Ren'Py Abandoned Heavy Five [Ch.2RS] [Nottravis]

[Oddball2k]

Is this thread has become troll central?

*singing* So be good, for goodness’ sake! Whoa... something's coming! Something's coming soon!

 

[reiterhaniwa]

Wait it's still not ready

What do you mean, "still"? Dev's still got another three months to make it in time, by your reckoning.

 

[Patchez]

What do you mean, "still"? Dev's still got another three months to make it in time, by your reckoning.

Hey, I still like the game, it's just I came here before a while ago and heard the same spiel about it coming out soon when I asked about release date. Got to the point where I got 2k word message about the "missing deadlines and drama" from someone

 

[reiterhaniwa]

Hey, I still like the game, it's just I came here before a while ago and heard the same spiel about it coming out soon when I asked about release date. someone

Just pointing out that someone with your, ah, challenges with the perception of time possibly isn't the most apt to be commenting. Don't take that for a moral judgement, we all have our own crosses to bear after all.

Got to the point where I got 2k word message about the "missing deadlines and drama" from someone

That's not really a surprise considering the amount of posters in the thread who whine about deadlines when as far as I'm aware the dev has never set one, and certainly hasn't recently. You can only remind people so many times before patience starts to wear a little thin. Now there's a conversation I definitely have never held before.

 

[reiterhaniwa]

Paused for 2 months (May+March) if we start the countdown from January while predicting Feb/March delivery? Doesn't that place it April/May to release? Or did I miss an extra month, which makes it May/June?

As far as I am aware, payments were paused for two months earlier this year, refunded for another, and paused in May and have not yet resumed.

 

[imnotoverhere]

Just pointing out that someone with your, ah, challenges with the perception of time possibly isn't the most apt to be commenting. Don't take that for a moral judgement, we all have our own crosses to bear after all.


That's not really a surprise considering the amount of posters in the thread who whine about deadlines when as far as I'm aware the dev has never set one, and certainly hasn't recently. You can only remind people so many times before patience starts to wear a little thin. Now there's a conversation I definitely have never held before.

Notty has repeatedly provided deadlines on this forum and on her patreon. On this forum she posted in January that she was gunning for a February release. She then shifted it to March (and posted on her Patreon that she was aiming for March). Please double check your facts. Also, please refrain from belittling people as it turns the forum into a hostile space. This comment, "you can only remind people so many times before patience starts to wear a little thin" is needlessly antagonistic.

 

[Astriedax]

Imagine putting time and effort to deliver something good, that one can be proud of. Then because things are more complicated than it looks, same person chose to not even getting paid. Some of the people who will have access aren't even patreons.

It's certainly outrageous! Notty may be the incarnation of evil itself. I mean, taking time to polish and deliver a finished high quality product, donating her time, while she ain't getting paid for the last months. I am just speechless by such a EVIL act. I am sure she came up with this diabolic plan, while she was eating babies on breakfast.

Anyhow. Some people have different things that keeps they going. For some people, things needs to be like they want it to be, otherwise it simply doesn't worth doing. As far as I know, Notty is a new developer, she didn't have the machine, and is was still learning to code. Hence, the remaster for better renders once she upgraded, and thus the incorrect timelines. For what I know, developing can be very deceiving in terms of ETA, and she's an indie of 1-man band.

 

[XaGnard]

Imagine putting time and effort to deliver something good, that one can be proud of. Then because things are more complicated than it looks, same person chose to not even getting paid. Some of the people who will have access aren't even patreons.

It's certainly outrageous! Notty may be the incarnation of evil itself. I mean, taking time to polish and deliver a finished high quality product, donating her time, while she ain't getting paid for the last months. I am just speechless by such a EVIL act. I am sure she came up with this diabolic plan, while she was eating babies on breakfast.

Anyhow. Some people have different things that keeps they going. For some people, things needs to be like they want it to be, otherwise it simply doesn't worth doing. As far as I know, Notty is a new developer, she didn't have the machine, and is was still learning to code. Hence, the remaster for better renders once she upgraded, and thus the incorrect timelines. For what I know, developing can be very deceiving in terms of ETA, and she's an indie of 1-man band.

