It's completly fine. As I said, I would like them to appear as LI, I won't deny that, but I much rather assure they fit the story rather than being "forced" into it. If there isn't a good way to introduce then it's unfortunate, but again, you're the one who has his mind on what's the goal for the end of the game and it's story. I even also assume the brother being around will give challenges already on having the mother and sisters as well, so have the rest will give even more, so it's completly understandable.
- Thread starter Jubs!
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- Jul 26, 2023
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Progress so far this week is pretty good. I've been creating and adding in the sprites and static images. I've made all the backgrounds and I'm about a third done with adding sprites and static images and about 15% done with adding animations (I've made probably about 40% of the animations, but only added in 15% to the scripting so far). Have just finished the first combat scene which I think turned out pretty good. AI tools are pretty bad at making combat look convincing or even slightly like it might in the real world. So I've kinda given up trying to animate combat sequences. However, that doesn't mean it is worthless doing so. They have moments that are not terrible and I can pull still frames and use them to show static images of action that aren't terrible. I've included a few examples that weren't used - her hair is too long and the action playing out is also wrong for the scene in question, but it gives you an idea of how I can still make use of some pretty bad animations.
Otherwise, not a huge amount to report. I'll just keep plodding on with these until they are done, then. There are a few screens of stuff I've made so far included.
DarthSpitz717
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- Mar 28, 2023
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Actually, I'd like the developer to make a YouTube video on how he codes and creates this fine game. Of course, some of the spicier stuff can't be shown on YouTube, but I think it would help other developers and artist as well as satisfy my curiousity (and others) to the process.
I'd put this game in terms of animations in the top 5 of all games
Thank you! That's certainly nice to hear. I'm not sure about a youtube video, but I do write down my experiences and reflections on the process and problems with it, how I overcame them (nor not) on my the developer blog.
HunterSeeker
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- May 13, 2017
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The author does a fantastic job of making a world rich with lore. However, I feel like there's one big plot hole that doesn't truly get addressed (maybe it does in future chapters): why isn't anyone angry that they were forcibly pulled by The Weaver? Usually in a situation like this, people would be putting in lots of work to find a way to get back home or at least joining a rebellion to take down the Weaver to return them back to their worlds. If I were in this situation, I would ask if there is a way to get home... This whole entire plot point just gets skipped. There are some people who say they gave up on going back home. My question is: why? Why did they give up? How does anyone know that it's impossible to go back home and why is no one angry that they've been pulled from their world and forced to conform to an unfamiliar one? I feel like this plot point needs to be properly addressed in the first chapter.
EisTeeAT
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- Oct 1, 2017
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Considering that the rest of the family has already been there for quite some time before you (the protagonist) arrive one can assume that they were angry but found that it is unfortunately no use. Also they got help from their special friend .. who obviously will turn out some kind of nefarious. Further they struggle with money and survival .. so really not a lot of time to be angry and try to find a way home in the beginning. When you finally arrive you get told its no use .. so make the best of things.
I do agree that it might be nice to address it a little more in form of did you guys ask what ppl have tried to get back home or at least get a message to our remaining family ... Cause that is most definitly what any reasonable person would do. But overall i would not say it is a HUGE plothole. It is a smaller one in my opinion.
However with the possibility that this society might turn out to be some form of Autocracy one could also infer that maybe the ppl asking questions have been forcibly silenced/removed .. might come up later when Protagonist starts aksing questions as he should.
And yes i very much do believe that the Ruling Party in Luminaria is going to turn out to be evil in some way.
To the Developer:
I do enjoy the Story so far and the World building. ONe can see that you get better with the pictures over time, i look forward to seeing more progress as you go along. Just a little tip: Dont stop writting the erotica as well .. like Love of Magic eventually did.
Just animated Sex scenes with no text or anything is not the point of games .. then i could just go watch regular porn ;-).
YOu are doing a great Job and i do look forward to the further story. Maybe whenever the update ends throw a short message so ppl know. FOr repeat players they now know ok the Home Screen with no more further options is the end. But the first time i played it was on my phone and i was like .. hhmm.. maybe the android version is bugged at this point.
Keep up the good work !
Much Love EisTeeAT
That is fair, it is intended that Sarah and Lilly already investigated it but I probably didn't get that across well enough. It is a known 'fact' in the world that the direction of travel is one way. Whether that fact is correct or not is another matter...
