Ren'Py Noblesse Oblige [v0.3.11] [Alvir Studio]

[kartolas]

So I can't play it if I don't accept the job?! So sad.

 

[Alvir]

So I can't play it if I don't accept the job?! So sad.

Well, this game is about working for a magic academy, so there is no route where you can avoid getting the job. Maybe it will change with time, but I can't guarantee this for you.

 

[curiouslycruising]

I'm always eager to try another training/management game. But I had a bit of trouble with menus appearing or disappearing making the gameplay very difficult to enjoy. Also, the finance section isn't updating the projected income and expenses, even after you've set the schedule.

I'll check back in on this project in a few updates. After some polishing is done to the systems and graphics. Keep up the good work though, there are some solid foundations to this game.

 

[mmmonsterkill]

As cleaning skill is leveled up, you will clean much, much faster ^_^
Also, the game is constantly being rebalanced, so the cleaning speed may be changed in future updates!

i would suggest that cuz that sounded VERY excessive. anyway good luck with the game ill check back in a year or so cuz these games need to be fleshed out to be enjoyable for me else ill just spend time grinding for no purpose as the path might not be done or whatever, the summary made me think its simmular to slave trainer or whatever it was called that i played a bit back in the day.

 

[balitz Method]

Feature creep is a scary thing, and I totally agree with you that it is ruing a game if you try adding a lot of features without making them work with each other ^_^
And I do understand that right now this game is very barebone... But! This game is at the very beginning, and right now I'm almost done with introducing all main features, this will be finalized by version 0.2 and after it, all these features will be getting polished and combined to work perfectly together to allow you experience rich deep experience.
At this point in time, all these features that I introduce serve as a presentation of the foundation upon which all of the game and all of the events will be built.

In the state it's in I got the impression that you threw a lot of stuff like stats and skills in with the intention of figuring out what they'll be for later on. Like there are several types of magic and knowledge with zero situations to use any of it. Let your scenario dictate which ones are worth keeping; that will prevent you from trying to go back and make stuff for every little thing without a solid plan and ending up buried under a bunch of half-finished systems that barely interact with each other.

Even your basic systems aren't clear. The premise is that the PC is a teacher but they don't actually teach the not-slave anything themselves; it's borrowing everything straight from Slavemaker. For a premise like this it'd be a good idea to have some kind of goal for each student (skill minimums that you need to hit, maybe with randomized ((or story-based for important ones)) bonus conditions?), even and including introducing competing clients as you go (e.g. the kid's mother wants the student to go into a particular trade but a scheming uncle offers a larger sum to turn them into a prostitute or w/e) , and teaching involves either using the PC's stats as a basis for teaching in the areas that they're strong or finding tutors (like those other characters, maybe dateable for the PC) to fill in the gaps. You can also set up benchmark events, like training a debutante in dancing and refinement for a party, that have to be passed in order to succeed.

In other words don't lean on other games' structures or even worry about implementing a bunch of things like stats until you have a plan for how the game should play nailed down.

 

[Alvir]

I'm always eager to try another training/management game. But I had a bit of trouble with menus appearing or disappearing making the gameplay very difficult to enjoy. Also, the finance section isn't updating the projected income and expenses, even after you've set the schedule.

I'll check back in on this project in a few updates. After some polishing is done to the systems and graphics. Keep up the good work though, there are some solid foundations to this game.

Right now, income is showing your passive income not an active one, so it barely shows anything at the moment, expences show your expenses on classes and household upkeep, it should work properly. In future updates, I'll try to make it more useful
By the way, what is troubling you with menus? Which screens are causing this? I'll check them out to make them work better.

And thank you for trying out Noblesse Oblige!

 

[Alvir]

i would suggest that cuz that sounded VERY excessive. anyway good luck with the game ill check back in a year or so cuz these games need to be fleshed out to be enjoyable for me else ill just spend time grinding for no purpose as the path might not be done or whatever, the summary made me think its simmular to slave trainer or whatever it was called that i played a bit back in the day.

I'll do that
And I'll work hard on this game so that after a year you could enjoy playing this game

 

[Alvir]

In the state it's in I got the impression that you threw a lot of stuff like stats and skills in with the intention of figuring out what they'll be for later on. Like there are several types of magic and knowledge with zero situations to use any of it. Let your scenario dictate which ones are worth keeping; that will prevent you from trying to go back and make stuff for every little thing without a solid plan and ending up buried under a bunch of half-finished systems that barely interact with each other.

