Ren'Py Fantastic Strip Poker: Bail Bondsman [Development Thread]

[glassware]

After two years of thinking about it, I'm finally making a game. I've written down more than 100 ideas for Visual Novels, but I decided my most interesting idea isn't really a Visual Novel at all, it's a strip poker game, made in Ren'Py. A bit like classic strip poker games, your opponents bet money and eventually lose clothes. When they lose all their clothes and you keep winning, they'll pose, dance, and eventually have sex with you, all VN-style with pre-rendered CG images and some animations (sadly no stripping animations, though, that's virtually impossible).



The picture above shows off what the game will generally look like, but I've censored the characters as they and their poses are just placeholders, and I don't want you to get the wrong idea from them. I still have to add clutter and figure out what the lighting should be, but the picture shows the general tone and style of the game. Some of the time it'll cut to close-ups of just one character so you can get a bigger, more detailed view.

I call the process of going through my Daz content and picking out what to use "casting". I haven't cast the characters in the game yet, but I've "cast" the environment (above)—all the opponents will be in the same place—and started casting the outfits, because in a strip game, the outfits are gonna be really important. For example, we can go with your basic high school senior:

​

You'll play against 2 characters at a time, from 12 available. Each character can only appear on the left or the right side of the room, so there's 6 characters on the left, 6 characters on the right.

Each character will have three outfits that you can progress through. I'm thinking that the stuff you get after stripping them naked also progresses; maybe the first outfit is only posing, the second outfit is a blowjob or handjob, and the third outfit is sex. But I might change my mind about that once I get further along.

Here's an example of three outfits for a vigilante who claims she's a superhero, but appears to have no powers.

​

She may look suspiciously like the high school girl, but actually, I just haven't cast the characters, so all the outfits in here are being shown with generic Genesis 8 Female, no actual character. Same reason why they're unposed; my recent focus was just "designing" the outfits. This particular character uses some of the same pieces of clothing for the first and second outfit, which is not going to be normal, but I don't have any sets of three outfits to show for most characters, since for now I'm just designing their first outfit.

The 12 characters are divided into 6 pairs. Each pair of characters are connected storywise, in terms of backstory and in terms of the fiction behind them progressing to new outfits. You can mix-and-match the left and right characters that you play against, but if you play against one of the "official" pairs, you'll get more unique dialogue between them during the game. (Some random combinations may have their own unique dialogue, I'm not sure yet.)

One pair is actually a trio: an evil sorceress who accidentally transported herself, the Queen, and the Queen's maidservant from a fantasy universe to our mundane one.

​

Most of the characters have some special behavior that changes the game in some way just for/with that character, that's unique to that character. For example, the queen and her maidservant will play together, as a team.

One bit of actual gameplay will be a sort of puzzle: figuring out how to beat the cheaters. Because, yeah, several of the opponents can actually cheat (in the fiction, and they'll obey the fiction and not just have the game give them good cards).

Apropos of nothing, here's a time traveler from the far future, who stopped first in the old West and brought along a female cowboy to the modern day.

​

I'm planning on doing traditional 5-card draw, as 2-handed hold'em is kinda boring, and I don't want to deal with no-limit betting. That gives our cowgirl a fighting chance, as she's experienced with 5-card draw, playing in saloons. She might even have shot people who accused her of cheating at cards. But don't worry, she can't shoot you. Her holster is empty. Her gun is gone...

Because after she arrived from the past, today, she got arrested for possessing an unlicensed firearm. And put in jail. The judge set an unreasonably large bail, and she doesn't have any modern money (neither does the time traveler). That's where you come in. You're an experienced bail bondsman working out of a dingy office in a strip mall. Normally, you cover people's bail in return for some money. But these ladies don't even have enough money to pay your fee, so you make them a special deal: if they play strip poker with you, you'll cover their bail with no fee. (There's already a "Fantasy Strip Poker" on Steam, so I'm going with "Fantastic Strip Poker", and I figured the bail bondsman story is actually pretty unique and memorable, hence the terrible title.)

Finally, there's one bonus character: you have a secretary. If any of your regular customers jumps bail, she does double-duty as your bounty hunter. And if you only want to play strip poker against one opponent, she's also a professional casino dealer, so she'll sit in and deal for you—but she won't strip (I'm sure it's just a coincidence that she has three different outfits).

