VN Ren'Py Abandoned Dr. Amana, Sexual Therapist [v2.0.0P] [Ianvs]

[Deleted member 997153]

Alright, I promised you a playable demo of the new "sex system" in our game. Here it is.
Just visit our downloads page on our website and you'll find the links for both PC and Mac there.

This is not a completed scene, just a test of concept and a chance for us to get your feedback on the mechanism itself before we put it into production. We want to use this structure for all our characters going forward, not just the whores.

So please, if you have a moment, download it and let us know what you think. As always, we value your opinion and would love to know what you thin.

You must be registered to see the links

Interesting demo! Here are a few thoughts, realizing some of these might be more aesthetic issues that will be resolved down the line:

• You have three different interfaces that are not aligned spatially in the game window - scene selection is on the far left, the cum button is top right (missed it the first time), regular Ren'Py nav in the bottom middle. It might be useful to find a way to unite this into a single interface because it comes across as confusing and disjointed. As I mentioned, I missed the "Cum" button completely on the first play. From a UI/UX perspective, this is a big no-no.
• That wall of white boxes takes up almost half the screen and is pretty visually ugly and looks (forgive me) very amateurish. Each box seems to have a scrollbar that doesn't need to be there either.
• It would be nice to have a way to bail out of a scene in the middle rather than having to click through multiple screens to return to the menu. Maybe a hide/show button?
• This is more a personal nitpick, but having to read a text box with each movement was a bit annoying and ruins the illusion of animation. Maybe put in some actual animation loops between the text?

The first bullet is the biggest issue for me. I don't know about anyone else, but I hate having to criss-cross the screen searching the interface for where to click when I'm in the middle of my vinegar strokes. It's like trying to figure out which wire to cut on a bomb when you only have 5 seconds until detonation.

That said, I love the idea and especially love the narration when picking my options. Really helps with the immersion more than "Doggie", "On top", etc, etc. that you see in most games.

Overall, a sound demo and assuming you can work out the kinks (heh ), this interface will be a welcome addition to an already excellent game.

 

[RomanHume]

Interesting demo! Here are a few thoughts, realizing some of these might be more aesthetic issues that will be resolved down the line:

All very solid feedback and I appreciate you giving so much detail. Let me touch on a few things and see if I can extract some additional insight from you.

• You have three different interfaces that are not aligned spatially in the game window - scene selection is on the far left, the cum button is top right (missed it the first time), regular Ren'Py nav in the bottom middle. It might be useful to find a way to unite this into a single interface because it comes across as confusing and disjointed. As I mentioned, I missed the "Cum" button completely on the first play. From a UI/UX perspective, this is a big no-no.

First let me say that when it comes to UI design, I am a total failure. For all my artistic talents in writing, lighting and visual art, as a programmer I suffer from a lack of inspiration when it comes to good UI design. It's just something I've always struggled with. So I'm not at all surprised to hear my interface needs work.

That said, I am all for doing some redesign and making it more aligned. I'll see what I can do about drawing all of that together better. And of course any suggestions are greatly welcome.

(Furthermore, if you want to help save me some time, if you know of any good books or online resources specifically dealing with UI design, I'd read it eagerly. It's just not something I've had time to study up on in lieu of everything else happening)

• That wall of white boxes takes up almost half the screen and is pretty visually ugly and looks (forgive me) very amateurish. Each box seems to have a scrollbar that doesn't need to be there either.

Again, I suck at UI design and struggled with a way to make the text stand out so I just opted for the default "window" in the game. Lazy, and ugly, but I suffered coming up with something better. The scroll bars are there in anticipation of those lists growing beyond the scope of the screen. However, I suppose it would make sense to just turn them off until such time as they are needed.

• It would be nice to have a way to bail out of a scene in the middle rather than having to click through multiple screens to return to the menu. Maybe a hide/show button?

I hadn't considered this but I agree that would indeed be a valuable addition. I'll see what I can come up with in the next iteration.

• This is more a personal nitpick, but having to read a text box with each movement was a bit annoying and ruins the illusion of animation. Maybe put in some actual animation loops between the text?

