VN Ren'Py Luminary Protocol [v0.3] [Jubs Games]

[Jubs!]

So the different time periods depicted is deliberate? It's a bit strange for the family to be living in a modern house - modern electric lights and furniture, what looks like thermostat controls and maybe alarm system on the wall in the living room, but then be walking down an ostensibly Victorian street with multiple periods of dress in view. Also seems that what the family wears depends on where they are (inside the house or outside). Some of the insides of other buildings are very much middle ages or medieval as well as what is worn. We then get take to some chateau that has electric lights being led by someone in a dirndl and the MC looks like he is wearing a modern suit.
All very haphazard.

The whole house is transported with them, they are essentially living in a pocket dimension. For now anyway, it won't always be that way.

In all honesty, if I was starting again, I wouldn't have this feature. It was born at the very start of making the game out of my lack of ability to create sex scenes using AI tools. I thought I would have to revert to using real porn cuts and not a lot of pornography is shot in historic settings, so I needed a reason why they were having sex in a modern room. Fortunately I have worked out ways of doing this that don't require that, so the presence of the modern house is vestigial. But it does give me some narrative options I can explore in their future interactions with The Weaver.

The family were on holiday at the time, so they have a limited supply of modern clothes, which they sometimes wear. But the city has been receiving people from different worlds, time periods and cultures for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Those people will have had their own ideas and expectations about fashion, design etc. So the wider world is now 'corrupted' from it's normal cultural progression. Luminaria, having received so many time and world immigrants, is the most advanced city on the planet, but they are still way behind us. While 19th Century fashion and styling is culturally dominant in Luminaria, it is not exclusive and even that is affected by different religious and cultural beliefs to those of our 19th century history. It's also affected by what textiles are available, nylon etc. not being something they have broad access to. I haven't introduced it yet, but some of this corrupted culture stuff will be explored with other characters (Heidi primarily).

 

[catnapper]

The whole house is transported with them, they are essentially living in a pocket dimension. For now anyway, it won't always be that way.

In all honesty, if I was starting again, I wouldn't have this feature. It was born at the very start of making the game out of my lack of ability to create sex scenes using AI tools. I thought I would have to revert to using real porn cuts and not a lot of pornography is shot in historic settings, so I needed a reason why they were having sex in a modern room. Fortunately I have worked out ways of doing this that don't require that, so the presence of the modern house is vestigial. But it does give me some narrative options I can explore in their future interactions with The Weaver.

The family were on holiday at the time, so they have a limited supply of modern clothes, which they sometimes wear. But the city has been receiving people from different worlds, time periods and cultures for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Those people will have had their own ideas and expectations about fashion, design etc. So the wider world is now 'corrupted' from it's normal cultural progression. Luminaria, having received so many time and world immigrants, is the most advanced city on the planet, but they are still way behind us. While 19th Century fashion and styling is culturally dominant in Luminaria, it is not exclusive and even that is affected by different religious and cultural beliefs to those of our 19th century history. It's also affected by what textiles are available, nylon etc. not being something they have broad access to. I haven't introduced it yet, but some of this corrupted culture stuff will be explored with other characters (Heidi primarily).

A world without polyester - sign me up!

 

[Sparhawker]

When you get to the end of content screen, rollback a frame or two and click the book in the top right.

View attachment 5382734

Then click the Star

View attachment 5382735

You'll get a list of all the girls. Hover your mouse over each of them. If they light up like Sarah's does here. Click on it and it will send you to the scenes available for that character.

View attachment 5382736

yes, I did that but nothing comes up for the stepmom, only one that lights up is for Emelia

 

[Sparhawker]

Sorry, the end of content bit seems to cause a lot of confusion. I've overhauled it for the next update to make it clearer.

That end of content screen was intended to catch readers before the game automatically dumped you back to the main menu. As Milton says, the icon in the top right is where you access the additional content. There are two buttons in the hub menu where you can do that - the Star accesses character focused events and the envelope accesses faction focused events.

