Either they're dumb as you say, or that they wouldn't want to lose a substantial amount of people pouring their loose changes to Siren, which also means the staff losing some money off their paychecks. Projects made by Siren and the like bring the most money to Patreon (the other being 2D artists, for example) -- you know big games with a small development team and a bunch of people who had such high hopes that not even development hell or developers' negligence could even bring them down.
It's natural for them to let some people through to make sure everyone is happy, I'd say.
Pwener of course they know. Very few games with patches include the actual related dialogue in the patch. You can open the rpy files for Renpy games and the patch usually is one line turning on a variable. Others simply check if a file called patch.rpy is in the games directory. The file itself is literally empty.
The thing is Patreon takes a cut from all these devs. They only need somewhat plausible deniability to avoid bad publicity. Like virtually any company in the world, they are in the business of selling a product and making a profit.
Either they're dumb as you say, or that they wouldn't want to lose a substantial amount of people pouring their loose changes to Siren, which also means the staff losing some money off their paychecks. Projects made by Siren and the like bring the most money to Patreon (the other being 2D artists, for example) -- you know big games with a small development team and a bunch of people who had such high hopes that not even development hell or developers' negligence could even bring them down.
It's natural for them to let some people through to make sure everyone is happy, I'd say.
I fail to understand why Siren's Domain didn't move to Unity when they found out that Renpy is not good enough for a modern game. Because, honestly, neither is RPGM.
They enforce it if its straight up. The loophole games use to get around it, mentioned before, is being able to have the player name the roles instead of the game. So therefore there is reasonable deniability from the devs if a player does it, its not on them (even if there is secretly coded dialogue). Patreon honestly doesn't care as profits are profits. Just they can't be the main source of the incest content from the initial download of the game.
I fail to understand why Siren's Domain didn't move to Unity when they found out that Renpy is not good enough for a modern game. Because, honestly, neither is RPGM.
Each engine sucks and rules, depending on what you're looking at. The perfect software is like free energy or water engine: an illusion. There is not a single piece of software that does not have at least one significant flaw. And this is not limited to software, but it's true for all products...
If you want to know what RPGM can do when you "push" it a bit, then check games by NLT ("Lust Epidemic", "Treasure of Nadia" and now "The Genesis Order"). You'll see that the engine isn't everything, at all. And obviously, if you plan on remaking a "Final Fantasy" or a "Zelda" (troll bait: the real ones, the firsts, 8 & 16 bits consoles), it's THE engine you need. But for a VN, a pure VN I mean... Yerk...
Ren'Py quickly sucks when you try to make sandbox / advanced games, unless you add a shit ton of code, but obviously it's the best one for VN or KN - near no code at all is required for such productions, just the graphical resources and the story, then a monkey could assemble the two to produce a playable "game" - which is a graphical novel, in fact, and not a real and actual game... On the other hand, you'll need way more work if you plan to add RPG-like features, free roam / sandbox, grinding things, etc. and you'll probably produce a shit load amount of bugs during the development, due to Python itself first, and probably even more if you're inexperienced.
And Unity... I have mixed feelings for this one. Usually, I don't like games running with Unity. The sandbox mode is often not very better than with Ren'Py, while lacking some elements we're used to with Ren'Py, and I think that the engine is often underused - or badly used and it sucks CPU/GPU like hell. TBH, Ren'Py also often sucks CPU when pushed to its animation limits. Correctly using Unity, or Unreal Engine, or any other 3D engines, requires more than just some models, textures and a bit of story. To properly use them, you need to be a real developper, and not just a storyteller or an artist.
Honestly, I won't even consider the 2D mode of Unity: you'll have near as much work to do as with Ren'Py, for near no gain but saving a bit of CPU/GPU when playing. Yeah, Unity can do 2D. But its real interest is to be able to render 3D in real time, not to show pre-rendered CGI.
Think about it: you have here games for which the devs admit to not know computer development and the game presented is their first attempt - often, Python and Ren'Py save their asses but when you look at the code itself, you won't disbelieve their rookie level. Obviously, for a VN, it doesn't really matter: good models, rendering and possibly animations are more important - bonus points for a good story - but development skills aren't really needed. But here, it's not a VN.
When you try to make a RPG game, whatever kind of universe you plan to set in in, you'll need either a dedicated RPG engine, or real programming competences, and often you'll need both. Otherwise, you'll need a whole team and a AAA-game studio to redo yourself all the little things such a game need. And let's face reality: even AAA-game studios use third-party engines and libraries anyway! When you look at all the third-party softwares that a company like Blizzard use in their games, you'll understand that they would never finish a single game if they were forced to redevelop everything with internal resources... So, an engine is totally a crucial thing for a single, amateur developer.
The learning curve for using a new engine isn't always easy, and you'll probably have to trash a lot of your previous work (libraries, code snippets, tools, ...), and sometimes you won't even be able to keep your graphical resources (switching from 2D to 3D is a good reason) or to keep the same look-and-feel for the characters (i.e. a cartoonish look vs. a realistic look). Even for audio, you may need a lot of work to simply keep them, or you'll have to recompress them - with a possible high loss of quality.
So it's not so easy to switch engine, it's not like snapping fingers. For the kind of games produced by Siren, RPGM is still the best/fastest choice, and I personally like the 16-bits look & feel. Ren'Py requires too much work to be usable for such games, and Unity, while being better, requires also a lot of work to be adapted - and stepping to 3D would require a huge investment from the dev, while staying limited to 2D won't give much more than Ren'Py.
Major Scenes added:
Linda Holiday Sex (Day & Night)
New Location:
Living Room (Festive)
Costumes Added:
Linda (Holiday)
== New Content ==
Beta 0.7 is the first holiday update for House Chores!
To activate the event, when you have fully romanced Linda, going to sleep the next day will automatically trigger the event.
In the future, if a currency system is added, this event may be activated in a slightly different way so this log may
become outdated.
I hope you all enjoy this little holiday moment and I hope you all have a Happy Holidays!
Man there is just something about this game that checks so many boxes for me, wish it got a little more prioritization from Siren's side, I like it more than Town of Passion or Zombies Retreat. I know they were dealing with artist issues but hopefully that is resolved.
Agreed. I really liked Town of Passion but after a while it became too ridiculous for me to want to continue. Zombies Retreat was okay at first, but I stopped playing when it became a chore. I think what I like about this is it isn't absolutely bonkers. Like it's just in a house and yeah the ideas are ridiculous, but it's a porn game, so who cares.
Agreed. I really liked Town of Passion but after a while it became too ridiculous for me to want to continue. Zombies Retreat was okay at first, but I stopped playing when it became a chore. I think what I like about this is it isn't absolutely bonkers. Like it's just in a house and yeah the ideas are ridiculous, but it's a porn game, so who cares.
Yeah I agree, once the vacations started in ToP and you had to do very specific things to unlock everything and what not, just became overly complicated. Art is great, scenes are great, just needed work on the gameplay and with HC, it's just so simple, no crazy game mechanics to figure out. It just needs more content. I tried out ZR earlier but the version at the time was buggy, I'll give it another go now that it's finished.
I can't trigger the holiday event. I reached the end of the mom's route, found all three presents, fucked her all around the house, talked to her, and gone to sleep several times.
