VN Ren'Py Elmwood University [Ep.4 Gold] [WickedWare]

[Zorro#34]

According to her bio, Chelsea is a romantic, 2 kids & dog sort of girl. If you were to commit to her, I'm sure she would be very keen to go exclusive.

Ah, I see. That's a shame, actually, because I like Chelsea's model a lot, but I will break her heart if it comes to that, just as I've done with similar (really popular at that!) LIs in other AVNs. I may come across as a hypocrite saying this, what with the banging of her and her friends and all, but I mean, c'mon, girl, if you wanna something serious, you should show that from the start, not be easy…

Besides, her being the local rumor spreader doesn't add her any points as a serious relationship option.

 

[Hungover00]

I may come across as a hypocrite saying this

Yup. You do.

 

[TonyMurray]

Slightly off-topic: you made some real nice Character Rating cards for Law School, did you do it for any other games?

Yeah, I am compiling a list across all the VNs I've properly played, and I've done cards for some of them as well. I haven't done this for Elmwood yet, as I haven't gone through and grabbed images of all the girls yet (just got a couple of them as I played through the second episode recently).

According to her bio, Chelsea is a romantic, 2 kids & dog sort of girl. If you were to commit to her, I'm sure she would be very keen to go exclusive.

Lydia is just a party girl, not the type to take home to Mom yet.

I also think that while Ella is jealous, reserved, and hesitant, you have now won her over by making her jealous. I'm starting to feel that if you were to pursue her, a monogamous relationship would be possible down the track.

I actually do like Chelsea, I think she's fun and could be a top pick. Lyds is just a fucktoy, I don't see much in her beyond that. Ella is between the two, but its her jealousy thing that takes precedence, so it's difficult to see enough of her beyond that.

 

[Dessolos]

Ah, I see. That's a shame, actually, because I like Chelsea's model a lot, but I will break her heart if it comes to that, just as I've done with similar (really popular at that!) LIs in other AVNs. I may come across as a hypocrite saying this, what with the banging of her and her friends and all, but I mean, c'mon, girl, if you wanna something serious, you should show that from the start, not be easy…

Besides, her being the local rumor spreader doesn't add her any points as a serious relationship option.

I get what you mean there is nothing that is more of a turn off for me than a LI being quick and easy to sex in these games haha. ( at least if I feel I haven't gotten to know them that well , tho I do make a exception for harems) i'll still play their paths but usually won't be a first choice for me.

 

[jak1165]

I wish there was a little bit more content to judge the game off of. The writing is solid so far but from experience doesn't hold up if you play the game in a way that hits the author with the ol razzle dazzle

As an example, if you've played Something To Write About, the game's writing kinda assumes you're going to try for the harem right off the bat because Aoife, Lyndie, and Beatrix are basically all open to it from the jump. But in chapter 7, the game almost admonishes you for starting "drama", regardless of if you actually went down the harem route. Writing int he game treats you like a fuckboy even if you haven't fucked any of the characters lol

 

[Zorro#34]

Writing int he game treats you like a fuckboy even if you haven't fucked any of the characters lol

This reminds me of how Jill accused my Tremolo of seeing other girls in Ep. 8 of BaDIK. I was really hurt: "But honey, I haven't been with anyone but you since Maya in Ep. 3!"

 

[TonyMurray]

Slightly off-topic: you made some real nice Character Rating cards for Law School, did you do it for any other games?

Okay, I went through and got some images. I'll update these cards with some better ones perhaps, as the game progresses.


General notes: This isn't a tier-listing where the girls are ranked within the tiers, I don't want to get into that additional level of detail; these are my ratings based solely on looks (so please no one hate on me!) and are subject to change as I see more of the girls, so this is a very provisional list - Selina in particular has been altered, so is a potential change going forwards; most girls will always fall between tiers 2 and 4, all LIs are generally considered good-looking, so a low tier is not me saying she is ugly—Tier 4 is "Hot" and Tier 2 is usually the top tier (Tier 5 is "Hot...but" - there's just something there that doesn't work for me); I have another, Tier 1, that is rarely used and is for those who would normally be in Tier 2 but just have that little something extra that puts them in a league of their own—there are a couple of girls here who have the potential to make it into tiers 1 and 2 as I see more of them (I would say I've probably under-rated a few of these girls in this provisional list).

Overall, I think the general look of all the girls is of a really high quality. Already I'm looking at this and itching to tweak my ratings based on seeing them next to each other (and the same will happen when I put them against cards for other games, I'm sure), but I'll leave that for a future game update, when I can see more of them. What I should probably do is get the cards for multiple games together first and then rank them all in comparison to each other, as sometimes it can feel like there is a big mismatch just doing them in isolation like this.