For the MC's not angry reaction, I will probably have him reflect on this more in some of the character events. He could get angry and rage about it, but there is a sort of 'crisis mode' switch inside people. When switched, it allows them to accept quite terrible hardship because it's a crisis. You may have experienced it yourself during covid. I think I did, when the first lockdown was starting here in the UK I felt a curious sense of focus, of 'what needed to be done' and got on with it. I knew I felt different to normal and I knew that the situation was bad, even dangerous with no idea how it was going to play out... but I was surprised at how positive I felt about it. Whilst my experience wasn't really bad in the scheme of things, it was a taster of what I think things like "Blitz Spirit" would have been like. The situation is shit, has the potential to be shitter, but it could get better, and so you focus on doing what you can to not let others down who are going through the same thing. That's what I'm intending to be happening. It's why the family are going out of their way to support each other and do what is necessary to get them through. There is a little bit more to it than that, but you will have to wait and see.
I'll take another look at the end of content stuff. I had to learn how to force update the moving parts for it to do the flashy icon or not thing in the last update and these things never appear as simple as they should be. I think I can replace the 'do not show the button' code with a "show a different icon that indicates it's deliberate that the button isn't there' code.
For what it's worth, this bit of lore did not come across to me whatsoever. That could be on me; it's been a while since I played the beginning of the game, and after longer play sessions I sometimes skim over dialogue. Just giving you one player's experience here.
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I think, realistically, I would quite easily take it as fact that it's one way. These were normal people that got yoinked to another universe by magic. I think it's fair to say it's normal to not understand any of it and therefore be unable to question that fact. Whether people accept it is another matter, but I think it's pretty realistic for people to go "Well, I got portaled, I must be stuck here now".
Accepting a dire fate in your daily life is very normal too. Jubs mentioned covid as an example, but war would maybe be an ever better one. Yes, it's life destroying, but you still have to get through the day; eat, sleep, get some form of currency for survival. And you stick to the bonds that you still have, in this case close family. Standing in the town square yelling at the statue "PORTAL ME BACK, YOU TOSSER" will get you nowhere and soon you'll perish if you don't go on with life. There is certainly a percentage of people that get depressed and freeze up. They usually don't last long in these situations. I doubt Jubs will want to get into such a dark place in a game that we play for fun, but that's up to him.
I would suggest to add some dialogues, in which the main character and his family share some thoughts against the Wearer: in the end the Wearer is the one who must blame for this. You could also show how the mc, his little sister and his little brother are secretly thrilled by this new reality, since the first two can live a more adventurous life and the later is excited by the role of a grey eminence he can play in this new society.
I'm a little bit more bothered by the mother/stepmother: the lore suggests she will become some sort of powerful witch and we can suppose she attended the same school attended by the mc. So I'm not very able to see why she hasn't started to work for the guilds, like the mc has done. In this moment I am not able to remember the explanation you have given, but it seemed to me a little bit weak, if we consider the fact that the school gives an income to the students during the course of study and after there are the jobs from the guilds. It could be logical if the stepmother had failed at the school, but this would be in contrast with what she will become.
There is another little inconsistency I have always forgotten to highlight: when the mc enter in the atelier with his friend, the states he cannot pay for the clothes only at the end of the scene, when the tailor has already took the measurements. In my opinion, in a similar situation the mc should say he cannot pay to his friend, before the measurement, in order to avoid an even worst embarrassment.
There's a lot more to come about Sarah, but she is too old to attend The Academy which takes students up to around age 25 depending on circumstances. It otherwise sets it's attendance much the same as normal senior school combined with a college/university. The Academy pays nothing to it's students other one cooked meal a day. The MC and Lilly have started getting a small income for their indentured work, but it's tiny, intended only to allow them to survive. For 'immigrants' The Academy loans basic funds for clothing (loaned, it's added to their indenture period). Sarah had to work to get the funds needed to set themselves up and provide food, clothing, pay city taxes etc. Zara has taken her under her wing, gotten her a job and provided her with metaphysics training. She didn't do that out of the kindness of her heart. Everything revolves around Sarah.
In future updates there will be more time spent with Zara and Matsuyo and the MC will start to pick apart what is going on.
Alice and Ethan are definitely more excited about the possibilities of their new life. The MC and Lilly are being optimistic for the sake of the family. Sarah is barely keeping it together. As she sees her family grow, she will grow in mental fortitude. Similarly though, as she sees her family suffer, she will also grow into something else, not really a witch, but something metaphysical for sure.
With regards to explaining that they had investigated and failed, I thought I had included that in Sarah's summary to the MC in the prologue, but I hadn't so. So I've just added it. I do intend to explore this through character interactions in the future.
