I'm not trying to put your game down as I do like what I'm seeing so far, and I can see the creator's appeal in AWAM style padding (it's almost masturbatory in creative indulgence), but believe me, the padding adds no dimensionality to the characters. Needing five shots of Alice bent over looking for a towel tells us nothing more about Alice than the money shot already did, for example. Plus, the excessive cutting, especially in between indulgent shots of the same moment, is tiring on the eyes. There's a reason Snyder got laughed out of the building when he tried that with the Leonidas love scene in "300". All the same legitimate criticisms that AWAM received for its excessive padding applies here. If you want a much better example of making your characters look real and multidimensional, with an efficient use of shots, try giving the abandoned "High Life" a go. That one episode is a masterclass in Renpy storytelling.
Furthermore, and this is another reason why Lust and Passion had to trim down his padding, is that unless you have a rendering supercomputer, this will unnecessarily increase your time and labor cost. This will be magnified when you have to pay off all those storyline paths your setting up. Not to mention, once your file size starts exceeding AAA game file sizes (L&P took a lot of shit when his game projected to be bigger in file size than Life is Strange at only half his story completion) without the obvious AAA quality, the disconnect will be jarring.
The point isn't that it's locked in (my fault for framing it that way, I guess), but that a moment like that occurs so early and inorganically. A moment like that (coming out to friends) should be an emotional pay-off / milestone for a player making lesbian, or mostly lesbian, choices for the character throughout the course of the game up until that point. It's way too early for that to seem meaningful. Especially since the protagonist is starting out fairly prudish and conservative. Also, if she keeps getting "offered dick" after making an announcement like that, she had better be as irritated as any lesbian would be.
You get a 2 part reply.
####Part 1####
[Us compared to AAA games]
It's nice to be compared to the big boys that make AAA games, but we are not exactly Electronic Arts here. EA has like $5 Billion in annual revenues and 9,300 employees. They got pay to win with loot boxes. It's like comparing our lemonade stand to Walmart. We got just 2 guys that haven't made a penny in profits that work for free or at the moment actually at a loss in opportunity loss, assets, electricity ect. (I was up late at night coding on Christmas Eve for like 12 hours into the morning to make sure that we could release on Christmas. Because a Christmas release was our internal target.) In military terms it's like a couple of spartan warriors up against a modern army division that has tanks, drones, helicopters, and can call in airstrikes. If we went to war with EA we are Bambi and they are Godzilla we are under no delusion of it being anything different, but still we fight our battle for our fair share of our piece of the pie our current goal is just to break even.
Our game will always be free to play. I know times are tough out there, but if just 1 in 1,000 people who enjoy our game generously helps us out with just $1 a month we can hit our current goal happily. We are artists first, and business people second. As Miss Thornberg so eloquently put it in our game when she is talking about love and money. We are working on love right now and not a whole lot of money.
I have played "High Life" and I loved that game. It's a shame it became abandoned. That bad boy is #2 on my favorite abandoned games list right after "My Sweet Neighbors". The bronze medal there for me goes to a tie between "Primal Instinct", and "Our Fate". All great games. It sucks these got abandoned.
####Part 2####
[Our Process]
As for when you say that sometimes we will have more renders than the dialogue calls for. That is a logistics problem we are handling as well as we can. I'll explain a little bit about our process to you. I (Frank) am the writer, and Chris (SinAppeal) is the render side. If we had to go off of my renders and off of Chris' writing people would be laughing at our game. He can't write, and I can't render, but the opposite is true. Between the two of us we got 1 person who can write, 1 person 1 can render, and 2 people that can kinda code and 2 people who can photoshop. If you have ever seen the 1989 film "See No Evil, Hear No Evil" film (Great movie btw) that's us. It's like a Blind Guy and a Deaf Guy teaming up to have all of the senses. We are doing the best we can with what we got.
When the time comes for us to make a new scene it has various steps. I'll go through this step by step.