After the first mission with Emelia and the caves, there are then 3 character events, starting with Emelia, which unlocks one with Lilly then one with Sarah. After that the 2nd cartogropher's guild event is unlocked. In the next update, that will then unlock the next update with Alice and Emelia, your choice which one you do first.

In the next update I've overhauled the way this works so that instead of that catch screen with the instruction to click the button, it will just open up the hub. In the hub, the star and envelope icons will only be visible if there are events to play through.

ok, that has just confused me and blown my mind. I have this :-


Where do I go after that, if I can. Nothing I do get's me away from a screen telling me I have finished and nothing lights up from anywhere in the top right icon where you go to the contracts.

 

[Idontplay]

Go back to the previous screen, click on the icon in the top right corner, click on the star, click on the icon with the woman. Not all the icons will react to your pointer, since they will become active in sequence: the cartographer, the stepsister, the stepmom… In this moment I don't remember the right sequence and I don't remember if the sequence is something like: cartographer, stepister, cartographer, stepmom or cartographer, stepsister, stepmom, but this is the logic.
This is true if you need to unlock only the scenes with the women. If you need to unlock also some mission the procedure is slightly different: click on the icon in the top right corner, then click on the envelope or the star (again they will become activea in sequence), then click on the active character icon (if you have clicked on the star) or the mission icon (if you have clicked on the envelope).

Jubs! It seems to me that this way to update the game is a little bit confusing for a lot of us. Maybe you should start to adopt the "story driven" updates adopted by all other developers and that you have dropped after the first mission with the cartographer.

 

[Jubs!]

ok, that has just confused me and blown my mind. I have this :-
View attachment 5383629

Where do I go after that, if I can. Nothing I do get's me away from a screen telling me I have finished and nothing lights up from anywhere in the top right icon where you go to the contracts.

As I said in the previous post, I'm aware this process causes confusion and have a better one in place in the next update.

 

[Jubs!]

yes, I did that but nothing comes up for the stepmom, only one that lights up is for Emelia

It's in order: Emelia first, then Lilly, then Sarah.

 

[HornyyPussy]

It looks like there's a block of dialogue that I didn't do. The script I went through is not the one that's here. Mine doesn't even go to 12673. Jubs! I'll make sure I do that bit as well for the next update.

View attachment 5382167

Uh huh.....

Sorry if you good name was besmirched.

Oh please......

From your description you should have still content with 3 more girls, folllowing Miltons tips

So you're saying he only gives the tip?




Sorry Milti, that was a lot of snark directed at you

 

[MiltonPowers]

Uh huh.....


Oh please......


So you're saying he only gives the tip?




Sorry Milti, that was a lot of snark directed at you

 

[HornyyPussy]

View attachment 5383666

 

[twifight]

It looks like there's a block of dialogue that I didn't do. The script I went through is not the one that's here. Mine doesn't even go to 12673. I'll make sure I do that bit as well for the next update.

No worries, glad we found what went wrong, besmirched one!

 

[xapican]

So you're saying he only gives the tip?

I think he goes all in....

 

[MiltonPowers]

I think he goes all in....

 

[MiltonPowers]

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A day early on the update, but I'm out tomorrow evening so figured I'd get it done now.

I've finished Alice's event completely. It took a lot longer than I thought it would to do all the sound and music. When I say music, most of it is ambience. It involves layering and gradually changing ambience tracks over time as the weather and environment changes quite a bit. Beyond that there are also quite a few small scenes where they are doing physical things. I think these land better with accompanying sound. Which means sourcing a fair few new sound effects. Usually they have to be converted into mp3 format. Some of them have to have their audio levels adjusted, others need to be cut up. The places that sell these effects often sell a batch of say 10 variations in a single .wav file, so you then need to go in and cut them up into separate files and convert them to mp3 format. I use Audacity to do this, which is a really great free audio editing tool. Very easy to use, very intuitive and it has loads of great features. I did have to edit a few sound effects for length but also fade effects and things like that. I've recently been sourcing effects from Artlist where I have a monthly subscription. Their array of sound effects is great but I've recently started going through what music tracks they have as well and the selection is really good, consistently high quality.

