Ren'Py Lessons in Love [v0.46.0] [Selebus]

[buff]

As a serious fan of the game who has given a bunch of money to it (even bought merch), it pains me to say this, but....

I recommend that players do *not* start over with a new save. In fact, I recommend that if you talk up the game to new players, you have them play chapter 1 on a 23p2-or-earlier build and then toggle over to the current releases. The rework is just..... bad. The bones of the story is still fine, the prose is the usual high Selebus quality, but jesus christ it shits all over the basic rules of storytelling. There is no easing people in, no generating interest, no teasing, no build up. Just punishing players that Selebus thinks of as Unworthy (mainly, someone who might consider jerking off). The dude has been listening to too many of his sycophants on his discord, and it shows.

I don't think his attitude is going to hurt the quality of the new Ch3 content since that is already off the rails into dark-land, but it makes it so I can't imagine him getting many new $5 pledges. The first 30 minutes of gameplay were sexy and fun, and now they come across as pretentious "look at me I am so dark" bullshit. (You simply can't start a story talking like an edgelord, you have to earn the reader's respect first.) I think the bulk of first-time players will say "lol, some angsty teenager who believed his creative writing teacher when she called him talented" and close the game and never come back. It's a slog, it's badly paced, it's not entertaining enough to justify the beating, and it's just a huge turn-off.

I'm going back to my old pre-rework saves and just pick up where we left off. I'm sorry Selebus wasted so much time making his early-game into a lesser product.

Predictions:

- When Sel reads this, he will skim it and dismiss it as being written by someone unworthy of playing his game.
- His patron counts are going to start dwindling once the last Patreon people find their way over to SS, because the new interest will be so low as to be unable to even replace normal attrition
- He will blame Patreon for the above
- He will still make enough to live on-- lack of new blood will be partially offset by existing fans bumping their tiers-- so the game will continue but the player community will get more insular.

This all makes me sad.

 

[Cool'Thulhu]

that hole Nodoka dug

Don't forget, the game tells you a lot of times on ch1:

"THERE'S SOMETHING BURIED UNDERNEATH YOUR FEET"

I wouldn't be surprised if it was a corpse, now who would it be?...

 

[barglenarglezous]

Some theories of mine regarding recent events:

Spoiler

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That scene doesn't actually disqualify Noriko as a possibility, though. The playdate Ami talks about is far enough back in her life to be a fuzzy memory -- so we're probably talking pre-school or very early schooling. The Young Noriko scene looks like late middle school or so at best, and might only be a year or two prior to the time loop starting. If Noriko's dying her hair, she could easily have started doing it in the time between the play date and that scene.

 

[KPowder]

As a serious fan of the game who has given a bunch of money to it (even bought merch), it pains me to say this, but....

I recommend that players do *not* start over with a new save. In fact, I recommend that if you talk up the game to new players, you have them play chapter 1 on a 23p2-or-earlier build and then toggle over to the current releases. The rework is just..... bad. The bones of the story is still fine, the prose is the usual high Selebus quality, but jesus christ it shits all over the basic rules of storytelling. There is no easing people in, no generating interest, no teasing, no build up. Just punishing players that Selebus thinks of as Unworthy (mainly, someone who might consider jerking off). The dude has been listening to too many of his sycophants on his discord, and it shows.

I don't think his attitude is going to hurt the quality of the new Ch3 content since that is already off the rails into dark-land, but it makes it so I can't imagine him getting many new $5 pledges. The first 30 minutes of gameplay were sexy and fun, and now they come across as pretentious "look at me I am so dark" bullshit. (You simply can't start a story talking like an edgelord, you have to earn the reader's respect first.) I think the bulk of first-time players will say "lol, some angsty teenager who believed his creative writing teacher when she called him talented" and close the game and never come back. It's a slog, it's badly paced, it's not entertaining enough to justify the beating, and it's just a huge turn-off.

I'm going back to my old pre-rework saves and just pick up where we left off. I'm sorry Selebus wasted so much time making his early-game into a lesser product.

Predictions:

- When Sel reads this, he will skim it and dismiss it as being written by someone unworthy of playing his game.
- His patron counts are going to start dwindling once the last Patreon people find their way over to SS, because the new interest will be so low as to be unable to even replace normal attrition
- He will blame Patreon for the above
- He will still make enough to live on-- lack of new blood will be partially offset by existing fans bumping their tiers-- so the game will continue but the player community will get more insular.

This all makes me sad.

