VN Ren'Py My New Girlfriend [Ch.5 v3] [CircleGames]

[SymbioticLife]

Even though we are still very early in the game, with the money he is making so fast and increase in waiting times between updates in direct proportion to this, is not a good sign. The next update intervals will reach 6-8-10 months very soon. It's called power poisoning and very few people can handle it. Mark my words.

Not all updates are made equal, the editing, quality control and standards are from what I have seen/heard yet again risen with this update. There are those will still be unhappy I am sure, but comparing the length of time it took to produce say chapter 2 with it's fairly straight forward renders and editing to what takes place in chapter 5 is not a remotely fair comparison. Complex multi character scenes, high quality static backgrounds, animations and establishing consistent outfits across a large number of characters all add time to these sorts of projects, the payoff will be worth it for most I think.

Now I know some here do not care about quality as a metric, given the games they enjoy and that's fine. Some just want something quick and dirty to fap to. But for those who enjoy sleek design I certainly think theyll understand that waiting a bit longer is worth it.

 

[rob_trowy_97]

Given that they never seem to be particularly happy anyway I think the lesson here might be to not give in to any begging, and for CG to continue to do his own thing.

I'm pretty sure NTR fans didn't specifically ask for NTR comics, though I do agree with the overall sentiment.

 

[rob_trowy_97]

Besides, let's be frank here - the comic has little of what makes a good NTR product.

 

[idkmanerally]

Not all updates are made equal, the editing, quality control and standards are from what I have seen/heard yet again risen with this update. There are those will still be unhappy I am sure, but comparing the length of time it took to produce say chapter 2 with it's fairly straight forward renders and editing to what takes place in chapter 5 is not a remotely fair comparison. Complex multi character scenes, high quality static backgrounds, animations and establishing consistent outfits across a large number of characters all add time to these sorts of projects, the payoff will be worth it for most I think.

it comes down to "was it worth it?"

if the dev spends an extra month on an extremely expensive (in terms of development time) group dance scene... well, that dance scene better be pretty amazing, you know? because otherwise... it was a waste.

AI is notoriously bad at handling certain types of scenes, like cramming multiple people into a single scene. a smart dev might actually choose to write a story that plays to the AI's strengths, and focus the story more on 1-on-1 interactions, instead of giant orgies.

Now I know some here do not care about quality as a metric, given the games they enjoy and that's fine. Some just want something quick and dirty to fap to. But for those who enjoy sleek design I certainly think theyll understand that waiting a bit longer is worth it.

quality can't be objectively quantified, it's up to personal taste. development time CAN be measured, and i think it's useful to do so. it is very, very rare for development times to get FASTER as they go, as others have pointed out.

to me, the every-2-months releases felt appropriate for the content that was being released. if the tradeoff for "more group scenes" is "3-4 months development time instead of 2," that's definitely not a good trade in my opinion.

 

[AbyssGames]

it comes down to "was it worth it?"

if the dev spends an extra month on an extremely expensive (in terms of development time) group dance scene... well, that dance scene better be pretty amazing, you know? because otherwise... it was a waste.

AI is notoriously bad at handling certain types of scenes, like cramming multiple people into a since scene. a smart dev might actually choose to write a story that plays to the AI's strengths, and focus the story more on 1-on-1 interactions, instead of giant orgies.



quality can't be objectively quantified, it's up to personal taste. development time CAN be measured, and i think it's useful to do so. it is very, very rare for development times to get FASTER as they go, as others have pointed out.

to me, the every-2-months releases felt appropriate for the content that was being released. if the tradeoff for "more group scenes" is "3-4 months development time instead of 2," that's definitely not a good trade in my opinion.

You're right about AI being bad at handling certain types of scenes or even poses. However, luckily, there are ways around that if you're experienced with it. It mainly involves a lot of photoshop, doing cutouts, manually drawing things, adding shadows, ect... The thing is, most people like group scenes, especially within this genre. Every update is better than the last and seems to be increasing in size. It's hard to find a sweet spot, but Circle has never let us down and I don't expect him to let us down in the future. As a friend, he's incredibly talented with how he makes his scenes and how he presents the images to the audience.
Most people don't care about how they are presented, whether the images make sense, whether they have good quality control and consistency, but there's those who do, including myself.