​

I haven't talked about the programming part of it, because that's not the part I'm worried about. I've made card games before, and I'm a good enough Python programmer to negotiate ren'py. If for some reason I can't make it work in ren'py, I'll just do it in Unity or something. The part I'm worried about is having the patience to sit down and pose and render characters in Daz Studio. I recently bought a new PC, an RTX 3090, and a bigger monitor, and I've decided to put them all to use making this game, and it's going pretty well so far!

It'll be a while before I'm ready for a first release; it'll probably only have a few characters with one outfit each, but I suspect I'll have designed all of the characters and their first outfit anyway. Obviously I have to build out the game itself in Python, solve all the ren'py issues, and then render out a lot of poses with progressively fewer clothes, all of them in sitting poses which means terrible clothing poke-through issues which I hope isn't a nightmare. I'll probably do multiple releases without animations as I prove out the ideas.

Thanks for reading! Hopefully I'll post again when I've made meaningful progress.

 

[lagaard]

Hmm, an interesting read. I would agree that the idea of a bondsman is pretty unique (can't really think of anything off the top of my head!).
You seem to have a fairly decent idea of what you want to do, so there's some nice potential here. Will really have to wait and see what you make though.
The information is fairly clear on some things, but one thing that isn't strictly clear is if the player is also at risk of being stripped, or do they simply lose if they run out of money?

 

[glassware]

The information is fairly clear on some things, but one thing that isn't strictly clear is if the player is also at risk of being stripped, or do they simply lose if they run out of money?

Yeah, the player doesn't strip. That's always seemed a bit pointless to me (except, I guess, for the role-players in the audience who actually do it), and there are some issues when playing more than one opponent. This is one of the two motiviations for the bali bondsman story.

Fictionally the deal you make is, if you win, they strip and you pay their bail, but if they win... you also pay their bail. They just have to play to the end one way or the other. But instead of the player running out of money, they win if they earn enough in the poker game to cover their bail.

(Similarly, the game doesn't stop when they're naked, it goes until they've lost enough "money" to cover their bail. So the bail amount determines how many rounds of stripping there is, so if a character's outfit has 6 items of clothing and I want them to do 3 rounds of extra stuff after they're naked, I'll set the bail amount to $900. Of course that means they also have to win $900 for them to win the game, and I don't expect anyone to keep playing long enough to lose that badly, I expect players will restart at that point.)

 

[osanaiko]

Commenting just because you used apropos of nothing in your first post

I feel your comment in my soul when I hear you've had 100s of ideas of games, good to know I'm not the only one who has never turned any of the ideas into something playable. I'm just the fluffer for other devs. Or maybe the guy with the jiz mop.

Build something, release it, hopefully you still are excited enough about the idea to continue. Or else have learned some skills to make the next idea easier to deliver. May the Pastalord speed your way.

 

[lagaard]

Yeah, the player doesn't strip. That's always seemed a bit pointless to me (except, I guess, for the role-players in the audience who actually do it), and there are some issues when playing more than one opponent. This is one of the two motiviations for the bali bondsman story.

Fictionally the deal you make is, if you win, they strip and you pay their bail, but if they win... you also pay their bail. They just have to play to the end one way or the other. But instead of the player running out of money, they win if they earn enough in the poker game to cover their bail.

(Similarly, the game doesn't stop when they're naked, it goes until they've lost enough "money" to cover their bail. So the bail amount determines how many rounds of stripping there is, so if a character's outfit has 6 items of clothing and I want them to do 3 rounds of extra stuff after they're naked, I'll set the bail amount to $900. Of course that means they also have to win $900 for them to win the game, and I don't expect anyone to keep playing long enough to lose that badly, I expect players will restart at that point.)

I would disagree with it being pointless, since the game is, after all, 'strip' poker. So the stripping of clothes is sort of the main draw of the entire thing.

But I agree that with the premise you present, it can make sense why the player doesn't have any clothes in the betting pool.

