Ren'Py Love & Sex Second Base [v24.6.0a] [Andrealphus]

[Cartageno]

Yeah, of course the reviews for this game are below average for this kind of game, which obviously means some people don't like it as much while they like others, of a similar type (the examples you mentioned: 2d graphic sandbox), more. And that can be reason for concern if Andrealphus wanted to compete with them.

But for one point it would be absolutely annoying if all devs would go for the way that gets them a maximum rating because that would mean most games would be virtually the same. And while many people would enjoy that (hence the good ratings), others not as much, so if you find your niche then you can ignore part of the rating issue. That there's always some players not liking games is unavoidable, you may just not fit their taste (and since I heard complaints about "my mother is not a virgin but had sex with other people" I think everything is possible). So games being different is a good thing for the whole genre, even if it means some people will enjoy less games.

And I think this is especially true with the whole "grindy" question. Some players, myself included, prefer a slow story progression, prefer working a bit for their reward. Others want to have every girl jumping at them in the first scene. Yet others are inbetween. None of them is wrong, but again, many would not like the other games.

And the second point is: a dev more or less has to do what they want to do. Listen to their players and patrons for ideas, sure. But a dev who makes a game solely for player requests will most likely make a game they themselves would not like as much, and the game will suffer for it. There's more to it than just "drop mechanic X and add kink Y and people will love your game more". They probably won't, even if they despise mechanic X and love kink Y.

As for me, of the three games compared here I prefer L&S by far and would be disappointed if it were to be closer to the others. Which admittedly is a somewhat moot point since I am not a patron (so far), and it doesn't mean that the other games are bad, just that different people have different tastes.

 

[Andrealphus]

I honestly don't care about my rating on F95, the people coming to my patreon page or itch.io from here are a very little fraction of my players (thank you google analytics for the info)
I do think however that both my interactions with everyone so far proves that I am both civil and willing to take advices and opinions and use them in the game.
I am pretty proud of my game and what I accomplished in those three years.

 

[BryEdw]

I honestly don't care about my rating on F95, the people coming to my patreon page or itch.io from here are a very little fraction of my players (thank you google analytics for the info)
I do think however that both my interactions with everyone so far proves that I am both civil and willing to take advices and opinions and use them in the game.
I am pretty proud of my game and what I accomplished in those three years.

It's like walkin up to someone and saying "Hey! Your baby's ugly!" Who does that shit? Yeah that might be their opinion, but keep it to themself. There's always gotta be somebody that has to shit on a parade. A damn good parade at that. Shit I'm proud just to have this game. I think it's pretty damn cool.

 

[Vasin]

Yeah, man, I'm right there with you. I keep saying that everyone but Morgan just clogs up the game, and it's better off without them, but does anyone listen? Nooooo.

 

[spiritmaster2001]

This game has so much potential. I wish the devs would rather focus on existing girls rather than constantly introducing new ones. Also I'd rather prefer some kind of story instead of an hour long mindless grind. Does anyone actually enjoy grinding stats instead of actual conversions with the characters? All that grinding for really short sex scenes... Imo other games like FET or Summertime Saga do a far better job when it comes to designing enjoyable character interactions.

As one of the people who has written large sections of some of the story (Palla, Cassidy), your implication that there's no story is clearly not as polite as you believe it to be.

Andrealphus' answer was rather flip, sure, but your comment isn't even factually accurate. There's rather a lot of conversation with many of the characters.

Constructive criticism talks about problems that can be improved, points out things that can be done better. It's incredibly valuable, and I for one appreciate constructive criticism.

But for the life of me, I can't see anything in your comment that fits the word "constructive". There's nothing in that paragraph that suggests there's anything that can or should be done to improve things, it just says other games are better. As a negative review I guess that's fine.

And if you feel it's okay to write something like this about a game and are hurt by a flip answer, I guess you see the world pretty one-sided. That's fine too, I guess. Nobody has to like everything. You don't have to like this game, and Andrealphus doesn't have to like your negative review, right?