Even your basic systems aren't clear. The premise is that the PC is a teacher but they don't actually teach the not-slave anything themselves; it's borrowing everything straight from Slavemaker. For a premise like this it'd be a good idea to have some kind of goal for each student (skill minimums that you need to hit, maybe with randomized ((or story-based for important ones)) bonus conditions?), even and including introducing competing clients as you go (e.g. the kid's mother wants the student to go into a particular trade but a scheming uncle offers a larger sum to turn them into a prostitute or w/e) , and teaching involves either using the PC's stats as a basis for teaching in the areas that they're strong or finding tutors (like those other characters, maybe dateable for the PC) to fill in the gaps. You can also set up benchmark events, like training a debutante in dancing and refinement for a party, that have to be passed in order to succeed.

In other words don't lean on other games' structures or even worry about implementing a bunch of things like stats until you have a plan for how the game should play nailed down.

The teacher part will arrive in soon, as it will be based on your skill rank difference, so if MC has a higher rank than protege, he will be able to teach her that skill. The magic part of the game is written on paper and waits for me to get to it, I think I'll get to it in the first months of 2023
That's a good idea to let the scenario dictate what systems I should leave, and I'll try to do that, thanks for your advice ^_^

About the goals of your tutoring, that is also already written, but I need to get to it For example our first heroine will have an event in the library where she finds out that she likes books and want to develop her knowledge, then she gains interest in magic, and you will have opportunities to fulfill her wishes, or change her mind and lead her on a different path, or simply brainwash her to do anything that you would like(that will be an evil route of making her your slave). But it takes time to implement it all, so I do understand that right now it all seems like a mess and not a coherent game.

So I hope that after a few updates I'll be able to flesh out this game to the point where you and all the other players will be able to enjoy it

 

[fgh24]

could you make it so that if you do the same task as your student that they do it with you and i have a better idea for the protagonist and the student with high love value she will be the most loyal to you and dating could be a feature for night activity but it could be done during the day to and the protagonist proabably should have way more tasks and maybe level up and maybe have the maid girl trait depending on your relationship with her

 

[Alvir]

could you make it so that if you do the same task as your student that they do it with you and i have a better idea for the protagonist and the student with high love value she will be the most loyal to you and dating could be a feature for night activity but it could be done during the day to and the protagonist proabably should have way more tasks and maybe level up and maybe have the maid girl trait depending on your relationship with her

Some tasks you will be able to do together, this feature is already in development!
Dating is also planned but a bit later, first I want to add more options to discuss activity, and more love-related events
MC will have much more tasks to do in the future, but first I need to flesh out current ones, and maid trait will be obtainable as a part of one of the possible routes ^_^

 

[fgh24]

Some tasks you will be able to do together, this feature is already in development!
Dating is also planned but a bit later, first I want to add more options to discuss activity, and more love-related events
MC will have much more tasks to do in the future, but first I need to flesh out current ones, and maid trait will be obtainable as a part of one of the possible routes ^_^

cool could you also add a jealousy trait to so if your relationship is high enough they will become jealous it should happen for some trainable characters not for the current one but with the jealousy trait they will get mad if you hit on other women or people and could you not limit one trait per person with high obedience they will gain like a loyality trait and i think the mc should be able to buy more traits later maybe put in some sort a guild where you can do missions and stuff the guild should increase skills

 

[Alvir]

cool could you also add a jealousy trait to so if your relationship is high enough they will become jealous it should happen for some trainable characters not for the current one but with the jealousy trait they will get mad if you hit on other women or people and could you not limit one trait per person with high obedience they will gain like a loyality trait and i think the mc should be able to buy more traits later maybe put in some sort a guild where you can do missions and stuff the guild should increase skills

I'll write it dows as an idea for future updates, thanks!

 

[Deleted member 1143342]

the title btw is not to be confused with CLOCKUP'S Noblesse Oblige

 

[fgh24]

could you make like different routes like where it depends for each trainable character and will there be different magic per person like you could go by element or other things but different magic should have different perks

 

[262177]

I see yuri, I see female protagonist, I see training game... I bookmark. Looking forward to testing this, watching for now, best of luck with the project Alvir!

 

[Alvir]

could you make like different routes like where it depends for each trainable character and will there be different magic per person like you could go by element or other things but different magic should have different perks

There will be character-specific routes, don't know about character-specific magic, but as game development progresses, I may introduce such a feature.

 

[Alvir]

I see yuri, I see female protagonist, I see training game... I bookmark. Looking forward to testing this, watching for now, best of luck with the project Alvir!

Thanks for your kind words!

 

[262177]

Some time to test a few things at last. Awesome interface!

