VN Ren'Py Light of My Life [Ch. 8 v0.8.1] [Naughty Road]

[naughtyroad]

Two things naughtyroad ..

1. If you aren't making a living out of this, then why not hire some help so the updates are not year long.. I mean, it's way too long of a time to wait for an update. (I know the reason you aren't to be honest, but I said "What the heck, let's post it anyway)

2. Maybe limit the content with the rest of the cast and focus more on the main characters ? Just a thought..

Otherwise this is by far one of the best games in this forum. Great work.

1. There's quite a few reasons why that's not only unfeasible, but makes no sense even.

For one, from a work perspective:
Hiring on another person won't double development speed, as I'd need to train and coach them in my work methods, plan, specify and communicate what they should work on, verify their work and issue rework, and process their output. And there's some jobs that just can't be offloaded (at least, not while keeping it the LomL it is today). Also, a lot of the extra work that comes in is taking me away from what I love doing, which is making LomL.
I've written more extensively about the above before if you're interested in more details, but you'll have to do some digging in the thread.

Nr two, from a business perspective:
It does not seem likely that hiring on another person will increase revenue to a point where it justifies the cost of hiring on another person. When I did the math end of last year, net income from support is a little shy of Western Europe minimum wage, on an hourly basis (given I spend about 50 hrs a week on Light of my Life, and after VAT and every platform, payment provider and the tax man takes their bite).
I don't see that income doubling from shaving a couple of months off of a 10/11 month development period. In fact, it seems support has reached a natural limit and after the boost following the last release, right now it's already back at almost exactly the same level it was this time last year.

On a little side tangent, that's one reason why short releases cycles with little or no new content is a much better business practice, as it allows a dev team to keep kicking that line up before the effects of the last release wear off. It's also exactly how I don't want to make Light of my Life.

But coming back to what I was saying: what you're suggesting is sinking that income into what'll end up (after taxes and VAT) to be a little shy of half of a Western European minimum wage for someone else. Mind you, that leaves 0 income for me, without any less work for me. And the only gain from that seems to be "it's still to long to develop, just a little less too long".
I mean, I don't do this to get rich (or I'd just moonlight my other job and make a killing), but that just doesn't make sense, whichever way you turn it.

Finally, I've heard people say "it's too long", but then again, for movies or series a year or two between drops is quite normal, and they have crews of hundreds. I appreciate people are eager, but I'm not about to throw quality out of the door to satisfy this demand for quantity, so any development time will be "just long enough to get it right", and y'all just need to redefine your expectations to match.

2. The side cast is very important for pacing (entire chapters would have been left without any lewd content to speak of), comedic relief (the coven) and as an antagonist to drive some dramatic developments (Brooke). Cutting that content out would make Light of my Life a less complete and balanced experience IMHO, so that's not going to happen.

 

[mightybored]

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

 

[naughtyroad]

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

Price of salmon is going up, so they're taking quite a big bite out of the budget. Otoh, if the salmon run out they take a bite out of me so I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place.

 

[deathhound7]

Hey, I'm just popping in here to say that I just finished reading(?) this VN, and I think that it's absolutely spectacular. I'm fairly recent to this type of media and was originally just looking for fap material, but writing happens to be a failed hobby of mine, and I quickly ended up craving romance and a good story out of these things more than anything else. That's . . . hard to find.

If I have any complaint about the story at all, it would probably be the stuff going on between Lou/MC and Denise. Compared to everything else, it comes off as super-creepy and pretty much snaps suspension of disbelief. Denise comes off as far too innocent (well, until you figure out what she's really like) and Lou/MC would have to be practically brain-dead in order to be convinced that doing stuff like jacking-off in front of his daughter was a reasonable request out of concern for his health. I know I'm asking for realism in an incest porn VN, but I really felt that by comparison, the stuff going on between Macy and Denise, and eventually Lou and Macy, were all very natural and believable.

If you were to ask me how I might try to do it better, however . . . I donnu. I wouldn't have the first clue on how to touch that one. All I can really say with any certainty is that I had more of a problem in the beginning of their progression, rather than much later, when the pretense of this not being for mutual gratification had been all but obliterated. If there's one thing that I do like about Denise and Lou's relationship, it's that Denise, in many ways, takes care of her father and even acts maternally, which does a lot towards the power-dynamic between them. In my mind, her extreme naivete and her vulnerability would mean that she's completely off-limits to a character as old as Lou, but her saving graces are her maternal instincts and well . . . the fact that she's probably the most perverted character of the cast.

I think that I've been drawn to incest because the taboo presents such a challenge. In regular romance stories, there's the will-they or won't-they element, but with incest romance stories, there's the, "How the fuck does this even happen?!" element to it. I think that father-daughter stories might be even harder to write than other pairings. At least with siblings, you have similar ages, so there's less to deal with on a power-dynamic front. Mother-son pairings would be a bit harder, but with the way our society currently views men and women, you could simply overturn the power-dynamic altogether and write the son as being the more protective, even more dominant of the pair. With father-daughter pairings you have to overcome the obstacle of how fathers are supposed to see themselves as protectors beyond all else, and how such a relationship would violate those convictions. There's also the real-world problem of it being more common for father-figures to be sexually abusive towards their children than any other abusive familial situation.

So far, there's only four father-daughter VNs that I like; yours (LOML) Daughter for Dessert, Petal Among Thorns, and Now and Then. I have problems with each one, but I would also say that each one of these have impressively tackled a very difficult subject/premise.

PS: That bear scene. I had actually completely and utterly missed that Macy was licked by a bear. I saw her swinging that twig in the background, but was too focused on Denise and Lou's conversation to notice that a mother-f'ing grissly had come into the frame at all. When Macy recounted what had happened, I actually had to rollback in order to confirm that it, indeed, had.

 

[styggtuff12]

on steam it says the planned release is second half of 2022, does that mean the next update is second half of 2022 or will the game be finished second half of 2022?

 

[Count Morado]

On a little side tangent, that's one reason why short releases cycles with little or no new content is a much better business practice, as it allows a dev team to keep kicking that line up before the effects of the last release wear off.

I have brought up this exact point when dealing with "update when"/milker complaints in other threads. Glad to see this shared by a trusted developer.

on steam it says the planned release is second half of 2022, does that mean the next update is second half of 2022 or will the game be finished second half of 2022?

there is still a lot of story remaining for beyond the next update of chapter 7.

 

[afterlights]

Hmm, darkcookie's character design are always great I think, but I kinda hope super busty nerdy hijab girl finds her way onto the stage in some other incarnation at some point.

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?

 

[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