I'm glad you hate it! Because I hated writing it. It's repetitious and a pain in the ass to come up with. I quickly ran out of the vocabulary needed to say "She was wet and tight" nine different ways.

I'm like you, I prefer simple transitions in place of actual animation where unavailable. But a point of feed back was that there wasn't enough internal monologue during the sex scenes. In retrospect, I probably went a bit overboard. So it's just a matter of finding that balance. Each camera angle has about 4 to 5 motions, so doing the simple transition/animations isn't a problem. I just hate writing sex scene dialogue so I need to train myself to find the balance between what's enough and what's too much.

That said, I love the idea and especially love the narration when picking my options. Really helps with the immersion more than "Doggie", "On top", etc, etc. that you see in most games.

I'm glad you enjoyed this. I didn't want to break with the narrative style of the game during the sex scenes and this seemed like a good balance between "Roger's telling a story" and "I'm at an all you can fuck buffet".


I'm excited about utilizing this system for two reasons. The first is that it makes creating the sex scenes so much easier programmatically speaking. It has a very clean pipeline and we can generate a large number of visuals in a few strokes.

Second, it opens up the possibility of including an infinite variety of sexual locations, positions, and points of stimulation during a sex scene. I'm hoping we can monetize it by allowing patrons to make a one time contribution to request additions of their choice to one or more sex scenes. That will really help us offset costs and work toward getting a rig that can just render full time.

Plus, by putting the development of the list in the player's hands, we avoid spending time on poses and positions that people simple don't want. Narrows the focus so to speak.

Anyway, thanks again for giving it a try and triple grazie for such a detailed analysis!

Salute mate!

 

[Deleted member 997153]

(Furthermore, if you want to help save me some time, if you know of any good books or online resources specifically dealing with UI design, I'd read it eagerly. It's just not something I've had time to study up on in lieu of everything else happening)

I'm sure there are others on these forums with real UX experience that could provide better guidance. My knowledge is about 20 years out of date and it was called "Human Factors" or "Human-Computer Interaction" back then. But generally, good UX is like good CGI - if you don't notice it, then it's doing its job well.

I did a quick google for resources and this is a good start - sound principles that should apply to your situation.

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The scroll bars are there in anticipation of those lists growing beyond the scope of the screen. However, I suppose it would make sense to just turn them off until such time as they are needed.

That would be the advisable way to handle it.

I'm like you, I prefer simple transitions in place of actual animation where unavailable. But a point of feed back was that there wasn't enough internal monologue during the sex scenes. In retrospect, I probably went a bit overboard. So it's just a matter of finding that balance. Each camera angle has about 4 to 5 motions, so doing the simple transition/animations isn't a problem. I just hate writing sex scene dialogue so I need to train myself to find the balance between what's enough and what's too much.

You have animations in the latest iteration of the game. Are you planning to continue to use those or will those change?

I'm glad you enjoyed this. I didn't want to break with the narrative style of the game during the sex scenes and this seemed like a good balance between "Roger's telling a story" and "I'm at an all you can fuck buffet".

From an immersion standpoint, it absolutely helps. I wish more developers would interweave narration into the menu choices.

Second, it opens up the possibility of including an infinite variety of sexual locations, positions, and points of stimulation during a sex scene. I'm hoping we can monetize it by allowing patrons to make a one time contribution to request additions of their choice to one or more sex scenes. That will really help us offset costs and work toward getting a rig that can just render full time.

That's a really smart way to generate a new revenue stream. It never even occurred to me to do that. Given how many top tier patrons get to design characters in some games, I'm sure there is an audience who would want to add a specific fetish or position. Really brilliant! Be careful though - you don't want to overwhelm users with too many choices. If memory serves, 6-8 choices is the upper most limit you'd want to consider. Considering this is a porn game, you might even want to consider limiting it to no more than 4. With three categories, that would still give you tons of variations in a single scene.

