HornyyPussy
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- Apr 26, 2020
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And lets not forget the flirting with our little brother! We'll see where that's going!
- Thread starter Jubs!
- Start date
- Jul 26, 2023
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I forgot all about him. Haven't seen the lad for a while.
He's busy. He has a business to setup and an Academy to graduate from. He features in the family faction as he tries to get the family business off the ground and has to navigate the murky and competitive world of business. The tax forms are a nightmare and someone has to deal with the Karens.
- Jul 26, 2023
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It's been a fairly unexciting week, not a huge amount to report. I completed everything except the SFX and music for Alice's event and I'm about half way through doing Emelia's. I should hopefully have that done this weekend.
The last week has mostly been a tale of frustration over what can and can't be done with video generators. They have really weird and overly cautious limitations, after about 10 gen attempts (which all cost credits from the monthly balance I get from a subscription) just trying to get someone to playfully slap/pat/tap (and a full thesaurus of alternative words and descriptions for this action) another person I had to give up. Just now I gave up on a scene where the MC has his back to the camera with only tiny part of his face visible. The animator tools kept making him turn his face to make it visible and the faces they come up with... horrendous. The first time it did it, I realised I was going to have to specify the general look of the MC for when it inevitably turned his head. It doesn't matter if you specify him not to, or that he is looking somewhere else. If the starting frame is a certain way it WILL do it and there is nothing you can do to stop it. Somehow multiple different generators turned "Caucasian, handsome, clean-shaven British male with short straight dark hair" into a someone that looked like they had an auburn coloured afro, facial features that looked like botched plastic surgery, a weird afro beard and heavy makeup on. Multiple times. So that scene has had to be redesigned as well. It can be quite demoralising when you run up against these brick walls, but I just have to tell myself that human imagination is a pretty powerful thing and if I can't animate it, it isn't the end of the world. I just make sure the description of it and the sprites and scene composition are good enough. Anyway that's my therapy rant for this week.
Speaking of scene compositions. When I first started this I mostly used background scenes I had generated using standard SDXL checkpoints. Which does the job, just not particularly well - especially if people are in the scene. Which is why some of the early scenes in Luminaria have quite botched faces in the background characters. I later switched to Flux Pro, which is where nearly all the backgrounds from about half way through Chapter 1 onwards came from. For the last update I also started using Nano Banana. Flux does great stuff, but for general backgrounds it tends to produce very similar overall compositions and it wasn't working for the rainforest scenes because it was adding in well worn and easily traversable paths into most generation attempts. I tried a few different ones and Nano Banana was good at not doing that and creating more varied scenes, so I started using that too. For the Emelia event I needed to do more scenes in Luminaria with people in the background. I tried out SeeDream 4 and was pleasantly surprised as the images were pretty good, it handled concepts like fusions of modern and and old fashioned clothing well and the background faces were much better. Still problematic but fixable with face improving upscaling tools. It's also very good at following instructions. Attached are some of the backgrounds, including the redesign of the street where Vivian's shop is located. It's a little bit basic in terms of colour schemes, but I think for future stuff I can probably get much more intricate designs out of it. Flux will do wording and signs, but nothing like as consistently as this. I don't think it would allow me to specify the signs and parameters for 3 different shops with signs and actually do them, whereas SeeDream did. So that's a nice little find. Unfortunately its 3x as expensive as flux to use, but I need less generations to get what I want so there is a trade off there.
I think everything is looking good for the early access release to be out in the usual 1 month window (first week of November). Once these events are done I'm going to re-do Vivian's scenes in Chapter 1, transfer more character profiles over to the new format and work on making the end of content messages and mission or event availability systems and codex screens much more user intuitive. I've seen some feedback that suggests it's not clear what you need to do at that potential end of content screen, so it needs some work.
Jubs!
Began to play your game, now at the prologue. There's an exceptional error after the introduction, at first I blamed restoring content patch and then I began to notice that it's not patch's fault. No one introduces MC's dad, but his name is a variable (hence that error appeared). Then, during thunderstorm there's MC's younger brother who is supposed to be somewhere else with MC's dad. Lightning strikes him before MC and we see him in another world, just like the rest of the family (except MC's father). And then MC's mother is unhappy and the reason is (citates) "It isn't hard to guess why, your stepdad and stepbrother are basically dead to her". I understand you're still undecided if MC's brother will be at the game or not. It's like "I'm a novice dev so no one cares if I make some logical errors in the prologue". Guess what, if people play your game for the first time, prologue is the face of a game for them. And if you cannot make it without any errors then all your game isn't woth playing.
It's just my humble opinion but I guess if you want people to give you money (and judging by the fact you're using Patreon - you are doing it for the money) you should make prologue as best as you could - it's like a face of your game, your introduction. Anf if you failed the introduction, you failed the whole sale.