In the end, for most game developers who use AI, the game is AI. With this game, AI is simply a tool to produce images, everything else is hand-made or hand crafted. Every image is touched up, edited or redrawn.
We're not that far away from the update now and I'm sure it'll blow everyone out of the water!

 

[pts402]

Record
View attachment 3997264
How many can your girl take?

So, who is she ?
We know the original name of the other models, but her, it's a imposible search.

 

[metramaks]

So, who is she ?
We know the original name of the other models, but her, it's a imposible search.

It was posted on Patreon as someone's wife render.

 

[LUISIL]

Carol from the NTR Halloween comic

 

[DoingMeAConcern]

But the irony is youre also whining in that capacity, begging to change the game into something it is not. There's no debate on the topic CG has already talked about his intentions earlier in the thread, interracial is a theme but not the main theme and the primary relationship isnt NTR. You can never make everyone happy but thats just how it is, there will be those who want none of that and those who want more of it.

On the topic of the comic... my understanding was that it was in part made to please the hard NTR fans, giving them an experience more in line with their preferences. Given that they never seem to be particularly happy anyway I think the lesson here might be to not give in to any begging, and for CG to continue to do his own thing.

Yeah yeah keep coping lmao, the dream at the very beginning of the story is very clear about what type ntr will dominate the story. Cry about it.

 

[Deleted member 1364951]

You're right about AI being bad at handling certain types of scenes or even poses. However, luckily, there are ways around that if you're experienced with it. It mainly involves a lot of photoshop, doing cutouts, manually drawing things, adding shadows, ect... The thing is, most people like group scenes, especially within this genre. Every update is better than the last and seems to be increasing in size. It's hard to find a sweet spot, but Circle has never let us down and I don't expect him to let us down in the future. As a friend, he's incredibly talented with how he makes his scenes and how he presents the images to the audience.
Most people don't care about how they are presented, whether the images make sense, whether they have good quality control and consistency, but there's those who do, including myself.

In the end, for most game developers who use AI, the game is AI. With this game, AI is simply a tool to produce images, everything else is hand-made or hand crafted. Every image is touched up, edited or redrawn.
We're not that far away from the update now and I'm sure it'll blow everyone out of the water!

There is something i find quite interesting. You always come to CG’s help, like his comments, promote his stuff etc. Which is great since you consider yourself his friend and friends’ should have each other’s back.

However i haven’t seen CG in your game’s thread, not even once. As the matter of fact he didn’t even react to your first post. So yeah, i guess this tells something about CG’s values.

 

[Rajesh Ram]

Any Laura content in upcoming update?

 

[AbyssGames]

There is something i find quite interesting. You always come to CG’s help, like his comments, promote his stuff etc. Which is great since you consider yourself his friend and friends’ should have each other’s back.

However i haven’t seen CG in your game’s thread, not even once. As the matter of fact he didn’t even react to your first post. So yeah, i guess this tells something about CG’s values.

Just because he isn't posting anything in my game's thread, doesn't mean he's not helping me out or supporting me in different ways. Me and him regulary talk about game development, whether it's MNGF or SoA. I share knowledge with him and he does the same. I'm also more of a degenerate than him, so I spend more time on this site than he does.

Most of our conversations happen in DM, so I get why you might be under the impression he doesn't support me, but he does.

Thanks.

 

[Deleted member 1364951]

Just because he isn't posting anything in my game's thread, doesn't mean he's not helping me out or supporting me in different ways. Me and him regulary talk about game development, whether it's MNGF or SoA. I share knowledge with him and he does the same. I'm also more of a degenerate than him, so I spend more time on this site than he does.

Most of our conversations happen in DM, so I get why you might be under the impression he doesn't support me, but he does.

Thanks.

Thank you, you see , this is how healthy conversation goes. I assumed he doesn’t back you up since i never see him in your thread, you explained the situation. So again, thank you.

 

[cros134]

it comes down to "was it worth it?"

if the dev spends an extra month on an extremely expensive (in terms of development time) group dance scene... well, that dance scene better be pretty amazing, you know? because otherwise... it was a waste.

