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

professorx10 · Jul 12, 2023

anne O'nymous said:
Yes we are, and unlike the few sour guys still coming here time to time, because they can't live with the idea that there's happy people on Earth, I can tell that the only way to delay the release is to shutdown internet, or to burn Notty's house.

Not a 'sour guy' ... just someone waiting for the big ONE!

JD59 · Jul 12, 2023

Just keep in mind she will release the game progressively. Chapter Five will come later :

Krynh said:
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It's the "Good news!" update...
Well, hello!
And good news it does appear to be as, for once, I'm not going to prattle on about development, graphics design, rectifying gameplay faults or, indeed, anything problematic. Instead, I'm going to talk about releasing content.
I can wait a moment if you need to pick yourself up off the floor?
Ready? Ok then...
The "cut to the chase bit" is that in a couple of weeks I'm going to start putting up fresh downloads. There has been some discussion with the testers over whether I should wait until we had absolutely everything tested and cleared and then do a single drop or whether, since we're testing each refreshed chapter in order, update as we go.
Given that there is a lot of new content in each chapter, even if only animations, I decided that I may as well release chapter by chapter. After all it has no impact on the final release date of Five and the only real difference is that completed work is available for you if you want it as opposed to just sitting on my hard drive.
Of course, this also puts the decision in your hands. You can download each chapter as they come out or simply wait until Five drops and do a single download then. You don't need me to make that decision for you. As discussed before, chapters will be in both HD and compressed versions for your convenience.
Releases will be every couple of weeks, sometimes even weekly and will be in the following order:
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Strip Philosophy Ping Pong*
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
New Trailer
Chapter Five
Secret Project 2**
Bonus Pack

Why not release work now? Why the couple of weeks?
To allow a bit more time for testing and animation corrections. Once I start dropping content I want it to be consistent and frequent.
Heavy Five was always a complex little game and that's even more so now. There is still some work the testers haven't seen and I want the final product to be as perfect as possible for you and so I want a little space to ensure the guys have had sufficient time to try and break it. On animations (and, crikey there are a lot of those) although I'm happy they play smoothly enough I also want to ensure that there's nothing I've missed. i.e. no small clipping or other errors which haven't been noticed. Bugs are quick to fix, animations less so. Hence a bit of padding timewise.
Plus I have some admin to do. I need to re-jig the Patreon page (Patreon are doing some format changes so I need to completely update it), clear a ton of messages and generally clear the decks and do some housekeeping before I start dropping releases.
Do I need to play through everything again?
No. In doing the re-design I've worked pretty hard to ensure that this refreshed version remains compatible with your old saves, building the new interface on the old code. The only thing that won't work completely with your old saves will be the "all game achievements" module as this required a different set of coding. So my advice, for what it's worth, would be to do a playthrough on the new version just to see what is new and then use your old saved games as you see fit. But it's your call of course.
How much more work is left to do?
Testing and, any, animation corrections, a bit of re-wiring on Chapter Five and some work on the two "secret projects". That's it.
What on earth are the "secret projects" and why have you done them?
Well, they're a secret? So....
But I'll go so far as to say that one of them is additional in-game content and the other is something useful.
Do you have a solid date for Chapter Five?
Yes. But sod's law if I say when, no doubt something will go wrong. I'd rather not tempt fate at this point.
Does this mean you're going to start charging again?
Not as yet. Charging will remain off until Five is released. You didn't ask for this work to be done and even though it is a massive improvement on what we had before and makes the game a whole lot better, it doesn't feel right to me to expect you to support it.

And I think that's it from me for now. As an aside the new working hours are working a lot better for me, dev-wise that is. Whether I'll continue doing it once all of this is out of the door I don't know. Crunching "real life" means I have less time during the week for things such as Discord, Twitter etc (hence my almost complete absence from social media gubbins of late) so we'll see. What I do know is it has allowed me to be able to focus more of late and nail some of more complex stuff a lot more easily. But so far as the above goes, it was the right call. I should have probably done it earlier but "Shoulda, woulda, coulda" doesn't get you anywhere does it?
Thanks once again for your continued interest and patience. Stay, or be, lucky.

Notty

* Given the show it's based off is in Chapter Two, it seemed a good idea to drop this here.
**Not a typo. There's also a Secret Project 1, but that's hidden in Chapter Five. I've been a busy little bee...

brody990 · Jul 14, 2023

JD59 said:
Just keep in mind she will release the game progressively. Chapter Five will come later :

I think it's just nice to have a solid bit of info, like Notty does amazing work but everyone knows dates arent her strong suit (her lack of luck taken into account) so we have a set timeline now to expect it sooner than later instead of it being up in the air.

Oddball2k · Jul 15, 2023

Krynh · Jul 15, 2023

Nottravisgames

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Hello!

Just a quick(ish) post this week for, incredible as it may seem, I have some downloads for you...

As I mentioned in my last post, I'm going to be re-releasing a new chapter every couple of weeks until we get to Chapter Five. This is largely as Five still has some play testing to be done and rather than me just sitting on everything until it was ready to go, I thought I'd give you the choice of having regular updates.

It is of course your choice. You can feel free to ignore the updates and just wait until Five drops and download it all in a single go. Totally up to you.

There are, as promised earlier, two versions of each chapter. The standard version and a compressed one. The compressed versions are, roughly, a third of the size of the standard one and I've tried to hit the sweet spot of "smallest size yet still acceptable graphics quality". Certainly any smaller than this and the graphics become, to my eyes at least, unacceptable. The compressed version is, however, of a lower graphics quality. Still images are slightly more washed out and animations, although presentable, are less sharp and smooth in comparison to the standard version. Note that the file sizes for both are disproportionately large for this chapter due to the inclusion of all the interface graphics. But these are needed from the start and thus this is unavoidable I'm afraid.

Changes (and why)

The old interface was awful. It looked terrible and wasn't very useful or clear. So it's been improved to rectify those issues.

Path guidance was non existent. This has been a major buff. I haven't gone so far as to provide a walkthrough as I dislike the concept of them to be honest. That becomes less you playing the game and more you following a series of steps typed out for you. But H5 has so many paths that it would be easy to not even realise the content existed. So now there is both a "major plot point" path identifying together with individual ones for each character. Both done on a chapter by chapter basis. Why both types? Well you as the player may just want to have an idea over character content without accidently revealing any story points. It's just a way to give you a bit of flexibility in how you play.

Immersion destruction. Prior versions of H5 had an introduction from Becca. she'd explain the chapter, any new features and then say how'd you done at the end of the game. It was cute and fun and she was quite popular in some places but...she did kill any immersion in the game. So she's gone, replaced by a new "in-universe" start and tutorial and with an "in-universe" results scene.

Animation buffs. The old ones weren't too awful but I had a lot of power sitting around whilst I re-coded the game and added extra and new content. Polishing the animations seemed a bit of "no-brainer" as they could run whilst I was busy.

I'm still behind on admin issues, such as clearing mail and refreshing/re-designing the patreon page but I've taken a couple of days off at the start of next week to do this (I needed to make some changes to the combat modules in Three and Four and so the time originally set aside for admin went on development work. Sorry...)

And that's it for now. We're getting there and for those who do decide to have a download of the above, I think you'll notice quite a difference in terms of quality overall.

Until later, stay lucky guys.

Notty