The aim is to satisfy people's lusts, really. No one is playing Newlife to get deep and profound philosophical insights, nor are they playing it for the quality of the gameplay, which is bare bones basic and repetitive. This is why content is king and having to resort to skipping sex scenes says it's on a bad path. The only worthrhile updates are actual new scenes and variety to them. Maybe he needs to learn how to touch type or something or just declare open season and let the mod scene do all the heavy lifting if they are willing?
- Thread starter wynin
- Start date
Weirdly, because it's a life sim and is continuously looping through a small set of choices, I'd argue the other way around
Newlife wants to simulate committed relationships, but the things that make routine sex good are difficult to translate into fiction. If something's routine, the game should be summarising it otherwise the player will just end up skipping through it after the first few repetitions and will completely miss any nuances you add to the scene. Actual sex scenes should be the result of dramatic events, whether they're initated by the player or by the game, eg:You cheat on your partner and he becomes withdrawn and uninterested in your pleasure, or so focused on pleasing you (oral focus despite no LIKES_ORAL)? that it becomes offputting.
The jerk friend comes along and gets in your boyfriend's head. He becomes obsessed with fucking you in a position you don't enjoy.
A threesome with a more skilled third leads to partner insecurities, or the player character falls in love with the third.
Pregnant friend gets insatiably horny and ends up propositioning you or your partner, then loses interest completely when the baby is born.
There's a reason any fictional series with romantic elements will skip over the good times and jump to the points where a relationship is tested - and when a couple has proven solid enough to overcome any manufactured drama, will usually switch focus to a new set of characters.
There's a fair amount of content not written by SO in the game already, but to be frank the route Newlife took has ended in a catch 22. Writing new content in Newlife's style is code-heavy for most writers - even without the complication of the custom formats it uses - and not many coders have the writing skills to produce something compelling. Collaborative efforts are possible, but you need a lot of stars to align for that.
Those are some interesting concepts, sta123, and once again shows that several in this thread seem better at ideas and design than SO! Having all the daily grind simply cut out and described with some variety of "time passes..." and only dropping you back into the narrative when something interesting happens like that to avoid repeats would be a great idea and far, far more elegant than the skip choice. Better for the player and probably opens up a lot of options for SO design-wise rather than being boxed into this day-by-day system for no good reason. I hope this is something that SO adopts. It seems very doable.
I think that the biggest lesson from seeing what others do, especially with Newlife, is that building a good core system or using someone else's good pre-made engine saves so many headaches that it is worth the investment. Stops you getting painted into a corner after months of even years of effort and pain. That and get advice from others and listen to it (as we've seen a lot of good suggestions)! Don't assume you know everything or a wall you meet is impassable or only has one way around it.
I think that the biggest lesson from seeing what others do, especially with Newlife, is that building a good core system or using someone else's good pre-made engine saves so many headaches that it is worth the investment. Stops you getting painted into a corner after months of even years of effort and pain. That and get advice from others and listen to it (as we've seen a lot of good suggestions)! Don't assume you know everything or a wall you meet is impassable or only has one way around it.
- Jan 27, 2018
- 148
- 81
This is hands down the best description of what I like about this game. It lets you indulge in sexual fantasies, sure, but the real cake is how it portrays relationships and the dynamics between characters. It's a story that tells itself and reacts to your many minute choices.Weirdly, because it's a life sim and is continuously looping through a small set of choices, I'd argue the other way around
You cheat on your partner and he becomes withdrawn and uninterested in your pleasure, or so focused on pleasing you (oral focus despite no LIKES_ORAL)? that it becomes offputting.
The jerk friend comes along and gets in your boyfriend's head. He becomes obsessed with fucking you in a position you don't enjoy.
A threesome with a more skilled third leads to partner insecurities, or the player character falls in love with the third.
Pregnant friend gets insatiably horny and ends up propositioning you or your partner, then loses interest completely when the baby is born.
There's a reason any fictional series with romantic elements will skip over the good times and jump to the points where a relationship is tested - and when a couple has proven solid enough to overcome any manufactured drama, will usually switch focus to a new set of characters.
