Ren'Py Harem Hotel [v0.19.1] [Runey]

[shadowtempered]

Huh, I could've sworn that last time I played most of the cast's plotlines were put on hold for the trip to elfland Lin was pushing for, but maybe my memory exaggerated it. Or did you just mean raising stats when you said "play with a girl?"

That's a long way in. There's an early arc/set with Kali that'll give you money (if you do other stuff first you have to balance money and it wastes a lot of time). After that, Runey blocks paths to keep cohesion in the story (the boat trip being one of them, but there are smaller ones for select girls). They're not too bad, but those blocks are mostly main story blockers/stabilisers, so they're a good thing.

The stat scene I'm referring to is the Cromwell challenge. The outcome varies based on Lin's stats but overall won't deter the story from progressing if you don't have 'em. It is the only scene that constantly asks "are you ready" before heading out since you're supposed to be training her. To the best of my knowledge though, all you miss out on is slightly different dialogue for winning/losing. I can't confirm, as I've always won.

Otherwise the only other stat that seems to impact scenes is exhibition, but it's super minor and completely not necessary.

 

[Towik]

Thanks for the reply o/

But honestly I don't think this is a game for me, maybe few years ago. But i cannot stand when a character waste time constantly, i have to keep skipping time so much, cause there is nothing to do. o__o

 

[Skode]

I lost my saves few years ago... I used to play this before the save screen spots increase...
anyway, can someone tell me how I can get back to this, lick tips and so on...
kind of lame I think I spent 50+ hours in this game

The vast majority of what you played has been rewritten and revamped so honestly as annoying as it is starting from scratch means you get to see all the new content organically. There is so much more to do now as well from explore the town to grow a garden that you will soon find there is never really any point for a LONG time in the game where you have nothing to do that you have not seen before (and even then the hundreds of sex scenes will of course make a great way to fill the time in those situations anyway lol).

 

[ZenoMod]

IMHO the farming minigame is a boring waste of time that adds nothing to the storytelling and just surreptitiously inflates the gameplay hours.

That’s the thing with minigames in general: you spend a few days coding them, and then you can recycle them infinitely, wasting hours and hours of the player’s time with almost no coding effort — just by defining new targets.

 

[KhaiFirst]

play 19. B4 feel like beta.. so gonna download 18.2 icho see different

 

[shadowtempered]

IMHO the farming minigame is a boring waste of time that adds nothing to the storytelling and just surreptitiously inflates the gameplay hours.

That’s the thing with minigames in general: you spend a few days coding them, and then you can recycle them infinitely, wasting hours and hours of the player’s time with almost no coding effort — just by defining new targets.

It's purpose was to add an alternate source of income and add plants that would allow you to trigger lust scenes easier(not sure if these were added yet) while allowing Runey to expand on Jin's storyline.

Thanks for the reply o/

But honestly I don't think this is a game for me, maybe few years ago. But i cannot stand when a character waste time constantly, i have to keep skipping time so much, cause there is nothing to do. o__o

Really depends on what you mean by wasting time. If you mean just skipping days, doing nothing, to wait on money generation - then there shouldn't be much of that. Early game it used to be a mixture of girls/waiting, but Runey added the bowling mini game, so ontop of taking/selling photos, you have slightly more options for cash early game if you need it.
If you think spending time with the girls to level whichever sexual stat you're working on is wasting time, then yes, there is a lot of that since each girl has 5+ different sex stats to level.

 

[torpedogoat]

If you mean just skipping days, doing nothing, to wait on money generation - then there shouldn't be much of that.

In my experience, even with the money cheat, there can be a lot of day skipping at the end for players like me who have started the game recently and have no idea which events were in the game from very early on and which are relatively recent. The problem is that it's possible (and, I guess, likely) that you play all the wrong (late) plots to the end until you find the (early) one you need to advance in order to get a variety of new events. So you must often skip to the next week and go to a specific room to get the next event. And when you are unlucky, that event is cancelled due to a competing event caused by a much later plot element.

A related issue is continuity errors. The most grave one: It is possible to go through events with a character who is supposed to be traveling at the time. Like the previous problem, the issue is that the various combinations of doing events from early game versions concurrently with events from late game versions never get tested because the testers know the rough order in which events are expected, even if they don't rely on older saves.

This is a general defect of practically all sandbox games. Harem Hotel is the only sandbox game I know that is so well programmed that it makes sense for most of the time (i.e. isn't inferior to an AVN [oops: I wrote VPN] most of the time). Most other sandbox games have problems similar to what I described, and others, from very early on.

 

[shadowtempered]

In my experience, even with the money cheat, there can be a lot of day skipping at the end for players like me who have started the game recently and have no idea which events were in the game from very early on and which are relatively recent. The problem is that it's possible (and, I guess, likely) that you play all the wrong (late) plots to the end until you find the (early) one you need to advance in order to get a variety of new events. So you must often skip to the next week and go to a specific room to get the next event. And when you are unlucky, that event is cancelled due to a competing event caused by a much later plot element.

