I've been following Newlife for a few years and poked around with a decompiler at one point, comparing the differences in code between a couple of versions. My take is that SO is not lying when they say they put hours into it, it's just that Newlife has deep-rooted design issues that make it extremely cumbersome to develop new scenes for.
A lot of Newlife's writing effort looks to be wasted on the many combinations of character traits and NPC traits, none of which can be seen without multiple playthroughs. The inflexibility of character traits is an unusual design decision. A lot of games make gradual changes to the main character's sexuality a staple of their gameplay. If Newlife was refactored / reworked to a more flexible system of tracking behaviour characteristics, one that would allow for unlocking content based on character choices instead of just decisions made at the start, I think players would get a lot more mileage out of the variations and their character would seem less static.
Unfortunately, reworking Newlife substantially would be difficult, because so much of the text content looks to be tied up in blocks of code. There was an attempt to create a higher level scripting language to allow third parties to create custom scenes, but instead of developing that idea further and adopting it wholly, the majority of SO's content is formed by concatenating java strings. Trying to connecting the variables tracked by the game to all the variations of text in a way that makes grammatical sense is an extremely high workload task without using some sort of higher level language.
TLDR: I can believe SO when they say they work hard on Newlife, but I think the resulting progress is massively underwhelming because of flawed game design decisions that are difficult to reverse.
A lot of Newlife's writing effort looks to be wasted on the many combinations of character traits and NPC traits, none of which can be seen without multiple playthroughs. The inflexibility of character traits is an unusual design decision. A lot of games make gradual changes to the main character's sexuality a staple of their gameplay. If Newlife was refactored / reworked to a more flexible system of tracking behaviour characteristics, one that would allow for unlocking content based on character choices instead of just decisions made at the start, I think players would get a lot more mileage out of the variations and their character would seem less static.
Unfortunately, reworking Newlife substantially would be difficult, because so much of the text content looks to be tied up in blocks of code. There was an attempt to create a higher level scripting language to allow third parties to create custom scenes, but instead of developing that idea further and adopting it wholly, the majority of SO's content is formed by concatenating java strings. Trying to connecting the variables tracked by the game to all the variations of text in a way that makes grammatical sense is an extremely high workload task without using some sort of higher level language.
TLDR: I can believe SO when they say they work hard on Newlife, but I think the resulting progress is massively underwhelming because of flawed game design decisions that are difficult to reverse.
" massively underwhelming " is an understatement, the majority of the content that the game has was added in the first to second year of development .
also, i dont tend to play wildly different characters but the time i did so i didn't notice that much of a change based on traits, it was at most just flavor and very few unique scenes for certain traits.
also, i dont tend to play wildly different characters but the time i did so i didn't notice that much of a change based on traits, it was at most just flavor and very few unique scenes for certain traits.
Okay, there's a lot of stuff I'll complain about with NewLife, but this is just asinine. This is a legitimate game design decision and you seem to think the explicit point of it (To allow multiple playthroughs to each give a different experience) is somehow a demerit. That's not a complaint or a criticism, that's just a difference in design philosophy.
Stormkool above me is giving an actual critique about that system by saying he believes it's not varied and/or meaningful enough to make an actual difference and accomplish that design goal of a different experience each playthrough.
What you're doing is like getting pissed at a comedy for having jokes. Not for having badly written/timed jokes, for having jokes that are anachronistic to the tones/themes of the production, or some other actual critique, but for having jokes at all. You could not have missed the point more.
No, sta123 is likely correct, the modular approach that was chosen and the way it was implemented in java requires constant rework of previous event modules when new depth is added and QA to get the new content to work with the old grammar. And the huge amount of variables (traits etc.) likely make creating new events a tedious task, when a single sentance might require multiple variations or hundreds of word injections in order to facilitate all possible trait combinations possible.
I believe SO works hard on the game, but working hard does not always net the same result as working smart. But in this case it would likely require a start from scratch in order to streamline the workflow, the way "Female agent" went.
That's not really what he was saying, though. He was speaking as if the mere idea of doing it this way is pointless unconditionally. As if it's something that should never be done, no matter what. That's not a complaint or attempt to attribute where the problem is like what you're saying. That's a difference in preferences.
The way he said it is no different from "This game is bad because it has <Insert Fetish I Have a Hatred of Here>."
As for actual discussion of where the issue is, no he's not correct. There's dozens of other areas that being terrible mismanaged that are the real problem. Take a look at Undertale. It also had a huge number of variables determinant of your actions, was made by a single person, and it was finished in less time than NewLife's been in development for. When viewed by itself, NewLife's execution of the idea is flawed, yes. However, it is most definitely not the root cause.
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You might have misunderstood me, not helped by bad wording on my part. I was trying to suggest that 'unlocking content based on (the player) character('s) choices instead of just decisions made at the start' would be a better design choice, which seems to be what Undertale does.
