VN Ren'Py JPDE Refrain - Sonata of Fire [v4.6] [JPDE/Meinos Kaen]

[Crimsonlights]

This game is amazing. Had me cracking up so much. The characters are amazing and I'm really enjoying the story.

I'm a bit concerned about the time limit, though. Hopefully, that'll be removed or extended in the future.

 

[nzn]

does this have any lewd content?

the patch adds lewds

 

[Unlraniks]

I thoroughly love what I've played of this so far. I enjoy the writing, I enjoy the character interactions, this feels like an adult novel in a world I want to keep seeing. That being said, I do have a few suggestions for improving this for the future, just as a thing really.

1) Make the time limit optional/Give us more opportunities for progressing with characters beyond saturdays. I enjoy the concept of only being able to make progress on saturdays, I really do. But if you actually check the time properly, you can get about 5 characters maxed out if you're lucky, and while I enjoy the game, I'd be losing a lot of enjoyment for playing it over and over again.
2) Make the gallery actually work. I can understand it not working right now since you're still adding cg's and such, but it'd definitely be useful going through certain character's storylines and such, getting through and getting the lewds, and then having those in the gallery so that I can "appreciate" what I've gotten.
3) (temporarily) give us a warning if a character isn't fully finished yet. this is just a personal bugbear, but when I'm looking at a character like glynda or peachy and then find out they don't actually have anything beyond the first two saturday events, it gets quite sad and I feel like going back and not bothering with the characters until they're finished, so I can see an actual conclusion. Obviously when this is actually finished it won't matter anymore but it does right now.
4) Give us a couple hints as to how and when we can progress with other characters. The first time going through this, I had no idea characters and even interactions were gated behind time progressing, so I spent way too much time amping up my stats in useless areas when things were already good to go. Either let us know that things are gated with a tip screen or something, or for some characters, stop them from being gated on saturday so much.
5) Personal request, give me a harem ending. I'm a greedy bastard who enjoys all the female characters, and I want them all. This somewhat ties into the lack of time to actually explore all the characters in one single playthrough, because I don't want to play through this three or four times just to see what each different character does. Make it an optional thing, make it super difficult with required paths, I don't care. I'd rather it be difficult to achieve but possible and rewarding, even just an extra bonus of sorts compared to the actual endings than not have it at all considering your game is built around fooling around with multiple characters.
6) Fix ozpin. His character looks weird and that strange chin gives me ptsd. Not major, but at least make him look similar to the actual ozpin instead of looking like his jaw is lower than it should be and in an almost perpetual troll-faced grin.
7) Please keep working on this. I don't know if the creators would even look at this site or anything, but if they do, I truly appreciate how much time and effort you've put into this project, and I enjoy the new additions of CG's and such. I want this to finish, to be made and finished so I can play it through in all it's glory, enjoy the world of remnant and more.
8) (Bonus) Make more lewd cg please. I like what you've done with the amber stuff, if possible rework all the other lewds too, that would be awesome!

 

[phupdup]

Is the dev on here? This blue on green mess is basically unreadable:



Text should always contrast against the background to be readable. Notice how the white font stands out just fine. Then try to read that thing in the middle which seems to be just more green grass when viewed from a distance away from the screen. Why is this so hard to see?

1. The blue in the font is the same intensity as the green.

2. The green is actually a green to blue gradiant from top to bottom. So our eye mistakes the blue font as part of that gadiant.

3. Green is very close to blue on the color wheel, and this green is probably only a few degrees away from the blue in hue value.

I'm not color blind, but this will drive a blue-green color blind person crazy. Why are we changing the font color here in the first place anyway? It's not like its a hyperlink which is why the dev probably chose the blue in the first place. It's just a place name. Why not keep it white, but just drop the intensity a little bit from what appears to be 1.0 to 0.75 to turn it into a more readable but distinct gray? If you insist on using a color, kick the intensity up to 1.0 to match the white. That will help out the color blind who actually compensate by discerning differences in intensity better than the non-color blind. Blue is harder for the eye to focus on because its wavelength is a much shorter wavelength of light at the right of the spectrum visible to the human eye. Red is at the far left of that spectrum and is thus the easiest for the eye to focus on.