Bugs/exploits:
- [Character creation] Perks/traits don't seem to check for MC.originSum so it is possible for the player to get them all last. Skills can also send the player into the negatives (as long as they have at least 1 point) as they check for a non-zero sum before deducting 10 points. Mitigated by the fact the player will be punished with a negative pool and not get to assign any point if origin points are to be earned later.
- [Character creation] Unassigned points (for both stats and perks) are lost without warning.

A few minor cosmetic bugs:
- [Schedule screen, cosmetic] [ActiveHeroine.niceName] and [MC.name] are shown as is when hovering the names (variable name instead of the string value); possibly related to tt.Action not resolving the variables? (scheduleScreen.rpy, line 73)
- [Day schedule, continuity/cosmetic] Daytime schedule seems to sometimes show 16:00 instead of 18:00 (before starting the nighttime schedule from 20:00 to midnight). The nighttime schedule goes just as planned and no extra action takes place (so it isn't exploitable either). If I understood the code correctly, a calendarN.AddTime(2) call after the exhaustion checks might just do the job (Scheduler.rpy, line 237) Edit: Seems like it's a particular action that does this, sometimes it does display 18:00 just fine. Will investigate on this one.
- [Night transition, cosmetic] The cuddling placeholder transitions a bit too quickly for the player to notice (pretty thoughtful to have put fitting placeholders, and they're quite nice too!)

Hope this helps, please let me know if you need debugging details but I haven't encountered any gamebreaking bug (or exploit) so far except during character creation. Quite a deep world for an early development phase, really promising. You might want to get a spellchecker and proofreader as the story expands but the dialogue is perfectly understandable.

Edit: Added a character creation exploit and a potential oversight.

 

[262177]

For those interested, a quick recap of what each stat does. Perhaps Alvir might want to include it as a tooltip upon character creation? Trying not to go full-blown number cruncher to keep the post short.

Base stats are capped to 8 min and 18 max upon creation and start out at 10.
Increasing a stat costs 2 points at 14-15 and 3 at 16-17.

Strength (STR): Affects Force Martial Arts, Athletics and Swimming gains.
Agility (AGI): Affects Agile Martial Arts, Cooking and Dancing gains.
Constitution (CON): Affects Cleaning, Endurance and Fitness gains.
Intelligence (INT): Affects Knowledge gains (all three types).
Wisdom (WIS): Affects Perception, Reasoning and Willpower gains.
Charisma (CHA): Affects Acting, Persuasion and Refinement gains. Directly affects two choices at the time. Current maximum required is 14.

 

[Alvir]

Some time to test a few things at last. Awesome interface!

Bugs/exploits:
- [Character creation] Perks/traits don't seem to check for MC.originSum so it is possible for the player to get them all last. Skills can also send the player into the negatives (as long as they have at least 1 point) as they check for a non-zero sum before deducting 10 points. Mitigated by the fact the player will be punished with a negative pool and not get to assign any point if origin points are to be earned later.
- [Character creation] Unassigned points (for both stats and perks) are lost without warning.

A few minor cosmetic bugs:
- [Schedule screen, cosmetic] [ActiveHeroine.niceName] and [MC.name] are shown as is when hovering the names (variable name instead of the string value); possibly related to tt.Action not resolving the variables? (scheduleScreen.rpy, line 73)
- [Day schedule, continuity/cosmetic] Daytime schedule seems to sometimes show 16:00 instead of 18:00 (before starting the nighttime schedule from 20:00 to midnight). The nighttime schedule goes just as planned and no extra action takes place (so it isn't exploitable either). If I understood the code correctly, a calendarN.AddTime(2) call after the exhaustion checks might just do the job (Scheduler.rpy, line 237) Edit: Seems like it's a particular action that does this, sometimes it does display 18:00 just fine. Will investigate on this one.
- [Night transition, cosmetic] The cuddling placeholder transitions a bit too quickly for the player to notice (pretty thoughtful to have put fitting placeholders, and they're quite nice too!)

Hope this helps, please let me know if you need debugging details but I haven't encountered any gamebreaking bug (or exploit) so far except during character creation. Quite a deep world for an early development phase, really promising. You might want to get a spellchecker and proofreader as the story expands but the dialogue is perfectly understandable.

Edit: Added a character creation exploit and a potential oversight.

Thank you for your detailed analysis ^_^
I'll tinker with character creation to make it more transparent, and remove those exploits/bugs. Thank you for pointing them out!
And I'll hunt those minor bugs, that 16:00 thing is probably relevant to some event not having calendarN.AddTime(2), need to search for this one, but it should not be too difficult to pinpoint.

You are highly helpful with this detailed review of this early stage of development, it will help me make this game bug free! Thank you for your review and your kind words, I really do appreciate it!