 

[voronkov]

Такие игры интересны. Я ради интереса сделал нечто подобное. Только камень, ножницы, бумага. Насчёт снятие одежды героем. Тут можно просто число проигрышей и пару фраз от персонажей, типа . О, у тебя последняя вещь. Даже не надо делать вид героя. Насчёт сюжета, судя по скриншотам там игра не один на один, а по несколько персонажей сразу. Хотелось бы чтобы они тоже взаимодействовали между собой при проигрыше или выигрыше в зависимости снятой одежды. Я такое в своей игре реализовал. Правда пришлось сценарий написать для всех возможных вариантов. Я добавлю ссылку где показано как делал игру. Может немного даст при создание своей игры эта информация.

Such games are interesting. I did something similar out of curiosity. Only stone, scissors, paper. About taking off clothes by the hero. Here you can just the number of losses and a couple of phrases from characters, such as . Oh, you have the last thing. You don't even have to pretend to be a hero. As for the plot, judging by the screenshots, there is not a one-on-one game, but several characters at once. I would like them to also interact with each other when losing or winning, depending on the clothes taken off. I implemented this in my game. True, I had to write a script for all possible options. I'll add a link showing how I made the game. Maybe this information will give a little when creating your game.

Spoiler

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[OhWee]

I checked the 'open source' minigames on the Lemmasoft forums. Nothing immediately came up r.e. Poker (there was some sample code for a blackjack game), but I did find this:

You must be registered to see the links

That might save you a little time maybe.

This game is cited as an example which has a poker minigame:
https://f95zone.to/threads/love-of-magic-books-1-3-droid-productions.41188/

I haven't played this game, but if you want to look over the minigame code to give you some ideas as you come up with your own minigame code framework, well it's a thought.

With a 24GB RTX 3090, I seriously doubt that you are going to have much problem actually rendering characters for your game (most people around here are making do with 6-12 GB of VRAM, including myself). But, in the interest of your own sanity, I'd suggest maybe setting a 5-6 clothing state threshold. I.E. clothing 'areas' that each gal has (arms, legs, top, bottom, shoes, maybe socks and coat) that can be removed as needed.

Gloves and shoes are often grouped together in Daz Studio. There are ways you can hide say just the left item (glove, shoe, sock) for these, but it can be a bit of a chore depending on the item. This is why I suggest just grouping these items together as one 'item' for your strip poker game, i.e. a house rule that requires both shoes/socks/gloves count as one item, etc. in the interest of a shorter game and making it more fair for the other players.

One other thing to keep in mind is that if you have multiple positions at the table, you may need to render each gal at each table position. A 'kludge' here could be that each table position only has certain gals that will sit there.

Example:Mysteria always sits to the left of the MC if she's chosen for the game, that'd cut down on the necessary number of renders for her (i.e. you wouldn't have to render her in the opposite or right chair.

I suppose you could build in 'buffers' for certain gals (i.e. some gal is wearing a lot of clothing layers, giving her a larger 'clothing buffer' to make it a bit harder to win against that particular gal, just keep in mind that you'll have to render each clothing state, probably multiple poses for those to reflect body language and such...

This could also work the other way, i.e some gal is only wearing a bra and bikini swimsuit combination, which would make it easier to 'defeat' her, but of course this gal might have a 'hidden talent' that gives her an edge to offset her 'clothing deficit'... or that could be a 'difficulty level' thing if players want a faster game.

As for the nuances, bluffing and gauging your opponent's actual hand is a big thing in Poker. Possible ways to cheat could include reading your opponent's mind or sneaking a look at your opponents card via another viewpoint (hidden camera, looking through the eyes of a 'familiar/pet', etc.. That might make it harder for the MC though unless you limit the number of times the NPC players can do this...

In any case, at least on the rendering end this seems like it'd be a lot easier to set up and render than the usual VN as you only have one main location (the room your characters are playing poker in) and maybe some 'intro locations' which wouldn't require a lot of renders just to introduce their backstory, that is unless you want to do a lot of 'table banter flashbacks...'

There are several card game props and pose sets available for Daz Studio. There was one in the $1.99 Daz+ for a day earlier this week, dunno if you grabbed that one yet:

You must be registered to see the links

Usually we get catchup sales, so I was kind of surprised to not see a catchup sale on Daz3D.com. Might be worth grabbing this asset if it pops up again for cheap.