 

[phupdup]

After picking up play again, I noticed that they do switch to a red font for certain things. While that is much more readable, its intensity could be bumped up a bit more to make it contrast better.

Moving on, there's excessive use of CPS overrides and "line at a time" effects being used. This sort of stuff should be used very rarely or not at all. Otherwise you end up annoying speed readers like me who then grow too impatient and click to get the whole damn element displayed at once on the CPS overrides. Then I end up clicking multiple times to get past the line at a time mode crap and inevitably overshoot dialog and then have to roll back. I'm tempted to hack the script to get rid of all of this shit so I can read in peace.

$ JPDESoF-4.17-PC/game $ find . -name "*.rpy" -exec grep -iH '{' {} \; | wc
grep: ./.#script.rpy: No such file or directory
  84905 1260471 11585795

YOU HAVE GOT TO BE KIDDING ME. 84905 lines in rpy sources have dialog overrides including waits and cps changes?

Enough. I've nuked the script from low orbit to rip it all out. This also had the effect of putting all of the font back to white. Note that I've only done this to script.rpy and haven't yet gone back to hack the other rpy sources. I may start doing those as well if they end up annoying me too much. Drop the attached script.rpy into your game folder to overwrite the existing one.

 

[Crimsonlights]

I thoroughly love what I've played of this so far. I enjoy the writing, I enjoy the character interactions, this feels like an adult novel in a world I want to keep seeing. That being said, I do have a few suggestions for improving this for the future, just as a thing really.

1) Make the time limit optional/Give us more opportunities for progressing with characters beyond saturdays. I enjoy the concept of only being able to make progress on saturdays, I really do. But if you actually check the time properly, you can get about 5 characters maxed out if you're lucky, and while I enjoy the game, I'd be losing a lot of enjoyment for playing it over and over again.
2) Make the gallery actually work. I can understand it not working right now since you're still adding cg's and such, but it'd definitely be useful going through certain character's storylines and such, getting through and getting the lewds, and then having those in the gallery so that I can "appreciate" what I've gotten.
3) (temporarily) give us a warning if a character isn't fully finished yet. this is just a personal bugbear, but when I'm looking at a character like glynda or peachy and then find out they don't actually have anything beyond the first two saturday events, it gets quite sad and I feel like going back and not bothering with the characters until they're finished, so I can see an actual conclusion. Obviously when this is actually finished it won't matter anymore but it does right now.
4) Give us a couple hints as to how and when we can progress with other characters. The first time going through this, I had no idea characters and even interactions were gated behind time progressing, so I spent way too much time amping up my stats in useless areas when things were already good to go. Either let us know that things are gated with a tip screen or something, or for some characters, stop them from being gated on saturday so much.
5) Personal request, give me a harem ending. I'm a greedy bastard who enjoys all the female characters, and I want them all. This somewhat ties into the lack of time to actually explore all the characters in one single playthrough, because I don't want to play through this three or four times just to see what each different character does. Make it an optional thing, make it super difficult with required paths, I don't care. I'd rather it be difficult to achieve but possible and rewarding, even just an extra bonus of sorts compared to the actual endings than not have it at all considering your game is built around fooling around with multiple characters.
6) Fix ozpin. His character looks weird and that strange chin gives me ptsd. Not major, but at least make him look similar to the actual ozpin instead of looking like his jaw is lower than it should be and in an almost perpetual troll-faced grin.
7) Please keep working on this. I don't know if the creators would even look at this site or anything, but if they do, I truly appreciate how much time and effort you've put into this project, and I enjoy the new additions of CG's and such. I want this to finish, to be made and finished so I can play it through in all it's glory, enjoy the world of remnant and more.
8) (Bonus) Make more lewd cg please. I like what you've done with the amber stuff, if possible rework all the other lewds too, that would be awesome!

Agreed with basically all of this. I'd also add that the text - specifically who's speaking - can be very difficult to read at times because of the colour.

 

[Meinos Kaen]

Thanks for all the feedback on the UI. This has been a long time coming, seriously.

Since you guys seem knowledgeable on the subject, what colour would you say works best against the green background?

And sorry for the CPS but I was trying to write the dialogue like spoken word and different people speak differently at different times (Also comedic effect)

 

[newgrounds]

how does this work? limited amount of days to gather scenes but also work in progress?