Reading this makes a lot of my thoughts on this game a lot more sense. I'm pretty sure I didn't get too far into it in the grand scheme of things, I got to the end of the big beach trip in chapter 1, but getting there was a drag. I don't see the point in making you grind out affection or lust points in a game like this. The only reason i made it as far as i did was the guide mod tbh. Thank fuck someone put in the work to code that, it's such an improvement. Speaking of "game like this", I'm not entirely sure what the target demographic here is. Is the goal to bait and switch people that are looking for a porn game into protagonist angst "I'm such a bad person I gotta monologue about it to myself every other event" simulator?

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the individual parts that make up this game. I vastly prefer angst-sensei over the typical self-insert protag who is 100% oblivious that every single action the player can make him take is creepy as hell. I like a lot of the characters, and at this point the game even made me care about some of them. There's some neat character dynamics and the writing doesn't shy away from talking about some of the not-great things in human nature. The CG is way above average for an anime-aesthetic kinda game, just generally polished. I don't even mind the tryhard grossout-adjacent Doki Doki knockoff parts that much, and there's some genuinely unnerving stuff in the more angst-y parts of the game that made me uncomfortable pursuing some of the girls for a bit. But when you just blend all of that up together you get a mish-mash of an experience that doesn't know what exactly it wants to be.

Hearing that the first chapter got remade *into* this is, very weird to hear. I am curious how it was before the remake but I don't have the patience to essentially re-read what i assume are the same general story beats of a story I already spent hours reading. I really just wish the game would take one or two of the directions it's trying to pull into and run with those instead of trying to be 7 different things.

For the time being I guess I'll just take it out of my porn folder and put it somewhere else. It's pretty clear to me that this game doesn't want me to engage with it in that way, even if the genuinely good porn CGs may try to convince me otherwise. Kind of a shame on that front, but I'll just pick it back up when I'm in the mood for something "dark", for the sake of not using the word angst for the 10th time in a row.

 

[barglenarglezous]

Reading this makes a lot of my thoughts on this game a lot more sense. I'm pretty sure I didn't get too far into it in the grand scheme of things, I got to the end of the big beach trip in chapter 1, but getting there was a drag. I don't see the point in making you grind out affection or lust points in a game like this. The only reason i made it as far as i did was the guide mod tbh. Thank fuck someone put in the work to code that, it's such an improvement. Speaking of "game like this", I'm not entirely sure what the target demographic here is. Is the goal to bait and switch people that are looking for a porn game into protagonist angst "I'm such a bad person I gotta monologue about it to myself every other event" simulator?

I think the primary audience is "people who like horror/denpa games that also like porn and are willing to deal with a minimal amount of porn in their denpa"

As someone who loves psychological/existential horror, I thoroughly enjoy this game, but I can easily see why it would turn some people away.

 

[Deleted member 3482284]

As a serious fan of the game who has given a bunch of money to it (even bought merch), it pains me to say this, but....

I recommend that players do *not* start over with a new save. In fact, I recommend that if you talk up the game to new players, you have them play chapter 1 on a 23p2-or-earlier build and then toggle over to the current releases. The rework is just..... bad. The bones of the story is still fine, the prose is the usual high Selebus quality, but jesus christ it shits all over the basic rules of storytelling. There is no easing people in, no generating interest, no teasing, no build up. Just punishing players that Selebus thinks of as Unworthy (mainly, someone who might consider jerking off). The dude has been listening to too many of his sycophants on his discord, and it shows.

I don't think his attitude is going to hurt the quality of the new Ch3 content since that is already off the rails into dark-land, but it makes it so I can't imagine him getting many new $5 pledges. The first 30 minutes of gameplay were sexy and fun, and now they come across as pretentious "look at me I am so dark" bullshit. (You simply can't start a story talking like an edgelord, you have to earn the reader's respect first.) I think the bulk of first-time players will say "lol, some angsty teenager who believed his creative writing teacher when she called him talented" and close the game and never come back. It's a slog, it's badly paced, it's not entertaining enough to justify the beating, and it's just a huge turn-off.

I'm going back to my old pre-rework saves and just pick up where we left off. I'm sorry Selebus wasted so much time making his early-game into a lesser product.

Predictions:

- When Sel reads this, he will skim it and dismiss it as being written by someone unworthy of playing his game.
- His patron counts are going to start dwindling once the last Patreon people find their way over to SS, because the new interest will be so low as to be unable to even replace normal attrition
- He will blame Patreon for the above
- He will still make enough to live on-- lack of new blood will be partially offset by existing fans bumping their tiers-- so the game will continue but the player community will get more insular.