(There is still some general outlining and mundane details I'm going to leave out, but this gives you a good idea of what we do.)
Step 1: "World Building" This is mostly just gathering assets and the physical building of characters. I help find some of what we need, but Chris is more the visual guy in that department, but we work together on this. If we see an asset out there that we like and want for a scene we get it and Chris sometimes makes minor modifications to character models so it's not always an out of the box asset and it has a little bit of originality to it. This is not always the case though sometimes we just use stuff out of the box usualyl more so for for objects all of our characters have been morphed to some degree. I may have him render a character in a certain way a simple shot that will get a thumbs up or thumbs down for a person I will write for, and there we go we got a new person for the game or a new scene or new object. The form that I get to see visually sometimes is not fully rendered it's more so a "Pre Render" version. If the "Pre Render" is good I say go ahead for a lone render on a new character to see what they look like.
Step 2: "Visualizing" I write the scene out descriptively as possible, but just visually. At the top of the page I will put what characters I need, if they need any special modifications (Such as alice's black eye). What they are wearing. What set we are using. This is all under the assumption we have the set and characters made already which is a whole 2nd process. I will go render by render at this scene and describe what each character is doing, what expression they are making, where the camera is angled, what level of lighting / time of day. and so on. (A funny story about this. During the gym locker room scene a single render had Rose putting her hands up with two peace signs that looked like Richard Nixon. I laughed, but we kept it and that's how she got her last name.)
Step 3: The ball has been passed over to Chris. It's on him to work his render magic. He has to do all of his visual stuff from here. He builds the scene out, but doesn't render it yet however he comes back to me with some pre renders. If I see a problem with the pre renders I say "no no, like this" and we may pass it back and forth until it is how it's needed.
Step 4: I pass the game script over to Chris. He puts the newly created renders in. By putting the renders in I mean he puts them in like this:
scene image1
"1"
scene image2
"2"
scene image3
"3"
and so on. He tries to get them in the right order, and in the best order possible.
Step 5: The renders are now in. However there was supposed to be a menu, and variables. I add the menu and variables. I play the scene out physically playing the game with just "1" "2" "3" as the text of the newly added scene. Sometimes the renders are in the wrong order. I re order them. If It's a 3 frame animation I write the animation script and put that in. Then I test the various speeds of the animation a few times to get it looking right then ask chris "Hey this look good?" he is like "No it's suck try again" so I try again
then eventually get it right. Now we got the scene built minus the dialogue. I look at each image and the sequence of images. I write dialogue that fits as best as possible. Pass it over to chris "How does this sound?" We now got a rough draft of the scene.
Step 6: I check the spelling and grammar. Sometimes I find new words and think up a possible joke to put in. Sometimes the scene did not come how I wanted so I wipe the slate and start again. Back down to step 5 repeat if necessary. Back on step 6 now. I write the writing in as good as I can and fix all the mistakes and got it polished up and as well written as possible. Chris will sometimes add some SFX or music to the scene. Then we got a new scene ready for showtime.
Step 7: We are now 2 or 3 scenes later. Got a new idea. The original foreshadowing doesn't add up. So go back and change that so it does.
During this process sometime we are left with some extra renders than what was needed. If it is an instance of say 1 naked person in the bathroom looking around like "Where is the towel?" adding a mountain of internal dialogue on top of that is sometimes too much. Sometimes when the writing is done I have as much as 120% of the renders needed to fit the story fully. Other times I only have 80% so I go back and poke my render buddy "Hey render this I need it!" Usually (90% of the time) I get what I need, sometimes it just can't be done and I gotta work with what was already made. I'm not going to hit the nail on the head every time. I try to under shoot more than over shoot the writing but sometimes I over shoot.
If you see many lines of dialogue on few render = I under shot and it feels a little light on renders temporarily.
If you see few lines of dialogue on many render = I over shot and you get bonus renders when you play.