 

[nzn]

Agreed with basically all of this. I'd also add that the text - specifically who's speaking - can be very difficult to read at times because of the colour.

I honestly gave up with some namings. especialy with pairs (since it tends to mix the colors of the respective speakers it tends to end with black on dark background)

Thanks for all the feedback on the UI. This has been a long time coming, seriously.

Since you guys seem knowledgeable on the subject, what colour would you say works best against the green background?

And sorry for the CPS but I was trying to write the dialogue like spoken word and different people speak differently at different times (Also comedic effect)

according to color theory purples/violets, with reds and oranges being close second.
the theory i read didn't account for darkness gradients so i would add dark blue, white and black.

also note that contrasting greens can work if the contrast is high enough (human eye discerns more shades of green and most eyes are adapted to looking at green gradients to find things (food and foe))

none of this takes color blindness into account nor possible specific evolutionary adaptations or what not

also with gradient you use using lesser contrasts is inadvisable due to, depending where on screen they end up, they might become illegible.

short version: I recommend white for basic text with black or another dark contrasting color (dark blue, dark brown, dark violet) for any needed highlights.
also set the multiname color to one default that is legible (due to namebox being dark this should be a light collor)
in general using dark/light contrast helps avoid these problems

on an unrelated note: can we have an option or mod to disable the quick time events? they never add anything to any game I've seen and amount to padding while also being extremely annoying. doubly so in a VN.

 

[phupdup]

Go with the flow used by e-book readers. High contrast black font on white or off-white background like good 'ole dead tree books or white font on black or dark grey. You can make the hud partially transparent but there's a point where the blend into the scene makes things hard to read somewhere between say 75% solid down to 50% or so.

Old farts like me grew up reading dead tree books so our brains are wired to go at "our speed". Years of reading those famed TPS reports at work have honed that skill even further so that we skim even more quickly when not otherwise engaged by witty prose. Those text effects are anathema to us. It's bad enough most Renpy VN's feed us only one line of dialog at a time with a hud where that line probably doesn't even take more than half a row of text on the hud. If I had my way, I'd be putting the hud as a 1/4 or 1/3 proportion of the screen from top to bottom on the left with the scene in the remainder to the right and the hud 100% solid. You may not want to use this layout where there is one line at a time being tossed back and forth between actors, but Starship Innana level exposition or Bill Shatner's Capt Kirk style dialogs at the climax of a ST:TOS episode would do well here. The old farts can then sit back and read or listen to whatever audio is in the media coming at us without having to do the constant click, click, click or space, space, space.

And that brings up a final point for me. Don't expect your consumer to have audio. In fact, I don't even know if you have audio in this thing. I play in a sandboxed user account on Linux that has no permissions given to it for the audio device. These games run in a window or browser tab that are separate from my normal desktop user login. So I don't have to worry about some jerk or newbie dev blowing out my speakers with a full volume barrage of whatever DMCA clickbait music the rent seeking corporate parasites favor to steal away the monetization of your YouTube videos. This is also a SFW mode a lot of people use to sneak in a little joy into our lives while toiling away in the salt mines of our corporate overlords.

Thanks for all the feedback on the UI. This has been a long time coming, seriously.

Since you guys seem knowledgeable on the subject, what colour would you say works best against the green background?

And sorry for the CPS but I was trying to write the dialogue like spoken word and different people speak differently at different times (Also comedic effect)

 

[iamnuff]

And that brings up a final point for me. Don't expect your consumer to have audio. In fact, I don't even know if you have audio in this thing. I play in a sandboxed user account on Linux that has no permissions given to it for the audio device. These games run in a window or browser tab that are separate from my normal desktop user login. So I don't have to worry about some jerk or newbie dev blowing out my speakers with a full volume barrage of whatever DMCA clickbait music the rent seeking corporate parasites favor to steal away the monetization of your YouTube videos. This is also a SFW mode a lot of people use to sneak in a little joy into our lives while toiling away in the salt mines of our corporate overlords.

To be fair, that's kind of a 'just you' issue.

90% of the people playing this game aren't going to be linux-users with a sandboxed no-permissions account that they use specifically to play games because... what? You intend to steam this or put it on youtube or something?