There's a fair amount of content not written by SO in the game already, but to be frank the route Newlife took has ended in a catch 22. Writing new content in Newlife's style is code-heavy for most writers - even without the complication of the custom formats it uses - and not many coders have the writing skills to produce something compelling. Collaborative efforts are possible, but you need a lot of stars to align for that.
Worth noting though that I don't think most of the concepts I mentioned would be easy to implement in Newlife in its current form. That isn't to say SO screwed up spectacularly though, any attempt to do this is brave as trying to simulate human behaviour in games remains extremely hard, and even today there aren't many credible systems for it (In the interactive fiction space there's StoryAssembler as an example of the state of the art, but it's still in an immature state, and no-one's really done anything interesting with it).
One of the biggest criticisms I have with Newlife is that it's effectively a large collection of painstakingly-constructed systems that interact in a limited way, but surprisingly there seems more of an expectation that these interactions will result in interesting stories rather than any sort of careful planning for them to do so. As a result the technical complexity at its core doesn't really get many opportunities to surface and I feel you end up with an event chain that is less a story and more just a list of things that happened. Being brutal about it, Newlife is ultimately the erotic game where you painstakingly learn to cook 20 dishes for your partner and then casually order out for a threesome.
Honestly most of these things (purely text based attempts like NL) are probably going to be obsolete eventually anyway as from what I've seen the AI systems for story (even lewd) making are ideal for this free form text based roleplaying. It'll feed you endless novelty and variety without waiting six months to see a new scene. That also offers complete personal customization instead of begging one developer for years to put that one thing you like or feature in you want but you never get or at best get a handful of sentences and a lot of stuff that's doesn't work for you.
The whole slice of life thing is pretty shit and repetitive with NL and always will unless he really works hard at vast amounts of text for variety and long play novelty without repetition. Or an AI can just churn it out on the fly to suit your whims and needs that very moment and tailor to you over time too. It's not like the AI is competing with a top tier writing team or author.
The whole slice of life thing is pretty shit and repetitive with NL and always will unless he really works hard at vast amounts of text for variety and long play novelty without repetition. Or an AI can just churn it out on the fly to suit your whims and needs that very moment and tailor to you over time too. It's not like the AI is competing with a top tier writing team or author.
Eh, obsolete is a bad term for it IMO. Technically there's a hell of a lot of games that are obsolete by virtue of better systems being made for that game type. In the case of AI writing, that's hit or miss depending on how it's done. I personally don't see there being a really good (free / mostly free) adult story AI for a while.
Even if an AI becomes available, depending on your preferences and fetishes it may not be suitable / have been taught for that niche. It might be hard to find a writer / developer for the niche you want, but that can be more consistent. And hell, you might like / prefer the writing style of a specific author that an AI won't replicate without teaching it.
As for the repetitive gameplay loop, that's the standard of the life sim genre. Some of them are less detailed (like NL) and some take it to ludicrous levels of detail (Girl Life is one example). You may not like them, but as long as there's a market for them, they'll still be made. And honestly, sometimes you want more details like that in a game. I like to point to Dwarf Fortress as a good example of this kind of thing in the (generally) SFW example. A lot of people would ignore the classic version of DF simply because it's ascii graphics, and it has a learning curve like a brick wall. But it's enjoyable for those of us who like that detail in a colony builder game.
so the update has been "delayed" 5 days already. Anyone want to take bets on how many days more?
splendid doesn't usually delay updates, usually he would release an update with two things on the changelog and call it a month
either he was way too lazy or one of the contributors he pads the changelog with underdelivered and he's scrambling lol
either he was way too lazy or one of the contributors he pads the changelog with underdelivered and he's scrambling lol
Newlife 0.7.8
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whoah, 5 more minutes of content.
why is moving names to a file a major change
- May 27, 2017
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You can choose what names each races use, no more east asian Bob's and black Patrick's.
- May 12, 2017
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w/ fixes
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In case you really want to keep your save for something, you can edit the savefile and delete all of "maleNames"
- Jun 24, 2017
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SplendidOstrich is like that for the last 2 years. Really big improvements are lacking. Instead all he does for a month of patreon income is the bare minimum. - As you can see with the last releases. Basically just a cash grab. Which is sad because the initial game idea is intriguing. You can indeed follow the decisions you can make every (ingame) day.