VN Ren'Py Neon Babylon [Development Thread]

[OsirianObsidian]

Overview

Welcome to the development thread for Neon Babylon, a cyberpunk odyssey being developed with the RenPy engine using Honey Select 2 animations/assets and influenced by the giants of the science fiction and cyberpunk genre. In Neon Babylon, you are thrust into the heart of a government conspiracy that threatens to tear apart the very fabric of reality for the population of Midtown. All the information needed to save the bustling arcology from this dark fate is inside your mind. The problem is, you are both lock and key - a memory cap has been placed on a part of your engram...the part that knows the truth. Who can you trust? Who can trust you? The answers lie in the rain soaked streets of Neon Babylon...

Game Style

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Game World

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Game Systems

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Characters

Ariadne

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Danielle

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Elenora

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Elspeth

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Finley

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Kara

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Laken

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Morgan

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Nadia

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Nova

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Reagan

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Riley

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Taylor

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Yasmin

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NOTE: This game is currently in active development, with Episode 1 around 70% complete. Thought I'd make this post cause this has been years in development (have had a few setbacks) but there's enough content available to start discussing it. Not going to make any grandiose claims about how this game is going to revolutionize AVNs etc...instead, I will quote Rick Rubin:

"If you go to the movies...so many movies are just not good because they're not being made by a person who cares about it. They're being made by people who are trying to make something that think someone else is going to like. And that's not how art works. That's something else...that's not art, that's commerce."

 

[Noah Neim]

Looks good, good luck, also uploading images of the models with clearer backgrounds so that they're seen better would be nice

 

[OsirianObsidian]

I mentioned in the first post the Freebase social media system. This took a long time to develop, so I'm going to explain this a bit more and how you can interact with posts. Let's say you find something interesting in a conspiracy thread about a secret United Nations moonbase, and you want to make a reply. Well, just like on an image board, you simply click on the post number, and reply options come up that you can select:



For every post, there is a positive reaction, a negative reaction and a neutral reaction. Let's see what happens when we replied positively:



Seems like we got a bit more information that we otherwise wouldn't have received. Note that some replies can start of completely new chains of conversation, mimicking a real, organic board. Also note that the board updates in real time, and new subjects appear as the Freebase AI analyzes your interactions with different people and the environment. In this way, the game evolves into a living, breathing world.

Bear in mind that while posts are initially anonymous, once you have shared your neural net blockchain number with someone else, all of their posts and all of your posts become associated with that ID. In other words, the veil of anonymity is pierced and they get to see what you've said about various subjects. This will positively or negatively affect their opinion of you once you've achieved enough trust points with that character...especially if you've been telling them one thing to their face and another anonymously online.

The idea behind the Freebase app is not just to add depth to the world-building of the game, but to place clues and use it as a narrative device. An example of this would be the following: let's say a character you've just received the neural net number from has gone missing. Now that you've got their number, all their posts are visible, so you scroll through all the Freebase boards and threads and stumble across a conversation between them and an anonymous user talking about how she should meet at the same location as everyone else. So you go back through the thread, cross-referencing the post ID number (that doesn't change in the thread) and eventually find the location of the meet.

What if you didn't have enough trust points to have the characters number when they went missing? Or didn't bother to check Freebase? No problem, the story continues, it just takes a different route to the same destination. These immutable narrative points are called Nexus Hubs in Neon Babylon...and in the next post, we will talk about how they come together to create a dynamic story.

 

[OsirianObsidian]

For an example of a Nexus Hub, let's take the conversations that you have at Pandora strip club in the red light district of Sodom. We'll explore one of the possible paths you can take with Morgan.

First of all, in order to strike up a conversation, you need to improve your charisma stat to 10. This requires drinking, or rather, the social interactions that come with drinking. Since you start at zero and don't know anyone at the start of the game, the only person you can interact with are people who are paid to listen to you - that is, bartenders. But like a good chef, we'll look at a character that we've prepared earlier that has the prerequisite stats to talk to Morgan.



