VN Ren'Py Ich Will Project [DEMO]

[AmazonessKing]

Overview:
Eileen, your childhood friend, trust you a secret: How to enter people's psyche, right before disappearing in front of you, and no one around you being able to remember her existence, or do they? With very few knowledge of what is happening, it's your task to unveil the mystery around her and the people close to her. Will you be able to bring her back? Or you will share her fate?​

Developer: AmazonessKing -

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Version: Demo - 1.0
Genre:

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Developer Notes:

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​

 

[Ragnar]

It sounds like an anime, I hope MC doesn't fuck anyones mind.

 

[AmazonessKing]

He can't alter people inside their minds, but he can use what he learns there to do whatever he pleases. He can also do as he pleases inside without consequences outside.
However, I don't plan to make anything fucked up, but rather wholesome. MC will change the girls for the better, but the girls needs to realize first, and the bad endings will consist on the MC failing at this and ending like Eileen. I don't really want to force an story where the MC just save these girls, but rather one where they grow along each other.

 

[AmazonessKing]

Well, going into today's devblog:

I was making changes to how the gallery looks. Since I will embrace Koikatsu for now, I went all in and going to do most assets with it to help give a better feeling of what I'm trying to do.

Today I did something I've been wanting to do for a while, improving the gallery. Before the gallery was a really ugly black mess, and although functional, it wasn't really pretty. So what did I do? Well, I made something I liked from imouto paradise's gallery, I made chibi characters of my own characters and used them for the icon of each gallery.

In addition, the gallery counts with an image gallery and an scene replay gallery. However, when changing between the two, the background and the chibis change, the background to show their psyche outfits, and the chibis are shown in the character's underwear.

In even addition to that, one little detail I really like is that once you finish a route, the character of that route is added to the background. I don't want to reveal how the final picture will be, although you can have a guess with the banner in the OP, but I liked this detail so much that I don't know if add it to the main screen or not. I may do something similar to the main screen.

Of course, it's still not finished, I will either add a frame for the chibis, a background for them, or make the background darker.

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Lastly, I made more scenes the game needs for the intro. I will be doing a lot of those as I prepare the demo as well. Biggest problem with this is that Koikatsu don't have all the maps I could need to finish a game with the variety of the one I'm doing. Things like the beach and the school works really well, but I have to figure out how the hell I can do a castle and a futuristic city. I might as well just use some generic backgrounds.

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That's all for today. And as a final note, here's the music I was working with today. I like looping music, particularly inspiring one.

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I will, hopefully, be posting every day at around this time. So see ya tomorrow.

 

[recreation]

Inspired by

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? xD
Your tags really could use an update if you want to gather some interest

 

[AmazonessKing]

Yeah, in fact, the last name of all characters are in german. However, the name does have to do with the story.
Charlotte Engel
Julia Sauer
Valerie Lang
Laura Müller
and Eileen Becker
I will look into updating the tags in a bit. I do have all the scenes written, but it will take a bit to put it all down.

 

[AmazonessKing]

Today's devblog:
Nothing really significant outside of the code, except... I spent like 3 hours making a gym prop from scratch because I need it. I may need to do the same with a lot of other stuff like a castle, but man... It will be a lot of work, I will see if I can do something to reduce the time I will spend on it, because the gym took enough time, and it's an small thing.

Speaking of small things, it's funny that when I finished the gym, and put models on it, the ring was comically small. Of course, these 2 characters are relatively tall, but still. Instead of fixing it, I will give it an in-game explanation.

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I was also making more images needed for the demo/introduction of each character. As said before, since I believe game development is utilitarian, I will use few images, just to give a feel of "this is how the world looks like", something like what Final Fantasy VII and VIII did with FMV, but not to that extent.

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Lastly, about the code, I'm trying to make the game more pretty and fix some problems I have with replays. For example, when putting a character to a full left or right, they are in the corners. I will make an style to show them not so far but I forgot how to make styles, so I will have to either ask or go through documentations. I've also been experimenting with choices. Originally, there was only one bad ending before triggering a a route, and since then it was going to be linear. However, I figured that INSIDE a route I can add choices, and it would work with points, with 3 choices going from Bad, through Neutral and Good, that would add -1, 0 and +1 points, and in the end, depending on how many points you have, you will have a good, neutral or bad ending.

The choices will only affect dialogue, mostly, and maybe the scene showed as consequence, not a different one, but repeating an old one, as an indicator that, maybe, you are doing something wrong.

And final music note:

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See ya tomorrow.

 

[AmazonessKing]

Today's devblog:
Nothing much to say with images. I'm only 2 image short of completing everything I need for the demo CGs, which is out of 7 images. However, I still need backgrounds, and I have 2 options here:

• Either use the older placeholder backgrounds that are ugly as sin.
• Or make my own custom scenes as I did with the gym, which will help me with future scenes but will take so much time that is stupid.