No. The vast majority of the people playing this game are going to have a normal setup. That is, windows (probably win10) and headphones.

You know, normal people.

DMCA claims aren't something that regular users give a shit about. We aren't being recorded while we play and if we're on F95zone we presumably already thought up some kind of solution to the 'I don't want porn-noises blaring out of my computer where my family/neighbours can hear.' issue.
Which is... to just use headphones, obviously.

TLDR: This part of your post, at least, feels like something that the developer doesn't need to care about.
You occupy a rather obscure niche that most people don't care about.

 

[phupdup]

Now think about normal people at work. And you even mention it yourself when 'I don't want porn-noises blaring out of my computer where my family/neighbours can hear.' I may not be as a rather obscure niche as you may think. Using headphones at work may be an instant tell to your corporate overload that you are goofing off. That jerk dev that blasts at you at full volume when your cans aren't fully enclosed may broadcast those screams of climax all around your pod prairie.

To be fair, that's kind of a 'just you' issue.

90% of the people playing this game aren't going to be linux-users with a sandboxed no-permissions account that they use specifically to play games because... what? You intend to steam this or put it on youtube or something?

No. The vast majority of the people playing this game are going to have a normal setup. That is, windows (probably win10) and headphones.

You know, normal people.

DMCA claims aren't something that regular users give a shit about. We aren't being recorded while we play and if we're on F95zone we presumably already thought up some kind of solution to the 'I don't want porn-noises blaring out of my computer where my family/neighbours can hear.' issue.
Which is... to just use headphones, obviously.

TLDR: This part of your post, at least, feels like something that the developer doesn't need to care about.
You occupy a rather obscure niche that most people don't care about.

 

[Unlraniks]

I think the issue you've got there is that you're asking the developer to take the time and effort to allow you to watch and enjoy his porn content while you're at work. The developer doesn't need to fix things at that point, you need to get better at hiding it, or take steps so that you can enjoy your erotic content while at work.

 

[phupdup]

Actually I'm just pointing out that devs should never assume audio to be important to their work. Doing things like spending time and resources on it like voiceover actors do nothing for us. If anything, following our suggestions will cut time and effort that will be better spent somewhere in your earlier releases for developing fans. Note that video and animations are still quite useful without associated audio.

I think the issue you've got there is that you're asking the developer to take the time and effort to allow you to watch and enjoy his porn content while you're at work. The developer doesn't need to fix things at that point, you need to get better at hiding it, or take steps so that you can enjoy your erotic content while at work.

 

[nzn]

Actually I'm just pointing out that devs should never assume audio to be important to their work. Doing things like spending time and resources on it like voiceover actors do nothing for us. If anything, following our suggestions will cut time and effort that will be better spent somewhere in your earlier releases for developing fans. Note that video and animations are still quite useful without associated audio.

many genres of games are heavily dependent on sound weather to alert you of shit going on or threats out of vision. most can be played on mute with reduced experience. accessibility options do exist on some games (mincraft comes to mind surprisingly) but not all. and while i sometimes play on mute or even listen to my own music (headphones irritate me if used for long and i binge some games, also sometimes i'm just in the mood for different sound) it wouldn't occur to me to demand devs of free games to accommodate my niche.

Go with the flow used by e-book readers. High contrast black font on white or off-white background like good 'ole dead tree books or white font on black or dark grey. You can make the hud partially transparent but there's a point where the blend into the scene makes things hard to read somewhere between say 75% solid down to 50% or so.

many seasoned VN players are used to backgrounds and ui beeing of "games color" (greenish in this case). it is considered good and adds to a games feel. everything is fine as long as text collor isn't atrotious (similar to your sugesstion us dark text on light backrounds like lite blue or pink or yellow and vice versa). text display speed is usualy adjustable in options alowing instantaneous display of text and texboxes being not completely filled is the norm rather than exception. since this isn't a deadtree book (something i still partake in on occasion to be fair) it can afford to not fill every part of a page with text for pacing, dramatic reasons and characterization (things that make the medium shine) restricting development and art due to our inability to adapt is backwards thinking and shouldn't be encouraged. the famous dots (...) of VNs existed since at least early 2000 and where used to create dramatic pauses and general scenes since at least then.

also you might wish to us singular I in your personal opinion statements in the future since you never know how many people will agree with you.