So in my mind, the hard part will be coding the card game itself. Once you've positioned the gals at the table, it's pretty easy to just use a pose preset and then re-render them with varying states of undress in the same pose. I'd probably 'group' each gal so that you can quickly position/anchor them at each table position, and then do the 'ctrl + click' thing and uncheck the x/y/z coordinates when choosing each pose, that way their scene positon doesn't move. This also makes them easier to hide (just hide the group that hey are nested in).

The other thing to take into account is how much sex acts are worth in this game, if you are doing a 'clothing item or sex act is worth 'x' number of chips' approach.

If you see this idea through, I'd definitely want to see FFFM action at the end of the game if the player wins! One on one sex is boring, reverse gangbangs baby!

Anyways, hopefully this gives you a few ideas...

 

[glassware]

One other thing to keep in mind is that if you have multiple positions at the table, you may need to render each gal at each table position. A 'kludge' here could be that each table position only has certain gals that will sit there.

Thanks, OhWee, all of these are good ideas, but they're ideas I've already had and written down! But I can't complain about good ideas.

For example, there are two spots for girls, and each girl is hardcoded to only go in one them, I mentioned that in the original post. So 6 girls who can go in the left slot, and 6 girls who can go in the right. (Which means there are 36 combinations, or 48 if you include ones with only one girl).

I suppose you could build in 'buffers' for certain gals (i.e. some gal is wearing a lot of clothing layers, giving her a larger 'clothing buffer' to make it a bit harder to win against that particular gal, just keep in mind that you'll have to render each clothing state, probably multiple poses for those to reflect body language and such...

This could also work the other way, i.e some gal is only wearing a bra and bikini swimsuit combination, which would make it easier to 'defeat' her, but of course this gal might have a 'hidden talent' that gives her an edge to offset her 'clothing deficit'... or that could be a 'difficulty level' thing if players want a faster game.

Yep, the plan is that a couple girls will have fewer and fewer clothes in their later outfits, while a couple will have more and more.

As for the nuances, bluffing and gauging your opponent's actual hand is a big thing in Poker. Possible ways to cheat could include reading your opponent's mind or sneaking a look at your opponents card via another viewpoint (hidden camera, looking through the eyes of a 'familiar/pet', etc.. That might make it harder for the MC though unless you limit the number of times the NPC players can do this...

Re: bluffing, one of the things these games often do is claim that each opponent has a different AI (by which they mean different parameters of how much they bluff, etc). But in my experience it's really hard to tell; because you don't see the hands a lot of the time, and poker is very high variance, you really don't know what's going on, and it's not obvious that the opponents are playing differently. That's why I decided that in my game, each character is going to have some distinctive thing that impacts gameplay in a way that you can tell. Some of them cheat, and you'll know they're cheating. One wants to make it a drinking game. One doesn't know how to play and is always asking for help. One dresses skimpily and seems to be playing to lose. One wants to make side bets all the time. The Queen & her maid have their own dynamic.

The cheating is all planned out already. Each cheater has a different mechanism: the sorceress swaps cards with magic, the time traveler does the hand over, the cowgirl puts aces up her sleeve, etc. They will have some kind of timer before they can cheat again, but they may cheat the timer and do it faster to prevent the MC from completely stripping them by luck. (That is, if you're not actively cheating against a cheater, the game will actually cheat extra hard to make them unbeatable.) This might be too unfun, locking away some content, but that's my current thought.

The MC will acquire (some of) those same cheating abilities to be able to turn the tables on the other cheaters.

In any case, at least on the rendering end this seems like it'd be a lot easier to set up and render than the usual VN as you only have one main location (the room your characters are playing poker in) and maybe some 'intro locations' which wouldn't require a lot of renders just to introduce their backstory, that is unless you want to do a lot of 'table banter flashbacks...'

Yep, as you said elsewhere the 24GB in the 3090 RTX is overkill since I'm mostly just rendering one scene and one girl at a time, but I'm glad to not have to worry about it. For example, to cast the characters, I rendered out about 200 gals from my collection. Then I went through those and picked out 40 of them, and then I made a single scene with all 40 of them at once so I could sort through and decide who to use for the 14 actual characters. It was nice to be able to just have all 40 loaded and have both Filament and Iray rendering not bog down.