I think I will use a combination of both. I will make all the scenes, but I will release the demo with some of the older placeholders. I, however, improved some minor things like making the chibis bigger in the gallery and added an alpha channel mask to the background. In addition to that, I redone a problem I found withing the banner image, a god awful problem, but I already fixed it, and also added some shading to some old pics.

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Also, you guys tell me, how the gallery menu looks better, as it was originally or how it looks now or how it originally looked.

Also, I made some custom textboxes, supposed to show in different character's psyche, because I like those details. They are transparent and I hope it isn't too jarring in the eyes, plus, all the character's fonts will change inside of their minds, to reflect where they are, whereas the regular renpy textbox will act as the "real world". I want to change some other guy elements in that aspect.

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But that moves us to the code. I recently made a new thread in dev help asking for something I've been stuck with most of the day, which is probably silly. Trying to change these details seems to be harder than I thought, but I hope I can manage since it may add a bit more of charm.

Speaking of demo, I do have a really really old build of the game, and I'm quite ashamed of it right now, but if you wonder how that looks like, you can find a download link in my discord.

And so, I also want to ask, do you guys think is a good idea to open a patreon right now? The trust is, everything is set, but I was waiting to at least have a demo and different art...

Final music note:

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[Oppai Auteur]

And so, I also want to ask, do you guys think is a good idea to open a patreon right now? The trust is, everything is set, but I was waiting to at least have a demo and different art...

If you're dead set on opening a patreon as soon as you can, I would suggest at least waiting until you have a demo ready to go.

Having money involved can cause extra pressure, so you need to watch out for that. Even though patreon is for donations, there a lot of people who don't view it that way.

If you're willing to wait a little, it might be a good idea to start the patreon after the first couple of updates. That way people can see how consistent your updates are in terms of time and quality

In the end its up to you, just do what you feel comfortable with

 

[Canto Forte]

"even though the game is complete, it sadly lacks art" => N.O.T .. A .. G.A.M.E ... !!!
rECENTLY SOME OTHER DEVs posted their .10 version with the GUI and some pics.
There are text based games ... they say so in the tags so people know what they are gettin' into
Tech demo might mean GUi and some pics, unreal devs use it all the time
<a broken alpha if you will> where they feature the art.
Text is O.K. => GUI is horrendous in text based games though and the grind of hitting the correct invisible hit box is jarring.

About your text boxes ... first of all they are high contrast and will kill immersion ... on top of that ...
all AAA games are done away with them boxes for good in order to allow gamers to actually game and not destroy immersion by covering 30-60% of the screen with useless texts turned meaningless without the art to illustrate them.

Does this clean full render not look awesome enough to you NOT TO SMEAR IT WITH BOXES ???

 

[AmazonessKing]

Having money involved can cause extra pressure, so you need to watch out for that. Even though patreon is for donations, there a lot of people who don't view it that way.

Well, my demo will be, hopefully done in a couple of days, most assets are ready and at this point I'm just trying for the game to look as good as possible. I'm already working full time in the game as well. That's why I made a goal of posting progress here once a day. Plus, right now, the only thing I need to work the most on is making backgrounds with Koikatsu, and that takes a lot of time, and the ones I did recently don't look too good. I figured that as I work on the backgrounds, my patreon can open!

About your text boxes ... first of all they are high contrast and will kill immersion

The idea is quite the contrary. Since I'm making a visual novel, you DO need text boxes. However, I was looking into ways of making it more immersive and fun for the player. For example, Charlotte mind is set in an old town with a castle, so I tried to make a brick wall box. Or Valerie, in a tropical island, with a camo. I'm also playing with the idea of changing fonts, but I may save it only for names.

About the contrast, you may be right, I changed some of them, and I need some of them needs to be more transparent if possible. But as you can see from image, I designed the CGs in a way that boxes don't get in the way, but on top of that boxes are transparent and you can make them disappear in renpy. I also plan on implementing an slider that would control how transparent boxes are for the player!

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Sorry both for the late response, but I have been working all day on the game!

 

[AmazonessKing]

Today's dev blog:

Pretty late, and I'm dead. There were some protests in the country I live in, but that's besides the point. I worked both in the code and the images.

So for images, I finished all the ones I needed for the demo, 2 images for the 3 main girls of the game, that I can easily edit to add more variation, if needed. I have some problems with rendering the intended effects of some of the images, but I will try to fix it by tomorrow.

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Also, I've been working on backgrounds, that look like shit. Before you ask, they are intentionally that bright, there is a good reason why they look like that!

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Additional to that, I'm in the middle of making some cool backgrounds for the gallery, to "showcase" the characters, so to speak.

As for the code, if you can see from my previous post, I managed to implement custom text with a bit of help. I will be designing custom clock displays as well, which is why the old one is not being used anymore! I went forward with the introduction for the demo, and it's almost all done!