 

[Featherine]

Can you get pregnant if you're playing as female MC? Is there any content for that? Walkthrough mentions everything about Male MC getting girls pregnant but not the other way around so I was wondering.

 

[Ugh123]

I've heard of this wonderful thing called using search function, you might want to try it.

really? What a wonderful participant on this discussion board you are.

Other than folks having the same question, there were no answers. (I was having the issue with LP=60 (120) and KP=75) - what finally worked for me was doing the date in the afternoon on Saturday, then when it asks to continue for the evening, selecting the cinema again - then it triggered the final event that was missing for Morgan. After that, the Morgan/Kleio pub event worked as well (i.e., don't have to choose one of them)

Sorry to see folks giving the game designer a hard time - I think the game is well done. Hope there are many more updates to come!

 

[AngryBabboon]

Hmm, so lavish is locked in 70 LP and 50 KP?

 

[Vasin]

really? What a wonderful participant on this discussion board you are.

Other than folks having the same question, there were no answers. (I was having the issue with LP=60 (120) and KP=75) - what finally worked for me was doing the date in the afternoon on Saturday, then when it asks to continue for the evening, selecting the cinema again - then it triggered the final event that was missing for Morgan. After that, the Morgan/Kleio pub event worked as well (i.e., don't have to choose one of them)

Why, thank you. I see you did exactly what I suggested doing here ten days ago

You have to go on a cinema date after you've gone on an afternoon (weekend) cinema date once. So just go with her to the moves on saturday twice.

 

[lordlysin]

this game is dope, but i think i fucked up samantha's story line... i didnt tell her about her 2 times champion husband until they got married and my character fucked her lol, she got mad and isn't anywhere to be found & doesnt respond to calls. did i fuck up?

 

[Andrealphus]

She should come back

 

[Mrsubtle]

I honestly don't care about my rating on F95, the people coming to my patreon page or itch.io from here are a very little fraction of my players (thank you google analytics for the info)
I do think however that both my interactions with everyone so far proves that I am both civil and willing to take advices and opinions and use them in the game.
I am pretty proud of my game and what I accomplished in those three years.

How does Promoting/networking the game work when you start? and how good or bad is Piracy in combination with games like these?
Most of the Adult games I've discovered on this forum. And i've tried looking for other sources that advertise these type of games. I'm know of Itch.io but haven't really explored it yet. Or am I overthinking this?

At the moment i'm working on Premise, still need to research Archetypes and what not. And plenty other stuff to learn from scratch.

 

[FauxCount]

Andrealphus I've loved the game for awhile now, but I wanted to give some feedback on the current release:

- I like the storyline tracker you've added. Would it be possible to add a menu-accessible splash page explaining what the icons mean though? Think of it like how in a console game there will be a tutorial through the buttons and mechanics, but you can still pull up a button map that shows what everything is.

- In the current update, I can't access the main menu, the settings, or the load screen once I've entered gameplay. It's annoying to need to save and quit the entire program any time I want to access those screens.

- A bunch of people are piling onto you about grindy elements, and while I don't think that's super justified, I do think that you should account for grinding in your GUI design (I define "grind" here as "incremental stat-increasing segments of a game which are not immediate new content"). Each update to the GUI has slowed down the rate of player menuing through the game and increased the number of clicks. This isn't ideal when there are grinding elements — those elements are fine, but they combine poorly with elements forcing clicking through multiple stages to move around and with needing to click small icons spread across the screen.

 

[Seven Drip]

1. Band Harem quest is missing from the Story Tracker. So, are the threesome and foursome one time events or repeatable?

2. How to actually "Fuck Bree on the beach"? The Fuck option is available among other interactions, but she always gives BJs instead.

 

[Vasin]

- In the current update, I can't access the main menu, the settings, or the load screen once I've entered gameplay. It's annoying to need to save and quit the entire program any time I want to access those screens.

Have you tried pressing "Escape" button?

 

[G.ian98]

I cant do the midnight meeting with cassidy. Nothing appears on my screen and then it says: I didnt attend to the bla bla bla
I need help, If a continue to play without doing this event cassidy leaves my game
Does anybody knows what to do? Or the console commands to trigger this event?