In fact I've put all 14 into the office location with an eye towards using it both as a banner and as a character select screen--I didn't expect all 14 to fit, but they do. It's VERY slow to render 14 characters in an actual scene, even on a 3090, but fortunately I'll only do it once. I didn't save my tests of this since right now half of the characters have no outfit and generic hair, as I still haven't completely finished casting them.

(Obviously could render them seperately and composite them--in fact, in the end I will do this so the character select screen switches between their outfits--but it's nice to work out a composition with all of them loaded and rendering.)

But most of the rendering is going to be much simpler. I've already become (as far as I can tell) the world's only expert on using Iray's "Lens Shift" in Daz Studio to render a larger scene in tiles; this lets me render the left half and the right half of the gameplay images separately, so I only need one character loaded at a time. The following picture is actually two separate halves, and each was rendered without the other character present, so the lighting in the background doesn't quite match. This was a test to see how bad the mismatch is, and the answer is, in this scene, it doesn't matter. I do have a trick to help hide the mismatches if they're worse with other poses, but I don't think players will care much.

(these are still placeholder characters)



Also seen here is a refined, closer camera position from the old one (seen below), and new 3-point lighting. I'm not really thrilled with the look of the lighting, but I don't know how to do any better, so I'll live with it.

As I said in my original post, the issue is less going to be the rendering, and more dealing with Daz being tempermental (like randomly locking up for a minute at a time) when trying to pose, and especially, dealing with pokethrough. I used many D-Formers to fix pokethrough issues in the outfits in the original post (I think one had something like 6 D-formers in it), and that's with the characters in the A-pose. Once they're sitting it's probably going to be horrific.

I'll try to use D-Force in some cases to handle those issues, but D-Force is so slow! So I buckled down and shelled out for Zbrush and I've tested out the workflow for using that to eliminate pokethrough more effiiciently, and hopefully reusably.

There are several card game props and pose sets available for Daz Studio. There was one in the $1.99 Daz+ for a day earlier this week, dunno if you grabbed that one yet:

I've got that handled...

So in my mind, the hard part will be coding the card game itself.

Yep, understandably, but this isn't something I'm worried about, as I'm a professional programmer in my day job. You'll just have to trust it won't be a problem!

Once you've positioned the gals at the table, it's pretty easy to just use a pose preset and then re-render them with varying states of undress in the same pose. I'd probably 'group' each gal so that you can quickly position/anchor them at each table position, and then do the 'ctrl + click' thing and uncheck the x/y/z coordinates when choosing each pose, that way their scene positon doesn't move. This also makes them easier to hide (just hide the group that hey are nested in).

That would be the boring and easy way, and I want it to be higher quality than that. I plan to do every pose at every level of undressing uniquely. For example, they'll sit down in a different overall pose as they strip each item off. I'll have to check for and deal with poke-through in every pose anyway, so hand-customizing hopefully won't be that much extra time and it will hit a higher quality level. (Unless I just clean that up with Photoshop or something.)

If you see this idea through, I'd definitely want to see FFFM action at the end of the game if the player wins! One on one sex is boring, reverse gangbangs baby!

This is one of the reasons there's official pairings. There's too many left/right combinations (36) for me to make FFM scenes for every combination, but the idea is that if you beat one of the 6 official pairings together you can get an FFM scene. (And since one of the opponents is actually a pair, that makes the official pairing a trio, and there's your FFFM!) I might do bonus hidden content where certain other pairings have sex content, or I might not.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts!

 

[voronkov]

Всё довольно чётко расписано, надеюсь во время игры будет много разнообразия. Я по той ссылке что присылал делал против трёх персонажей одновременно и сценарий прописывал разный в зависимости от количество снятой одежды, так же могли добавлять диалоги, другие персонажи тоже в зависимости от снятой одежды говорили что то. Типа я сняла и ты снимай. Или, ну наконец то ты хоть что то сняла. Насчёт персонажей. Я их делал в HoneySelect 2 и они были отдельно друг от друга на фоне. В зависимости от переменной была разная одежда на них. Для меня ДАЗ к сожалению слишком требовательный.

