure hope to see an update sometime, I was really liking this one.
Somehow I missed your comment, but wow, I really appreciate it. The game's not dead completely, I just don't have time to work on it right now. But the story is still bouncing around in my head and I am trying to figure out how I can fit writing and producing the game into my crazy schedule right now. I will post here when I have more updates, and thank you so much for the kind remarks.
 

a1fox3

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Pudthumper

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Somehow I missed your comment, but wow, I really appreciate it. The game's not dead completely, I just don't have time to work on it right now. But the story is still bouncing around in my head and I am trying to figure out how I can fit writing and producing the game into my crazy schedule right now. I will post here when I have more updates, and thank you so much for the kind remarks.
I totally get it. Best of luck with everything, I will keep an eye on this thread, for sure.
 

Pudthumper

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You want a completed emotional depth game well you have one on here that has 5 different paths to go down that is full of emotions.
If at least 2 of the stories don't bring tears to your eyes then you don't have a hart.
https://f95zone.to/threads/katawa-shoujo-four-leaf-studios.4276/
Thanks fox, I'll check it out. I still cry when I watch Bambi, so I'll be sure to have a box of tissues at hand. Lol

*edit* Damn, no mobile port and my pc is down for the count. :(
 

a1fox3

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Thanks fox, I'll check it out. I still cry when I watch Bambi, so I'll be sure to have a box of tissues at hand. Lol
Just remember there is sex but its not porn and can take a long time to get to.

Use the girls walkthrough to get 100% completion.
The music in this game is right on the mark.

Make a save once you start talking to the first teacher, this is the starting point for all paths.
 

seamanq

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Ok. So the brain is putting stuff out that I just can't hold on, so I am starting the process for Episode 3. I took advantage of some really good discounts to buy assets and gift cards to get more that I needed to advance this story at the end of the year. So now I am starting to render images that will be needed for Episode 3. However, it is going SO ... SLOW!!! We're talking 2 hours for a single render. Now this is partly due to the fact that I have an ancient 760GTX video card, and I don't have the money to upgrade it. It's also due to the fact that my previews are whacked, and I only see tiny details like fingers going through a table after 30 minutes of rendering, so that means restarting the same render, multiple times. So, in reality, each render is taking 3-4 hours.

So I will do one or two renders a night, and see how long it takes me to render the essentials before I can actually tell the story that I want to happen in Chapter 3. I think I am going to forgo a sex scene for this episode, because I have a lot of story I want to tell, and sex scenes, with my rig, take an EXCEPTIONALLY long time to render (we're talking a day or so each). But I wanted to let people know that care about this project that I am trying to do some work in it in the evenings, even though it is the busiest time of the year for me for the work that actually pays my bills. I know ... a detail (as Sgt. Bilko would say).
 

seamanq

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Well boys and girls and sports fans. It looks like my video card has been deprecated, which means I can't render iRay using the GPU. So that means that renders are sucky slow because they are CPU only. Thankfully, I have a ridiculous 16-core Xeon chip in my rig, so what could be ridiculously slow is only painfully slow. Now that I am getting into it, single renders are taking anywhere from 1 hour to 2 hours. So I just have it rendering in one window and go about doing everything else I need to do in the other window, pretty much all day. That should get me about 4-5 renders a day, maybe more depending on how long I am on the rig.

So I am working on a story arc I call the "Revenge of Shane." Shane, as we know, is fiercely protective of her cousin (or not cousin, depending on the choices you made at the beginning of the game). Soooo ... this means that Frank didn't really get away with anything, he just thinks he got away with something. Well, Frank is moving on with his life, and he thinks a lovely bonus for his college aspirations is to be the Brighton Beach Student Council President during his Senior year. Shane may have something to say about that. Interestingly, his opponent is a young woman of color. So we have mister entitled white boy against a really sharp opponent that he thinks will be super easy to beat. This may or may not be something similar to what I experienced when I was in my high school days.

Anyway, things get crazy at the debates, and somehow the media shows up and it becomes a media circus. Imagine who might have precipitated that? Anyway, I have a few of the renders I did, the introduction of the debate

debate_introduction.png

Coverage being introduced from the local TV studio

Episode3_Newsroom_Explaining_4.png

And the start of an in-the-field interview and coverage of the event.

Lecture_Room_Interview_5.png

Now what on earth could happen at a student council debate that would spur such interest? I mean, usually these things are as boring as watching paint dry ...

Stay tuned for more.
 