Other thoughts:

• Consider making the boxes horizontal and center them in the screen. If it's gonna overlay the scene, it might as well be in the user's direct field of view
• Consider adding the "Cum" option as a box that is underneath all the others. Or break-up the box to give options for creampie, facial, etc and save the user a click
• Kick up the contrast on the text in the boxes, either with an alternate font or using bold-face
• Consider implementing a cascading menu - Select Location -> Select Position -> Select stimulation

Hopefully this was helpful and I hope there are people in this community with real UX experience that can offer additional (and better!) advice. Good luck!

P.S. Don't spend too much time on it. I'm eagerly awaiting my meeting with Jane after school on Monday!

 

[OM24]

Alright, I promised you a playable demo of the new "sex system" in our game. Here it is.
Just visit our downloads page on our website and you'll find the links for both PC and Mac there.

This is not a completed scene, just a test of concept and a chance for us to get your feedback on the mechanism itself before we put it into production. We want to use this structure for all our characters going forward, not just the whores.

So please, if you have a moment, download it and let us know what you think. As always, we value your opinion and would love to know what you thin.

You must be registered to see the links

Hmm, always a bit tricky to give feedback to a Work in Progress since it is hard at times to tell what is already being worked on and what is up in the air.Also hard to tell what someone is willing to change verse what they will fight to keep. Well he we go.

First off, the whole set up with the white boxes a really poor way to handle this, not only do they take up a lot of the screen they stand out too much. Stylizing them might help, but in my opinion it would be best to find a way around using the three boxes. Beyond the visual issues, breaking from a flowing narrative to a branching section--one where you navigate through a series of clicks and occasional choice to one you navigate through a series of boxes--can take people out of the story a bit.

Another point I noticed is how you choose to structure this, which is three choices combed leading to a scene(four in total I believe). Another way this can be handled is being doing choice then small dialogue or scene. For example, you pick the bed, this leads to a a scene of how they get to the bed followed by the next choice and then a scene involving that choice. This also lets you go back. Example of this, you choose bed, but once on the bed like the choice given and decide you want to do the window instead, well one of the choices can easily be going to the window. In my opinion this makes for a better flow of actions and narrative since each choice is basically telling what happens next and would have its own transition. The down side to this approach is that it is a lot more writing with you now having to make a transition from every point rather than writing block scenes, although the entire flow would go better in the end. I am also not sure how the coding for this would be, and do acknowledge that it might be more of a headache than it is worth which is a valid reason to not go this route. Just as is it feels stiff and more of a scene selector rather than part of a narrative.

Besides that there is just minor things that come to mind such as when doing a scene more than once(again, possible coding pain since this would have to be kept track of) or just. Not sure that helps much, take or leave as you will.

 

[zeuswargrave]

Alright, I promised you a playable demo of the new "sex system" in our game. Here it is.
Just visit our downloads page on our website and you'll find the links for both PC and Mac there.

This is not a completed scene, just a test of concept and a chance for us to get your feedback on the mechanism itself before we put it into production. We want to use this structure for all our characters going forward, not just the whores.

So please, if you have a moment, download it and let us know what you think. As always, we value your opinion and would love to know what you thin.

You must be registered to see the links

As pointed out earlier, while the premise is fantastic, UI needs some work. If I may, I would suggest using pictograms for title descriptions like, "Select Location". And increasing background transparency to enhance the side panel, are some hacks to enhance the UI setup. Do try to maintain text format monotony, as closely placed texts of varying fonts do tend to mess up the overall look.
Hope you find it helpful

 

[desmosome]

Does the incest patch for 1.0.5 work for the latest version?

More importantly, does the incest patch make sense in this game or was it kind of a forced thing? Like did the dev write the story with incest in mind, but left it ambiguous due to obvious reasons?

 

[NeroZee]

Yea i tried the demo, everyone already explained in much better detail than i could what could use some improvement and i will definitely reinforce the idea that there is way too much talking during those sex scenes and the constant clicking just takes you out of the scene entirely.

P.S. Don't spend too much time on it. I'm eagerly awaiting my meeting with Jane after school on Monday!

Also this^

 

[botc76]

Does the incest patch for 1.0.5 work for the latest version?