I just have this nagging sensation that the game world and your intentions for the game are far too ambitious for your own good. I hope I'm wrong.
There are a lot of things that are missing to make the experience cohesive and complete, things that were introduced or hinted, but the greatest fear I have is that your need to provide new content that moves forward the story will make the other parts a bit shallower. Conversely, if you focus on the other parts (LI, side paths and so on), the main plot will halt for far too long.
And that is before the burnout that eventually will come, arrives. What you have achieved is impressive, but you have to consider the path ahead. Even with AI 'assisting' you, do you see yourself completing this project in a reasonable time? Do you see yourself investing 100+ hours per week for the next 2 years?
Do you have a plan? A planned ending (or endings)? A list of events outlining what the path to the end will be?
You are still early enough to make course corrections, to find help, focus development, cut content or features, and so forth, but as time passes and more development time is spent, it will become harder and harder.
Anyway, those are my worthless two cents.
Thank you.
It seems I have missed that part in the prologue and it is only your fault!
Since there are a lot of information to process, in order to understand this complex scenario.
100 hours a week? No... not unless it ever gets so popular that I can quit my day job! Its currently about 20-30 hours a week and that is sustainable, but not ideal. My day job hours, especially with working from home without commute etc. mean I can stick about 2.5 hours a day in on a weekday and then I do 4-5 hours a day on weekends. Sometimes I do crunch a bit more, but I still find it all quite satisfying to see it come together. My wife has complained about the time it takes, so I have to keep it under control. I get occasional periods where I wish I could spend that time on my games backlog instead of this, but it's not as though I don't enjoy doing it. This started about a year ago as a hankering to do something creative and a big dip in my motivation for my favourite hobby; gaming. I don't intend to stop doing this, it's so ingrained now that it's almost habit and I just enjoy creating and bringing the characters to life too much. Whether LP makes it to the end, rather depends on whether it's popular enough to justify me expending the time on it, rather than drawing a line under it, taking what I've learnt and starting again with a new project. I'd quite fancy doing a cyberpunk or post-apocalyptic game, but for now LP is going pretty well, so I'm hopeful I can see it through. To be honest, the fact people are paying me money to support it kind of cements in my head that whatever I do, I need to make sure that it reaches a good conclusion of some sort, even if It's just Ark1 being completed.
I have 3 arks of core plotlines, this is currently ark 1. Each ark has a boss of sorts, to overcome. I designed the world and these plots to minimise the diminishing returns of the power creep that affects a lot of franchises (oh my god, now there is an even deadlier world ending super baddie that the last one coming to get us!).
There are some faction plotlines that I had wanted to get into straight away, that I will likely divert to later arks - courtesans, healthcare institute and the business guilds for example. Although Gabriella and Isabella will still have roles to play in this ark. My expectations for 0.45 (the xmas update) are relatively light touch - it will be all the Zara debriefing scenes, a character event with her and some stuff with Lyra). This will give a bit more context about what is going on and what the big threat is for ark 1. At the same time, because 0.45 is going to be fairly light touch. I'm going to use the time to do some more specific planning, flow mapping and the like.
On the plus side, I just treated myself to a 5080, which should be coming at the end of the week. I know that 5080's are a bit sickly this gen for gaming, only about 15% faster than a 5070ti, but 40% more expensive. However, they are about 30-40% faster than a 5070 ti for image and video generation and will also allow me to start playing around with WAN for video generation. Framepack is great and all, but it's really limited. I'm hoping WAN will open up more options. Either way, that all improves efficiency so I do the same in less time, or do more in the same time.
- Jul 26, 2023
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So Christmas is upon us and I decided to take advantage of Black Friday to put in for an upgrade, for "efficiency" purposes. That's my story and I'm sticking with it. I am due a shiny new RTX5080 card and a new monitor, which should be arriving in the next couple of days. The situation with RAM finally tipped me over the edge, I always expected to upgrade in 2026, but because all RAM is going up in price, that will also push up VRAM prices, so GPU's are expected to increase in cost again. Aside from the fact it's a big upgrade to gaming performance over my current 3080, there were actually some practical reasons as to why I went for a 5080 over a 5070ti. Gaming performance is only about 15% better but image generation is about 35% better. With the amount that I do that translates into a significant time saving. It should also be about 20% faster at framepack video generation than the 5070ti is. Vs the 3080 it's up to 5x faster for SDXL image gen and 50% faster for framepack. Also due to the way that framepack works, the higher VRAM allows it to maintain better consistency and higher resolution outputs. I'll also be able to try out WAN now, which should improve the NSFW animations I can produce locally.