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myuhinny

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The dude looks like a douche and I can't wait to see Shane and her cousin beat his face in.
 

seamanq

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The dude looks like a douche and I can't wait to see Shane and her cousin beat his face in.
As the saying goes, revenge is a dish that is best served cold. Frank, and his douchebag father are going to find out exactly how cold things can get, including a certain complicit local Police Chief. Heads are gonna roll! To borrow a line that Shane might like: "Ya mess with the bull, ya get the horns" (shamelessly plagiarized from Some Kind of Wonderful, thank you Mary Stuart Masterson.)
 

seamanq

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The dude looks like a douche and I can't wait to see Shane and her cousin beat his face in.
He's even more of a douche when Brenda, his opponent, pushes the right buttons.
debate_brenda_focus_1.png

Perhaps a suggestion about why it's not good to have a rapist represent the student body?

debate_frank_focus_1.png

And entitled butt-boy Frank gets his knickers in a royal twist.
 

myuhinny

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Douche boy wouldn't like me as I always ignore whatever a douche is saying in any game and only read or listen to the ones I want to. Would be funny if someone put a bucket full of something above his head and during the event it gets dumped on the douches head while it's being broadcast across the world.
 

seamanq

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Douche boy wouldn't like me as I always ignore whatever a douche is saying in any game and only read or listen to the ones I want to. Would be funny if someone put a bucket full of something above his head and during the event it gets dumped on the douches head while it's being broadcast across the world.
Oh, don't worry. Butt-boy Frank will definitely suffer from the revenge of Shane. Losing the Student Body Presidency will be the absolute least of his problems.
 

seamanq

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Just another chapter in stuff that makes devs crazy. A couple of years ago, my video card stopped being supported in Daz3D which I create my art in. So that means I have to do rendering using the CPU which is dog-ass slow (1.5-2 hours per render). I had a sequence of five images I had shot of an actor before I realized there was something strange on her forehead by the hair line. <insert picture of something strange here>
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And a closer look.
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After doing some detective work, I figured out that if I hid her hair, the problem went away, which means something in the hair was whacked, creating the artifacts on her face. Well, I had only done 5 renders of this actor with this hair, so that means 5 renders to redo with different hair. SIGH. Just another chapter in the life of a struggling game developer. BTW, I tried to sign up with Paperspace to rent a rig with a GPU but it wouldn't take my credit card to sign up. I just figured out wy it wasn't provisioning. I will report back on how that goes for me.
 

myuhinny

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Yeah I have seen that hair thing in many different games before. I mostly don't even notice it anymore as I'm use to seeing it.
 

seamanq

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Yeah I have seen that hair thing in many different games before. I mostly don't even notice it anymore as I'm use to seeing it.
Well, being the perfectionist that I am, I simply can't abide it. So I am re-rendering. I am also building a virtual machine at Paperspace to use for rendering. They have dedicated GPU units that are crazy powerful, so I should be able to render a lot faster, but there is an overhead cost. So I am going to have to consider that and maybe launch a SubscribeStar site as well as relaunching my Patreon site, if only to recoup the investment in Daz3D assets and rendering that I am making at this point.
 
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seamanq

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So I built a rig on Paperspace that has a decently fast GPU (Quadro P5000, to be exact). Not terribly expensive. I have documented what and how I did it elsewhere, so I won't go into it in detail here. Now that I have pushed my Daz3D library to the cloud, I have started rendering on the new virtual machine (VM) at Paperspace, and it is working respectably well. Render speeds are anywhere from 15 minutes to 40 minutes, depending on the complexity. Which beats the crap out of two hours guaranteed for each render, which is what I was capable of on my machine with CPU rendering only. So a got a bunch of renders done this evening towards the next episode. I think this episode will probably be the most ambitious one I have done. I probably will skip an H scene this episode because I have so much story to tell at this point. I am thinking of holding off on writing/releasing Episode 3 until I have at least an outline of the rest of the story. Rather than going willy-nilly, I want to have a cohesive story with a start, finish, and end. That way, everything I do along the way will contribute and build to the climax (pardon the pun) at the end of the story. Then it's just denouement. Think Acting Lessons (and don't start a flame war here about AL, because it absolutely will be shut down faster than Shane gets horny). Ok, so a little tease here from Episode 3.

Who is this lovely lady, and what does she have to say that is so interesting?
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seamanq

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Ok, here's a lil update. I went on a major road trip a few days ago (about 2-1/2 hours each way to the nearest big city). I had to get some stuff from the library and took the opportunity to grab a few things from stores we don't have in our little town (everything but Safeway). Long drives are good because I had my characters talking in my head the whole drive up and back. Which means, when I got back, I had to sit down and write story arcs for the next three episodes (Episodes 3, 4, and 5). Even though it is the busiest time of year for me, work wise, I am taking a little bit of time to actually start writing dialogue. I have about 2,000 words written for Episode 3, with about 2,000-3,000 more to go. With the help of the Paperspace rendering rig, I have probably 75% of my custom renders already done, and I don't think I will do an animation this time around. So, if things go well, y'all may be seeing an update within the next few weeks. I'm not committing to a date because I can't but rest assured, progress is going well and I am hopeful that it will be sooner rather than later. Thanks to everyone for the support and enjoying the game. I hope you will enjoy what's coming down the pipeline.
 
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