It doesn't matter how much some people here try to ignore it, if an update takes 9+ months and is constantly postponed, you should become a bit skeptical. It is possible to discuss something like this without it being regarded as a condemnation of the developer.

Especially perfectionists can benefit greatly from a little more time pressure. Not everyone who is creative is necessarily good at project management. If people always pretend that there is no problem with 9+ months per update, there is no hope for improvement.

 

[NeimadFR]

It doesn't matter how much some people here try to ignore it, if an update takes 9+ months and is constantly postponed, you should become a bit skeptical. It is possible to discuss something like this without it being regarded as a condemnation of the developer.

Especially perfectionists can benefit greatly from a little more time pressure. Not everyone who is creative is necessarily good at project management. If people always pretend that there is no problem with 9+ months per update, there is no hope for improvement.

I don't think comments on the fact that it take 9+ months are what tick people off, it's the implications that she's been doing nothing and is milking her patrons. Some of us are following the development closely and we know the amount of work she's been doing so it bothers us when the uninformed start throwing accusations, and most importantly blatantly ignore anything we say. The fact that she's been pausing pledges on Patreon for month should also prove that she's not milking patrons.
I agree that she have issues with project management and perfectionism and I welcome constructive criticisism such as yours but sadly what we get most of the time is just trolling and baseless accusations with no openeness to discussion.

 

[TheDevian]

It doesn't matter how much some people here try to ignore it, if an update takes 9+ months and is constantly postponed, you should become a bit skeptical. It is possible to discuss something like this without it being regarded as a condemnation of the developer.

Especially perfectionists can benefit greatly from a little more time pressure. Not everyone who is creative is necessarily good at project management. If people always pretend that there is no problem with 9+ months per update, there is no hope for improvement.

It also depends on what you get in that time period. This next update has over 20 min of fully rendered, 30fps video for example, enough to make a full TV show episode, all done on one 2080ti. Not to mention over a 100 paths already.

The original version of the first chapter, had so many paths, that it kept one guy going for over a month, and he still never saw everything. And now that is been expanded, and even includes options for Male/Female, with a black or white version of each. That's 4 paths right there, before you have even started the game.

Sure, it is taking a while, but I don't know anyone else trying to do anything close to this ambitious. If she had nothing to show for this time, sure, that might be a problem, especially if she was still charging people, but she is clearly producing results, we see it all the time. Between that, and all of the refunds and paused billing, you can easily see that she is doing her best, and producing results. Most of the time, it is her supporters telling her they want to pay her anyway, even when she pauses it, because they can see how hard she is working.

Different strokes for different folks. This game is not for everyone. Some people are happy to throw out any slop they can, others are perfectionists, with everything in between. If you don't like how a dev works, don't support them, it's as simple as that.

 

[Astriedax]

It doesn't matter how much some people here try to ignore it, if an update takes 9+ months and is constantly postponed, you should become a bit skeptical. It is possible to discuss something like this without it being regarded as a condemnation of the developer.

Especially perfectionists can benefit greatly from a little more time pressure. Not everyone who is creative is necessarily good at project management. If people always pretend that there is no problem with 9+ months per update, there is no hope for improvement.

Experience and staff size also play a role on development time.
We can discuss what is the ideal time frame per release, but a few things to consider first.
Compromises would be a natural consequence, that means, rushed story, cut content with unsatisfying result, worse renders, worse animations, shorter chapters, small segments of chapters release with dead ends waiting for new updates to complete the chapters... In the end of the day, it would more likely turn the game into a pile of shit, and make the playtime not great.
Also, if you think about it, if it takes 9 months for a complete chapter, or if we get 9 small release pieces of the same chapter each month, we would get the exact same product. In one case scenario means wait for a finished flashed out product, the other means less waiting but riddled with bugs, dead ends, save corruption, not worth update content length, and also would be more likely to delay the development process further.