 

[spiritmaster2001]

1. Band Harem quest is missing from the Story Tracker. So, are the threesome and foursome one time events or repeatable?

It's there, it's called "Deathless Harpies" as it's the name of the band.

 

[spiritmaster2001]

I cant do the midnight meeting with cassidy. Nothing appears on my screen and then it says: I didnt attend to the bla bla bla
I need help, If a continue to play without doing this event cassidy leaves my game
Does anybody knows what to do? Or the console commands to trigger this event?

At midnight you should get the appointment button, which is the go on a date icon.

 

[Andrealphus]

Andrealphus I've loved the game for awhile now, but I wanted to give some feedback on the current release:
- A bunch of people are piling onto you about grindy elements, and while I don't think that's super justified, I do think that you should account for grinding in your GUI design (I define "grind" here as "incremental stat-increasing segments of a game which are not immediate new content"). Each update to the GUI has slowed down the rate of player menuing through the game and increased the number of clicks. This isn't ideal when there are grinding elements — those elements are fine, but they combine poorly with elements forcing clicking through multiple stages to move around and with needing to click small icons spread across the screen.

Can you be more specific on that one ?
I honestly don't think I increased the depth of the UI

 

[FauxCount]

Can you be more specific on that one ?
I honestly don't think I increased the depth of the UI

I think I wasn't clear, and on review, some of my impression was warped, as we'll see below:

Generally speaking, I forgot how much of the navigating between sub-areas and area hubs was present in the older builds.

As a perfect illustration of this, you significantly streamlined navigation between v18.06.13 and v18.12.1 by treating each area as generally accessible within its area and only needing to go to the hub to leave the area, which was a wonderful idea and implementation. v18.12.1 is probably around where I started playing the game the most, because I had completely forgotten various aspects of v18.06.13, so for the rest of the discussion, I'll start with it and move forward from there. For the record, I'm arbitrarily selecting builds for comparison entirely based on what I find fastest which shows what I want to mention.

In v18.12.1 the menu is entirely text based and you can navigate around very quickly with minimal movement of the mouse using the left menu. This menu is the easiest to get around, but obviously has the least attention to aesthetics — for the majority of navigation menus, that doesn't matter to me, but I admit that the inventory and stores could have some issues in readability due to the wall of text.

By v19.2.2f you had moved to the square pictures for for the locations, circle buttons for area activities, although the straight text menu remained for talking with girls. When this happened, I felt the game slow down a lot for me. Navigating around the various regions got much slower due to needing to move the mouse around so much (especially on a laptop), and again, this is only relevant when you need to do grinding sections (such as playing through multiple weeks for getting stats for the next job promotion, for reaching the weekend or a specific day, for leveling the band, or for season change (this was the worst offender, and certain changes you've made since then have helped a lot).

v20.1.2 moves girl interactions to the vertical circle buttons just like the area activities. I should mention here for this version and v19.2.2f that I actually really like the appearance of these bottles. They do a great job of showing what's going on. My only complaint is that the time to move around and select everything is just getting slightly slower each release due to the smaller buttons spread over a larger area.

v20.2.2a moves all interactions to the circle buttons, but now on horizontal. I like the girl icons on area tiles, and I love the story guide and inventory changes. The problem is the same as before, that things are now all small buttons over a large area. "Problem" here again isn't an accurate description in the abstract — the entire game is getting prettier and more polished with every release. The only problem is that the navigation requires incrementally more attention and time each release, and when needing to go through numerous full day cycles, it adds up to impact player experience.

I want to repeat where this is coming from: I'm not a developer, and I don't have any real solutions — you're making a great game and I can explain to myself where all your decisions came from and they all make sense. I just wanted to raise a constructive comment of one issue that I feel causes friction and sometimes lessens how long I continue playing. As mentioned before, I also definitely misremembered some of the trajectory of the game's development and you were correct in your confusion regarding my comment about clicks (given that I was totally off base with a mistaken memory there).