This all makes me sad.

Yeah, it looks nicer graphically but I keep cringing at the writing when I didn't used to on my new playthrough. The only real purpose of the changed story in the revamp seems to add more shock value, but it's badly executed. And there's no feeling of mystery and it doesn't feel special anymore, it just feels malignant. Broken. Disjointed. And that's partly fine for the genre, but it's not supposed to make you feel 2nd hand embarrassment with a semi permanent cringe face from what you're reading. You're right that he's got the wrong people surrounding him, there's no direction in the altered story and it's tragic

I stopped playing it after a couple hours because I felt like I was reading an sad emo kids journal. Haven't picked it up for a few days. I don't particularly care about the reduced + less quality h scenes, I figured he'd take away from the main reason people bother to play in the first place. But the narrative is a lot worse than it used to be in the revamp. And it's clear to see it

 

[rightsaidfred]

Yeah, it looks nicer graphically but I keep cringing at the writing when I didn't used to on my new playthrough. The only real purpose of the changed story in the revamp seems to add more shock value, but it's badly executed. And there's no feeling of mystery and it doesn't feel special anymore, it just feels malignant. Broken. Disjointed. And that's partly fine for the genre, but it's not supposed to make you feel 2nd hand embarrassment with a semi permanent cringe face from what you're reading. You're right that he's got the wrong people surrounding him, there's no direction in the altered story and it's tragic

I stopped playing it after a couple hours because I felt like I was reading an sad emo kids journal. Haven't picked it up for a few days. I don't particularly care about the reduced + less quality h scenes, I figured he'd take away from the main reason people bother to play in the first place. But the narrative is a lot worse than it used to be in the revamp. And it's clear to see it

I'm really glad it's not just me, i thought maybe it was just me and i didn't understand.... i'm not sure what. But when i started replaying the "redone" portions, i couldn't make myself continue. The tone change is just...Not appealing. I'm really not sure i would have given this game the chance i did, if i had originally "discovered" it in it's current version.

Anyways it's nice know i'm not alone here.

 

[maliceinblunderland]

Does going back and "fixing" your already well-liked product ever work out well?

 

[Boomboxthegreat]

After the re-work, I was scared about how Chapter 3 will move things foward, but so far it has been excelent! It exceded all expectations, I'm glad to see that so far the re-work didn't affect the current game, if it ever does I might have to drop it, cause it was awful, my God!

 

[1804maya]

I wrote a small mod that lets you skip the affection/lust point grind without having to go through the tedium of typing in cheat codes or having your save labelled with the cheater flag. Features:

• Sets all girls' affection and lust points to a value X unless they were already higher than X
• Written to be future-proof (i.e. will automatically work for any new girls)
• Enables the developer console

Usage:

• Download the attached file
• Move into the game subfolder (found in the folder that you launch Lessons in Love from)
• Load a save and open the developer console with Shift + O
• Press Enter a few times so you can see the ">" symbol in the top left of the screen
• Type setLoveAndLust(X) and press Enter, where X is an integer (i.e. a whole number). For an example, see the image below
• Press Esc to close the console and now you can play!

View attachment 1901303

Note: I recommend using this with the guide mod for max efficiency, because other than grinding points, the main time-sink with this game is trying to trigger events.

Advice from alex2011 on how to use the mod so that you don't accidentally miss events (note: I used the mod myself with 50 affection from the start and didn't experience any issues. You can still miss events even if you follow the instructions below and you can still see all events while ignoring those instructions.):


Uninstall: delete the files z_set_love_lust.rpy and z_set_love_lust.rpyc from your game subfolder

I also made a mod that lets you scroll your mouse-wheel to simulate clicks, makes the game more convenient to play https://f95zone.to/threads/use-scroll-wheel-to-simulate-mouse-clicks.120507/#post-8406783

Is there a specific way to just target one character lust and love statistic or does it do them all forcefully

 

[kitsunedawn]

Does going back and "fixing" your already well-liked product ever work out well?

If the game is complete, and you're going back to just polish some things, yeah, it does. If however you haven't completed the game, going back and making major changes can be jarring to people. Especially if it's a sudden change that for whatever reason, they never saw coming.

 

[jamyong]

Is there a specific way to just target one character lust and love statistic or does it do them all forcefully

there's really not much pointing targeting one character and not all of them. every character's events are all entangled with each other and with the main events too, so it doesnt accomplish much if you raise the stats for one and not the others.

