VN Ren'Py Friends in Need [S1 v0.85c] [NeonGhosts]

[MausMaus]

Is there a dark path for all characters or just some?

 

[UnamedPluto]

Is there a dark path for all characters or just some?

As of now you can be pure evil with everyone you encounter. If the dialogue in-between scenes changes heavily based on your actions, as in MC becomes more internally angry and evil-scheme-y.

 

[MausMaus]

As of now you can be pure evil with everyone you encounter. If the dialogue in-between scenes changes heavily based on your actions, as in MC becomes more internally angry and evil-scheme-y.

Ok awesome. thank you. It affects the scenes too I assume, or the scenes are the same with some modified dialogue?

 

[Hongfire Survivor]

Ok awesome. thank you. It affects the scenes too I assume, or the scenes are the same with some modified dialogue?

Affects everything, the woman maybe more scared, some tears, etc.

One of the very few VNs worth replaying twice.

 

[Avaron1974]

As long as no one picks the bad path for the super sweet Russian girl.

Anyone doing that deserves to have their arse fingered by an Elephant without lube.

 

[CrazyRabbit]

As long as no one picks the bad path for the super sweet Russian girl.

Anyone doing that deserves to have their arse fingered by an Elephant without lube.

If someone is evil and depraved enough to do this, that kind of punishment might be labelled as "Saturday Aftertoon Fun Time" for them

 

[Lorenz1]

If someone is evil and depraved enough to do this

Eh, could've been worse. We don't know if she gone preggo from it.

 

[CrazyRabbit]

Eh, could've been worse. We don't know if she gone preggo from it.

We'll add an Elephant to the Saturday Aftertoon Fun Time in case of preggo

 

[DannyLucifer]

Will, there be trap/trans/femboy content? (I hope so...)

 

[NeonGhosts]

Will, there be trap/trans/femboy content? (I hope so...)

I've talked about this in the past a little, but I personally am just not attracted to dick, even when it's on a girl. So, on the one hand, I just don't know that I'm the guy to do that subject justice. On the other hand, trans people (but particularly trans women) experience outsized homelessness, disproportionately take part in sex work, are at a greater risk for assault, suicide, homicide, drug addiction, abuse.. So, it would make sense for the MC to encounter a trans girl in need.

So, the answer right now is maybe?

I wasn't really into foot stuff until I did Nicki's footjob scene. So, maybe writing a trans girl and doing her sex scene would make me a believer! But for right now, none of the characters are trans women, and I don't have concrete plans to add any trans women.

EDIT: Hey, wait. You gave me a two-star review saying my game was basically a kinetic novel bereft of choices. What're you doing asking me about future content?

For anyone wondering where the update is, I've got the renders going now. Hard to say when they'll all be done processing, it just kind of takes how long it takes. Until then, here's a little teaser for something the MC finds, while looking for spank material.

Spoiler

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[Canto Forte]

Keep being invested in what you like about making this game.
We want you focused on what keeps you going, not searching for inspiration
in some random whack idea thrown about in comedy.

I've got the renders going now

 

[Naxos]

Any way to stop Nicky running off and becoming a onlyfan idiot?

Seriously.... I love you so much, I ran away didn't come to you when I was in need and decided to go live with some dude that paid me to be his private whore stripping and mutilating my body, but I love you mc...

Fuck. I hated Nicky in chapter one, but she looked good, now I hate her twice as much and she doesn't even have the look anymore to offset that. From the dev's comments defending her from "haters" in the early days I expected some redemption and maybe it will come eventually but she doubled down on the shit-o-meter for me.

 

[mr.AwesomeGameTaste]

As long as no one picks the bad path for the super sweet Russian girl.

Anyone doing that deserves to have their arse fingered by an Elephant without lube.

ok,but you are providing the elephant im not doing it myself.

 

[Hongfire Survivor]

EDIT: Hey, wait. You gave me a two-star review saying my game was basically a kinetic novel bereft of choices. What're you doing asking me about future content?

It's why I hate that reviews carry weight on here with little oversight.

You don't even have to play the game to review it sooo


Also means I now have to write a review of this great game to offset stupidity

 

[BallerTime]

It's called Friends in Need, not Friends Who Are Doing Perfectly Fine.

While a cute one-liner, that doesn't really mean anything. There are innumerable ways to write someone into a bad situation without compromising their likeability. People can easily find themselves "in need" without having gotten themselves into it by repeatedly being a moron or otherwise being unlikable/irritating/annoying/etc. Just go read the news. Good people get fucked over by bad luck every day. Rent prices skyrocket. People get hit by unexpected medical expenses. Houses burn down. Tons of people in this country are one unfortunate confluence of events from being in a really bad place through no fault of their own.

What is being demonstrated here is a common trap a lot of developers fall into when attempting to design a game which simultaneously wants to allow people to be unrepentant assholes to others and also have a good guy route. If the routes are coupled too closely to each other, one side or the other almost always suffers.

The developer reasonably wants enough people to experience both sides of the story or they might feel like it was a waste of time to put all that work into the evil path if everyone plays the good guy route and then moves on, but statistics of what players choose in games with a good/bad dichotomy tend to lean extremely heavily toward the good side. So, developers have to either make the good side less appealing or the bad side more appealing (usually both) to push people toward a more even distribution.

How does that work in a porn game? You intentionally make the love interests do things that you know the players won't like for whatever reason. If you can make the player angry at the love interest or make the player perceive them as having been tainted in some way, they'll be more likely to pick the degrading options. This increases uptake on the bad guy route at the expense of making a lot of people enjoy the good guy route less than they would have if there were on a route written explicitly for that purpose. Instead of both sides getting stories that quickly diverge onto separate paths tailored to each audience, at least one side (if not both) will get a suboptimal experience because they have to stick to one shared middle path with relatively minor deviations.