Anyhow, next topic. Size. Simply put, it won't be a small update. I believe it would be worth of 2.5 - 5 months of other creators that rush and release content without quality. Now when you add the quality into the mix, and the good writing, I am fine with the time frame personally.
Does X or Y developers deliver more in the same time frame? Sure. But their game is not this game.

Personal level. Artists, writers and people that like quality, simply put, will feel bad if they have to release something in a shit state. As flawed humans are, you get to understand that in the long term run, if the developer doesn't feel good about their baby, it's doomed.
It's not a company business, in fact it's not even a business model we have here. It's a person who is developing a game, which get funded by people who want to support said person to keep doing what he/she enjoys doing. Therefore, the perfectionism rhetoric couldn't be less meaningless. In business there are metrics to beat, profit to generate, except this is not business.

 

[professorx10]

...
I agree that she have issues with project management and perfectionism and I welcome constructive criticisism such as yours but sadly what we get most of the time is just trolling and baseless accusations with no openeness to discussion.

If I may, your observation about the trolling and baseless accusations is accurate. About the discussion, my 2 cents is that there is not much else to discuss but delays and deadline extensions when a new revision takes over half a year. That makes it look like the dev has a lot of ambition and limited follow through.

I agree that what she's done is excellent work. I think part of the project management issue is really basic game design. I still posit that making the mc choose different characters --one of 4-6 characters (sorry forgot ?)-- and making each character have a different main game path is a design problem that creates management issues...and uprev issues. I think that is a major contributing reason to her long delivery times & difficulties. If I had a constructive criticism, it would be to not try to uprev all the character's paths at the same time with each uprev, but maybe handle one at a time so she could put out one path upgrade every 2-3 months.

That alone would change the tone of discussion on this thread.

 

[NeimadFR]

If I may, your observation about the trolling and baseless accusations is accurate. About the discussion, my 2 cents is that there is not much else to discuss but delays and deadline extensions when a new revision takes over half a year. That makes it look like the dev has a lot of ambition and limited follow through.

I agree that what she's done is excellent work. I think part of the project management issue is really basic game design. I still posit that making the mc choose different characters --one of 4-6 characters (sorry forgot ?)-- and making each character have a different main game path is a design problem that creates management issues...and uprev issues. I think that is a major contributing reason to her long delivery times & difficulties. If I had a constructive criticism, it would be to not try to uprev all the character's paths at the same time with each uprev, but maybe handle one at a time so she could put out one path upgrade every 2-3 months.

That alone would change the tone of discussion on this thread.

I'm not sure what you mean by characters path, is it the 4 choices of MC a the start or the different love interest?
If it's the former, there is a lot of overlap between each MC for example white male and black male would probably be 90% the same thing.
If it's the latter the game structure makes it impossible to have one Sarah update followed by one Chris update and so on and so forth.
The only possible way segmenting the updates could work is if she did one for the morning, one for the afternoon and one for the evening.

 

[Akamari]

I agree that what she's done is excellent work. I think part of the project management issue is really basic game design. I still posit that making the mc choose different characters --one of 4-6 characters (sorry forgot ?)-- and making each character have a different main game path is a design problem that creates management issues...and uprev issues. I think that is a major contributing reason to her long delivery times & difficulties. If I had a constructive criticism, it would be to not try to uprev all the character's paths at the same time with each uprev, but maybe handle one at a time so she could put out one path upgrade every 2-3 months.

On the design part in general, I respectfuly disagree. I really don't like the approach with updates focusing on just one specific path / girl. The main reason is that there's a good chance it may not be the path / girl you follow. So, an update gets released and... it's disappointing because there may be nothing in it for me and my waiting continues. I have abandoned games before because after three updates of my chosen path not getting any new content I just simply didn't care anymore when it finally happened. Over a year with no update for me personally.