More importantly, does the incest patch make sense in this game or was it kind of a forced thing? Like did the dev write the story with incest in mind, but left it ambiguous due to obvious reasons?

Yes, it makes sense, as the game was initially planned with incest, but then patreon...
Roman Hume is very active here, so he can probably answer this better, but iirc the plan is to have a patch that restores the game as it was supposed to be, once it is actually finished.

 

[botc76]

Okay, I think the new sex system is a great idea with flaws.
1. The boxes as others have mentioned are jarring. For me making them smaller and letting them be a bit transparent would be enough to make it easier to the eye.
2. The writing during the sex. I like the idea, what throws me off is that it's as if the box is reloaded with every click, why not let the pics play as a sort of animation in the background and let the story flow in the box without breaking it up with each sentence and each click?
3. My biggest concern though is this. The development for this game has become so slow compared to how you guys started out and now you add another heavy load to your work, as this kind of sex system definitely needs more time to produce.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but what I want is for the story of our MC and the lovely ladies he's acquainted with to continue as fast as possible.

 

[Tisi]

3. My biggest concern though is this. The development for this game has become so slow compared to how you guys started out and now you add another heavy load to your work, as this kind of sex system definitely needs more time to produce.
Maybe I'm in the minority, but what I want is for the story of our MC and the lovely ladies he's acquainted with to continue as fast as possible.

If you're in the minority, I'm right there with you.

 

[Skantarios]

If you're in the minority, I'm right there with you.

Supported. Story really is more important than visuals for me. Its why I play games like this instead of just watching porn.

 

[RomanHume]

So it's scaring me how comfortable I'm getting with renpy screen language. I was able to put this together in about three hours tonight on the laptop while the beast is cranking out renders.

Taking much of your feedback to heart, I've revamped the sex menu system and made some serious improvements to the interface.

1. The boxes have been made semi-transparent and are much less jarring to the eye.
2. They dynamically resize based on the amount of content in each box.


3. The individual menus can now be manually opened and closed via the arrow in the upper right of each box. This means if you have chosen a location and position for example and just want to explore all the stimulations, you can save yourself some space by collapsing the other two boxes. The game will remember which boxes were open and closed each time it is opened.


4. The menu remembers the choices you made higher up on the hierarchy by darkening the text of the previous selections. This too is remember each time the menu is opened.


5. The entire menu can be expanded or collapsed at any time via the icon in the upper left. This means that in the middle of a sex scene you have the option of jumping tracks to a different one if the current scene just isn't doing it for you. This icon only appears during sex scenes and will be absent during the rest of the game, freeing up valuable screen space.


6. You can terminate the sex scene complete at any time, not just at the end of a scene. Thus giving you complete control over the experience.


Other suggestions will be implemented at release time. We always intended to include better transitions between locations and positions to create a better narrative flow. So that is already in the pipeline and almost complete. We're also going to scale back the amount of text during the sex scenes. It will be a fairly even combination of click throughs and looped "pseudo-animation" of about four or five scenes.


That said, the reason I'm excited about this system is because it is a lot less work on the development side. The reusability of it alone is going to save us from having to manage all kinds of loops and jumps that tend to get buggy as they get bigger. It also makes developing sex scenes a little more formulaic which requires less planning overall. I now have the freedom to just come up with four or five smaller sex scenes that I think are appropriate and feed them into the menu.

Our new batch rendering system is also capable of doing camera changes between renders. This means we can set up our six or seven sex scenes, set four or five cameras, and then just let the computer take over. It's a far cry simpler than before when ever frame needed to be saved as a separate file and rendered out one at a time.

We can also program in a few minutes of downtime between batches for gpu cool down. This means we can leave the computer on autopilot for longer periods of time throughout the day and that's going to help us render faster.


I know the development speed has been ebbing and flowing a lot lately and that's largely due to team reduction and that other job I have encroaching in on my free time to work on the game. But rest assured, development never comes to a stop. Some weeks may only have ten to fifteen hours, others I eek in twenty five or thirty.

I know everyone has been waiting extra patiently for this next update. I won't try to placate you with estimations or promises. But know that I will not stop!

