By the way, another kind of compromise could be thinking of rewriting the whole game in a different form by yourself, like a pure text adventure for example. Blasphemy, I know: but again, it would be a way to keep the full ownership of your story.
In any case, good luck for your future endeavors!
I actually considered this at one point just because so much is already written.
I don't envy RomanHume. This is a tough position to be in.
To take away from the negativity of some of my posts on this topic, it's just because I really like this story, the characters, and the art. RomanHume did a great job and that's why it pains me to see it could possibly go in the proposed direction.
Also, I forgot the reason why RH isn't doing the renders anymore. Guess I can try to search the thread...it's just been so long that I forgot the reason behind it.
It's time consuming and requires I be in a specific locale to do it. The writing I do on my laptop pretty much anywhere I have a free minute. Airport terminals, coffee shops, hotel rooms, hanging out on the porch. But the artwork requires me to be at my desktop where I have the rendering power and my hours available to dedicate to that portion of the project are scant.
RomanHume tell her that she needs to get past the idea of re-doing the old scenes. Lots of games die when devs decided to remake it from the start in HD, it's a daft idea. Changing the hair can be just handwaved in the story as a change of style.
New content attracts new people, remaking the game takes time and isn't a money maker.
It isn't about money. This is purely a passion project and my love for these girls in the story is what keeps it burning in my heart. However, I think the artist and I have reached a fair compromise and we're going to work closely for the next two months while we are out on holiday. This will give us a good four or five weeks to work together side by side on it and then once we have our stride figured out, we can proceed more remotely and just pass the ball back and forth.
The creator ought to do something with the rights of this game. As in letting someone else take over. There are a few games that need this as well. Hell, I would take a crack at learning how to do everything to take over this one. It's too good to be abandoned and needs to be finished. I'm pretty good when it comes to coming up with a story and writing it. I've always been good with wordplay and stories.
Yeah I tried that for the last year. There were no takers. I even hit a point where I was offering 75% of the financial proceeds to anyone wanting to do the art. Still no takers.
And I have story for days! It's art that I need done. But a solution is ready for testing.
Too many fucking characters kills another Renpy VN
That had nothing to do with it. It was about not having enough hours in a work week to do anything about the art for the game.
RomanHume
The static backgrounds (blurry or not) is certainly a huge downgrade, but there are great games that use a similar approach (Love of Magic being one). This is essentially the "character sprite" concept. The thing is, these floating sprites are ok for regular dialogues and what not, but the sex scenes
need to be fully rendered.
Think about it. The floating sprites thing is essentially using the 2DCG VN style with 3D models. 2DCG games use the character sprite in normal dialogues but they pretty much always have full CGs for the scenes. This is where the compromise has to be made. If she can commit to fully rendering at least the sex scenes, I think it could work out.
In all honesty, the writing was the main selling point anyways. As long as the writing stays the same quality, there will be people waiting to play it regardless of what happens to the art direction.
We are going to test two approaches in the course of November and December.
1. Same quantity of images but with stock image backgrounds for dialogue and fully rendered scenes for the sex.
2. Same high quality, fully developed images, but with fewer per scene.
So with option two we would loose some of the facial expression changes that evolve during character conversations, but what remains will be the same top quality as before.
Let me stir the pot a bit on the way out. It's always amusing how people interpret the abandoned tag. As if F95zone putting the tag on a thread somehow makes the game officially dead or something lol. As if the status of the game is somehow in a different state than what it was prior to getting the tag. As if the more than a year with no updates didn't signify clear development issues prior to getting the abandoned tag. As if they are finally justified in urging others to stop spending their money because F95zone said it's abandoned. It's pretty funny.
FYI, games get the abandoned tag for 3 reasons. Dev said it's abandoned, 6(?) months of radio silence, or 18(?) months of no update. This game hit that last criteria and got the tag.
In all fairness, I don't worry about the tag. Once my girl has an update out, that tag can be removed as easily as it was put up.
Just a thought, if the game is only "abandoned" because the developer cannot make progress at this time, then why isn't the game tagged as "on hold" instead?