You might notice that the image in the gif looks a little blurry...that's because the player is currently feeling the effects of alcohol. In fact, it's possible to get TOO drunk when talking to characters in bars, which can lead to results that are both good and bad depending on the situation. Let's see what happens if we are too drunk when talking to Morgan:



Ouch. Well, at least she didn't slap us, right? The next time we meet Morgan after this, she will bring up the fact that we were drunk, adapting her initial conversation to the situation before continuing the default conversation tree. However, this not only costs us romance, trust and domination points, but it also skips an opportunity to gain them, because it misses the following interaction:



Morgan is a dominatrix, so the player has a choice - they can either accept or reject Morgan's offer for a spanking. In this instance, the player has decided to go down the dominant path with Morgan, which amuses Morgan, as seen by her raised eyebrow. Note that choosing this path gains points in all three stats of domination, trust and romance.



Morgan is curious as to what a guy like you is doing in a place like this. What are you going to tell her - are you going to be honest and say you're just here for the nudity, or will you come up with a funny excuse as to why you're drinking in a strip club?



Seems like honesty isn't the best policy when it comes to Morgan. Notice how her expression changes the moment you tell her the reason. However, while you might think 'Okay, this is the bad route, don't go down this path'...while romance and trust points are affected, domination points actually increase quite a bit by challenging Morgan. After all, she's being a little quick to judge when she's working as a stripper, isn't she?



Seems like she might be attracted to you, doesn't it? Though she's currently too angry for you to do anything about it. But her response begs the question - why work here if you hate the customers?



Sounds like it's both a practical and enjoyable vocation for Morgan. She gets a little barb in at the end - obviously she finds it enjoyable to inflict pain on those who only look skin deep. There might be some unresolved issues there that we will explore in future conversations.



But alas, our attempt to reconcile with her falls flat, and we reach the end of our first conversation with her...that immutable point in the game that never changes. How Morgan perceives us is quite different depending on our path...if, for example, we had said "Are you going to put me over your knee?" when she said that we need a good spanking, our domination points would have gone into negative (meaning her desire to dominate would have increased)...and when we said that we're just here for the nude girls, instead of our domination points rising, they would have fallen even further. This is because of Morgan's desire to 'put us in our place' as a dominatrix.

In this way, the motivations and dynamics of character interactions are fluid and respond to your choices. Perhaps continuing to go down a path of pissing off Morgan and making her want to dominate you will end up in a mindbreak situation where she becomes so consumed with this idea that she can't stand the thought of being humiliated by someone she despises and it cause her to completely shut down and become a mindless fuck doll if you manage to make her your slave. Maybe she actually ends up enjoying your honesty and finds it endearing enough to want to marry you. One thing is certain, there will never be one choice that determines the path for any of the love interests in Neon Babylon, but rather, a pattern of behavior that the characters will react realistically to.

 

[OsirianObsidian]

Just as an aside - having a fully voiced game requires a lot of work in terms of getting lipsyncing right.



While Honey Select 2 is limited in terms of how detailed lip movements can be, it's important to do the best that you can in terms of ensuring that each syllable appears to be enunciated properly.

Why bother with voice if it's so much work? To increase immersion levels into the world. The point is to get you focused on the expressions that the characters are displaying as they speak, rather than the text at the bottom of the screen. If you've ever played the game LA Noire, you'll remember that when people were telling lies or half-truths, they would show different expressions - their eyes would move in a direction that indicated they were fabricating a story, or they would fidget. In Neon Babylon, characters respond in the same way - eye rolls, blushing, side glances, smirks, folding arms etc. For example, during Morgan's conversation, you will see that she is becoming more interested in you by the fact that she turns her body to face the MC and opens her legs a bit more, which is body language for sexual receptivity. Say the wrong thing, and she will turn back and close herself off once more.

Of course, at the beginning of the game, everyone is a stranger so there aren't many cues to pick up on, but as you progress with investigations as to what is going on in the city, there will be opportunities to press people for more information about a subject they are guarded about if you've raised the intelligence of the MC high enough to pick up on these. This is where the trust mechanic comes in - if you've built up enough trust, the character will tell you what you want to know. Don't have enough? Then you might end up tanking your relationship with them by falsely accusing them of something that they are saying they didn't do...so you better have hard proof (or something else that will convince them to open up to you) in your Datavault or inventory before you start asking them about subjects they don't want to talk about.