For Emelia's event; about 95% of the sprites are in and about 40% of the sound and music. I'm still rendering the animations for the sex scene, but all the other animations are done and in. I'm going to have to re-do some of the sprites. One of the sprites (which unfortunately also had 3 emotion variants), just wasn't quite right. So my SDXL checkpoint is currently churning out a batch of Emelia's.

Found and fixed a bug causing a critical error in the prologue that was introduced in the last update. I had been doing some tidying up of my character profiles and deleted a couple I thought I had never used, but it turned out I had, once, in the prologue.

I've updated the stat change notifications to include a summary of your current and max possible scores for that state. I've added in a record of what the alignment and money stats are for the MC on his character page as well. It needs some tidying up, but it's in.

I've also re-designed the 'end of content' event. Renpy is designed to run linearly and when it reaches the end of what it has, it dumps you back at the main menu. So that screen was intended to ensure that didn't happen before the player had a chance to save their game. But it was causing confusion. It required that the player click the button in the top right and check the contracts and character screens to see if any other content was available. A lot of people weren't picking that up. I had an idea of how to fix this and thought it might be quite easy to implement. It wasn't. Currently when you access those menu screens, pressing the button involves toggling them on and off. But for the end of content I needed the player to end up in that hub screen automatically and to change it so that it is not possible to return to the game, unless you have clicked to access a new event. This is called 'calling' the screen, and it has slightly different rules and functions as to toggling it. I need the access button to be there all the time during normal gameplay, but switched off at end of content. Anyway, long story short... I had to script in different behaviour and tracking for every button in the contracts and character events screen and the homehub. So that took most of my Sunday afternoon. But it's done and now I can deliver a much better user experience.

I expect the early access release to be Wednesday next week. Aside from the stuff detailed above, between now and then I have to re-do Vivian's scenes from Chapter 1 to use her new improved look and transfer over as many character profiles to the newer format character screens as possible and try to add a character profile screen for Vivian as well. If I have any time I'm going to start revisiting some of the older style sprites still in the early game and start replacing them with better ones.

I don't have many screens of the latest update to share with you as I don't like to show too much about the content that is coming, but there are a couple there + a little sneak peak at a Halloween extra pack I'm very slowly putting together for tier 1+ patrons. I had intended to try to include every character, but I won't have time so I'm aiming for just Sarah and Caitlin to be appearing in it.

 

[MiltonPowers]

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The EA release of 0.35 is done and currently uploading to the file server, I'll put the links up later today for tier3 members.

The stats for the update are as follows:

Alice's Event
Approximately 8000 words and a 1000 lines of renpy script.
46 sprites or static images of Alice.
18 animations of Alice.
6 sprites of the MC (he also features in a few of the animations and static images included in Alice's stats).
15 backgrounds.

Emelia's event
Approximately 7500 words and 1000 lines of renpy script.
37 sprites or static images of Emelia.
27 animations of Emelia.
5 sprites or static images of the MC (he is in some of those included in Emelia's stats).
7 sprites of Vivian
1 animation of Vivian.
7 backgrounds and 3 animated backgrounds.

Chapter 1 Material
Reworked Vivian's scene in chapter one to reflect her new look.
6 sprites of Vivian.
2 animations of Vivian.
3 new backgrounds.

