VN Ren'Py Abandoned Faulty Wish [Ch.0.5] [PinkHeartGamez]

May 21, 2023
43
93
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If you thought punctuation was bad you should've seen my last game. Well I'll definitely try and improve on that especially if its killing my humor. Also thanks for pointing out spelling mistakes I thought I got them all but apparently not. UI Is something I plan to work on and a lot of the other stuff you mentioned is on the list, I just wanted to get something out since I haven't posted here in awhile. Character bios is a neat idea I haven't thought of, might try this.

The Facial Expression thing is something I am struggling with. Its part of the reason why I don't use standard character icons like most VNs and try to just make it so every scene has a unique shot. I have thought of some solutions to this though, most however make things take a bit longer and can end up removing some consistency if I am not careful.
 
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AlBetGam

Member
Feb 22, 2018
439
2,873
Combining AI with Koikatsu is definitely a really interesting idea... but goddamn these porn AI models can't tell the difference between a flat-chested female and a male.
To be fair, I've seen more than a few non-AI Koikatsu characters male MC's backside was as feminine as any of the girls'.
 

Amitiel

New Member
Feb 17, 2020
10
21
If you thought punctuation was bad you should've seen my last game. Well I'll definitely try and improve on that especially if its killing my humor. Also thanks for pointing out spelling mistakes I thought I got them all but apparently not.
There's a lot that's good about this for a first release so I don't want to be negative, but I'd seriously run the dialogue through a spellchecker. The number of things like your/you're or missing apostrophes that do detract from what otherwise seems like it could be a decent story.
 

joryh

Active Member
Nov 8, 2021
904
1,778
bro it's either ai or koikatsu just pick one, you can't just double dip
Everything ai is double dipping, or more. To tRaIn the ai they scrape artists works, aka, steal it for their own purposes. Then they have the ai regurgitate whatever style they ripped off and call it aRt.
 

Firaxius

Active Member
Aug 13, 2020
667
762
Not a bad start, usualy I don't play these kinda graphic VN, but I found some good ones and yours belong among them now, the story itself was interesting, I only wonder why are they in a compound and why are they killing eachother, that seemed somewhat unclear, I can geuss being in the compound due to their powers, but why not stick together and be a team, why killing eachother. Anyway I'm sure interested to find out more about it and if they will catch the killer or killers.
 
May 21, 2023
43
93
Not a bad start, usualy I don't play these kinda graphic VN, but I found some good ones and yours belong among them now, the story itself was interesting, I only wonder why are they in a compound and why are they killing eachother, that seemed somewhat unclear, I can geuss being in the compound due to their powers, but why not stick together and be a team, why killing eachother. Anyway I'm sure interested to find out more about it and if they will catch the killer or killers.
thank you so much. <3
 

EvolutionKills

Well-Known Member
Jan 3, 2021
1,046
3,313
FULL DISCLOSURE

I was messaged directly by the dev after they saw my post about the Lessons in Love knock-off called Space of lost (not a mistake, as that is in fact how the dev spells their own game, without capitalizing the 'L' in 'lost').

If you are curious, you see that post for yourself HERE!

The message I got from pinkheartgamez was as follows.

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While I can appreciate someone who is so vigorously seeking out criticism, that doesn't mean I'll be pulling any punches. So for anyone who thinks I'm being 'too mean' or just have an axe to grind with those who use AI, remember that the developer themselves asked for this.

We good? Good.



Now, I did sit down and play though the entire game. My honest opinion? It's not great. Not awful, but it has a myriad of problems that keep it sitting firmly in mediocre territory; and keep in mind the relatively deprecated bell curve of quality when it comes to amateur porn games. It's not offensively bad, nor do I think the dev is just a zero-effort grifter looking to vacuum up some Patreon crumbs from mimicking a popular game or creator. The game has a lot of issues, but it appears to me that there is still someone trying to be creative at the core of all this; even if they are far from sticking the landing when it comes to quality.



Art & Animation

It just isn't working for me. For starters, it suffers from the same overly airbrushed look that most generative AI anime shares, which makes this initially look like just another 'me too' shovelware grift; even though I know it's not. The images pretty clearly appear to be generated in Koikatsu Party, then fed into generative AI to give them a new coat of paint. The dev is taking the time to properly set up 3D models in a virtual environment, pose them as needed, and continue to do so for each subsequent shot or scene in sequence. This is not just AI generated character sprites talking to each other over a series of bad AI backgrounds. There is a lot of legit work being done here in Koikatsu Party, and the dev appears to have a pretty decent eye for framing and shot composition.