Everything is pretty clearly painted, I hope there will be a lot of variety during the game. I used the link that I sent against three characters at the same time and prescribed a different script depending on the number of clothes taken off, they could also add dialogues, other characters also said something depending on the clothes taken off. Like I took it off and you take it off. Or, well, at least you took something off. About the characters. I made them in HoneySelect 2 and they were separate from each other in the background. Depending on the variable, there were different clothes on them. For me, DAZ is unfortunately too demanding.

 

[OhWee]

glassware

I do postwork regularly in my rendering, so every render I do goes through Photoshop anyways for minor tweaks and resizing - I render at 4K, and reduce my render sizes by half, for two reasons 1) Keeps download size down and 2) helps with grain a tiny bit, but that isn't important here. My main point here is that every image goes through Photoshop anyways. So there are a number of times that I render in multiple passes, with only a couple of characters in each pass, when rendering multiple characters into the same scene, then combine them in Photoshop.

In Renpy, you can of course overlay images, or in your case if you are using a 'hard divide' in the middle you could use the left 'scene/gal' as your scene layer then show/hide the right side of the screen on top of the scene layer, which would focus on your second character. The right 'show' layer would have the left side of the image transparent of course so that it didn't cover the left side.

Note that I'm not a genius when it comes to lighting (there are much better Daz artists in this regard than me), but what I'd do...

You mentioned your lighting situation for the room you are using. Something you could try is removing the ceiling and then using a HDRI to provide 'ambient' lighting if you were trying to brighten up things a bit. Another thing you could do is render the room background as it's own layer, then render the chair, couch and card table (and gals) without the room walls. The main reason you'd do this would be to reduce render times/scene complexity. In this case, a transparent HDRI (i.e. hide dome) could light your characters, and you could augment with a spotlight or two as needed. It'd have to be the right HDRI though, otherwise the 'back lighting' may not look right.

With a 3090, I'm guessing your render times won't be bad to begin with, but less time rendering = more time for posing.

Anyways, if you did the 'render characters separate from room walls/ceiling' approach, there's ways in RenPy to assign a group of renders to 'show groups' so that updating a particular 'show' in that group automatically replaces/hides the previous 'show' but it's been a while since I messed with this so I'd have to look up the exact coding for this. Otherwise, shows will continue to stack on top of each other if you aren't hiding them afterwords, which eventually becomes a memory issue... This 'show group' thing might just be a screens only thing, again I'd have to look it up as it's been a while...

Edit: Here's the documentation that addresses what I'm trying to refer to here:

You must be registered to see the links

This is about as good of an example of any of me using the 'render foreground separately from background and then overlaying in photoshop'.

The gals, chairs and bar are rendered in a separate pass from everything behind them, except for the glowing blue lettering, so that entire background is essentially transparent pixels, which makes it easy peasy to overlaythe gals over the background render later in Photoshop. While in this case I had to do some fancy editing to keep the rail in front of the glowing blue lettering, if that background was say some Room HDRI that wouldn't be as much of an issue. I could have used this same approach in RenPy, overlaying the gals there instead of in Photoshop, but since this is a comic and not a RenPy story...

So your left characters would be one 'show' group, your right characters would have it's own show group, and then scene would be used for the background. The chair/couch that the gals are sitting on would be in the 'overlay' layer. This way you could also more easily blur the background, to take it out of focus a bit with a scene change/more blurry layer once the game gets started.

There may be some room/indoor HDRI out there somewhere that you could use for your background, or that reasonably matches up with the room lighting situation you are using now, but makes your gals look better, that could provide the bulk of the lighting for your scene (again, hiding dome, then render the room in the background separately for the 'scene' layer.

In your case, since the gals are the focus, giving them prettier lighting to help show them off better is more desirable IMHO, and the room walls can mess with the lighting. Using 'scene oriented' HDRIs (using Hide Dome so that the dome isn't rendered in the scene, just the lighting effects from the dome) that are more 'portrait' oriented can give you pretty compelling lighting that can have less render math overhead (i.e. if the light isn't bouncing off of various walls, etc. that's less math = faster renders).

The goal here should be to incorporate the sexiest gals you can, and make them look pretty, so don't be a 'slave' to whatever lighting your room may have is my point. If this was a film noir or something, that'd be different but this is a strip poker game, so the point is that the players want to see sexy gals! The right lighting can help with the 'sexy' angle, sooo...

