HTML Abandoned Female Agent [v1.20.1p] [Crushstation]

[AnnoyedMexican]

The dev seriously wrote an 11 page PDF to say "Game has slow development so I'll cut and rework what it has now"?

Why do I feel like that was an elaborate scheme to hide the issue that the dev doesn't know how to make the playable part of the game story in Bangkok?

This game became the text analogy of Star Citizen... but at least that game is partially going somewhere.

 

[Tallyhoe]

He should go learn to play golf.
so that he will know that you can’t go back the holes to fix your shot.
You can only move forward and do your best for your next shot.

 

[Beggarman]

I'm not sure if I'm understanding this right - Is Crush saying he's going to do everything he's outlined, or part of what he's outlined? Because he does seem to have identified some problems correctly* but some of the solutions seem to overlap a bit. Like, removing some backstory options and temporarily removing one backstory to push forwards with others (hey something I actually predicted) - do options need to be cut outright yet if pushing forward with a limited set? Unless he just thinks they're redundant, which I guess is fair.

And some of these options just seem a bit... contradictory to what needs doing. As Arkady already pointed out in one example - A lot what's already been established actually does have a point and logical explanations already, and "streamlining" them seems to be more work than rationalizing them in the new framework. What's the purpose of Dubai? In game: Credible backstory for the player, as mentioned. Test run to see if the player character is capable of doing what needs doing (seducing someone and having sex with them and doing espionage-y things to them which may hurt them and not feeling overly guilty about it afterwards). Outside of game: It's a demonstration of the kind of mission you may be doing in Bangkok against a low-level target (If that wasn't the case to begin with, I'll be shocked).

Anyway. Glad to see he seems to have come to his senses somewhat, and that his post wasn't about remaking the game in an instance of TurboPASCAL emulated in Minecraft. Even if some of the ideas seem to clash a bit, it's better than... whatever he was doing.

*and some which I didn't even expect, because... aaaah how do you spaghettify the coding to begin with!? Sure, the image side, I don't know shit about, but like 80% of this game seems to just be setting basic variables and then referencing them. I'm gonna assume I'm misunderstanding that. There's no way a scoreboard and a bunch of if statements got spaghettified. I'm also a little bit worried that he says scenes weren't planned but again I'm gonna assume there's some misunderstanding there because I don't know how you even start something without some idea of where you're going. Even my CHOYA chapters tend to have a plan.

 

[Mangora]

My advice to Crush would be to stop what he's doing and actually play some Choice of Games text games to get an idea of various structures that can be copied to be used with female agent and get an idea what a form a completed text game can take.

 

[yaryaryar]

No update in July/August?

 

[Cyberpunk20]

My advice to Crush would be to stop what he's doing and actually play some Choice of Games text games to get an idea of various structures that can be copied to be used with female agent.

You mean Choice of Games LLC? It's the fist time I've heard of them. Can you recommend some?

 

[AnnoyedMexican]

You mean Choice of Games LLC? It's the fist time I've heard of them. Can you recommend some?

You didn't ask me but my favourites were: Choice of Robots and sabres/guns of Infinity (its a trilogy but the 3rd part has been on the making for close to 4 years). I recommend those

 

[kkkkknuc]

I think we should strongly consider the possibility that this game is going nowhere, despite the dev coming up with a lot of literature.

I say there is a possibility that this has been a troll experiment all along - to see how many people are willing to keep paying real money for minimal product in return. And this is coming from a former paying patreon.

Crush should definitely take better care of his health instead of relying on pills. But at the same time, something is amiss here because he has had no product or progress to show for all his 'efforts' and 'worries' in the last... year or more?

Remember - "Real artists ship"

 

[CassieBare]

Also, there's no way that a person with no other job, with 3 months (since I came on board) can only deliver a couple new lines/pages. They're obviously doing something else with their time, and should people be supporting that behavior?

 

[asdfasdf12341234ACSACA]

Also, there's no way that a person with no other job, with 3 months (since I came on board) can only deliver a couple new lines/pages. They're obviously doing something else with their time, and should people be supporting that behavior?

This is something I've sort of asked about a couple of times before. Even if he's "only" working 4 hours a day (and it's apparently more than that), just what is he doing in those 4 hours? It's so hard to work 20+ hours a week on a project and have nothing to show. Even if, somehow, he spent an entire week "analysing what went wrong" (and producing that not-so-fancy PDF), that's still only one week.

 

[Deleted member 576]

asdfasdf12341234ACSACA It feels like he put more effort into making that pdf than what he spent working on the game. Its a good pdf but considering who made it, it looks like a party manifesto before an election. He also seems to be down about 1k $ on patreon.

 

[laddiestlad]

we all know countless devs who work for several hours for months and either never deliver or when they release something, it's a miniscule amount, so you can guess what he was doing from experience

 

[Beggarman]

This is something I've sort of asked about a couple of times before. Even if he's "only" working 4 hours a day (and it's apparently more than that), just what is he doing in those 4 hours? It's so hard to work 20+ hours a week on a project and have nothing to show. Even if, somehow, he spent an entire week "analysing what went wrong" (and producing that not-so-fancy PDF), that's still only one week.

I'm not sure if this is the case for Crush or just me being fucked in the head, but I find it so easy to just spin my wheels and not even realise I'm doing it. Get hung up on a certain wording or not liking the tone of something and then 2 hours later I realise all I've done is rewrite a sentence 8 times. Or try to work out a better method than the way I'm doing something and end up spending 10 hours just trawling through documentation (though considering the time put in, I'd expect Crush to be knowledgeable enough that that doesn't happen much now). Or write a plan for a scene and then scrap the entire thing the next day because now it reads like crap or I just don't get what was hot about it. Shit, even happens to forum posts. I went into this going "c'mon, you know you spend ages on this shit, just type it up and fuck off" and I've already spent half hour 45 mins on it and rewritten it twice two-and-a-half times.

