VN Ren'Py Light of My Life [Ch. 1-7 v1.0.0] [Naughty Road]

[ohgodmyeyes]

Maybe I'm overlooking something, but I didn't find this artist in the search results. Can you tell me what work they've done?

Summertime Saga

 

[InvaderZim]

But how much of the budget is for bears, though?

Asking the important question!

 

[Adultress]

I'm enjoying this for the most part, but I really hate the lack of a face for the MC. So many shots have really weird compositions to prevent showing a face, and I find it quite distracting

 

[Adultress]

Chapter 3 is really lazily written. It manufactures drama by wresting control from the player's hands rather than having it arise organically from their choices.

Edit: And chapter 4 is continuing this ignoble tradition by forcing you to have dinner with your coworker. I declined the offer because I knew it would definitely result in an argument, but the game still insists that I go, which naturally pisses off the MC's daughter. This game has more railroads than Atlas Shrugged.

Edit 2: My frustration is exacerbated by how good the writing is apart from this. It's like the dev forgets everything they know about writing whenever they want a conflict to occur.

Edit 3: This isn't to say the writing is perfect because it's not. The game's systems give the player a lot of choice (railroaded arguments notwithstanding) but the MC himself lacks agency. He spends most of his time reacting to the characters around him rather than being proactive. In other words, there's considerable ludonarrative dissonance.

 

[naughtyroad]

Chapter 3 is really lazily written. It manufactures drama by wresting control from the player's hands rather than having it arise organically from their choices.

Edit: And chapter 4 is continuing this ignoble tradition by forcing you to have dinner with your coworker. I declined the offer because I knew it would definitely result in an argument, but the game still insists that I go, which naturally pisses off the MC's daughter. This game has more railroads than Atlas Shrugged.

Edit 2: My frustration is exacerbated by how good the writing is apart from this. It's like the dev forgets everything they know about writing whenever they want a conflict to occur.

Edit 3: This isn't to say the writing is perfect because it's not. The game's systems give the player a lot of choice (railroaded arguments notwithstanding) but the MC himself lacks agency. He spends most of his time reacting to the characters around him rather than being proactive. In other words, there's considerable ludonarrative dissonance.

Some interesting points here. The ludonarrative dissonance one in particular. I remember seeing some youtube vid about that not too long ago, specifically that the term was coined in connection with how in Bioshock, the gameplay and the storyline caused a dissonance as gameplay seems to reward players harvesting (killing) the little sisters, while the storyline seems to indicate this is bad, and the tension that derives from that is what the author of the original post the vid talked about called ludonarrative dissonance. They also made the point that ludonarrative dissonance wasn't a bad thing, btw, but that's neither here nor there.

I disagree with the point about Bioshock rewarding you for doing bad things in particular, actually. Having played it, harvesting the little sisters never entered my mind because I'm not a monster, but in not doing so I found you receive different rewards in the form of gifts and rewards they leave for you. IMHO ludonarrative dissonance was only "a problem" in this case for those playing the game like a psychopath, to which I an only say, meh, the game is exactly exactly in sync between gameplay and narrative, namely telling you you're a dick for playing like a dick. Bioshock has a lot of interesting things to say about players in that regard, the "would you kindly..." being another one where they smack you up the head with a sudden realization of ludonarrative dissonance (you thought you were being this badass free agent but you were just doing what the game bad guy wants you to do).

Coming back to the point here, and the other remarks about agency and railroading, you do realize that you're not playing Bioshock, right? Or lets make the gap a little smaller and say, The Sims. This is not a relationship sim. It's a Visual Novel. Emphasis on the second part.

There is no emergent gameplay here like you might expect of Bioshock or The Sims. In a Visual Novel, like a regular novel, a particular storyline with particular events will take place. Even though it comes with little notes at the bottom of the page that say "if you want to get on the balloon, go to page 41, if you want to continue on camel-back, go to page 58", like one of those classic choose your own adventure books I read as a kid, huge parts of it are just set in stone, like a novel. You will arrive at the oasis either way.