With Newlife a significant amount of content is locked to inflexible traits you choose at the start of a playthrough, traits that can't be influenced by your character's choices (actions). That's an unusual design choice. I think many / most players miss this content.
With Newlife a significant amount of content is locked to inflexible traits you choose at the start of a playthrough, traits that can't be influenced by your character's choices (actions). That's an unusual design choice. I think many / most players miss this content.
I've actually looked in to the code of Newlife too, and I'd have to agree. As a disclaimer: it is not easy to determine what code does without source code sometimes, so I have to make educated guesses. That being said, holy shit their coding is like over 90% objects. It's just unnecessary and overcomplicated, you have to call dozens of objects to even do simple things, with very high chances of things breaking, not working, or doing something unexpected.
SO started Newlife some time ago, and I'd say fits into the end of the time frame where people were being taught that style of coding. For JavaScript we learn the exact opposite now, so obviously that style worked real good. The sad reality is that unless they want to go back and rebuild the core of their game, greatly expanding the content or adding complex mechanics would be a huge challenge. Honestly, I'd say the game is effectively finished, they'd be better off making a Newlife 2 or something - after learning more modern coding methods.
I'm still kinda amazed that no one else has tried to make a game like Newlife, instead sticking to 'tismulators where you live out a neurotic whore's life to the microsecond. Probably because it is deceptively hard to make a game like that.
People who think it's easy to hammer out content for a game like Newlife are ignorant.
The reason why people play this one over a ton of the other games is the depth out there--the fact that you can play a substantial variety of traits and variation of things. However, that also means that writing scenes gets very complicated. Scenes have to take into account all the different things you might be wearing, the traits you may have, your character's various attributes, which scenes you may have already been in.
Which makes it way harder to write for than a much more "on rails" game, but that's also why people want to play games like this and not the "on rails" games.
Support it, or don't. Play it, or don't. But instead what we have is you guys clearly being big fans of the game because you're still sticking around here and wanting to check out every new version with bated breath... and yet failing to realize that the reason why you do that is also the reason why it takes a lot of work to add new content. Which is that every page of content you see is going to be dozens of pages easily of content, just only showing you the bits that apply to your particular playthrough.
This is also why people try to make imitation games, and those games fail hard as soon as they get to the point where rising complexity causes new scenes to be work to add.
The reason why people play this one over a ton of the other games is the depth out there--the fact that you can play a substantial variety of traits and variation of things. However, that also means that writing scenes gets very complicated. Scenes have to take into account all the different things you might be wearing, the traits you may have, your character's various attributes, which scenes you may have already been in.
Which makes it way harder to write for than a much more "on rails" game, but that's also why people want to play games like this and not the "on rails" games.
Support it, or don't. Play it, or don't. But instead what we have is you guys clearly being big fans of the game because you're still sticking around here and wanting to check out every new version with bated breath... and yet failing to realize that the reason why you do that is also the reason why it takes a lot of work to add new content. Which is that every page of content you see is going to be dozens of pages easily of content, just only showing you the bits that apply to your particular playthrough.
This is also why people try to make imitation games, and those games fail hard as soon as they get to the point where rising complexity causes new scenes to be work to add.
"waah it's so hard to write literally one scene over a whole month"
have you tried not scamming people? the devs who do that seem to do just fine
btw the point at which this game had a large amount of fans (at least in this thread) is long gone, you'll notice barely anybody's even asking for the update now since they're all obviously shit token updates to not get your patreon shut down for taking money for nothing, people are mostly posting because they genuinely dislike the scammer dev now
i'm sure your paragraphs of deflection and cope keep the paypiggies happy on whatever other brainlet farm you have going though, keep it up
oh and
"dude my game has so much depth that's why it takes one month to write a tiny little scene which you can only ever access 2% of the time if you meet extremely specific conditions and which has otherwise zero impact upon the rest of the game"
how smoothbrained do you think people are to buy this 15 IQ argument
have you tried not scamming people? the devs who do that seem to do just fine
btw the point at which this game had a large amount of fans (at least in this thread) is long gone, you'll notice barely anybody's even asking for the update now since they're all obviously shit token updates to not get your patreon shut down for taking money for nothing, people are mostly posting because they genuinely dislike the scammer dev now
i'm sure your paragraphs of deflection and cope keep the paypiggies happy on whatever other brainlet farm you have going though, keep it up
oh and
"dude my game has so much depth that's why it takes one month to write a tiny little scene which you can only ever access 2% of the time if you meet extremely specific conditions and which has otherwise zero impact upon the rest of the game"
how smoothbrained do you think people are to buy this 15 IQ argument
It isn't an issue of story writing, it's a problem with writing code. Newlife is a mess of a game internally and it makes even simple literary goals like adding small scenes incredibly complicated. Making text games with semi-dynamic text, and branching interactions is complex to code, and much more difficult than it seems at first, too.