AI is notoriously bad at handling certain types of scenes, like cramming multiple people into a single scene. a smart dev might actually choose to write a story that plays to the AI's strengths, and focus the story more on 1-on-1 interactions, instead of giant orgies.



quality can't be objectively quantified, it's up to personal taste. development time CAN be measured, and i think it's useful to do so. it is very, very rare for development times to get FASTER as they go, as others have pointed out.

to me, the every-2-months releases felt appropriate for the content that was being released. if the tradeoff for "more group scenes" is "3-4 months development time instead of 2," that's definitely not a good trade in my opinion.

Another problem is that in the months between updates a million clones of this game have popped up to the point of oversaturation. So even while it was the original that every AI dev is ripping off, if we are only getting a chapter every 4 to 5 months, by the time we get Chapter 6, there will be 200 games that are really similar, and hype will start to die down. While most of the copycats are slop, as AI gets better and easier to use, a few creators will inevitably make something pretty good, and start getting more attention. It places more pressure on each release to be a home run.

 

[sullilepu]

I get complaints after playing the game, but complaining before release when the dev never lied about release dates is crazy.
Some games I play that takes more than 6 months each release, but what matters is if said release have enough content to make up for the waiting.

I’m not criticizing the developer here, but I would like to share my opinion. Games that typically take around six months to develop are usually choice-based, offering multiple paths and a complex storyline. In this case, however, the story is linear.

Additionally, the artwork is AI-generated(
While I’m not implying that it’s easier but it is more efficient compared to traditional artistic drawing & coloring or graphics rendering in some cases)

The developer mentioned upgrading their PC with better hardware for faster image generation, and at the same time, AI-generated art has significantly improved.

Also, not sure if anyone noticed it but looking at some of the art from the newer version, there is a slight decline in quality and inconsistency in the faces compared to the older versions.

Now, looking at the data below, you can see the issue. Let's see what v0.5 brings to the table and hope it would shut my mouth.

Chapter	Days	Pics	Pic per day	Script, KB	KB per day
2	25	115	4.6	93	3.72
3	50	186	3.72	115	2.3
4	65	271	4.16	160	2.46

 

[peteraw]

Another problem is that in the months between updates a million clones of this game have popped up to the point of oversaturation. So even while it was the original that every AI dev is ripping off, if we are only getting a chapter every 4 to 5 months, by the time we get Chapter 6, there will be 200 games that are really similar, and hype will start to die down. While most of the copycats are slop, as AI gets better and easier to use, a few creators will inevitably make something pretty good, and start getting more attention. It places more pressure on each release to be a home run.

A main difficulty I see with AI games is that if the script gets more complicated, then the AI demands past a simple 1 or 2 character image become difficult: so we see many AI games abandoned ( awaiting tech catch up ) or finished early with a simple route. Those of you who have tried AI scene creation will know that simple images are improving all the time, but more complex scenes involve many failures and re-generation.
Plus yes, there are new similar AI games weekly now, as you would expect from a self learning tool, the iterative process accelerates with volume demand.

 

[AbyssGames]

A main difficulty I see with AI games is that if the script gets more complicated, then the AI demands past a simple 1 or 2 character image become difficult: so we see many AI games abandoned ( awaiting tech catch up ) or finished early with a simple route. Those of you who have tried AI scene creation will know that simple images are improving all the time, but more complex scenes involve many failures and re-generation.
Plus yes, there are new similar AI games weekly now, as you would expect from a self learning tool, the iterative process accelerates with volume demand.

Very true. Especially in the NTS genre, it'll eventually involve multiple character scenes. Making every individual character feel alive and part of the scene is a difficult feat. Circle having an art background really does help and the work he's done in Chapter 5 is very impressive so far. There's a lot of things Pony or SD can do, but there's even more that it can't do, which is why a lot of the games coming out... feel the same? They have the same poses, same facial expressions, ect...

Then you have the games like Moonripple, Mila and MNGF who take things a step further with a lot of custom poses/expressions. I mean this rule counts for every game, anyone can render a scene in Daz and anyone can render an image through AI, but there's a steep learning curve and those who spend the time to really get into it, are able to produce some amazing results.



Even something like this, which might seem pretty straight forward... is incredible hard to generate through regular means. As Pony will always try to make it into a kiss or french kiss. Licking someones cheek? It doesn't know that, so you have to force it in through other means. (Obviously this picture has issues that need to be fixed, but it was more as an example).