Thank you all again for your patience. It means a lot that you've stuck around this long.

Salute!

 

[botc76]

I know the development speed has been ebbing and flowing a lot lately and that's largely due to team reduction and that other job I have encroaching in on my free time to work on the game. But rest assured, development never comes to a stop. Some weeks may only have ten to fifteen hours, others I eek in twenty five or thirty.

I know everyone has been waiting extra patiently for this next update. I won't try to placate you with estimations or promises. But know that I will not stop!

Thank you all again for your patience. It means a lot that you've stuck around this long.

Salute!

Good to hear it isn't likely to slow down production speed, even if there's a little nagging voice inside me, that wonders if the automated versions are really preferable to each sex scene being done as one, but hey, it's not me who is developing games.

May I ask how many of you are still working on the game for now? Would you be interested in adding new members?
Not that I'd have the time or skill, but we got a bunch of people here who seem to.

 

[RomanHume]

Does the incest patch for 1.0.5 work for the latest version?

More importantly, does the incest patch make sense in this game or was it kind of a forced thing? Like did the dev write the story with incest in mind, but left it ambiguous due to obvious reasons?

Yes, it makes sense, as the game was initially planned with incest, but then patreon...
Roman Hume is very active here, so he can probably answer this better, but iirc the plan is to have a patch that restores the game as it was supposed to be, once it is actually finished.

Botc was kind enough to take point on this one, but I'll see if I can add some additional clarity and share future plans.

We did originally plan to have incest, but the great Patreon debacle occurred almost a month, maybe two, before our first release. So we quickly revamped some character relationships and wrote our way around it.

There is no code or easy fix to re-initiate the old relationships. We were paranoid and wanted to leave no trace of anything that might result in future blackouts from Patreon.

However, on the side, I am working on v1.1. It's slow going as most of my effort is on keeping the current version moving forward. We stopped development once to rework old material and I refuse to do it again. So in the meantime, late at night for an hour or so before bed I've been slowly constructing v1.1. The reason I even mention this is because in v1.1 I've built a menu where you can manage "Pet Names". These are just nicknames that the MC has for each character, and that each character has for the MC. You can populate these "Pet Name" fields with anything you want and can change them at any time in the game.

Eventually, when I get v1.1 all caught up, it will replace the current version that is being worked on. In the meantime, I owe you guys more story and I plan on delivering it.

Sneak Peek at v1.1 Pet Names Menu

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[Demonius]

Botc was kind enough to take point on this one, but I'll see if I can add some additional clarity and share future plans.

We did originally plan to have incest, but the great Patreon debacle occurred almost a month, maybe two, before our first release. So we quickly revamped some character relationships and wrote our way around it.

There is no code or easy fix to re-initiate the old relationships. We were paranoid and wanted to leave no trace of anything that might result in future blackouts from Patreon.

However, on the side, I am working on v1.1. It's slow going as most of my effort is on keeping the current version moving forward. We stopped development once to rework old material and I refuse to do it again. So in the meantime, late at night for an hour or so before bed I've been slowly constructing v1.1. The reason I even mention this is because in v1.1 I've built a menu where you can manage "Pet Names". These are just nicknames that the MC has for each character, and that each character has for the MC. You can populate these "Pet Name" fields with anything you want and can change them at any time in the game.

Eventually, when I get v1.1 all caught up, it will replace the current version that is being worked on. In the meantime, I owe you guys more story and I plan on delivering it.

Sneak Peek at v1.1 Pet Names Menu

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i like the pet names thing

 

[TheDevian]

View attachment 299319

...'laid down' for past tense, or 'I lie down' for present.

Aside from being nit picky, glad to hear it, I never could get far with it.

 

[RomanHume]

Good to hear it isn't likely to slow down production speed, even if there's a little nagging voice inside me, that wonders if the automated versions are really preferable to each sex scene being done as one, but hey, it's not me who is developing games.

May I ask how many of you are still working on the game for now? Would you be interested in adding new members?
Not that I'd have the time or skill, but we got a bunch of people here who seem to.

