Zanurah
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- Jul 10, 2022
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It's a shame the dev is more interested in milking his product than making any true progress with it. In truth I wish I knew the code and knew how to code for that matter, because I'd love to make something similar set in my dark fantasy universe.
CorvusCorax
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- Nov 12, 2019
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The code is the easy part. I mean it takes time but the real challenge is to make a compelling and fun game that people want to play. I mean if you really want to take a look, you can take the files and decompile them.
The dev even has a way for you to create scenes for the game if you want to add custom stuff.
If you are serious about it, try to create a plan for your game, somethign with structure. Then you just need to find a coder if you dont know how to do it
Finding someone to code the game is ideal, of course, but I had some luck using ChatGPT to build a simple game idea I had. It is less ambitious than Newlife and made in Twine, but it works pretty well. Might be worth looking into that.
I have not published it yet.
It's supposed to be a spiritual successor to
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. I have a nice framework, with stats, a game cycle and upgrades, but no events (I want to write them myself).
Vaelaztrasz
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- Sep 26, 2022
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Sounds interesting. If you do decide to share, kindly make a post in this thread
Zanurah
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Know any coders, then? And how do I go about decompiling the files? Where can I find how to create scenes for this game, too?
I'm a programmer, and I've decompiled the game's files in the past, it's unfortunately obfuscated (meaning all of the sensible names like "CharacterData" is renamed things like "a" and "b"), which is done specifically to prevent people from easily reading decompiled code.
Zanurah
Member
- Jul 10, 2022
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That's unfortunate. I suppose the next question then is how hard would it be to build a similar game?
In terms of complexity? Doesn't seem too bad. You'd need to design a few UIs. Build the framework for your people and locations. Possibly an unexpectly heavy lift would be clothing interaction. Newlife has a TON of different clohting options, and they can be manipulated differently through scenes where the character is undressed in various ways (an example would be if the character flashes her breasts works differently if she is wearing a sweater that she pulls up from her waist, a dress she pulls down from the above, or maybe she can't easily because she's wearing a high neckline dress).
And then there are events. That is a fair bit of content, and they can be much more complicated by taking into account the player's traits, clothing, and relationship to the NPC(s) involved.
TLDR: I don't think you need to be a great programmer to pull this off, but there would be a lot to keep track of to make it decently immersive.
Sometimes I'll use ChatGPT to help with architecture of code and the like. For small things, it's a great tool to learn how to get the hang of things but it will over complicate SO MANY things. I'm fairly engine agnostic and even I struggled to figure out what the hell it was trying to do and why. It's best used as a boilerplate filler, placeholder content filler, and general resource to talk through HOW to do things, but you pretty much have to be VERY specific with it.
No one has to wonder how I feel about vibe coding lol
The clothing system is not actually that tough to recreate - you need to be a little disciplined as a developer and make sure that you always use an internal API for clothing interactions so that, for example, you're always checking if her skirt is short enough to slide a hand up between her thighs and that something is always checking to see if her nipples/labia are visible, but none of that is hard just time-consuming.
The actual work is in writing the scenes, not building out the mechanics (in this sort of text-based game), each of which ends up with potentially many branching paths depending on player character traits, current state, randomness, and player choices.
Honestly this game REALLY isn't that complex. I could probably whip up an engine that works similarly over the course of a weekend, maybe a week if I'm not rushing myself.
From what little I could read from Newlife's code, it's no wonder there's so few content updates - the way it's set up really isn't smart. It's clumsy and amateurish, with way too many hardcoded scenes.
A better way to do it would've been to code the engine in C#, load scenes from YAML, and allow for scripting via Lua. That way once the engine is done, it'd be trivial to upload new content, even opening up mods and community updates quite easily.
I haven't really considered making a "better" Newlife before, but maybe I should.
From what little I could read from Newlife's code, it's no wonder there's so few content updates - the way it's set up really isn't smart. It's clumsy and amateurish, with way too many hardcoded scenes.
A better way to do it would've been to code the engine in C#, load scenes from YAML, and allow for scripting via Lua. That way once the engine is done, it'd be trivial to upload new content, even opening up mods and community updates quite easily.
I haven't really considered making a "better" Newlife before, but maybe I should.
you should, free money as we can see
At this point you might as well since its always looked like one reason for the gradually slow updates was because of their OCD in not wanting others to mess with the game code. At this point it just looks like you guys confirmed what a lot of us figured years ago, their code has so much jank that they ran into the same problem many developers run into... kicking an obvious problem further down the road!
Do that. If you make it easy to add scenes, traits, questlines, clothes and activities you might not even have to write the content itself, people would do it as a community.
If I remember correctly, SO originally chose Java because they wanted to learn Java. Velocity & YAML weren't part of the original design at all, everything was written in Java. This is, to say the least, not how I would choose to do it either.
A better design would enable more and more complex scenes and more sophisticated story lines within the game, but a lot of people in this thread have convinced themselves that the "content" aspect is trivial, super easy to do and that's just not true. Newlife is restrictive in what a custom scene in Velocity & YAML can do because of its design, but making new content in it isn't going to be quick and easy, and you aren't going to get a fun and hot game that's at all coherent by relying on community members for anything significant.
I disagree. I believe this new, modular and open game would have a small group of writers that would create good, consistent and interconnected content in a way that the game doesn't feel like a messy compilation. Randoms would drop content evey now and then, some of it good, some of it bad. We'd get lots of redundant content, obviously (like a dozen iterations of a SLUTTY trait or three different BARISTA careers, each one with different scenes, some overlapping), but people would just pick the one they prefer(or the one their favorite content packs need) and natural selection would ensue.
I think that without an individual or team working to release a single, coherent game the whole thing would become an unplayable, fragmented mess. Eventually either people would drop it and move on or someone (possibly a group) would coordinate to make a more or less official release. Even in games where there's a singular product being released (Skyrim, XCL, etc), mods and add-ons are routinely incompatible in ways that users cannot resolve and break whenever a new version of the base game drops.
This is all assuming that a working, well-documented engine is released and a bunch of people immediately start working on content for it, which seems unlikely to me; without enough starting content to be playable and interesting, I doubt you get many people dedicating time to making content for someone else's framework.