Ren'Py Golden Mean [v0.6] [DrMolly]

4.20 star(s) 130 Votes
Discussion Reviews (130)
9alwa

9alwa

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Sep 16, 2020
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If i'm not mistaken it's been almost 4 months now with no proper progress report. I'm starting to worry as well :BootyTime:
 
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yoyomistro

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Jan 15, 2017
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9alwa said:
If i'm not mistaken it's been almost 4 months now with no proper progress report. I'm starting to worry as well :BootyTime:
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This is why devs who waste time on gatekeeping are always a red flag... they're too worried about the money for a fucking crowdfunding project, which means they're either broke and should be doing something else, or are gonna end up salty they aren't making mint and not put out... You can't win with these types, no matter how good their work is...
 
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Dr.Zed

Dr.Zed

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Jun 4, 2020
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a bit of elaboration from his side would gone a long way! why can't you say that you don't have even an rough estimate, I mean yeah... my hopes are falling by the week. I was so pumped for it! ohh well... on to the next adventure!
It was good as long as it lasted.
 
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mma456

mma456

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Dec 2, 2018
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AnimeHentaiGamer said:
the first guy whom owned the game was paying the server costs that sped up renders and also made them look really good. after they had a falling out. this is what you get.
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Who was the guy who was in charge before? Got any name or patreon page, etc?
 
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Redelin

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Sep 20, 2017
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Horny Little Brother said:
I agree with you, I am terminating my subscription.

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When I saw your name in my notifications, I thought we were finally getting some news lol, but thanks for being willing to share patreon posts with us Horny Little Brother, and to Looper9 too. Molly and Dax's lack of communication with both patreon and the community reflects poorly on them and the game. Although I'm usually one to give the benefit of the doubt to them, I think its fair for more and more patrons to want to back out with how often they go radio silent, especially this long between updates.
 
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yoyomistro

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Redelin said:
I think people overestimate how much Inked Horn Studios played a role into this games development, and simultaneously underestimate the work Molly did and has done by themselves. Before giving Inked Horn this much credit, I recommend you play the demo and see for yourself how poorly made it is compared to the current renpy version of the game.

My take away from playing the unity version of the game is that it is inferior to the renpy version in all ways and it's actually quite impressive that Molly was able to render, write and code a better game in the same amount of time it took Inked Horn to release his unity version of 1.0, but that is only if the 1.0 version of The X was actually made in Unity and not renpy (and that GM 1.0 was also a ren'py release and not unity), as the links to both versions of the game are broken, so I made an assumption off the demo linked on f95 that both the demo and 1.0 version released by Inked Horn were both made in unity.

That being said, after both playing the demo and actually reading the patreon post, I've come to the conclusion that although Molly 100% ripped off Inked Horn, Inked Horn carries a fair chunk, if not most of the blame. My summary, that you can fact
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, is as follows:

- Inked meets Molly on Redoxa discord
- They discuss creating a game, come up with 3 ideas
- molly has a bad gpu for rendering, Inked offers and rents server for molly to use for rendering
- Molly uses the server to work on things other than the game (comics w/ redoxa, pixiv commisions)
- Inked wants feb release, feb comes molly is still working for Redoxa due to personal and money issues he was having
- they decide to push release to april, still nothing done, so they release demo (current game's intro that you can skip)
- due to work not getting done on game, Inked says he can no longer pay for expensive server
- inked keeps giving Molly money even though he isn't working on their game
- molly gets better gpu in july to render on his own machine, inked says focus on writing the game for now, says that if the game is good patrons will come and money issues will be solved
- inked keeps complaining about molly being difficult to work with (how he doesn't write well, that he's finding it hard to write, wants to rent server again etc.)
- Inked wants last bit of dialogue from molly to start testing and needs to find tester
- Inked keeps saying molly is complaining about work and his health and money, they start communicating less and he finds himself in the situation he was in during the rendering server fiasco, where Molly gets to do whatever he wants and Inked twiddles his thumbs
- Molly gives last bit of dialogue on 25 august 2022, and Molly wants to release their game by august 29/30 2022 (molly releases renpy version on 19 sept 2022)
- Inked says he won't be able to release by then
- Inked later finds out that Molly opens his own patreon and releases his own version of the game in renpy (assumption of renpy, I don't have access to GM 1.0), released the exact same day that Inked releases ep1 (assumed unity like demo, link to The X 1.0 is broke)

Conclusion: Molly did do wrong by Inked Horn, but Inked Horn's own poor communication skills (based on his own testimony) make him the actual fool. Meets a stranger on discord, continue dumps money into that stranger while complain in his head at how much said stranger doesn't do what he wants. Enables Molly to use the rendering server for whatever he likes, entrusts Molly with essentially all the work for the game minus programming. Everyone likes to pretend that this rendering server was responsible for the quick release dates for all prior updates, but based on Inked Horn's own words, this server was barely used for the game and seemingly only existed for the duration of the Demo, aka the Intro in the current game (as Inked mention in his post that after their demo release in april, Molly wants to rent the server again for rendering in july, which Inked Horn stopped paying for). The work they did was only for 1.0 so every release after was entirely Molly and Dax. The render farm Inked paid for only existed until their demo release, with the rest being done on Molly's upgraded hardware.

There's definitely warrented criticism of Dr. Molly in this situation and with GM in general, but calling to this situation over and again is a bad gotcha. It's a weird thing that happened early on in this games development and Molly sounds pretty bad from Inked's perspective, but I don't have much sympathy for a guy who kind of just sat on his hands the entire time, did pretty much none of the work aside from making a pretty shit version of the game in unity and then disappeared with his last patreon post saying he was making a game in unreal. Molly's renpy version is infinitely better than Inked's.
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Damn, I never even read all the drama with the close; I knew it happened, but I don't think Inked had posted that essay at the time. Crazy how half the devs in this space are always sick/broke. IDK if they think this is a free money printer or something.

At this point I still have a hard time disaggregating who was responsible for most of the bones of the story; I think it's still going in an OK direction, but it's both progressing really slowly and somewhat meandering... Either way, I feel like Inked has bad intuition about what makes a project good (doing a VN in Unity, without actually making major improvements to the plugins available like Faerin, just handing responsibility off to a rando, not storyboarding and pre-programming based on the boards, etc...) and would probably not have done anything great without Dr. Molly. As we've seen, he still hasn't come up with a replacement project or hired another artist to continue his version of the story.

But while Dr. Molly has put out a better product, there are way too many red flags on his side, including his writing abilities (in a more structural sense than syntactical). Also, the animations haven't been as good as I'd hoped they'd be based on the initial product. We'll see if they improve on the next release.

Also, does someone have the 0.1 release of The X?
 
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YaBoy

YaBoy

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Jan 2, 2017
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There's a few new preview posts as well as a progress report posted today, hope somebody can share.
 
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4.20 star(s) 130 Votes