Began to play your game, now at the prologue. There's an exceptional error after the introduction, at first I blamed restoring content patch and then I began to notice that it's not patch's fault. No one introduces MC's dad, but his name is a variable (hence that error appeared). Then, during thunderstorm there's MC's younger brother who is supposed to be somewhere else with MC's dad. Lightning strikes him before MC and we see him in another world, just like the rest of the family (except MC's father). And then MC's mother is unhappy and the reason is (citates) "It isn't hard to guess why, your stepdad and stepbrother are basically dead to her". I understand you're still undecided if MC's brother will be at the game or not. It's like "I'm a novice dev so no one cares if I make some logical errors in the prologue". Guess what, if people play your game for the first time, prologue is the face of a game for them. And if you cannot make it without any errors then all your game isn't woth playing.
It's just my humble opinion but I guess if you want people to give you money (and judging by the fact you're using Patreon - you are doing it for the money) you should make prologue as best as you could - it's like a face of your game, your introduction. Anf if you failed the introduction, you failed the whole sale.
Try reading the text - it is all clearly explained, MC has TWO (count them) brothers.
The youngest is with the father at the second holiday home (where the rest of the extended family are staying).
- Jul 26, 2023
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I think you're playing a different game to me. There's 2 brothers, one is with them, one is not.
The prologue was awesome for me and hooked me immediately.
HornyyPussy
Board Buff
- Apr 26, 2020
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You really should check the facts before making asinine comments.....
Also, he has a Patreon so that means has HAS to be doing it for the money? What are you, 12?
I guess, it's not me who's missing the facts. Let me tell you in a way everyone understands. I played the prologue (first time playing and wanting to feel what dev is telling us) and met with error on a phrase "Your father, [csn], has taken your baby brother, [jn], to the cottage your aunt, uncle and cousins are staying in, to give your [sr] some space." csn is a variable that wasn't defined so an application shows us an error. I can guess it's father's name. MC's baby brother is Ethan, so I guess variable jn is for him and that variable is clearly defined. It made me confused 'cause the phrase before that was about Ethan playing cards with Alice. And then, much text later, MC's mom is grieving over her husband and her son that wasn't near her. And another much text later, I learn about someone named James. Who is he? Why is everyone telling about him like he's the one I know? Get the picture?
"What are you, 12?" - Me? Guess someone needs to turn away from the mirror. Patreon is a platform that forces its own rules limiting creativity of its users. The only reason people would use it - is to earn money, nothing else. Because if you just want to make your project known you will use any platform that has no senseless limitations. Like itch.io or SubscribeStar. Or Boosty for the biggest country in the world.
I appreciate the spirited defence but he is actually right about the error issue and it's good he reported it because I hadn't realised. All feedback (well... except the AI is bad so this game sucks variety) is a gift.
In the last update I was reorganising the variables for the family names and saw the father and baby brother's ones and thought I hadn't used them and so didn't need them and deleted them. It frees up short versions of them - calling the baby James Sinclair with that name as a variable, means that to write speech for them I just have to start the line in Renpy with J or to refer to the first name i set the variable as JN, its a time saver. It does mean that once you have someone with a first name that begins with J, any subsequent characters have to have a different set of letters. E.G. Ethan and Emelia. Ethan I use E and EN, for Emelia I had to use EF and EFN. It's not a huge problem, but it just makes it easier on my memory if there aren't multiple people with names beginning with the same letter. I thought I hadn't used them so could delete them without issue but it turns out out I had used them, once, at the start of the prologue. And subsequently that crashes the game on a new play through. Kind of amazing that no-one else had reported it, but you can ignore it and it will move the game on without issue. It does mean that the piece of text that explains about where the father and baby brother are is not viewable. So your confusion here is entirely understandable. So I'll get that corrected for the next update. Thank you for reporting it.
Like Jubs! has said there are three brothers: the mc (in this moment I don't remember his name), which is the older one, Ethan (which was teleported in Luminaria with the mc, the sisters and the mother) and the baby brother, which is still in "our world" with the father. I suppose the bug you have find out, has messed up very well the dialogues, if Ethan has became the baby brother in your gamplay.
It won't have messed up the variables. it's just one of those renpy error screens with the option to rollback, ignore etc. pops up on the description about where the father and baby brother are. You can ignore the error and move on, but it never displays the explanation. So there is no clear indication that there are two brothers and since both of them are younger, where it mentions baby brother the reader is left to assume that refers to Ethan rather than the actual baby.
loved the look of this from the start but bit disappointed that I got a crash during the damn Prologue.....All I did was install and start so that is just bad coding.
Wondering if this game will continue for very long.
The quality of the 'AI' is very good, though I'm looking at their faces and I'm sure at least the mother and stepbrother are known actors. The three armed women in the street (and most of that first street scene) look like they were taken from a movie. If this is indeed ALL AI generated then I am impressed, but I'm having my doubts. I mean that sort of quality is like movie quality (like done for Avatar but better) is this sort of software available open market for very little money? If so, I want it as well.