 

[NULLWIZARD]

Is there a specific way to just target one character lust and love statistic or does it do them all forcefully

There's no way built into the mod but you can do that quite easily using the console by typing "{Girl's Name}_love = X" (without the quotes) and "{Girl's Name}_lust = X". For example, type "ami_love = 99" (without the quotes), then press Enter, then type "ami_lust = 99" and then press Enter again - this would set Ami's love and lust to 99.

 

[iebb03]

Does going back and "fixing" your already well-liked product ever work out well?

If he only updated the visuals sure.

I'm going back to my old pre-rework saves and just pick up where we left off. I'm sorry Selebus wasted so much time making his early-game into a lesser product

I agree that the pacing at the begining in the rework is bad for the reasons that many have listed, but I don't think is all bad, by the time you reached the first reset is essentially the same game and the transition is pretty seamles. My only problem is the Ami sex scene at the begining, and not because you can no longer jerk to it, but because it dumps you the horror aspect of the game without any build up. The Room with Clocks was so iconic in the original because by that point you already have a feel that something was wrong and seeing confirmation of it was kinda satisfying, plus it leaves you hooked on wanting to see more of it. Now is more trippy but it feel like it was done for the old players as it includes stuff that was added later in the game.

 

[Winchester741]

Could somebody tell me what's the last updated version with sex scenes is. I've tried to download & play 25. pt1 but it was Huggy Boy version which didn't support sex.
Is 24. Pt2 the last updated version with sex ?
I've not been playing for a while so I don't know how to distinguish one from the other.

 

[Castelier]

What's it like?

Also, any idea how to get the "Baby steps" event for Maki?

may i know what are those 3 games you used in your gif

 

[Psymind]

This update had a few parts that left my heart beating like crazy. It's very rare for a game to pull emotions off me like this (without cheap jumpscares). That being said I don't think this game is horror...more like..weird drama? It's just not scary at all, and hell I can't play a real horror game to save my life. I just get anxious and quit haha.

Anyway, I got a few things I've been thinking about after this update, mostly related to names.
So it's confirmed that everyone in a family has the same letter on the first and surname, as we see in Makoto, Maki and Masahiro, right? But after replaying this game after Chapter 1 Remake I payed more attention to details and noticed that when you visit Ami's parents, their names are Sekai and Nozomu Ara-something. Which sent me flags because Nozomu is said to be the god that fucked the fleshlight and created humanity, and he might also be Hope, maybe? Then Sekai...well Sekai means World in japanese and if I remember correctly, at some point it's said there are 3 gods: Hope, a god of roots and a god of wires. Now I think it makes sense that Sekai could be a god of roots, like a god of nature or something. And the last one, the god of wires...the god of machines (?). Well I think it might be Sensei. That's why his name is never shown since it probably doesnt start with an "A" like Ami.
Another candidate for a god of wires could be Tsuneyo's grandpa. We never see him but Tsuneyo tells us that he's connected to machines all the time but she never lets us see him. Also she's weird as fuck, seeing those black figures in the beach, so she might be connected to something big.
And the last thing is the mystery girl that appears in some events. I think she's the one we see in a bunch of those fast flashes where you can see a school and a naked girl. I bet her name starts with the letter T.

So yeah, what do you guys think? I just fear that Selebus will just fuck us over and never give definitive answers in the end so we will just keep theorizing for the rest of our lives.

 

[D3D3762667537515]

Is there a specific way to just target one character lust and love statistic or does it do them all forcefully

I have edited the script so you can target characters individually (also works for everyone):



But you can type [character]_love = 100 or [character]_lust = 100 and it'll work..

 

[barglenarglezous]

Could somebody tell me what's the last updated version with sex scenes is. I've tried to download & play 25. pt1 but it was Huggy Boy version which didn't support sex.
Is 24. Pt2 the last updated version with sex ?
I've not been playing for a while so I don't know how to distinguish one from the other.

It's supposed to be the opposite -- 23p2 was the last time there was a Huggy Boy dedicated version. The Patreon got taken down shortly after that, so there's no longer a need to support it.

But Selebus didn't return the pre-rework file structure, so all the sex scenes are still in the /Subscribestar folders, which are missing from the Android and Compressed versions, so they're still Huggy Boy. I don't know why this happens. If you download the full version, you'll get the game as it's meant to be. If you have the previous update installed already, the update-only patch will get you to the current version.

Edited to correct version #

 

[Perniciousducks]

I wish there was a mod that stripped out all of the poetic navel gazing in between dialogue...