Ren'Py By Another Name [v0.031] [Thornwell studios]

4.50 star(s) 2 Votes
Discussion Reviews (2)
Simulacrum29

Simulacrum29

Active Member
Apr 20, 2018
891
3,235
hthornwell said:
Fair question! There are things about sandbox that offer more freedom for side events that wouldn't be feasible if it was a more traditional AVN. For example, there are a couple dozen dorm visit mini-events that wouldn't really find their way into the main story, but I think they do a good job of filling out the world and the characters a bit. They couldn't really exist in a traditional on-rails AVN format, but if the player gets to choose how they spend their time, they can choose to engage with the extra content if they want, or just spam-click through stuff to get to the full-events. That's part of why the hint system exists, so that people who just want the main story can get the most direct path there.

Also, there are player choices that affect the story, that just doesn't happen to be one of them. Being a "sandbox" game and having some major decisions, like whether a main character is romancable, are not mutually exclusive. Frankly, I wouldn't be against the idea of having each character be opt-in for their romance path if I was a team of 12 people and could write 15+ major variations of the story for every character the player chooses/chooses not to date, but I work a full time job and am just one guy doing this in my time off because I think it's fun to make. It's just not feasible for me to write a game like that. But I still wanted to have sandbox elements, so this was the best compromise in my eyes :)
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It was really a genuine question. As I'm loving harem games not being able to chose LIs is not something bad per se. So I'm likely to take another look later down the road, depending on additional tags.


But you know that you are contradicting yourself quite blatantly in your post?
In the second half, you are talking about the time constraints that branching would put on you, and in the first half, you are telling us that the stuff you need the sandbox for is fluff. Something that's not relevant and has no place in the actual story (which still costs time to create). All of it is paired with four or five different MCs.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
 
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hthornwell

Newbie
Apr 9, 2021
24
10
Simulacrum29 said:
It was really a genuine question. As I'm loving harem games not being able to chose LIs is not something bad per se. So I'm likely to take another look later down the road, depending on additional tags.


But you know that you are contradicting yourself quite blatantly in your post?
In the second half, you are talking about the time constraints that branching would put on you, and in the first half, you are telling us that the stuff you need the sandbox for is fluff. Something that's not relevant and has no place in the actual story (which still costs time to create). All of it is paired with four or five different MCs.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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For sure, the dorm stuff isn't a necessity, and it does add on an extra couple hours to each update's development time...but it's fun fluff :D

More seriously addressing the difference in potential workload though (since I have some context of actual numbers that you may not have), writing the ~30 dorm mini-events per semester is like adding on the equivalent of maybe ~10 extra full events' worth of work per chapter. Compare that to writing variations on most of the events depending on who you're dating and...well, per chapter, it quickly becomes hundreds and hundreds of variations because of the scaling of having so many characters and needing unique interactions during main events pursuant to who you're dating at the time. For example, the next update has 15 events, and writing even just two versions of each individual character event (one for a romance path, one for non) and writing variations for the main events according to all the potential people you could be seeing, it would be roughly doubling the amount of work in that update (more concentrated in main events since there would be more variations in those than individual character events). Writing additional variations of an event doesn't take as long as writing a normal event itself, but each variation would still be more work than a dorm mini, for example.

If I was making a game with like 3-5 characters, it would be more feasible to keep up with that, but as it stands, I'm just not interested in investing the time it would take for the return in actual gameplay for players. The dorm stuff adds a couple hours per update cycle, while having unique paths for dating each character/dating groups of characters would add tens of hours per update-cycle of work for a pretty slim return on investment, IMO. I have a huge amount of respect for devs who write games like that, because it's a shitton of work for most players to not even notice how much you're doing behind the scenes if it's done well (Being a DIK has a couple different paths you can play through with totally unique interactions and it's super well done - would recommend if you haven't tried it to get a feel for how it can be done well and also how much work goes into it).

The extra character models, unlike the dorm mini-events, do add a fair bit of extra work tbh. But that felt more important to invest the time into, since the number of games that allow you to play as an MC that isn't a dude is shockingly small. I would love to offer more MC character models to choose from, honestly, but I'm capping myself to having four (male, female, and NB with either genitals) moving forwards to keep development cycles reasonably short. I could just keep adding stuff on per update, but it'd mean this would become one of those games where you get an update like twice a year lol. And while I understand why that happens to a lot of devs, I'd prefer it doesn't happen to By Another Name.
 
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littless

Newbie
Sep 3, 2020
48
32
hthornwell said:
This means I missed a potential condition for the hint system, whoops. Sorry about that. If you send me a message on here or discord with a description of the last event you did, I can patch that and tell you what to do next so you don't have to wait for a new build. That being said, nothing is actually broken about the gameplay itself, so if you don't need a hint right away, you could still keep playing in theory.
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yea its not big bug after i played nex event hints appeared again
 
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Freshkope

Newbie
Feb 10, 2021
58
58
I don’t think having a female protagonist who is able to choose their pronouns at the start of the game should count as a Futa/Trans Protagonist Tag. Personally I think the tag should be removed. That’s like saying one of the female characters was originally a man but now has a full female model, gimme that Futa/trans tag.
 
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hthornwell

Newbie
Apr 9, 2021
24
10
Freshkope said:
I don’t think having a female protagonist who is able to choose their pronouns at the start of the game should count as a Futa/Trans Protagonist Tag. Personally I think the tag should be removed. That’s like saying one of the female characters was originally a man but now has a full female model, gimme that Futa/trans tag.
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Tbh I agree but I didn't make the thread and I don't know how to ask them to change tags on it - I'll take a look this week to see if I can ask the OP to change the tags
 
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Mrmeeseeksletmein

Newbie
Mar 6, 2022
22
11
Are all the characters listed in the tab ingame the only one's we'll get more stuff with, or will more stuff be added for some of the ones we see every now and then (like Elise, Ino and Caitlin's Cousin)
 
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hthornwell

Newbie
Apr 9, 2021
24
10
Mrmeeseeksletmein said:
Are all the characters listed in the tab ingame the only one's we'll get more stuff with, or will more stuff be added for some of the ones we see every now and then (like Elise, Ino and Caitlin's Cousin)
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The characters listed in the character menu are considered "main characters" and will definitely get more content. The others (Elise, etc.) are side characters and will definitely show up again, though not all of them will definitely get their own events unless people really are dying to see more of a specific character.

That being said, I do have an Elise-based event planned for like...four updates from now lol.
 
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Mrmeeseeksletmein

Newbie
Mar 6, 2022
22
11
hthornwell said:
The characters listed in the character menu are considered "main characters" and will definitely get more content. The others (Elise, etc.) are side characters and will definitely show up again, though not all of them will definitely get their own events unless people really are dying to see more of a specific character.

That being said, I do have an Elise-based event planned for like...four updates from now lol.
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That's good enough for me! I was mostly just vaguely asking for Elise since I really like her look, haha
 
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4.50 star(s) 2 Votes