I'm a firm believer that a released playable update should be for every player of the game to enjoy and not just those lucky that their path got chosen. The "complete chapter" release is one of my favourite design features of Heavy Five. Yes, it takes longer, but it's worth it in the end. I can play the way I want to play without hitting any TBA walls.

Now, personal preferences aside, a path focused release approach is by design impossible in Heavy Five. The reason is that there are many paths and they intertwine. At pretty much any given point, you are following several different paths simultaneously, depending on your choices. These paths converge, diverge, pause, stop, continue, split...etc. all the time. It's a network that can't be easily seperated. It functions only as a whole.

So as Neimad says, the only way to split the releases is by having shorter part-chapter updates for every path and that in my opinion wouldn't be satisfying for many people. I think a substantial playtime within a single download is generally more preferable than a short one.

 

[professorx10]

I'm not sure what you mean by characters path, is it the 4 choices of MC a the start or the different love interest?
If it's the former, there is a lot of overlap between each MC for example white male and black male would probably be 90% the same thing.
If it's the latter the game structure makes it impossible to have one Sarah update followed by one Chris update and so on and so forth.
The only possible way segmenting the updates could work is if she did one for the morning, one for the afternoon and one for the evening.

I was referring to the 4 choices of MC at the start.
Now, if as you say, the path's are 90% the same, why not make them 100% and just let the player choose the character 'look' that they prefer? The drop in workload would be significant, not to mention the reduction of frustration of those who return to the beginning, change character and then find out they've only found so little additional game play it wasn't worth the effort?
I did assume that later in the plot, the character choice would make a significant difference in plot events because of the way the Dev set the game up. One would think so.

So again, I know it's too late to change the game design, but I was just pointing out that the '4 paths going forward' game concept might be a significant cause for the slow development and therefore the majority of comments all being toward the frustration of waiting endlessly for any new revisions.

Which at this point, seems to be possibly Late Sept. Early Oct. Maybe?

 

[I'm Not Thea Lundgren!]

...

Which at this point, seems to be possibly Late Sept. Early Oct. Maybe?

If you follow Notty on Twitter you'll have seen the release should be coming this week.

 

[TheDevian]

I was referring to the 4 choices of MC at the start.
Now, if as you say, the path's are 90% the same, why not make them 100% and just let the player choose the character 'look' that they prefer?

That would make little sense, and not be very fun or realistic. People react differently to you based on who and what you are. If nothing else, the sex scenes have to be different.

 

[NeimadFR]

I was referring to the 4 choices of MC at the start.
Now, if as you say, the path's are 90% the same, why not make them 100% and just let the player choose the character 'look' that they prefer? The drop in workload would be significant, not to mention the reduction of frustration of those who return to the beginning, change character and then find out they've only found so little additional game play it wasn't worth the effort?
I did assume that later in the plot, the character choice would make a significant difference in plot events because of the way the Dev set the game up. One would think so.

So again, I know it's too late to change the game design, but I was just pointing out that the '4 paths going forward' game concept might be a significant cause for the slow development and therefore the majority of comments all being toward the frustration of waiting endlessly for any new revisions.

Which at this point, seems to be possibly Late Sept. Early Oct. Maybe?

To be fair the 90% estimate was specifically for my experience with black and white male as of chapter 3, or black and white female for that matter. It probably drops to 70% between male and female.

 

[Akamari]

If you follow Notty on Twitter you'll have seen the release should be coming this week.

I'll elaborate on this little bit.

OK, first to the angry mob all those repeatedly complaining about delays, please settle down and don't respond to this with another complaint. Thank you. Or if you do, be nice and constructive.

Now, as I shared earlier (which I guess was deleted too so maybe most of you haven't seen it), the final testing was envisioned to start on saturday. That didn't happen, but there are good reasons for that, and no, it's not Notty's perfectionism.

- First, testing of the Chris domme module is ongoing and based on feedback Notty made some adjustments. So it needs a bit more testing.
- Second, Notty added a bit more content to the game.
- Third, there were a few fixes to be made.