 

[phupdup]

it wouldn't occur to me to demand devs of free games to accommodate my niche.

I am making suggestions not demands. As I have noted, this suggestion is a good way to maybe even lighten their workload.

text display speed is usualy adjustable in options alowing instantaneous display of text and texboxes being not completely filled is the norm rather than exception.

I guess you don't understand what all of those cps overrides in dialog do in Renpy. No matter what you set in the menu, it will be ignored. In this case, by the thousands of lines of dialog. I don't want to have to treat a static VN like some twitch mode FPS.

restricting development and art due to our inability to adapt is backwards thinking and shouldn't be encouraged.

I guess you never heard of KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid). Elon Musk may be a lightning rod of controversy. There's times I just want to meet him personally in order to tell him to just "shut up and build your fucking rockets." He's good at that you know. It's because one of his basic design drivers at SpaceX is to see what they can take out of the design because needless complications get in the way. Over my long career as a software and systems developer, technical sales guy and Linux security guy, I've seen the new folks ignore this as they bring in all sorts of code bloat (ie "Framework du jour") and complicated code (ie "unreadable code") just to do some form of dick waving about what they learned at school. Just look at this guy's project and what happened to him as I warned him about what was probably going on. Notice the warning in yellow on his OP talking about how the programmer skipped on him.

also you might wish to us singular I in your personal opinion statements in the future since you never know how many people will agree with you.

I am not the only person in the world with this opinion. Balls in your court dude. Also look up the use of the concept of "the Royal We" as it applies to the way a klng or queen never refers to "themselves" as an "I" because, in their mind, they are the kingdom. It's also a great way to cut out the use of gender specific pronouns so as to not cut out half of the human population when referring to the concept. Apparently this is now a concept under attack by the right wing grifter media in the USA because they are desperate to deflect attention away from some blowback they are suffering about abortion, attempts at sedition and future attempts at authoritarian rule.


Finally... Your spelling and grammer are "atrotious" (sic).

 

[nzn]

Finally... Your spelling and grammer are "atrotious" (sic).

considering English is my third language... tell me how many languages did you master.

I'll respond to the more substantive parts a bit later

 

[iamnuff]

Now think about normal people at work. And you even mention it yourself when 'I don't want porn-noises blaring out of my computer where my family/neighbours can hear.' I may not be as a rather obscure niche as you may think. Using headphones at work may be an instant tell to your corporate overload that you are goofing off. That jerk dev that blasts at you at full volume when your cans aren't fully enclosed may broadcast those screams of climax all around your pod prairie.

"Normal people" generally don't play porn-games at work, bruh.

Actually I'm just pointing out that devs should never assume audio to be important to their work.

Yeah, and you're wrong. They absolutely should assume that 90% of people who experience their media aren't trying to jerk off at work, and are probably willing to play with sound on.

Again, you are a tiny tiny niche of the player-base and your experiences and requirements are not representative of the userbase as a whole.
Telling the developer that the entire audio medium should be ignored or removable from his game just because you're a niche weirdo who uses his product in bizarre and likely unintended ways is absurd.

 

[phupdup]

Counting reading and not fluently speaking at one point I knew Latin, French and German. I've probably learned and forgotten somewhere between 10-20 programming languages and dialects. Most of those I've forgotten as they fell out of favor or their platforms wandered off into the sunset. Anybody remember Algol, Pascal, Modula, DCL, ARexx, APL or PL/I? Don't think computer languages are considered proper languages? Back in the 80's there was a linguistics class at my college where you could pick LISP and FORTRAN as languages to study. I went the LISP route and had access to a Symbolics LISP machine in the lab. Trivia du jour: symbolics.com is the very first (and still active) .com domain name that was registered.

I didn't say audio should be removed or fully ignored. Just don't make it integral to the story where you can't progress due to missing some sort of audio cue. Don't make it a high priority. Don't project your tastes in music onto the fanbase because they will most likely rather you don't so they can listen to their own or multitask listening to other things that are necessary IRL as they play.