Changelog:
* Added Alice's first event.
* Added Emelia's second event.
* Overhauled Vivian's scene in Chapter 1.
* Added a metaphysics codex entry.
* Updated the codex screen - clicking one option will now close any other open option and added a darkened background to the text box to make it easier to read.
* Rebuilt the end of content process so that it will open up the hub screen automatically.
* Hub screen has been changed so that if there are any character or mission events available, the icons will be slowly pulsing. If there aren't, the icons won't be there at all.
* Updated the stat change notifications to include a total score as well - this is still a little buggy because it now matters what order I scripted the update to the maxscore and actual score in at each choice. If I wrote for the game to update the maxscore after the actual score was updated, it won't reflect that in this notification. I will be going through all the choices and making sure they are in the right order over the next week. The stats are correct in the background.
* Migrated the MC's character profile screen to the new format. It will now show (your player name) Sinclair, rather than just "You".
* Added stat tracking to the player character screen.
* Fixed some bugs related to maxscore stat tracking - unfortunately now that the game has moved out of it's linear progression portion, I can't fix the incorrect max score stats on existing saves - sorry. I thought this would be a nice little feature that was easy to implement, but I have totally ballsed it up. It should™ now all be correct on a new save.
* Fixed a bug in the prologue causing a soft crash.
* Fixed a few errant spelling and grammar mistakes.
* Fixed a bug with Saga's character and gallery screens not working as intended.
* Removed about 15-20 extra backgrounds that were never used to reduce file size.
* Added more animations that are used in the game to the menu screen background player.

Normally I would go straight in to building the content for the next major update, but the game is in need of some maintenance before I do that. I've already been generating assets for Lyra and Alice and I'll keep working on the basics of those, but there are some things I need to get done.

The game is now 4.5gb, which is too big. When I first started out I was using png files for most things, thinking it would take ages to get to 4gb+. As I realised the size implications I switched to make all static images/backgrounds in .jpg format, but a lot of those original backgrounds are still pngs. I thought I had to use .png files for the sprites, because they need transparency. Having looked into it a little, I can instead use .webp and that will reduce the file size significantly without harming the image quality. So I will be going through everything and converting it to webp format. Having done a quick check there are over 1600 assets in the images folder now, which was a surprise... Ill also be reviewing the menu screen animations and removing some. Concept images for characters that don't really look like their implementation in game anymore, some that aren't really relevant and a few for characters who are over-represented in the rotation.

Until I do this I can't release a new version on Android. Just found out whilst tyring to package it up for Android that .apk files have a hard limit of 4gb and the only way to go above that is to release on google play. I'm fairly sure that they won't be overly supportive of this type of game.

I need to get all the character sheets migrated to the new format. This will also allow me delete a number of .png files as I will standardise the background and remove all the static images that hold the text currently.

I need to add a character sheet and gallery for Vivian.

I also want to start replacing the shitty sprites that I never got around to replacing from the prologue section. At some point I also need to have a go at Chapter 1 & 2's sprites, as there are a few dodgy ones in there as well. Not going to do all this now, it will be a rolling project to go back and redo a bit each month. Replacing some of the older style backgrounds is also needed.

In the attached screenshots there is an example where the Vivian sprite has been replaced only, and then the Vivian sprite and background replaced, but the old player sprite still remains. The difference is in quality is quite stark to me.

As part of the halloween bonus stuff I also went searching for ways to improve framepack output. I came across a custom version of Framepack called Framepack Studio. This has a whole raft of new features to it, most of which I haven't really tried yet, including looping animations. I'm thinking of trying to do some scenes as a constant seamless looping animation, rather than static background + sprites. There are two main things I wanted it for though. The first is that it has slightly better tech that improves generation speed and quality (only a little though) but also increases the variety of animations it tends to create and allows better prompt control. The second is it allows me to do batch runs. Previously I could leave one run going overnight and that was it. I might end up with 1 2 minute animation and picking that apart for usable bits the next day. I might also end up with a load of unusable garbage. It was quite a bottleneck. But now I can leave it running to create multiple separate animations, which greatly reduces the framepack rendering bottleneck I've experienced trying to get Emelia's scene animated this month. In less than a week I was able to put together a 17.5 minute long showreel animation of the NSFW Sarah and Caitlin halloween images for tier 3. Being able to run it when my pc is idle and have several 15 second long animations to choose from at the end of it, rather than 1 2 minute long one is a huge bonus.

 

[twifight]

That is a pretty hefty update Jubs! Cool stuff.

Also, as a programmer, I like reading about the technical details and AI/tools journey. Keep that coming.