 

[Zorro#34]

Okay, I went through and got some images. I'll update these cards with some better ones perhaps, as the game progresses.

Damn, you're a true MVP! I especially love the "Danger" tag on Selina and Nina!

 

[TonyMurray]

Damn, you're a true MVP! I especially love the "Danger" tag on Selina and Nina!

Thanks! I just need to find somewhere to put all of these, I'm not sure if it's worth creating a thread though. Selina and Nina definitely need warning labels, though maybe for different reasons. I need a bigger version of Florence's (Dr. Riley's) picture though, that one is too good not to use, but isn't great resolution because it was only a small part of the original image.

 

[flaviopaganini]

E2 Survey Review - Part 1/Many

E2 Survey is now closed. Thank you to the 196 people who provided feedback! This is more than double the number who completed the E1 survey and it's a great show of our community's growth. As I mentioned previously I'm not going to review the entire survey in one massive post, instead I'm going to review a couple of questions a day so I can keep working on other stuff and provide more detail on each question.

Here are the three general questions from the survey and I'm very pleased with these.

For the dialogue, 94% of you rated the dialogue as either a 4 or 5 which is very flattering to hear. In the E1 Survey that was 93%. 53% of you rated the E2 dialogue as a 5 compared to 47% of you rating the E1 dialogue as a 5 in the previous survey. So this might mean a slight improvement in my writing or a slight preference for conversations with E2 girls but really the difference is far too small to draw conclusions from. But I'm really glad you guys like the dialogue.

In the next question just over half of you rated the quality of E1 and E2 as equal. Of the people that did have a favourite, more of you preferred E2 which is a nice sign. I would be a bit concerned if the quality of E2 was considered significantly worse than E1 so I'm very glad that's not the case. I would like every episode to be a small improvement on quality than the last.

Lastly I'm glad to see you're mostly all very happy with GoFile. I included this question because someone did mention that it was blocked in their country. I am still considering paying for an additional file hosting site but this tells me it's not an immediate priority which is good.

Tomorrow we'll start looking at the attractiveness questions and those are looking pretty interesting.... When we combine the E1 and E2 girls we have 3 from each in the top six hottest girls and it is RIDICULOUSLY tight in competition. No one managed to take Ella's top spot but positions 2-8 are absurdly close it's crazy. Here are the numbers without revealing which E2 girl is which:
1) Ella - 9.25
2) ??? - 8.71
3) Taylor - 8.70
4) ??? - 8.68
5) ??? - 8.61 (TIED)
5 ) Chelsea - 8.61 (TIED)
7) Katie - 8.59
8) Lydia - 8.46
etc...

If someone correctly guesses these 3 E2 girls in the comments (in the correct order) I'll let you know if you're correct.

 

[flaviopaganini]

All 18 Girls Attractiveness & Personality

Combining the E1 and E2 surveys, this is how attractive every girl was rated on average:
1) Ella - 9.25
2) Ashley - 8.71
3) Taylor - 8.70
4) Dr. Riley - 8.68
5) Tasha- 8.61 (TIED)
5 ) Chelsea - 8.61 (TIED)
7) Katie - 8.59
8) Lydia - 8.46
9) Violet - 7.81
10) Chloe - 7.77
11) Paris - 7.76
12) Molly - 7.66
13) Saki - 7.56
14) Naomi - 7.55
15) Jordan - 7.52
16 Dr. Novotná - 7.47
17) Selina - 7.28*
18) Nina 6.72

*E1 Selina, likely higher after change

And then here are the combined personality rankings:
1) Ashley - 8.54
2) Florence - 8.53 (TIED)
2) Chelsea - 8.53 (TIED)
4) Tasha - 8.49 (TIED)
4) Katie - 8.49 (TIED)
6) Lydia - 8.46
7) Ella - 8.42
8) Violet - 8.09
9) Saki - 8.04
10) Paris - 7.78
11) Chloe - 7.58
12) Taylor - 7.44
13) Naomi - 7.37
14) Jordan - 6.54
15) Molly - 6.47
16) Dr. Novotná - 6.28
17) Selina - 5.97
18) Nina - 5.70