So, we started with four. A writer, a coder, a 3D artist and some one to throw money at this thing. And some while back we had to exile our coder, Datadog because he straight up lied about work he said he was doing that wasn't actually getting done.

So I took over coding (and am just now getting really good at it and knowledgeable enough to build slick interfaces for the game). Fecalmancer is/was/sort of is our 3D artist. But his wife is pregnant and very soon he will be on full time daddy duty.

That leaves me doing writing, coding and 3D art while Xanatos sits back and throws me whatever cash I need to make up the shortfall (which is getting smaller thanks to our patrons).

So a lot of time has been spent over these last few months bringing me up to speed and building the body of knowledge I'm going to need to carry this project forward.

If anyone doubts my dedication, know that I've logged over 60 hours of training on Udemy to learn all the intricacies of python and 3D art and modelling. I want to do this, and I want to be great at it. And I'm just now getting to that spot where I have the confidence to carry this ball to the finish line alone if I have to.

The upside of being a one man team is that I'll need fewer patrons now to afford to quit the old job and do this full time. But, there is still a gap to close there.



Yeah, so that's my life story for the last few months while grinding out this next update. But to answer your questions, I'm not averse to taking on additional help. But I would be very particular about who I would invite to work on this project. The area that could use the most help is visual art creation. But as I become better and better at creating visuals, I have become much more particular about quality.

I'm not saying I'm the best. Not even saying I'm top ten. But I'm definitely getting there and I've learned a shit load over the last month about optics, lighting, shaders, etc. There no good online courses for Daz. So I've been studying Maya. Fortunately the principles are still the same and the more familiar I become with one of the industries leading pieces of software, the more quaint and easy daz becomes.

One of today's 1 minute Test Renders:

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Fuck, I'm talkative tonight. Sorry about that.

So yeah, I'd gladly take on help, but I'm very demanding of quality. As long as whoever that candidate may be can accept constructive criticism and wants to learn every in and out of art creation, I'm all for it.

 

[RomanHume]

Supported. Story really is more important than visuals for me. Its why I play games like this instead of just watching porn.

My real goal is to make the game that I myself have always wanted. And honestly, that's a porno with a great story and good acting. So hopefully I can a crescendo with both of those and keep everyone, and mostly myself happy with the final product.

I love writing, and when I started this story, I began with the characters, their personalities and the backgrounds. Once I knew who they were, it was a matter of throwing them in the mix together and just seeing what happens.

I have broad strokes of where the story is going, but a lot of the writing is organic. So organic in fact that as I was working on this current update, the dialogue sort of took off on it's own and before I knew it I had a new conflict between characters that didn't exist before, and it blossomed into this fantastic side plot that weaves in nicely with the main story.

So I agree. Story is paramount. But I feel a great story also deserves great visuals, so I'm doing my best to deliver both.

 

[RomanHume]

...'laid down' for past tense, or 'I lie down' for present.

Aside from being nit picky, glad to hear it, I never could get far with it.

I appreciate the efforts of anyone who is trying to keep me from sounding stupid.

 

[Tisi]

My real goal is to make the game that I myself have always wanted.
So I agree. Story is paramount. But I feel a great story also deserves great visuals, so I'm doing my best to deliver both.

I think it's great that you want to put out, in your opinion, the best game possible. Here's the thing though, you've already done what amounts to a restart of the game. Initially I was annoyed by the restart of the game, but the current version is, IMO, better that the original.

My concern now is that, as you progress with your ability to render scenes, you're going to, again, restart your work. To put that into perspective: why continue on the current path when you can, once again, redo the content with "improved" sex scenes. It's not a bad thing to seek improvement. However, maybe it's worth the time to finish one game within in your development limits and then move on to another game to showcase your improvements.

At the end of the day, whatever you decide will never be "perfect" because the software is always evolving. Short of using some propriety system, you can't produce a product that can't be improved.

My personal opinion: animated/variable sex scenes are overrated. Let your players enjoy using our imaginations to, for lack of a better term, fill in the blanks when it comes to intimate scenes.