Not to say it's always like this, but I can see how some days you just don't look like you've done anything. Then scale that up to a big project like this - especially one with massive feature creep and constant rewrites to accomodate that - and it can easily end up looking like Female Agent does now.

 

[CassieBare]

I'm not sure if this is the case for Crush or just me being fucked in the head, but I find it so easy to just spin my wheels and not even realise I'm doing it. Get hung up on a certain wording or not liking the tone of something and then 2 hours later I realise all I've done is rewrite a sentence 8 times. Or try to work out a better method than the way I'm doing something and end up spending 10 hours just trawling through documentation (though considering the time put in, I'd expect Crush to be knowledgeable enough that that doesn't happen much now). Or write a plan for a scene and then scrap the entire thing the next day because now it reads like crap or I just don't get what was hot about it. Shit, even happens to forum posts. I went into this going "c'mon, you know you spend ages on this shit, just type it up and fuck off" and I've already spent half hour 45 mins on it and rewritten it twice two-and-a-half times.

Not to say it's always like this, but I can see how some days you just don't look like you've done anything. Then scale that up to a big project like this - especially one with massive feature creep and constant rewrites to accomodate that - and it can easily end up looking like Female Agent does now.

But this ^ proves my point. You did work on this (2.5x), took you 45 minutes and you contributed something meaningful. Approximately the same amount of content that happens on 1-2 pages in FA.

So...build that out. 3 months at (according to Crush) 7 days a week and 8 (or more, thanks to trucker pills?) hours a day for a total of 1680 hours of available work time. So we should have...around 1k pages of content. I'll even cut some more slack and say there's coding and admin and management of the team. So...250 pages.

I'm also a writer (hobby/aspirational profession), but if there's one thing I know it's this: write. It may be crap, you may change it later, but if you aren't writing now, you will *never* cross the finish line. Ever.

 

[berny]

I'm not sure if this is the case for Crush or just me being fucked in the head, but I find it so easy to just spin my wheels and not even realise I'm doing it. Get hung up on a certain wording or not liking the tone of something and then 2 hours later I realise all I've done is rewrite a sentence 8 times. Or try to work out a better method than the way I'm doing something and end up spending 10 hours just trawling through documentation (though considering the time put in, I'd expect Crush to be knowledgeable enough that that doesn't happen much now). Or write a plan for a scene and then scrap the entire thing the next day because now it reads like crap or I just don't get what was hot about it. Shit, even happens to forum posts. I went into this going "c'mon, you know you spend ages on this shit, just type it up and fuck off" and I've already spent half hour 45 mins on it and rewritten it twice two-and-a-half times.

Not to say it's always like this, but I can see how some days you just don't look like you've done anything. Then scale that up to a big project like this - especially one with massive feature creep and constant rewrites to accomodate that - and it can easily end up looking like Female Agent does now.

Yeah, I agree. I too believe him about working hard.
However, that actually makes me even more pessimistic. If he really works like 50+ hours a week (needing trucker pills and all) and there is still so little progress, it's just very hard to believe that this game has any kind of future that doesn't end in abandonment.

 

[DbatRT]

Whatever it is, it is obvious that something needs to change, or as the person above said, this game will be seen by our grandchildren.

 

[Breezerr]

On his new post, he talked about how the feedback on his plan was helpful...
and then he starts working on his plan???
Dude when you get so much criticism (I read all comments on patreon) than you should rework your plan before working on it!

 

[Nope]

Plan to get back on track. Basically nothing about actually getting to Bangkok....smh.

 

[euthanasia.]

To be honest, before Crush started throwing in all these customization options, stats and dice rolls he should've decided on an actual game first. None of the stats even matter right now and probably wont ever matter; like what is Mathematics or English going to do for the agent? Is she going to calculate how much dick she is going to take in a day then work out her profit? If so, why does that even matter? The game is just needlessly complex at the moment.

Imagine for example a game like GGGB and Eva made it so you could customize Ashley's background, threw in all these random stats, then made it so you need to dice roll for just to have a 60% chance to have sex with another character. And instead of actually writing the story Eva kept adding more random stats and useless shit to the game; different breast sizes for Ashley, new hairstyles for Ashley, sluttier fancier clothes for Ashley etc.

I get GGGB is a different game style than Female Agent but even a sandbox game like Tales of Androgyny only recently got customization and barely any at that, yet the players are still happy. Why? Because they are actually adding content to the game rather than new hair colors or a new nationality for the MC.

Like a few people have said; Female Agent would work fine as a CYOA that eventually gets customization options.

All that being said, something like Accidental Woman is basically in the same boat as Female Agent (has dice rolls for stat checks, full sandbox etc.), but has actually managed to push out development quicker. Maybe Crush is just not working and is just doing the good old milk Patreon friends super hard like ICSTOR.

 

[asdfasdf12341234ACSACA]

On his new post, he talked about how the feedback on his plan was helpful...
and then he starts working on his plan???
Dude when you get so much criticism (I read all comments on patreon) than you should rework your plan before working on it!

50 comments say "Nope, this won't work, do this instead"
5 comments say "Keep going you Crushypoo, ur da bes and we love you just take your time"

Of course he's going to hear to the 5 comments that line with his view. He's human after all (please let's get the haha I'm a crab joke out already)