ROFL and there you go...you have Idris Elba as Kane Flynn
Wondering if this game will continue for very long.
The quality of the 'AI' is very good, though I'm looking at their faces and I'm sure at least the mother and stepbrother are known actors. The three armed women in the street (and most of that first street scene) look like they were taken from a movie. If this is indeed ALL AI generated then I am impressed, but I'm having my doubts. I mean that sort of quality is like movie quality (like done for Avatar but better) is this sort of software available open market for very little money? If so, I want it as well.
ROFL and there you go...you have Idris Elba as Kane Flynn
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The mother is a combination of different women blended together (as are all the female characters in the game). Ethan is based on a masculinised woman. I'm curious as to which actors you can find to represent them?
Idris Elba is an influence for Kane, for sure (as he is a very famous black actor his training data will also be quite a strong influence within SDXL's references for middle-aged black males). But he is not the only one and as you can see below, put them together, and they are not the same. At a glance you can see that Idris has a more rounded face - rounder nose, wider bridge, wider nose in general, rounder cheeks, rounder jaw, his eyes are a different colour, aren't as sunken as Kane's and have a squint and his earlobe isn't defined like Kane's is.
You are looking for matches with celebrities, and because you are looking for the match, and our brains try very hard to pattern match everything we look at, you are seeing people who look a bit like them as being copies of them.
There is one character who looks too much like a celebrity, which is Isabella. Because for dark haired, caucasian middle-aged women certain celebrities are over-represented in the training data. Her look will be changing in future, still similar but something that moves her further from the more obvious spitting image that she is now.
As for the bug, that was introduced with the 0.3 update and will be corrected in the 0.35 updated in about a week's time.
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I don't really understand all that fuss about AI renders. It's good, it's fits its purpose and that's all. And it certainly better that all that free DAZ assets we see many times before. And more of that, AI renders have the same problem as DAZ renders - MC's mother looks just like MC's sisters, the same age category, certainly not a women at 40, mother of four.
About the game itself and the writing. Writing is certainly a good thing here, the text is colorful enough to not bother with visuals, you paint the picture with words much better than any renders can. A rare thing for AVN. But it by itself has a darker side - you write a book not a visual novel. There's no choice for players, they only follow the writing. And writing tells us a story of a young boy about an eleven years old (by writing, not by his years) that lived a sheltered life without any conflict, surrounded by only female characters (again, by writing, MC is girl wearing pants). He's yet to make itself a personality and he's only starting his way as a man. He's polite, and he's never seen any violence in his life (eleven? maybe more like five years old). He's feeling a breathe of a tailor through the fabric of his pants (what a breath it was!) and he cries when his first conflict is over. After half a year in a close to Renaissance society I must add. Not like that conflict was on his first day, half a year is long enough time to change even for a sheltered boy like he is. In other words, MC is not even remotely a man and male player has certain troubles associating himself with that boy.
And the thing close to this - we, players, has no say in who MC likes. When he's asked if he likes mature women, there's only two answers - "yes" and "yes, but..." What about "but youth has certain features I like" for example? Still polite but reader doesn't feel he's playing gerontophile.
Another strange thing I noticed is about art. In second chapter you plague our eyes with images of rape victims, there are many of them and there's no point storywise for players to see them. They're not characters, they're just some women without a name that we see in various states of undress over and over again. Like we don't read text and don't know what is going on.
- Jul 12, 2020
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Paragraphs and correct line breaks dude...they are important.
Quite a lot to unpack in that. Most of the romanceable characters in the game are mature women, there are 4 younger women, the rest are all 30+. The MC is a character who likes older women and younger women, he's equal opportunities when it comes to women he finds attractive. That's not negotiable or optional, it's a big part of the game and the character relationships.
This is a linear story. I took care to ensure that I explained in the blurb about this game that you don't have narrative control and the choices you have, of which there are plenty, are purely about flavour and usually have little overall impact on the story. It's incredibly time consuming and difficult to weave multiple outcomes into games. Each decision layers multiple variants on top of multiple variables. They all have to be coded and as a single person who has to do the writing, the scripting, art asset creation, animations audio and music, nothing would ever happen if tried to do that. You can see that with games that try to do it here, they spend literally years in development with the main plot barely developing as they try and fill in all the gaps. Even big studios with huge production budgets and hundreds of staff struggle with that. Just look at Mass Effect and how in the end they had to reduce all the choices in all three games down to red, green or blue.
The tailor is deliberately blowing air on his underwear, he is too innocent and naive to realise it's deliberate. I know for certain that you can feel it when someone does that.