Sure, there's Visual Novels that allow a whole lot of freedom with regards to who you chose to interact with and who not, and what events you want to attend or not. To achieve this, there are hardly any dramatic developments to speak of involving multiple characters, each one neatly compartmentalized and hardly interacting between them in any meaningful way, other than a little nod acknowledging what's going on before setting off on their own tangent again.
In that way, it doesn't matter if you set fire to one compartment and then lock the door, the other ones will happily keep on providing you with options. They'll provide you with an endlessly happy-joy parade of going to the beach, clothing store or restaurant to offer up some risqué encounter with your love interest du jour. Or maybe you work through some dark, deep secret and grow closer in the process. And then the next installment you can do the same thing with some other character. Or not, full agency.

LomL choses the opposite, and the trade-off is that you can't chose not to go to dinner with Brooke that day. or decide you want Macy but not Denise. Or not go on a holiday with them. You can chose not to be romantically involved with every (or any) character in the game, but the dramatic events will take place regardless. That's the novel part at work.

So while I feel you're raising some valid points about Visual Novels in general, and open the door but not quite arrive at some statement about this underlying trade-off between meaningful dramatic developments and full agency that different visual novels approach in different ways, I don't really feel there's all that much to take away here for Light of my Life in particular, other than stating that the choices I made in that trade-off don't do it for you, which is fine.

 

[Count Morado]

The last two posts used more 25-cent words in discussing the narrative of this game than were used in two semesters worth of my upper-level/graduate creative writing coursework. One sounded pretentious and the other genuine. I think y'all know which I mean.

 

[clowns234]

There is no emergent gameplay here like you might expect of Bioshock or The Sims. In a Visual Novel, like a regular novel, a

I think this is at the heart of a lot of arguments in the comments in multiple games. Some people assume that every game is of 'X' type where there can be no separation between the player and the MC.

 

[Aurelius Ambrosius]

I do see what Adultress means though. I understand you (NaughtyRoad) want to tell a certain story. But, you can very easily solve this by simply NOT offering a fake choice of doing a certain action (like going to dinner). I too hate it when games do that.

Personally, I prefer visual novels which have NO choices at all because I simply want to watch the stories unfold without experiencing the constant 'fear of missing out' worry. In every visual novel I watch/play I always want to do everything and see all paths. That often involves a lot of saving and rolling back and reloading and following walkthroughs. It is really annoying and severely reduces the fun I have with these novels.

 

[Count Morado]

The "fake choices" or manufacturing "drama by wresting control" is not unlike many choices we have in life - there are times we may not want to do something expected or necessary, but we find we have to do them in order to grow or build new relationship roads or just to see what's on the other side. There are few of these and they are far between.

This isn't an open world game that has tenuously threaded missions in order to have side quests, to have bestowed unlimited powers of persuasion by some deus ex machina, or to grind up skills so that we can beat the end boss. This is a narrative that has a defined arc with moments of tension, all out interpersonal conflict, and - at some point - resolution.

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One comparison could be made to a DnD game module where players, no matter how hard they try to divert to intent of the story, always have boundaries within which the DM confines their world and explorations to remain as honest to the story as possible until the final curtain is raise.

 

[naughtyroad]

(...) But, you can very easily solve this by simply NOT offering a fake choice of doing a certain action (like going to dinner). (...)

You may say false choice, I say option to give your MC a voice in a situation, even if in the end some even events will still take place. I know a lot of people enjoy that ability, and some don't, and I'm okay with that.

And in this case, there was never going to be an alternative choice of not having some event that sets Macy off, and avoiding the confrontation with her. Not having such a moment would leave story development dead in the water.

I get that some people hate this feeling of not being in control of the game, and feel like control is being wrested away, especially those who look at it from a standpoint of something that has to be "won".
I don't want to deny them their opinions about their experience, but they're not playing the game I'm making, and it feels like complaining how solitaire's rudimentary elemental combat system has some potential even if the implementation is overly simple, but the RPG elements are virtually non-existent and they didn't even bother to put character designs on the lower level units, they just assigned some numbers. All I can say is, well, yeah. Solitaire is a terrible RPG.