And final music note:

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I was starting to wonder if someone actually saw my posts, but thanks for the advice! See ya tomorrow.

 

[AmazonessKing]

On today's really late dev blog:

I spent most of my time improving old backgrounds and making new ones:

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I also made the gallery screens, as I said, and I've been improving those quite a lot, and those may also serve as "character intro" when you make a choice for them.:

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And I have some prototypes for how the clock would look:

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Lastly, for images, I started to design the image buttons you'd click for choices:

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For the code, story is already in place, and I may be adding some changes here or there.

Sorry for the short blog, but man, I'm tired, remember, any criticism is appreciated. See you tomorrow.

 

[Canto Forte]

Are you trying to blind players into submission or hide the hideous backgrounds from view?
Take those shining neon lasers down a notch ... Gamers still want to enjoy their witcher adventures after trying your game !

 

[AmazonessKing]

Are you trying to blind players into submission or hide the hideous backgrounds from view?
Take those shining neon lasers down a notch ... Gamers still want to enjoy their witcher adventures after trying your game !

Do you mean the one that has bloom to the max? Let me see if I can tone it down a bit.
I made some modifications anyway, and ended up like this, in angle and, on top of that, I want then to look like different buildings. My problem is hot lame the floor looks like, specially compared to what I had as "placeholder.

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I think the "control room" has good enough lighting.

 

[Canto Forte]

Yes .. the one on top is ludicrous. The bottom one bares quite a resemblance to a number of tv / movie environments both on land and under water. That kind of "peaceful" light show gamers can
enjoy.

 

[AmazonessKing]

Yes .. the one on top is ludicrous

As I said, it would take quite a lot of time to do something similar using Koikatsu. I can certainly do it, but I would spend a couple of days adding more buildings and a fitting background. I would go back to it if needed, but right now, the one on top, hopefully, fill the bill, for now.

For today dev blog:
Not a lot to say. About art, I finished all the the icons I will need for the demo for the menu select, and also gave it a relatively fitting background. I'm not too found of the rainbow background, but I will have to see into what can I change it later. Also, I made it so the background changes as the story advances and you unlock the secret routes, only having the main 3 girls on it at the beginning. The buttons have an idle and hovered frame, which I hope is enjoyable.

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I mostly made technical things, like trying to make some scenes work in an elegant way rather than transitioning all tacky, like hiding and showing the clock properly. And since the 3 introduction routes are technically finished, I can actually move to the sex scenes:

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As you can see, I decided including the MC as transparent entity. I may render him in sex scenes, but most likely from a POV perspective or in a way that it doesn't get in the way of the girl.

There are many variations of that one but I found a bit ago a way to make it better, so I will be redoing the scene by tomorrow, although the change is kinda minimal, there are 15 images in total, most of them variations out of 3 or 4 images, for a single sex scene. Originally I wanted something more simple to not tax an artist, but whenever I hire an actual artist, I would discuss with him how the scenes should properly be.

That being said, my PC stutters with this kind of scenes, because rendering the scenes is pretty taxing...

Lastly, next week the demo should be done, if not on monday. And speaking of which, I may take tomorrow free, because I do need at least one day of rest.

Last musical note:

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See ya tomorrow, even if it's my free day I would continue working on the game.

 

[Canto Forte]

Take your time ... perfection is a tedious job and keeping enthusiasm within common sense bounds might seem overly discouraging. Still ... make good on your promises to yourself and strive to make deadlines that seem fit for the time frame your work schedule designated for each dev task!

 

[AmazonessKing]

Take your time ... perfection is a tedious job and keeping enthusiasm within common sense bounds might seem overly discouraging

Of course. I will be working on it overtime. But, as it is right now, I hope it is enough for a demo, because I need it to set an atmosphere, that you are in a "really weird kinda futuristic city". As the project goes on, I will improve the backgrounds as I've been retroactively improving some of the previous pictures.

Also, a question. The following is the "smug no bra" shot for the scene. And I'm wondering, which one looks better, the first version, on top, or the second version, bottom?

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They are way too different from each other. In the smug one I wanted her to look other way because she is finally shy and embarrassed and only try to act smug. In the first one looks really cheap, but thanks to her position, her boobs looks better, whereas the second one, since she is facing the camera directly, I think her boobs don't look as good as they could. I guess I can rotate her body a bit for the second one.

What do you think?

 

[Canto Forte]

Well .. I have to go for the bottom one .. because her dewy eyes and her face expression if wAAaAay
better. In the top one, she looks expressionless ... looking into some sort of abyss .. looking in the void as opposed to looking either at the camera or the mist figure of the MC with a happy go lucky bombshell expression in the bottom one.

She is happy in the bottom one. She looks lost and grimacing in the top one. Game On!!