I just think it's a real shame that the dev is making their work worse by introducing all of the artifacts and limitations of generative AI, especially when they've already put in so much work beforehand. Let me show you what I mean...


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TL;DR

I honestly think the game would look better with well done Koikatsu Party renders, rather than those renders having a sloppy coat of Stable Diffusion lathered all over them. The AI introduces a whole slew of visual artifacts that cannot be fixed by feeding the AI better renders. Give it a perfectly fine hand, it will still mangle it. Stick with 3D, learn how to setup good lighting, and you'll have better and more consistent visuals. If you ever NEED to do animation (and nobody ever NEEDS to), the built in Koikatsu library is right there to do 90% of the work; with the added benefit that your sex scenes won't look like they're powered by reality warping eldritch horrors.

You have the models, you're already posing them and framing your shots. Learning good lighting and polishing up your other skills (posing, framing, etc.) is how you improve your own craft, and do so in such a way that you can find and correct mistakes on your own. How do you otherwise look into or fix mistakes caused by 'the algorithm'? You don't. You try and try again and hope you get an outcome that looks good enough and/or you get really good at fixing AI generated images with your own editing after the fact. The way I see it, you can focus your effort on making really good images from the get go, or train yourself to babysit and fix an unknowable algorithm. Your calculus might differ, but I'd prefer to bet on my own skills.



Story & Narration

I read through the whole game, so I'm not going to write all of this and not talk about it. This is a VN, your primary interaction with the world and the story being told is thought text; and that text is ROUGH.

The game starts in medias res, which is fancy talk for 'in the middle of the narrative'. It is a legitimate way to start a story, but it is also difficult to pull off successfully. Dropping the audience right into the story with no setup or context save for what they get on the way, and the stranger or further from reality a story is the harder it gets for an audience to keep up. Therefor it is a really easy storytelling tool to use poorly. Imagine the start of the original 1977 STAR WARS jumping right to Vader's capture of Princess Leah, but without the opening text scroll delivering all important expositional context. What would Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone be like if the movie started right at the first big gathering in the mess hall, or with the sorting hat? There would be a lot of necessary context missing for the audience, and thus they would have to do just that much more work to piece together things after that fact. This only increases the further from reality your story takes places. A modern day kids adventure in suburbia can let the audience do a lot of the heavy lifting, where they are largely familiar with how day-to-day life in our reality works. The further you stray from that reality, the more fantastical elements you add, the harder it gets to keep up when you hit the ground running. It can be done, with one of the best examples that comes to mind being the opening of 1999's The Matrix.

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Now you can do this on purpose, if for instance you are working with an unreliable narrator or presenting a mystery to an audience (think Rashomon). Part of why The Matrix works so well is that, immediately after Trinity escapes the Agents, the audience is introduced to the protagonist Thomas Anderson (aka Neo). Now the audience has been keyed into just how strange this world can be, and they're on the same journey of discovery as Neo is while he learns about the truth of his reality. Alternatively it is really easy to lose your audience in the weeds of unexplained jargon if handled poorly, and unfortunately this game handles it rather poorly.


Show, Don't Tell.

This games does a lot of telling, and little of it makes sense. You are very quickly introduced to Sommy's crippling (and scene dependent) anxiety, god(?), wishes(?), 'government people', 'the compound', a murder threat, 'powers', and those 'powers' being a secret. None of this gets explained, and it only sorta makes any kind of sense if you assume certain nouns (like 'wish') are being used outside of their typically understood meaning. How much of that is poor writing, and how much of that is being lost in translation? I can't say for sure. Given the style and breadth of grammatical mistakes on hand, my guts tells me this was written by someone who understands English as a second language, and tried to write the script phonetically. There are a lot of misused homonyms, misapplied turns of phrase, and even instances of entirely wrong but similar sounding words being used to complete a phrase. It is very much being written in the style of flowing dialogue, but is missing almost all of the necessary punctuation to allow for an audience to read it as intended. As currently presented, almost all dialogue is a series of run on sentences, lacking the punctuation for pauses or narrative emphasis.

Screenshot 2023-12-07 202753.png

^^ Disregarding all of the other grammar mistakes, this only makes sense if you read 'Oh though' as 'Although'.


