oldshoe

Newbie
Mar 7, 2020
84
214
Sadly the last Patreon post was 30th October. The 'good' news is that he caught COVID so perhaps we can hope with Christmas etc he's just taken a long break and will return. I'm not going to hold my breath, but we can hope.
 

Porrvald

Member
Sep 12, 2020
470
486
Sadly the last Patreon post was 30th October. The 'good' news is that he caught COVID so perhaps we can hope with Christmas etc he's just taken a long break and will return. I'm not going to hold my breath, but we can hope.
If there was a physical health issue he could easily have dropped a message.

Best case scenario would be that he needed a break and will return eventually.

There is also the very unlikely scenario that he has been working very hard on the game for the last few months but for some unknown reason just didn't want to tell anyone about it.
 

toolkitxx

Well-Known Member
Modder
Donor
Game Developer
May 3, 2017
1,473
1,789
Simply check the since LabRats2 went to be open-source. Content is still controlled by Vren but technically all code is visible as is any kind of progress.
 

Diconica

Well-Known Member
Apr 25, 2020
1,100
1,149
But we don't know anything about how long those devs have been silent?

"Abandoned: The game has been abandoned (confirmed by the dev) or the developer hasn't posted anything related to the game for at least 3 months."
https://f95zone.to/threads/game-uploading-rules-2019-06-25.524/#post-6137
Well you can look at them fairly easily and tell.
Take Last Man for example the author moved on to Red Pill.
Last man even per his own site hasn't been update since what is on here.

Just using google it looks like the most recent post for it was Oct 1, 2018

That didn't take a lot of effort to check.
 

Gato21

Active Member
Oct 16, 2021
923
2,486
RIP Lab Rats 2, you weren`t our favorite Lab Rats but a Lab Rats nonetheless.
Do you like the first one better? I haven't played either, but just was going to get started with Lab Rats 2. Kinda sucks that it's abandoned, but at least as a result, I have tempered expectations.
 

720NoScope

Newbie
Apr 8, 2021
64
152
Do you like the first one better? I haven't played either, but just was going to get started with Lab Rats 2. Kinda sucks that it's abandoned, but at least as a result, I have tempered expectations.
Was my first game Ive ever played from this site, it definitely feels more alive and fleshed out. Only downside are static images and that it is kinda old but on the sandbox part simply great. Loved that the dialogue changed on training and how far you advance on sluttyscore etc.
 
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Gato21

Active Member
Oct 16, 2021
923
2,486
Was my first game Ive ever played from this site, it definitely feels more alive and fleshed out. Only downside are static images and that it is kinda old but on the sandbox part simply great. Loved that the dialogue changed on training and how far you advance on sluttyscore etc.
So, on purely gameplay would you recommend the first one over the second? I am trying to find more gameplay focused/strategy games. The second, at a cursory glance, seemed more involved.
 

jan^s

Active Member
Dec 19, 2019
820
714
The first one was way shorter, like I'd say maybe 4-6 hours from start to le fin.
I have yet too finish the second one o_O.... The grind and save resets at new release versions make it difficult to accomplish.
 

Sokano

Newbie
Aug 13, 2017
17
71
They're very different games and hard to compare. But if you could only play each one once, I'd say Lab Rats was the better of the two.

The first benefited greatly from its much tighter scope which meant that updates were entirely story and dialogue related (with supported imagery). Big additions to the game therefore came around on a very regular basis.

The second has (or had? :() much greater potential and depth, but story and dialogue came at the expense of refining the 'game' side of things which seems to be Vren's main interest. It was looking like the mechanics were finally at the point of being mostly complete, then the Live2D implementation stalled things. If Vren is still working on this, then hopefully the Live2D challenge can be overcome, or abandoned, and the focus changes to story.

Lab Rats is a fairly short, fun and fappable game but doesn't have a huge amount of replayability.
Lab Rats 2 is one to come back to time and time again, and hope that it continues to evolve. Honestly the mod scene is what has elevated it from being okay to very playable so hopefully that continues if Vren does not return.
 

nobodx

Newbie
Nov 2, 2017
69
49
LR2 is more of a "open world" game, where you set your goals (mine was to corrupt every npc) with some smaller questlines
the mod added quite a lot more story-content

if you understand the potion-mechanic, you're swimming in all the money you want
 

Helger

Newbie
Dec 2, 2017
38
19
I still enjoy playing Lab Rats sometimes.

But Lab Rats 2 is a completely different style. In his opinion, Vren has been trying to make things a little more realistic with rules and a city administration in the last 3 years. It is up to you whether you like breast milk or not. I just don't use it because there's no contract or automatic sale for it.
As far as a storyline goes, I just refer to the student on campus. We could teach them to hire them afterwards. The screen with the message: "In the next update you can hire them in your company" was funny at first but continued like this for over half a year.
Lab Rats 2 and open source?
If that were the case, then a new version would have been released. But since only Vren decides, it is not open source. He makes money with it while the others do it for free. Even if I look at his question on Patreon from October which position he should program next, I wonder if he would have continued like this every month. This kind of slowdown in development of the game tells me that he plans to continue developing it for an even longer period of time.
Silence for over 3 months!
This could be the cause:
- He continues to work on the project alone and either comes out of the woods with Lab Rats 2 with Live2D at some point.
- He gave up the project and may already be working on Lab Rats 3 with different graphics and animated sex positions. So it makes the most sense to reprogram everything.
- His Covid infection had caused more problems and it is taking longer for him to return. In this case, he or someone from his family could have published relevant information about it.
- If he should have passed away, I wonder why his Patreon account still exists. Normally you cancel the account to avoid suspicion of rip-off.

Maybe several will get together and do their own project based on Lab Rats 2. The only thing left to do is wait and see what will happen in the next few months, because hope is the last thing to die.
 

ffive

Forum Fanatic
Jun 19, 2022
5,246
11,388
Simply check the since LabRats2 went to be open-source. Content is still controlled by Vren but technically all code is visible as is any kind of progress.
The repository only hosts stub code for the live2d tech demo, iirc. The code for the full version of the game hasn't been made public, although i believe there were plans for that.
 

renpy_guy

New Member
Feb 10, 2023
3
5
The repository is the full source code with live2d rendering enabled. A lot of the older code is commented out and the history isn't available in the repository. I worked on performance improvements to the live2d rendering but haven't heard anything from Vren since the October post.
 

Phoexist

Member
Mar 11, 2020
447
487
It's a Ren'py game.. The code is 100% available. Everyone who has ever downloaded the game has the code. It's all scripts which compile at run-time.
 
3.40 star(s) 127 Votes