But apart from all the other arguments about the format and the technical and practical limitations, the not being in control of events and people around you, that's just... life. I don't know about you, but all this stuff I have no control over just keeps happening to me all the time, this week being no exception.

 

[deathhound7]

I do see what Adultress means though. I understand you (NaughtyRoad) want to tell a certain story. But, you can very easily solve this by simply NOT offering a fake choice of doing a certain action (like going to dinner). I too hate it when games do that.

Personally, I prefer visual novels which have NO choices at all because I simply want to watch the stories unfold without experiencing the constant 'fear of missing out' worry. In every visual novel I watch/play I always want to do everything and see all paths. That often involves a lot of saving and rolling back and reloading and following walkthroughs. It is really annoying and severely reduces the fun I have with these novels.

I'll second not even having a choice at all when there really isn't one. One caveat to that would be something like Macy's dream sequence, where the choices given were what she had wished she had said to her mother, but what ends up happening is what she had actually said. That was potent and with purpose, but yeah, maybe the dinner 'choice' could have simply been omitted.

You're unique in wanting VNs without choices at all, but I feel you. Like you, I just want a story. I'm probably only going to read a VN once, don't like the idea of missing content or accidently locking myself out of paths and I don't really even have the time to explore multiple routes. If the story is meant to be primarily a harem story, I'd rather just be locked into that route. If the story is super-focused on one love interest, then being constantly bombarded with other choices is going to just come off as really distracting.

I actually didn't finish Now and Then, despite being really into it, because I had no idea which was the best was to go through the story. I first took it as a romance story between an older man and his adopted daughter. That's a rough concept to tackle if you're going to take it seriously, but things start to get ridiculous when you start to add harem elements to a story like that, so I immediately rejected the second love interest . . . and then the choice just kept popping up again, as if the harem route was always the 'one-true-way' to begin with.

The best friend's brother keeps getting mentioned, like a gun being placed on the mantle, but I don't know where the author is going with any of it, so that just leaves me utterly confused on how I should best experience the story. I decided to just take a step back and perhaps return to it later. Without choices, I would have probably stuck around to see where the authors intentions lead us.

Sometimes I really like choices when it allows us to avoid what we might consider to be really f-ed-up decisions on the part of the author; like, for instance, cheating on one's own daughter. Sometimes we get choices and still aren't able to avoid stuff like that. In 'Daughter for Dessert', I stopped doing anything with any other female character once the MC was involved with his daughter. Well, joke's on me, because he ends up waking up naked, in-between two women, anyway, after a night of drinking and doing drugs. I would have really liked to have opted out of that scenario altogether, and it's not even a kinetic novel.

Choosing to exclusively focus on Denise and Macy wasn't that difficult of choice for me here, but I still feel like I'm missing something in rejecting Brooke, and that's always going to nag at me. Not doing anything with Sarah, Zara or Sierra was a given, though---those three are absolute nightmare fuel and I'm just not that curious. lol.

 

[naughtyroad]

(...) You're unique in wanting VNs without choices at all, but I feel you. (...)

That's not actually true though. It's just the bigger story beats that will happen regardless.

There's plenty of choices and plenty of consequences. The fact that you can chose not to be amorously involved with any characters, or just a few, or all, for one, but there's quite a few more. If you were ever to open up the source code you'd see just how much consequence the dialog is allowing for and how much variation is in there for a ton of choices, in the way the different characters address the MC and reflect on events around them.
But it's okay not to notice that too, as it means the game's succeeded there at least in making whatever choice you made feel like a natural part of the story now, instead of failing to acknowledge it and making it obvious that choice wasn't accounted for.

 

[parachina]

When it comes to games posted in this forum, this game is truly on its own league. The dev is clearly very talented and it really shows on how insanely well written this game is (which is even more surprising since its a nsfw game). Its clear how much care and passion this guy put on his work

I rarely make comments on this forum, much less to praise games but this game was something else

 

[Aurelius Ambrosius]

NaughtyRoad, just to make this clear : I'm fairly sure the people passionately discussing your game here do so because they actually feel like this game is doing something special. If your game/story wasn't any good, then nobody (including myself) would bother to come here to comment on it.