Screenshot 2023-12-07 210413.png
Screenshot 2023-12-07 210431.png

^^ Is 'showed me her hands' here a euphemism for fighting? Not any that I'm familiar with. Does it make more sense in another language? No idea, but it seems especially nonsensical in English given the prior use of 'hands' earlier in the paragraph to mean just that, Sarah's physical hands.


Screenshot 2023-12-08 004715.png

^^ I have no idea if he is being serious, joking, or sarcastic. There are no clues in the delivery of the dialogue to glean his actual meaning, and the world so far has been so weird and unexplained that any or all of those interpretations are valid at this point. This isn't the good kind of mystery, where your audience wants to learn more; this is leaving your audience perplexed from a complete lack of context.


The narrative, as presented, only makes sense if you assume that 'god' and 'wish' aren't actually those things. There is some sort of other worldly power who is mucking about, but it does not appear to be a 'god' in the capital G or Abrahamic sense of the word. Keep in mind too that in popular mythology genies can grant wishes, their wishes are more far reaching and powerful than the ones on display here, and they're not deities either. On top of that, the 'wishes' are really nothing of the sort. When you think of a 'wish', the go-to pop culture reference is that of the aforementioned genie's wish. A grant of potentially reality altering desire with few, if any, restrictions. The sky is quite literally the limit when it comes to wishes. Even wishes as presented in Disney's film Aladdin are far more reaching in their scope and power than 'wishes' seem to be in this reality.

Screenshot 2023-12-08 005729.png

That's because here, wishes appear to be limited to granting C & D list comic book super-hero powers. The above paragraph is what made it all finally click for me. It makes way more sense when you read it if you substitute 'wishes' with the word 'powers'. Now this nonsensical paragraph is describing the competing power struggles of a bunch of powered-up normies desperately trying to Highlander themselves with their newfound abilities.

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The powers that the audience learns about are self immolation (Human Torch, sans the flying), animal talking (Squirrel Girl, minus the superhuman physicality), field manipulation (Susan Storm, minus the invisibility), and... semi-clairvoyant cum (Psychometry, limited to contact with ejaculate)? Also, whatever that little girl and her eldritch teddy bear holder has going on (a D&D Warlock/Druid hybrid without the spells)?

So again, if the game was better at explaining itself, so that the audience didn't have to piecemeal a critically important piece of contextual information lost to translation or poor word choice through context clues nearly 2/3rds of the way into the release? It probably wouldn't be nearly as impenetrably frustrating. There is no need for the narrative to be this opaque and obtuse, for what is at base, a goofy harem power fantasy; Rashomon this is not.

I could go into more detail, but I really hope I got the point across. This game is in dire need of a native English speaking editor, preferably one comfortable with screenplay style dialogue heavy writing. Also, beside the more immediate grammatical corrections, the writing could use more work creatively. More ancillary details, more stage direction, more internal thoughts and feelings. Just, more of everything else that isn't dialogue. You need more than just dialogue, and right now it feels like the narrative is 95% dialogue by volume.

But it's past 2AM, I've been working on this for over 4 hours straight, and I really need to take a break. Auf Wiedersehen.
 

DraxisSilencer1000

Well-Known Member
Aug 26, 2020
1,225
576
What is with this abrupt start? Also, your sex scenes have barely the right sequence. Its just cut after cut after cuts. Especially that threesome, I can't even tell if sex actually happened in there.
 

grisax

Newbie
Oct 12, 2020
73
128
I have no issues with the KoiKatsu+AI combo. it looks really good and refreshing to me. What I do have issue with is the Engrish though. Besides of lack of pretty much any symbols outside of A-Z, there are messed up tenses, "typos" everywhere, monstrosities like "Whos you" - damn, no offense, but mistakes like this should happen after passing 2nd lesson of English for absolute beginners. It turns the game to a language puzzle genre and effectively kills it. :/
 
May 21, 2023
43
93
I have no issues with the KoiKatsu+AI combo. it looks really good and refreshing to me. What I do have issue with is the Engrish though. Besides of lack of pretty much any symbols outside of A-Z, there are messed up tenses, "typos" everywhere, monstrosities like "Whos you" - damn, no offense, but mistakes like this should happen after passing 2nd lesson of English for absolute beginners. It turns the game to a language puzzle genre and effectively kills it. :/
Got some grammar checkers in my Coding software now. Should be improved a lot more by next release.