 

[swiver]

Another problem is that in the months between updates a million clones of this game have popped up to the point of oversaturation. So even while it was the original that every AI dev is ripping off, if we are only getting a chapter every 4 to 5 months, by the time we get Chapter 6, there will be 200 games that are really similar, and hype will start to die down. While most of the copycats are slop, as AI gets better and easier to use, a few creators will inevitably make something pretty good, and start getting more attention. It places more pressure on each release to be a home run.

This pressure's a bad thing?

You started me thinginck. Sounds like you're describing the prototypical growth of sophistication of any field. A breakthrough inspires more ventures which begin experimenting with the new potentials. As to what you're implicitly lamenting, formulated in capitalist terms, is that the most viable in the end might well not be the original venture? I can't remember but there's a very prominent old example - was it ketchup? and maybe modern stuff like google, windows and facebook might count- but Galileo's fame's a non0business parallel. IDK what i'm talking about... you've tickled interesting stuff, but I'm uncomfortable with something in the whole dynamic and I don't like that business success is involved in the value of objective achievement...

I am wondering why they're all NTS based too?

 

[hangmansjoke]

A main difficulty I see with AI games is that if the script gets more complicated, then the AI demands past a simple 1 or 2 character image become difficult: so we see many AI games abandoned ( awaiting tech catch up ) or finished early with a simple route. Those of you who have tried AI scene creation will know that simple images are improving all the time, but more complex scenes involve many failures and re-generation.
Plus yes, there are new similar AI games weekly now, as you would expect from a self learning tool, the iterative process accelerates with volume demand.

this is exactly why tracking development time is so important for these games. because these problems are inherent to AI development, and there is no obvious solution. as supporters, i think it's important to know "uh oh, this game is starting to hit the limitations of the dev/AI engine," because as we have seen many, many, many times now, this is usually the first step toward a slowdown and abandonment.

of course, the dev (or his many defenders in this thread) will come in and say, "what? no! i'm not going to abandon this!" but nobody admits to abandoning their games beforehand. they always just slow development to a crawl while continuing to take patreon money.

this game has a few more flashing warning signs: it seems like circlegames is franchising out his art style/AI generation techniques, which means there are at least 2 other games with very, very similar art styles to this game, all in the early stages of development, all of which will eventually hit the same "multi-person sex scene AI ceiling" and slowdown around the same time. the authors of these games are very quick to create patreons and pump out AI demos with paper-doll art and bog-standard poses they got from civitai, but the proof is in the payoff: will ANY of these games get to the part of the game where the NTS is being fulfilled, or will they all milk the teasing stage, because it's the only part the AI can handle?

 

[deviousstorm]

A main difficulty I see with AI games is that if the script gets more complicated, then the AI demands past a simple 1 or 2 character image become difficult: so we see many AI games abandoned ( awaiting tech catch up ) or finished early with a simple route. Those of you who have tried AI scene creation will know that simple images are improving all the time, but more complex scenes involve many failures and re-generation.
Plus yes, there are new similar AI games weekly now, as you would expect from a self learning tool, the iterative process accelerates with volume demand.

While some people might not agree, but learning to be your own artist and making your own art, not only can you do more but there are less restrictions. It might take a bit longer, but with how energy inefficient a render is with AI. It might be worth just getting into an self-art school or drawing over the art yourself and fixing it instead of praying an AI rendering will get it right with a shotgun method.

Learning something like photoshop or GIMP and just putting poses together of different characters while also learning how to do put two subjects together. Then overtime you can add more and more characters or multiple subjects for a single scene. Instead of rendering dozens of people for an AI the AI is instead focusing on one or two subjects at a time, then you put them together in photoshop with a rendered scene.

Typically what we did was we had two renders going on, one person did one character and basically sequentially (seperately done) added in different pieces of characters and they added lighting at the very end. Especially with rendering which is half the process, it is easier to add in those characters like that than trying to do all of them at once. Cause lighting will basically tie the whole piece together. While also retaining the same type of art style and also basically creating a bones and model for it to use. (3d modelling does this very easy) so instead of rendering everything at once we rendered each individually then combined them in post.

I would suggest for most people unaware of the process.

1. Create Assets
2. Pose Assets
3. Create background
4. Place Lighting overtop assets
5. Render Lighting / Shadows (easily done by hand)