Oh there's most def some down time, especially for new players, but in theory you shouldn't need to be skipping weeks out of time. Part of the issue is the game presents itself early on as a sandbox when it's really just a VN with optional sandbox components. This leads folks to picking favorite characters and then getting deadlocked because of some character they were ignoring being relevant to a plot point, but now you gotta catch them up. If you go in playing each girl relatively evenly, this is less of an issue but it's definitely something we've seen complaints about in the past.

A related issue is continuity errors. The most grave one: It is possible to go through events with a character who is supposed to be traveling at the time. Like the previous problem, the issue is that the various combinations of doing events from early game versions concurrently with events from late game versions never get tested because the testers know the rough order in which events are expected, even if they don't rely on older saves.

This is a general defect of practically all sandbox games. Harem Hotel is the only sandbox game I know that is so well programmed that it makes sense for most of the time (i.e. isn't inferior to a VPN most of the time). Most other sandbox games have problems similar to what I described, and others, from very early on.

I doubt we'll ever get full notifications/blocks for events to prevent this completely. This used to be relatively minor but it's only ramped up over the last two updates. Runey used to take reports for this with the goal to add in blocks to stop disappearing/reappearing story npcs but since he hasn't really been active here in a while, it's difficult to gauge if this is still a goal or not.

 

[ashwiiii_1]

can anyone tell the cheat code for harem hotel v_0.19 beta

 

[shadowtempered]

can anyone tell the cheat code for harem hotel v_0.19 beta

Since your search is broken, they're here:
https://f95zone.to/threads/harem-hotel-v0-19-beta4-runey.12760/post-17713176

 

[Gamer_Dan92]

I can't seem to get Nia's Level 9 event to trigger. I see it says that it'll activate if I go to the Santuary when she isn't there but when I go nothing happens, even if she isn't standing in the room

 

[shadowtempered]

I can't seem to get Nia's Level 9 event to trigger. I see it says that it'll activate if I go to the Santuary when she isn't there but when I go nothing happens, even if she isn't standing in the room

Nia's level 9 event is entering the hotel.
Nia's level 8 event is entering sanctuary.

You must be registered to see the links

There was one other post in the last few pages asking the same question but I saw no response or follow up if it had worked. If you're using the beta version, you might want to join Runey's discord and ask there to confirm if it's a bug. Otherwise, it's whatever the internal timing triggers are.

 

[holyknight3]

No, the code is a unmaintainable mess constricting development. it's not unoptimized, people often incorrectly call things spaghetti code but this is why every update rolls in broken and adds months to dev time.

I don't recall calling the code 'Spaghetti code'. Pretty sure python doesn't support GOTO (it does not, by design), which makes true spaghetti code impossible. And you may possibly be right, and I have ZERO doubt that Harem Hotel has a ton of technical debt which is just getting pushed off. The time that it would take to fix that technical debt is also time that isn't spent attempting to get out new updates, which would probably cost him patreon subs. Assuming a 25% rate of technical debt (A large assumption, I admit), it would take a year and a half given their current dev schedule to pay down that debt. That is a year and a half worth of shit they have gotten used to, for better or worse.

I looked through the python code, and I didn't see anything terribly egregious. I did not open up the RenPy scripts, because my experience with those is zero. A brief look at the docs didn't reveal much. Which files do you have a problem with in particular? And if you problem is optimization, then you are barking up the wrong tree here. The language is Python, the literal last choice for optimization. The game will still run decently on a potato anyway, so there isn't a need. Optimization comes at the end, not during dev.

 

[Aronkha]

Android port anyone?

 

[torresm]

I don't recall calling the code 'Spaghetti code'. Pretty sure python doesn't support GOTO (it does not, by design), which makes true spaghetti code impossible.

I don't think he meant you specifically, just "people". And Renpy has jump, which is basically goto with a different name.

I looked through the python code, and I didn't see anything terribly egregious. I did not open up the RenPy scripts, because my experience with those is zero. A brief look at the docs didn't reveal much.

I'm curious now, what exactly did you look through if not the scripts? If you mean the stuff in the \python\ folder, all that comes with the SDK and game devs normally don't touch them. You'll have to look through the scripts to see the dev's handiwork, but don't worry, they're easy to follow with even a basic knowledge in coding (speaking from experience lol).

 

[Gamer_Dan92]

Nia's level 9 event is entering the hotel.
Nia's level 8 event is entering sanctuary.

You must be registered to see the links

There was one other post in the last few pages asking the same question but I saw no response or follow up if it had worked. If you're using the beta version, you might want to join Runey's discord and ask there to confirm if it's a bug. Otherwise, it's whatever the internal timing triggers are.