That's development for you. None of this could have been predicted ahead of time.

Notty tends to be a perhaps bit too optimistic about the future at times (in my medical expertise possibly a result of sleep deprivation/jaffa cake overdose/finally seeing the finish line after all the hard work, or combination thereof), so again please don't take this as a promised release date. Objectively speaking, based on my knowledge of the work left, this week is a fairly reasonable estimate. However, there may be a major bug/glitch still yet hidden that could foil it. That had happened before. Still, it's possible it will go well, so fingers crossed.

We'll try to bring you as polished release as we can. I'll try to keep you guys updated as the testing progresses.

 

[imnotoverhere]

OK, first to the angry mob all those repeatedly complaining about delays, please settle down and don't respond to this with another complaint. Thank you. Or if you do, be nice and constructive.

Now, as I shared earlier (which I guess was deleted too so maybe most of you haven't seen it), the final testing was envisioned to start on saturday. That didn't happen, but there are good reasons for that, and no, it's not Notty's perfectionism.

- First, testing of the Chris domme module is ongoing and based on feedback Notty made some adjustments. So it needs a bit more testing.
- Second, Notty added a bit more content to the game.
- Third, there were a few fixes to be made.

That's development for you. None of this could have been predicted ahead of time.

Notty tends to be a perhaps bit too optimistic about the future at times (in my medical expertise possibly a result of sleep deprivation/jaffa cake overdose/finally seeing the finish line after all the hard work, or combination thereof), so again please don't take this as a promised release date. Objectively speaking, based on my knowledge of the work left, this week is a fairly reasonable estimate. However, there may be a major bug/glitch still yet hidden that could foil it. That had happened before. Still, it's possible it will go well, so fingers crossed.

We'll try to bring you as polished release as we can. I'll try to keep you guys updated as the testing progresses.

I don't care when Notty releases the game... I'm not paying so it doesn't affect me. Notty can take however long she wants as far as I'm concerned. What I do get frustrated with, is posts such as this one. The first thing you did in your post is describe anyone who points out the repeated delays as an "angry mob".... sorry... "angry mob" and tell them to settle down as if they're kids who are being irrational. This approach is condescending and belittling, especially since these criticisms about Notty are largely accurate. Notty has a huge problem with time management and most companies in this field would view it the same way. I have done development work before so I know that it's a difficult job. Programming is 95% problem solving and 5% coding. At this point Notty has been developing this game for years, however, even at this point she seems to struggle with her timelines and estimates (in January she posted that she was going for a February release).

2 hours ago Notty posted "Pretty sure it will be this week....". However, you have just informed us that the final testing envisioned to be on Saturday didn't happen so there is more testing needed. In addition, Notty has apparently added more content that wasn't planned as well.

To your point "That's development for you. None of this could have been predicted ahead of time." That literally could have been predicted. The whole reason testing exists is because bugs frequently happen during development and testing is there to find them so developers can fix them. Anytime new content is added, testing needs to be done on that, which now increases the amount of potential bugs and testing needed. So, here we have Notty publicly stating that she is "pretty sure" it will release this week, but she has increased the amount of content and bug testing is running behind schedule. Maybe she will hit that target, but her track record isn't that great.

I am not making these statements to attack Notty. I enjoyed the first 3 chapters of this game. I also, don't care when the update is released. I have no personal stake in this. This is just constructive criticism from someone who has done development work. Notty would really benefit from working with someone who could reign in her goals for each update or provide more realistic estimates. Financially, Notty would benefit from this as well. Smaller updates delivered more frequently generally see higher profits as it's easier to keep a fan base subscribed to Patreon. I'm not saying she's just in this for the money but every developer likes to get paid for their work (and making enough to turn it into your primary job is nice). I don't think Notty is attempting to screw people, but when she puts out incorrect estimate after incorrect estimate, many former supporters will start to walk away and assume they were being lied to. It's just a natural reaction. People who do that or complain, are not being trolls or an angry mob. They're people people who felt lied to and are expressing it.