One other note, if the gal is having a sex interaction with the MC (say a BJ or tit job), that could be on it's own layer/show group as well, which would be rendered in front of the 'usual' poker table scene setup. Of course, at this point you may want to go with a different camera angle and just not bother with the other gal in the scene/keep her out of frame, so you'd change out the background accordingly to 'reasonably match up with' the new camera angle. RenPy allows you to set the 'z-order' and assign new layers. I did this somewhere by creating a new RenPy layer to add something, but it's been a while. It's actually easy to do, and then call out layer (i.e. show somepic onlayer X or something like that would be how you'd assign the show to a specific layer).

You probably know most of this already, just throwing out ideas here in case some of them might be useful to you.


I'd personally prefer three gals in the poker game, because FFFM is more interesting to me than just FFM. I won't say no to an FFM (if the gals are cute, etc.) of course... but of course FFFM be more work.


One other thought. The gal numbers you are talking sounds extremely ambitious. I'd recommend starting with a smaller subset (say six gals total, 3 per side) and then adding more gals via 'expansion packs' or in future updates or whatever. That way you can focus on the game mechanics without stressing over having to render 36 different gals. You may have been planning that approach already, but it's definitely a thought!

Sorry for rambling a bit, I tend to do that...
Hope this helps!

 

[glassware]

Yes, I agree that making 12 opponents with 3 outfits each is ambitious, and I totally expect it will take a long time. I will definitely release it in smaller increments, like with only a few characters at first.

Anyhow...

Work proceeds at a reasonable pace. I only have one thing to show, as development still hasn't kicked into actually producing game art yet. But I finished a first draft of casting all the characters, a first outfit for each, and I posed them all in the office to serve as a banner image.

Having the character select screen be in the office doesn't really make sense, so I put them all in a holding cell instead, in the exact same lineup and pose. There will be a little animation for it the first time because it's ugly to put bars in the character select screen itself, but without the bars it's not immediately obvious they're in lockup, so I animated a rack focus from the bars to the characters. I actually rendered out a transparent animation of the camera moving slightly towards the bars while they go out of focus, and then overlay that on a still rendering of the cell, just to do some testing of how that works. I can only use the animation the first time, because once the characters change outfits, I'll need to composite each character in the right outfit into the character select screen, so after the first time there will just be a perfunctory fake animation done using stlil images and Ren'Py animation.

Anyway, this is the first frame of the holding cell intro animation:



And this is the first draft of the character select screen that the above transitions into:



You can see all the outfits from before, except the previously mentioned maid is now a member of the queen's guard and is in full armor instead of a maid's outfit.

And yes, all of this is overkill because in the initial game, I'm not going to make this scene clickable, there will just be a regular Ren'Py menu where you choose opponents. But eventually it will be clickable, and it's good for my morale and to keep me going to make interesting stuff and to help me gauge what level of quality I can achieve in the final version.

In addition to the work casting daz assets and testing rendering and compositing, I also did some writing. While each official pair has a defined relationship that allows them to have specific conversations during gameplay, I want to have other combinations of characters be able to have conversations, so some of them are also going to have pre-existing relationships. Some examples from memory, without checking my notes: the time traveller, who comes from the future, is probably a descendent of one the club girls. The other club girl is a cousin of one of the high school girls. The other high school girl might be a descendent of the cowgirl, who will, in the past, become famous enough that the woman in shades has heard of her. One of the characters is a con artist, so somebody in the cast wlil have been a past victim. The time traveler is actually sort of familiar with the the pink-haired girl--the only member of the cast who has a name yet, Cady Tu. She's nominally the supervillain nemesis of the superhero (but neither actually has superpowers; the superhero is only flying due to artistic license).

Of course any pair of characters can have conversations even if they don't have a prior relationship, but I think it will give opportunities for more interesting conversations.

Anyway, I put a bunch of writing work into developing Cady, who is actually

Spoiler

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I mentioned before that each character is going to have some unique behavior that impacts gameplay in some way. As you might guess from the spoilered text, Cady is really good at understanding odds, so even though she's never played poker before, she's going to play really smart, but also, at least at first, she doesn't understand that bluffing is an option, so she won't bluff at all and will be easy to bluff. But at some point, during the game, she'll figure out about bluffing and then she's going to become the toughest non-cheating opponent.