Yea I might have to check the discord. It says Nia is 9/10 for me with an exclamation point next to her, but whether I enter lobby or sanctuary, nothing is triggering

 

[ZenoMod]

It's purpose was to add an alternate source of income and add plants that would allow you to trigger lust scenes easier(not sure if these were added yet) while allowing Runey to expand on Jin's storyline.

My point is that a VN should be engaging in all its content.
I get, and I appreciate, the progression from rejection to sex, but what we do to seduce the LI should be enjoyable as well; it should be part of the normal gameplay. Minigames aren't. Never ever.

Not even the rare examples of minigames that could be enjoyable if played as standalone games. Even those break the gameplay and the story development with something totally different. They become a chore. A toll the user has to pay to access engaging content.

I mean: I like to solve Raven's matrices from time to time, but I hate being forced to solve them to progress the story in a famous AVN I won't name here (not to break the rules).

On the other hand... I would not play a farming minigame even if I was paid to in cash. Let alone if the reward are lewd scenes. It's an instigation to unrar the game and just watch them...

---

Personally, I'd rather have no updates at all for two years - and then a proper update (like all previous 17 updates were) - than an update involving minigames like v0.18 was.

 

[ZenoMod]

I don't recall calling the code 'Spaghetti code'. Pretty sure python doesn't support GOTO (it does not, by design), which makes true spaghetti code impossible. And you may possibly be right, and I have ZERO doubt that Harem Hotel has a ton of technical debt which is just getting pushed off. The time that it would take to fix that technical debt is also time that isn't spent attempting to get out new updates, which would probably cost him patreon subs. Assuming a 25% rate of technical debt (A large assumption, I admit), it would take a year and a half given their current dev schedule to pay down that debt. That is a year and a half worth of shit they have gotten used to, for better or worse.

I looked through the python code, and I didn't see anything terribly egregious. I did not open up the RenPy scripts, because my experience with those is zero. A brief look at the docs didn't reveal much. Which files do you have a problem with in particular? And if you problem is optimization, then you are barking up the wrong tree here. The language is Python, the literal last choice for optimization. The game will still run decently on a potato anyway, so there isn't a need. Optimization comes at the end, not during dev.

I'm not a Ren'Py professional, but I have read dozens of Ren'Py scripts from the major Devs on this site and since they ALL use Ren'Py jump instruction, I have to assume that Ren'Py script doesn't provide a more structured flow control.
After all, it's understandable: Ren'Py was designed with Visual Novels in mind. A visual novel require branching, but it doesn't require anything like while - do, do - while, or for loops.

@torresm is right: in a Ren'Py game all the Dev's work is in the game folder, specifically in the .rpy scripts. The code in the other two folders (namely lib and renpy folders), is standard code provided by the Ren'Py SDK, and it works out-of-the-box so the Dev typically doesn't change it.

Optimization is not an issue talking about a VN.

What may be an issue is maintainability.

It's not a matter of writing code in a machine-friendly style. Quite the opposite: it's a matter of writing code in a human-readable style - and as ordered and structured as Ren'Py allows to do - to be able to add new content seamlessly, that is without any new content potentially being incompatible with previous code.

I'm not assessing that Harem Hotel does have such an issue (I'm not qualified enough to confirm it nor to deny it), but I am sure that as long as a Ren'Py VN is concerned saving CPU or GPU cycles is not an issue; maintainability is the issue, if you are going to publish the game by incremental updates.

 

[Neoempiricist]

I have been following this title here, on Discord and Itchio etc. since 2018 and have been charmed enough by it with its evolving storyline to continue doing that. The effort that has and continues to go into this development is worthy of recognition and is atypical of games in this category. The female characters one first encounters are mostly sweet and interesting young people (in maturity if not in in-game age) and initially the focus is on the relationship and relations with the male MC. The underlying story is only hinted at in the beginning but, as time progresses, gradually emerges and is sufficiently engaging to keep players who appreciate a story-rich VN motivated. The MC character is morally and ethically dubious and appears at times highly protective of his evolving harem and at other time manipulative and exploitative of the vulnerable young women under his charge. Since you ARE the MC, you probably want to gloss over this darker aspect of “your” character and play him as optimally intended by the author for the fullest enjoyment and development of the title. Highly recommended.

 

[luwinkle]

I really wish Runey would make more repeatable actions, especially with the elves in the sanctuary. Like the event with Sylvia in the kitchen. There's absolutely 0 reason why that shouldn't be a repeatable. And rather easily done, as well.

But he seems really hellbent on trying to write war and peace in a Honey Select porn game.

This coming from someone who patreon'd HH off and on for years.


On a sidenote with the buggy beta I can't get Ellen beyond level 2. I got everyone else maxed but just can't get her next event to fire. :|