 

[OsirianObsidian]

Weekly update - currently auditioning for voice actors. I did originally start to go down the path of using AI generated voices, but I quickly realised that if I wanted to keep the immersion that I'm saying I want by using voice to begin with, eventually AI would be limited because it's impossible to really direct an AI to create an emotional response with the main characters. It's fine when it's just the MC/player talking to them, because I could keep generating takes until I found the right tone and inflection that would respond to how I imagine the MC asking the question...but what happens when you start having voiced characters interact with one another? What about when I'm trying to make the characters do something like talk dirty during a lewd scene? AI isn't going to cut it with that.

My opinion on AI for artistic work is the following - it's great for a creator to use for storyboarding and to give artists an idea of how you see the scene playing out in your head, but if you want to create magic, you need the tension between your vision and the artists/actors interpretation of that vision. As an example, originally I thought that the character of Elspeth was going to be a full on bitch, with a voice that was haughty and condescending. But then I heard the VA who has been assigned the role do her take on Elspeth, and it turns out that she's actually more your typical 'Daddy's little princess' type - sweet, spoiled and entitled.

Yes, it's way more expensive doing it this way...but fuck it, I don't want to be able to sit back and say that this didn't work because I was too fucking cheap to do it right.

 

[OsirianObsidian]

Hi everyone - back with another update - recruitment of voice actors has gone very well and is almost complete - just a couple of roles to fill. Thought I'd use this weeks post as a bit of a sound off on how character development is done in Neon Babylon, using the character of Nova as an example. Some characters are already fleshed out when the game is nothing more than a concept. Others evolve organically. Nova is definitely the latter.

Nova was originally going to be an NPC character when first designed, like any of the shops in the base game. Somewhere that the player could purchase food that would not only negate hunger, but also reduce the effects of being drunk. But when creating her conversation arc with the player, she started to weasel her way into more screen time. First, it started with the idea that 'hey, maybe I should give the player the ability to add a second minimum wage job to help minimise unnecessary grind in the game'. Then I started to wonder what would make a girl like her work in a fast food place when on the same street in Sodom there was a strip club where she could make bank - why wasn't she asking herself the same question she asks the player - 'Are you serious? You wanna work in this dump?'. So her story began to take on a life of its own - maybe it wasn't that she didn't want to work at the strip club...maybe it was that she couldn't. Why wouldn't a strip club want to hire her? Perhaps she has a criminal history and one too many red flags on her character. Maybe working at the fast food place was the only option she had. Ideas started to develop that linked to other ideas that I had already formed elsewhere, and it was almost like I was discovering her rather than inventing her.

Of course, not every character was created this way, like I said. But it's fun when one becomes like a muffin top and breaks free of the mould and does their own thing.

 

[OsirianObsidian]

This week, I thought I'd do something different - this is first interaction you will have in the game, complete with the fantastic talents of the voice actress Aracelis Gotay. Bear in mind that this is a WIP so there might be some issues with syncing that haven't been ironed out yet. And yes, the choice to not have any music in this portion is intentional - the music start up as soon as you're able to ask questions.


Modern witness protection programs? A completely new body? What exactly are you involved in that you need a completely new identity? Why are you given Elenora a personal assistant for 'investigative and research duties'? She obviously knows who you were before - is she there to help or handle you? The plot thickens...

 

[OsirianObsidian]

Back with another update - again, keep in mind that these are WIP and the animation/vocals being used might change in the final product. This is just to introduce all the VAs and characters mostly.

Here's Nova with the vocal talents of LeyLey on display:


With Nova, I wanted someone who could play a jaded character who feels as though the weight of the world is on her shoulders, with any attempt to be upbeat feeling like it was a bit of a struggle. You'll understand why Nova is like this once you play the game.

And Elspeth with the vocal talents of BrittanySkyy:


Elspeth is pretty much the complete opposite of Nova - the entitled rich girl princess who has a bright and sunny disposition but only when things are going her way. The type of girl that would be lots of fun humiliating and degrading...

 

[OsirianObsidian]

Another update - this time we're going into the adult store Eros, which doubles as a kind of relationship advice center. It's also where you can purchase a F.A.E. unit - Female Artificial Entity. As the brochure says, the F.A.E. is made of a 'mimetic polymer alloy' which allows it to mimic the appearance of any identity that it has gained express permission of, or that you have purchased the image license of. The possibilities are endless...