Firstly, darkrapunzel you were very close in your guess yesterday but you didn't get the order quite right. As you'll see the results here are incredibly close in places. I have everything to 2 decimel points and yet there are still THREE ties in total. That's crazy. To put this in perespective... there are TWO girls that separate literal twins... Ashley and Tasha are separated by just 0.1/10 and yet that's enough for two girls, arguably 3 with the Chelsea tie to fit in between them. It's wild how competitive those top spots are.
You'll notice there's quite a correlation between attractiveness and personality. Is that a coincidence? Maybe. Maybe we're observing the Halo effect which is a psych phenommenon you might learn about at Elmwood.
Unfortunately Nina is the loser here. She's the only girl to be rated less than a 7 on looks so that's sad :/ Might have to ask you guys some more questions about her at some stage because this really doesn't look good for her as she's really struggling to keep up.
I've plotted all this data on the graph above. On that graph, the hotter a girl is, the more to the right she is. The better her personality, the higher up she is. We have a lot of grouping on that graph, the most notable is this super tight region of girls rated around 8.5 on both attractiveness and personality. Feel free to let me know your thoughts on any of this data, and especially any thoughts on Nina

 

[flaviopaganini]

Dev Update #19


Hi all, just a quick dev update as I've been spending a lot of time looking at the survey and don't want to take too much time away from work.
Thank you again to everyone who completed it. The data is super super useful to me and I'll continue sharing the results this coming week. There are actually a ton of questions I should have also asked in hindsight and so I'll likely make another survey after E3 if I don't run some quick polls on Patreon before then.
As for actual development news, I've spent most of this week testing various ways to improve some of the 'jiggle physics' in sex scenes. I've tested a bunch of different tools in daz and hopefully I'll be able to make the E3 scenes better with them but there's still a lot I want to improve. Everything in E3 is planned out and this coming week I'm going to move on to getting a solid draft of the script done and then once that's finished I'll be all out on rendering the images and animating the erotic scenes. (Rendering and animating is of course the bulk of the workload so I'm keen to get going on that asap.)
This coming week on Patreon we'll go through the rest of the survey questions and then finish off with the FAQs and suggestions section. There are lots of questions from this but before we get to those I'll answer the biggest question I'm getting right now which is unsurprisingly - When E3??
At this stage it's very difficult to estimate and especially because I have some ambitious plans for E3 and want it to be the best episode so far. But I know this is an annoying answer so I will give an approximate release date of early-mid November for early access. Sorry if this is longer a wait than you were hoping for but it's the most honest date I can give you. Thank you dearly to everyone who will be supporting Elmwood during this time and making E3 possible - I'm so grateful for your support. Thank you.
There are a lot of other things on my radar right now such as an Android version, translations etc but right now I'm just focusing on making E3 and getting some more momentum for Elmwood. Looking forward to going through the rest of the survey with you guys and hope you have a great week.

 

[Jaga Telesin]

I get what you mean there is nothing that is more of a turn off for me than a LI being quick and easy to sex in these games haha. ( at least if I feel I haven't gotten to know them that well , tho I do make a exception for harems) i'll still play their paths but usually won't be a first choice for me.

Nothing wrong with a woman being honest and expressing what she wants, and going after it. Women don't HAVE to be "a conquest reward" in AVNs, just like they don't have to be in life.

I'm a bit older now, and I can't even tell you how much I appreciate it when women ditch the "chasing game" and simply say what they mean, and what they want. You know - just like most guys do. You know where a guy stands when he's oogling a woman.

 

[Dessolos]

Nothing wrong with a woman being honest and expressing what she wants, and going after it. Women don't HAVE to be "a conquest reward" in AVNs, just like they don't have to be in life.

I'm a bit older now, and I can't even tell you how much I appreciate it when women ditch the "chasing game" and simply say what they mean, and what they want. You know - just like most guys do. You know where a guy stands when he's oogling a woman.

I agree nothing wrong with that but idk I still don't like it when I see it in a AVN's unless that character is meant to be a slutty character or a side girl tbh. It just feels boring for me to get to the sex right away before I can get to know them and decide if I like them. But that's also cause I don't play these for the lewds but getting to know the characters , dates and other romantic stuff first. So basically I like the whole dating sim aspect of course it also depends on the game. I actually get annoyed when some games have to many lewd scenes in short periods of time or lewd scenes go on for to long , depending on the scene. Some games I play just to turn my brain off and enjoy it for what it is so it really depends on the game as well. I'm more okay with harems and fuck fest games being quick cause I know what im getting into. Unsure where this game falls for me it's one of the next few games I plan to play.