Your choice of models and the fact you made this game 95% about the characters OTHER than the MC are really a refreshing take on the genre. Your game can be a potential inspiration for other authors wanting to do something interesting with their game.

 

[Count Morado]

There's plenty of choices and plenty of consequences...

Even for those, there's a very good reason to add them...

That has been my view of single-choice options when used effectively. They are there to make the player pause, to understand what is about to happen has to happen (whether you want it to or not) because that is part of this world. Or to help the player understand the ramification and responsibility of their actions. It's that dramatic pause, the caesura (here's 25-cent word) - the notation in music, the blank page in a book, or the Pinter silence in plays.

This isn't a porn game as much as some want it to be. It's an adult visual novel that has ramifications for certain choices and inevitability for others. It has lewd bits, but the lewd bits aren't the source of the conflict of the story, they are the results.

For me, this is what makes this title stand out among the others I have seen. It's why I like the movie Caligula or the book The Story of O or non-lewd story-driven AAA and indie games.

Your Mileage May Vary - but that is part of the enjoyment of this experience.

 

[Miðgarðsormr]

When ppl complain about not having a choice ingame i always think about games like Final fantasy, Zelda, Resident Evil etc.
And Books many many books who got made into movies or TV series in which the audience go for a journey to magical lands or follow a story of many variations.

I always remember they never had any success cause the lack of choices.

Jokes aside this is a visual novel. Not a porn game and not a sex simulator. People may confuse this with the rampant amounts of porn games and sex simulators on this board but this is what a visuel novel looks like. Sure it has sex in it and rightfully so. But the essence of the game is the story and the characters and what they go through.

If it is not your cup of tea that is 100% your right or opinion to have. But at no point in time should naughtyroad change anything on this success story. That man knows what he is doing.

Never change a running system.

 

[ItsNotMeToo]

Downloaded this last month but finally got around to playing it last week and finished up yesterday. Wow. Anyone who even remotely considers this game should just go ahead and play it. Amazing, and I can't wait to see what else unfolds.

 

[deathhound7]

NaughtyRoad, just to make this clear : I'm fairly sure the people passionately discussing your game here do so because they actually feel like this game is doing something special. If your game/story wasn't any good, then nobody (including myself) would bother to come here to comment on it.

Your choice of models and the fact you made this game 95% about the characters OTHER than the MC are really a refreshing take on the genre. Your game can be a potential inspiration for other authors wanting to do something interesting with their game.

Reads a mediocre or sub-par story: Absolutely no criticism to be had, because it was forgotten in t-minus ten minutes.

Reads a story and can't put it down: Proceeds to write an essay detailing every single perceived and potential flaw.

Sounds legit.

 

[blurymind]

The renders look beautiful. You made some really good use of lighting and made the character sprites well integrated in the scenes. So much attention to subtle animations during dialogue too.

I like how the talking characters emote to intuitively draw attention to who the speaker is. There is also blinking animations almost everywhere.

What software/assets did you use for the rendering? Are these daz studio/ poser models? Did you render them in blender or some other external software?
Are the blink animations on another layer to preserve space or are they baked into the sprites?

 

[naughtyroad]

The renders look beautiful. You made some really good use of lighting and made the character sprites well integrated in the scenes. So much attention to subtle animations during dialogue too.

I like how the talking characters emote to intuitively draw attention to who the speaker is. There is also blinking animations almost everywhere.

What software/assets did you use for the rendering? Are these daz studio/ poser models? Did you render them in blender or some other external software?
Are the blink animations on another layer to preserve space or are they baked into the sprites?

Cheers. The characters are Genesis-8, but quite heavily customized various morphs and skins from the daz store (e.g. not stock characters). Rendering has been done using iray in daz3d studio. Effects like blinking, movement and camera pan/zoom have been created in ren'py using a variety of ATL transforms.