Additionally, since I'm not allowed to have the option to not interact with a character because everything has to follow the shared path or I'll miss out on #content, I am finding myself forced to sit through long dialogue sections with characters who actively irritate me in order to get to the ones I still enjoy interacting with. The excuse that I don't have to fuck them is silly. It's like telling someone they don't have to swallow the food they don't like but they do have to keep swishing it around in their mouth for a few minutes before they're allowed to spit it out.

Also, as for the "friends" part of the title, only one of them was actually a friend before the story begins... and the behavior Nicki has demonstrated thus far is not the behavior of a friend. It's more like the behavior of someone who sees you as an emergency parachute that she doesn't want to touch until things get really bad. So, there's a single ex-friend. The only other one with any relation to the MC is family and they're not presented as being friendly with each other either. Everyone else we meet is a stranger who just wants money and/or fame from him.

 

[Hongfire Survivor]

Any way to stop Nicky running off and becoming a onlyfan idiot?

Seriously.... I love you so much, I ran away didn't come to you when I was in need and decided to go live with some dude that paid me to be his private whore stripping and mutilating my body, but I love you mc...

Fuck. I hated Nicky in chapter one, but she looked good, now I hate her twice as much and she doesn't even have the look anymore to offset that. From the dev's comments defending her from "haters" in the early days I expected some redemption and maybe it will come eventually but she doubled down on the shit-o-meter for me.

That is why the author is rewriting Chapter One. It's way too easy to hate Nicki, since we the player barely know her.

So I'll reserve judgement on Nicki for now, but I do like her camgirl look and I usually hate tattoos

 

[NeonGhosts]

While a cute one-liner, that doesn't really mean anything. There are innumerable ways to write someone into a bad situation without compromising their likeability. People can easily find themselves "in need" without having gotten themselves into it by repeatedly being a moron or otherwise being unlikable/irritating/annoying/etc. Just go read the news. Good people get fucked over by bad luck every day. Rent prices skyrocket. People get hit by unexpected medical expenses. Houses burn down. Tons of people in this country are one unfortunate confluence of events from being in a really bad place through no fault of their own.

What is being demonstrated here is a common trap a lot of developers fall into when attempting to design a game which simultaneously wants to allow people to be unrepentant assholes to others and also have a good guy route. If the routes are coupled too closely to each other, one side or the other almost always suffers.

The developer reasonably wants enough people to experience both sides of the story or they might feel like it was a waste of time to put all that work into the evil path if everyone plays the good guy route and then moves on, but statistics of what players choose in games with a good/bad dichotomy tend to lean extremely heavily toward the good side. So, developers have to either make the good side less appealing or the bad side more appealing (usually both) to push people toward a more even distribution.

How does that work in a porn game? You intentionally make the love interests do things that you know the players won't like for whatever reason. If you can make the player angry at the love interest or make the player perceive them as having been tainted in some way, they'll be more likely to pick the degrading options. This increases uptake on the bad guy route at the expense of making a lot of people enjoy the good guy route less than they would have if there were on a route written explicitly for that purpose. Instead of both sides getting stories that quickly diverge onto separate paths tailored to each audience, at least one side (if not both) will get a suboptimal experience because they have to stick to one shared middle path with relatively minor deviations.

Additionally, since I'm not allowed to have the option to not interact with a character because everything has to follow the shared path or I'll miss out on #content, I am finding myself forced to sit through long dialogue sections with characters who actively irritate me in order to get to the ones I still enjoy interacting with. The excuse that I don't have to fuck them is silly. It's like telling someone they don't have to swallow the food they don't like but they do have to keep swishing it around in their mouth for a few minutes before they're allowed to spit it out.

Also, as for the "friends" part of the title, only one of them was actually a friend before the story begins... and the behavior Nicki has demonstrated thus far is not the behavior of a friend. It's more like the behavior of someone who sees you as an emergency parachute that she doesn't want to touch until things get really bad. So, there's a single ex-friend. The only other one with any relation to the MC is family and they're not presented as being friendly with each other either. Everyone else we meet is a stranger who just wants money and/or fame from him.

TLDR: "This game isn't for me, but what if it was?"

The answer is to go make your own game, which I'm sure will be awesome and universally beloved.

 

[JGoat]

Any way to stop Nicky running off and becoming a onlyfan idiot?

Seriously.... I love you so much, I ran away didn't come to you when I was in need and decided to go live with some dude that paid me to be his private whore stripping and mutilating my body, but I love you mc...

Fuck. I hated Nicky in chapter one, but she looked good, now I hate her twice as much and she doesn't even have the look anymore to offset that. From the dev's comments defending her from "haters" in the early days I expected some redemption and maybe it will come eventually but she doubled down on the shit-o-meter for me.

For real hopefully MC pays her to remove the tats and get a new hairdo and revert herself to her old look in the end.

 

[NeonGhosts]

For real hopefully MC pays her to remove the tats and get a new hairdo and revert herself to her old look in the end.

Nah, I'm gonna give them all face tattoos.

Even the MC.

 

[Naxos]

That is why the author is rewriting Chapter One. It's way too easy to hate Nicki, since we the player barely know her.

So I'll reserve judgement on Nicki for now, but I do like her camgirl look and I usually hate tattoos

Chapter 3 is what did it for me, I could have got past my dislike of chapter 1 Nicky and I don't think it needs to be changed, but I can't get passed what she did in the 3 months and her new look, but that's on me and not the dev. I just hoped I'd missed something that could have prevented it but that's not the case, so I'll politely put the game aside and leave it there.

It's not that I think it's bad, it's just not for me.

Good luck Neon.