 

[jak1165]

I agree nothing wrong with that but idk I still don't like it when I see it in a AVN's unless that character is meant to be a slutty character or a side girl tbh. It just feels boring for me to get to the sex right away before I can get to know them and decide if I like them. But that's also cause I don't play these for the lewds but getting to know the characters , dates and other romantic stuff first. So basically I like the whole dating sim aspect of course it also depends on the game. I actually get annoyed when some games have to many lewd scenes in short periods of time or lewd scenes go on for to long , depending on the scene. Some games I play just to turn my brain off and enjoy it for what it is so it really depends on the game as well. I'm more okay with harems and fuck fest games being quick cause I know what im getting into. Unsure where this game falls for me it's one of the next few games I plan to play.

Its difficult to pull off a well-written slowburn. I've seen the slow part. Its the "burn" part that trips most writers up

 

[MiltonPowers]

Its difficult to pull off a well-written slowburn. I've seen the slow part. Its the "burn" part that trips most writers up

The key to a successful slowburn (for me anyway) is that the player can see gradual improvement of the romantic relationship. Each update might have a 2 steps forward, 1 step back mentality, but at least we can see some progression. A lot of devs seem to think a slowburn is an LI saying no for 10+ updates and then suddenly 'yeah ok, let's fuck'. Very few devs are able to pull it off, as it is an art/skill.

 

[Dessolos]

Its difficult to pull off a well-written slowburn. I've seen the slow part. Its the "burn" part that trips most writers up

not just that it feels like even ones I feel like are done good most people don't have the patience for the slow burn and feel like it's blue balls more than slow burn because they wait years and years as the game gets developed. Eventually slow burn just gets rushed in some game ive played all of sudden after it being slow for awhile.

While I have alot of patience and really do not mind slow burn I even prefer it. Not everything needs to be slow burn either. I say as long as there is some character deveolopment and it makes sense for the romance / lewd scenes with the context that would be perfectly fine too , just really depends what kind of romance the dev has in mind for said character. As long as it isn't quick burn I really don't mind, as to me quick burn usually feels more rushed and forced.

 

[MAGO-DAG]

I agree nothing wrong with that but idk I still don't like it when I see it in a AVN's unless that character is meant to be a slutty character or a side girl tbh. It just feels boring for me to get to the sex right away before I can get to know them and decide if I like them. But that's also cause I don't play these for the lewds but getting to know the characters , dates and other romantic stuff first. So basically I like the whole dating sim aspect of course it also depends on the game. I actually get annoyed when some games have to many lewd scenes in short periods of time or lewd scenes go on for to long , depending on the scene. Some games I play just to turn my brain off and enjoy it for what it is so it really depends on the game as well. I'm more okay with harems and fuck fest games being quick cause I know what im getting into. Unsure where this game falls for me it's one of the next few games I plan to play.

Slow sex drive and slow build up to the story. This is a big problem for harem games, usually slow build up is associated with developers who like to milk and drag out time with slow teasing. So sometimes it's good when there's a little quick sex. And for quick sex, us also need a hot scene and a long build up to get excited!

As for the slow plot and teasing, I like them too, when IT is done well and qualitatively, especially when these slow plot and sexual attraction happen beautifully and slowly, the main thing is that the developers do not drag out with these. Everyone has their own taste, someone likes a quick transition to sex, because many are tired of slow teasing.
And some of us like a slow transition to the plot or sex, because it is exciting and makes you even more interested in the game and understand them and learn a lot about the characters.

 

[TonyMurray]

As for actual development news, I've spent most of this week testing various ways to improve some of the 'jiggle physics' in sex scenes.

I have to say, this is one of the key things that can take a game from good to great for me. There's nothing that has the potential to spoil a good game more than an otherwise-good sex scene where the tits just don't move at all (other bits too, depending on positioning - hair, ass, etc.). It sounds like a tiny little thing, but in terms of immersion (as much as I get that) it's a biggie for me. It shows the process and skill of the dev too, if they've not at least tried, it feels like they're not bothered about making their game look as good as it could look.

 

[Darth Sidious]

Thanks for the hint.
I used the hint from an earlier post where to place Nerdy Chick card and this alone was enough to win the game on first try against Saki.

This only works because AI uses the SAKI card poorly.
The strength of cards like Saki or Ella is the potential to flip 2-3 nearby cards, but those cards must be already on the board. Here the Saki card only yields 2 points instead of potential 4 points. Playing such a strong card early is kind a waste.
A stronger move for Saki would be like the shown Ella-move in late game on middle position, flipping up to 3 other cards.

You can try to prepare the board for a strong card, eg on central position, by letting AI place cards or let AI flip your own cards in neighbouring positions you can later flip back with your strong card. However there is always the danger that AI itself will place a card on that strong position, so minimizing the number of cards AI can flip from that tile is crucial.

This seems to be the only way to win this.