How smoothbrained do you have to be to think I'm the author of the game?
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TLDR 142 pages: Newlife should just die because the coding nightmare makes it effectively impossible for creating any new meaningful content and the devs are better off scrapping entire project to reboot using good code instead, which would save them and everyone else massive headaches and heartaches. Just take this out back already and put us all out of our misery.
Or, and I know this is crazy but hear me out, you could just go play something else. Instead of being put out of your misery, you could just not worry about the game at all. Maybe there's a nice visual novel you could click through.
Last I checked Newlife is run through a code obfuscator before it's released, so all these comments that go on about poking through the code and how it's a nightmare are coming from people that haven't actually seen the codebase the dev works on.
The notional "good code" people think would be so valuable ultimately wouldn't make scenes any quicker or easier to write; the effort is in actually writing decent prose and the complexity is in the ideas and concepts involved, not somehow an artifact of the object system or something. The object system isn't hard to use within custom scenes, Velocity is pretty simple (it's simpler than Twine/Twee and everyone seems to be able to pick that up easily enough), and YAML is both universally supported and not tough to figure out.
The only way to make writing scenes for Newlife easier to ignore all the variety in characters and traits by writing bland scenes that apply the same to everyone and need no internal logic or meaningful choice. At that point you may as well just go write short stories on Literotica.
oh my mistake you just admin the discord and defend a scam job for free
that's heaps better lol
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TLDR: Someone has a stick up their butt and thinks I'm upset about a game and it's dev process when in fact I was merely summing up what 90% of the posts prior to mine talked about. But hey, I enjoyed this game once or twice some time ago, now I just come here to read all the forum chaos. Glad I could make your brain implode with reeeeeee-ness as well. No sweat off my back lol.
Lol it's Eulexia and stochastic -- both are Ostrich's buttbuddies, erm, I mean, they're his admins at his Discord or something, hence they're the ones defending him. Maybe SO shares his earnings from milking his patrons with those two. 
Gotta love the discord going on here. lol But it only happened because of that stochastic dude. There's much more concord in his absence from this thread, because most of us are rightfully critical of MilkingOstrich's "work"... which, by the way, was not much as of last update. And this has been going on for years! I've followed this game's development for too long, and yes, I like the game, but it could be so much better. That a**hole SplendidOstrich has been clearly exploiting his foolish patrons year in, year out. This won't change. He won't change. Why would he? He's making easy money. Keep releasing as little updates as possible as long people pay him to.
Gotta love the discord going on here. lol But it only happened because of that stochastic dude. There's much more concord in his absence from this thread, because most of us are rightfully critical of MilkingOstrich's "work"... which, by the way, was not much as of last update. And this has been going on for years! I've followed this game's development for too long, and yes, I like the game, but it could be so much better. That a**hole SplendidOstrich has been clearly exploiting his foolish patrons year in, year out. This won't change. He won't change. Why would he? He's making easy money. Keep releasing as little updates as possible as long people pay him to.
I understand there's few person that willing to sponsor for this...*game*, but is there any hero for new version please?
It being unusual doesn't make it less of a valid design choice. That's no different than saying "This is good solely because of it's popularity" or "This is bad solely because it's obscure." You're still saying the same thing as you did in the first post.
The idea is that the inflexible traits mean that each created character will be different and thus give a different playthrough. This exact idea is 1/3rd of the entire design philosophy behind TableTop RPGs. His execution of it is just flawed and unmotivated.
Yes and no. Deobfuscators do a very effective job of rebuilding the structure of the code, and this is a text game so it self-comments quite effectively.
Everyone has a different style of coding, so it's pointless to say that code in a single-person project is 'good' or 'bad'. What I said is that it's clear that the text content is clearly deeply intertwined with the code (the game's engine and the game's content are one and the same, effectively), so it'd be difficult to make any significant retrospective design changes.
Agree and disagree. There's complexity in writing scenes for any form of interactive fiction, certainly, but the extra writing and conditionals - often nested - required for Newlife's elaborate game mechanics multiply the complexity.
Some of the story formats for Twine have very simple wiki-style syntax. I believe you could feasibly commission erotic fiction writers to write material for those story formats. I know it's an apples and oranges comparison because Newlife's game design is so complex, but I'm not sure there's a large pool of talent that could understand Velocity and YAML and still be able to write compelling erotic fiction.
Branching choices are good. I'd say the issue with Newlife's approach is that it involves lots of small branches for fine details, and the workload of implementing those precludes larger story branches. The ability to have your choice of flavour text comes at the expense of more story with more meaningful choices.