"Niche weirdo"? How many people do you think are out there who don't give a shit about their jobs? Why should they? Because you know three languages, I'm going to assume you have citizenship in the EU or somewhere that respects labor. Maybe you guys over there do think it's weird to not respect your employer. Here in Murica these corporate overlords treat their labor as a commodity that must not be unionized and squeezed out of every ounce of work they can get for less than subsistance wages. I doubt the "Normal people" are just looking at Facebook while toiling away on their own personal laptop or phone that their overlord forced them to use because they are too cheap to supply company hardware. Since it's their own hardware, they could be running just about anything. That is unless the corporate "toolset" they are forced to install includes Websense or some other spyware that will snitch on them to the Thought Police.

Maybe your VN is a little bit more SFW than others on here. Just consider that these poor souls might want to escape their plight every once in a while and don't want the audio to narc them out as they try to escape to a quiet place. They would rather have you spend your time on eye candy and the script instead of something that they probably have muted.

That 10% number that got pulled out of thin air may be a niche but it shouldn't be considered tiny. It's probably bigger than the survivors left out on smallville's Main St after Amazon and Walmart and the other big box stores ran everything else out of business.

"Normal people" generally don't play porn-games at work, bruh.



Yeah, and you're wrong. They absolutely should assume that 90% of people who experience their media aren't trying to jerk off at work, and are probably willing to play with sound on.

Again, you are a tiny tiny niche of the player-base and your experiences and requirements are not representative of the userbase as a whole.
Telling the developer that the entire audio medium should be ignored or removable from his game just because you're a niche weirdo who uses his product in bizarre and likely unintended ways is absurd.

considering English is my third language... tell me how many languages did you master.

I'll respond to the more substantive parts a bit later

 

[nzn]

Counting reading and not fluently speaking at one point I knew Latin, French and German. I've probably learned and forgotten somewhere between 10-20 programming languages and dialects. Most of those I've forgotten as they fell out of favor or their platforms wandered off into the sunset. Anybody remember Algol, Pascal, Modula, DCL, ARexx, APL or PL/I? Don't think computer languages are considered proper languages? Back in the 80's there was a linguistics class at my college where you could pick LISP and FORTRAN as languages to study. I went the LISP route and had access to a Symbolics LISP machine in the lab. Trivia du jour: symbolics.com is the very first (and still active) .com domain name that was registered.

I didn't say audio should be removed or fully ignored. Just don't make it integral to the story where you can't progress due to missing some sort of audio cue. Don't make it a high priority. Don't project your tastes in music onto the fanbase because they will most likely rather you don't so they can listen to their own or multitask listening to other things that are necessary IRL as they play.

"Niche weirdo"? How many people do you think are out there who don't give a shit about their jobs? Why should they? Because you know three languages, I'm going to assume you have citizenship in the EU or somewhere that respects labor. Maybe you guys over there do think it's weird to not respect your employer. Here in Murica these corporate overlords treat their labor as a commodity that must not be unionized and squeezed out of every ounce of work they can get for less than subsistance wages. I doubt the "Normal people" are just looking at Facebook while toiling away on their own personal laptop or phone that their overlord forced them to use because they are too cheap to supply company hardware. Since it's their own hardware, they could be running just about anything. That is unless the corporate "toolset" they are forced to install includes Websense or some other spyware that will snitch on them to the Thought Police.

Maybe your VN is a little bit more SFW than others on here. Just consider that these poor souls might want to escape their plight every once in a while and don't want the audio to narc them out as they try to escape to a quiet place. They would rather have you spend your time on eye candy and the script instead of something that they probably have muted.

That 10% number that got pulled out of thin air may be a niche but it shouldn't be considered tiny. It's probably bigger than the survivors left out on smallville's Main St after Amazon and Walmart and the other big box stores ran everything else out of business.

emm we are 2 different people. this seems to have confused you. i would like to be able to respond to specific statements instead of wall of text directed at 2 different people rather chaotically

where in JPDE does lack of audio prevent progression?

just because english is my third language doesn't mean i kow 3, "Counting reading and not fluently speaking" i reach 7. and of those 6 have spelling/pronunciation rules an one uses whatever rules where available at the time or in the language they took the word from. in any event i wonder how well you would write in German or Latin. note on glass houses:

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as far as the sound issue: you seem hellbent to die on a hill and keep insisting stuff that the vast majority of people don't agree with you.