The 2nd monitor is an efficiency purchase, the process of creating and editing sprites, then getting them into game is very intensive in terms of flicking back and forth between different folders and applications. I have a 32" screen now, but it's not big enough so I've got another one. This will save time in not having to search through open folders to find the one I want (and remember the one I want). Possibly just a me thing as well, but I find having to flick back and forth quite irritating and it definitely makes the process less enjoyable. So I'm hoping this will help me optimise my working environment.
Progress for 0.4 is pretty good. I'm about 75% through getting sprites into the game and all 3 action scenes are done. Action scenes are much more time consuming to do than any other scene (maybe on par with a sex scene). Image gen of weapons is extremely inconsistent, so it becomes about trying to minimise those inconsistencies. I have to spend time editing images to correct weapons and hands and often weapons and hands together, which is another level of complication. This means it takes much longer to generate the sprites. I then have to use the sprites to create a starting point for an image to video animation and then get a fight scene 'animated'. As I've mentioned before these are usually comically bad and it has a very annoying habit of making combatants dual wielders all the time. I'll need to create a number of animations, then grab useful frames out of those animations, run them through an upscaler and then present them as static images in game. Those images don't look particularly crisp, but as they are showing a still frame of a lot of movement I think it's OK. Obviously I'd prefer the images to look fabulous, but that is where having real artists or performers makes all the difference. I have made most of the animations, but I still need to get them into the game. After that it's sound effects and then it should be ready for early access. I'm cautiously optimistic that will be the 10th.
I've had to do a lot of backgrounds for this update and Flux2 Pro has just become available to me, which is expensive to use, but creates some pretty good and precise scenes. I've then been using Gemini and Nano Banana Pro to change perspectives in those scenes. An example of that is included in the screen shots here. Two of the alley images are linked. Original image created in Flux2 Pro and then I asked Gemini to create another image based on it but looking down from further up the alley, and it produced the 2nd image. I thought I was on to a real lifesaver with it because this was the first time I attempted it and it worked perfectly. But subsequent attempts have been mixed, in some cases with me literally arguing with Gemini over the it's interpretations of my requests. I have also used the same method to do stuff like change specific details in a scene. The train scene in the screenshots is an example. The journey took them through different landscapes and I wanted the windows to reflect that. So I created the image (the original here is a SeaDream4 image) and then asked Gemini to change what can be seen out of the windows. This is a really helpful thing because so often a great scene is ruined because the window shows something out of place, or refuses to show the right time of day.. has lights on when it's full daylight etc. Flux2 Pro also seems to be really good at creating extra details - I've included examples that show posters and flyers that I wanted it to add into the scenes that, I think, came out really well. It does these really reliably so now I can have a bit of fun when generating these images in thinking about what extra details I can include to make the world feel a bit more fleshed out and lived in.
So... yea. That's what I've been doing this week. A few screenshots included as usual, mostly showing all the experiments with chat to edit stuff.
EisTeeAT
Newbie
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Imagine only getting a second monitor and it is almost 2026 XD.
I have been using two Screens now for over 10 years i think.
I cant even imagine how you would work on ANYTHING without a second screen, damn.
Good for you even though way too late ;-) !
Looking forward to the next Upgrades !
Much Love EisTeeAT
I have been using two Screens now for over 10 years i think.
I cant even imagine how you would work on ANYTHING without a second screen, damn.
Good for you even though way too late ;-) !
Looking forward to the next Upgrades !
Much Love EisTeeAT
Yea, welcome to the 2010's I guess. It's one of those things that I always thought would be nice to have but never felt a need for it, but now I do.
A second monitor is like a lot of things from the past...Microwaves, VCRs (god showing my age here), mouse with a scroll wheel.
Prior to getting one... "Why would I need any of this pointless crap!"
After getting one... "How the hell did I ever live without this?!?"
Just hope your second monitor matches your first, nothing will drive you more crazy than having two monitors where the screens are at slightly different heights (because of the bezel of the monitor) and whose colour tones don't quite match....
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Oh, I have no doubt it's going to be a "can't go back" sort of change. And yea, that is a concern. They are both good monitors, both 32inches, one is flat (the new one which will become my main one) and the other is curved. Flat should be better for working with images. For gaming it depends what genre of games you focus on, I like all sorts so there isn't an inherent better option for me there. The curved one will be off to the side at an angle so hopefully it should work well.
Well, it was nice knowing your sanity...
That is making the big assumption you were sane to start with?