I don't really understand what you mean about the MC being 11 or 5? He's a modern, Western educated 19/20 year old introverted man from a comfortable background, who starts the story as a sports psychology student with no pre-existing trauma or experience of violence, abuse etc. If you feel that after 6 months of moving to a 19th Century environment, where you haven't seen anything particularly violent or disturbing during that time, you would be happy cutting people's throats left right and centre, unphased by witnessing gruesome murder, horrifying sexual abuse, coming within a second of getting stabbed to death and witnessing your own mother exploding someone with ice magic, without a second thought about it, then.. OK... that makes me wonder about your background and where you are from. And why it is that 12 year olds in your experience would be fine with all that?
The point of those images is that that is both what he is seeing and imagining and that is what is adding to the traumatic nature of the whole experience for him. It's also part of what he needs to see in order to start mentally toughening up. The tone of Chapter 2 switches to being very dark because until these experiences, the arrival in the new world and settling in to it was all just a bit of an adventure. After Chapter 2 that illusion is shattered, is not some fun adventure, it's life or death.
Quite funny actually. I had encountered the same error and ignored the screen. Because it wasn't game breaking I didn't mind too much (these errors are quite common in renpy/AVN games as I'm sure you know).
The reason I didn't report it is that it was in the very beginning of the game and I assumed many more people would have encountered it and reported it. It is unfortunately very common that AVN devs stop caring about older versions (or their content) of the game and not fix bugs in them anymore. So I assumed you knew about it and just didn't care. So props for going back and fixing it.
When we're on the subject; there are some grammatical errors in the dialogue. Most likely you wrote a sentence, then edited a part of it, but didn't read the whole sentence back to check if it still made sense. I never report those as I play for fun, not to work as a text editor. I'm sure it's not your favorite part either so perhaps you can load the dialogue files in some AI chatbot and have it auto check for errors for you?
edit: oh and Isabella gives major Monica Bellucci vibes in some images. If it were up to me Isabella would look a lot more like her
but I'm sure you could get into legal trouble if you do that.
- Jul 26, 2023
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The error didn't exist when most people played, it only came in with the latest release. So only newbies would find it, which explains why most people never even encountered the error.Quite funny actually. I had encountered the same error and ignored the screen. Because it wasn't game breaking I didn't mind too much (these errors are quite common in renpy/AVN games as I'm sure you know).
The reason I didn't report it is that it was in the very beginning of the game and I assumed many more people would have encountered it and reported it. It is unfortunately very common that AVN devs stop caring about older versions (or their content) of the game and not fix bugs in them anymore. So I assumed you knew about it and just didn't care. So props for going back and fixing it.
When we're on the subject; there are some grammatical errors in the dialogue. Most likely you wrote a sentence, then edited a part of it, but didn't read the whole sentence back to check if it still made sense. I never report those as I play for fun, not to work as a text editor. I'm sure it's not your favorite part either so perhaps you can load the dialogue files in some AI chatbot and have it auto check for errors for you?
edit: oh and Isabella gives major Monica Bellucci vibes in some images. If it were up to me Isabella would look a lot more like her
As the proofreader for this, I would be interested with the grammatical mistakes you found so they can be fixed if neccesary. I do cover every single line of dialogue, but sometimes things get missed. Any grammatical mistakes are on me, not Jubs.
Thank you for clarification. You're making not a VN but kinetic novel. Not my cup of tea. It's pity game not tagged properly.
OK, it seems I chose the wrong angle in showing what I mean. MC is infantile young man with the body of athlete but with a mind of an innocent child. Young, naive, virgin. Comfortable life with overprotective parents can do that. And you say no traumas, no experience of violence and abuse. OK.
Then, the other side. MC finished school, he said he played rugby. Still no violence? No school fights, no bullies, and even in rugby... well, I can only assume he played in cheering team, the only way to escape violence in rugby in my mind. And he chose combat training in the Academy (not like it was his choice, MC's too passive to make a choice and prefer to go with the flow). Even in his passive thinking he must understand that he'll train to be a fighter, to cause violence. I won't make any conclusion, I just stated what you written.
About 6 months in XIX century society. I guess you didn't read Charles Dickens' books. He's a good writer, really, AFAIK he's classic English writer. And he wrote about life in England in XIX century. I read only "Oliver Twist" and that book is totally not for the faint of heart. In XIX century violence was less common than in centuries before but still murder, rape and theft was a common thing. And children considered their parents' property. And many other things that we consider barbarian, violent or just disgusting. Imagine MC teleported in Oliver Twist's London, what was his state of mind after a half a year there. Considering the fact that MC's not noble or wealthy man.
You don't get it. I said there's no point for players to see these images. I understand the point from MC's perspective, but that's not the case here. That images do not show players anything they wanted to see (in most cases I must add), they do not add anything to the story. But player must click time and time again watching some disturbing images. Maybe it's worth to warn player beforehand and add skip button?