Ren'Py Of Devotion and Despondence [v0.2.15] [Earliestbird]

[Earliestbird]

Earliestbird

Wow, this is definitely a project I'd be interested in. So many wonderful tags. Since it's so early in development, I'm not going to critique the game, rather make humble requests.

And they are nothing but requests, I totally respect the dev's right to make what they want, and to put in as much work (or not) as they want. A lot of people are making these as a hobby, I get it.

The requests are put in spoilers, in case you're not interested. Which would be fine if you're not.

Spoiler

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Anyway, I'm getting carried away here.

View attachment 2145958

Thanks for the feedback and the suggestions!

1) The game will have both kind of scenes - some will allow you to choose between, for example, anal and/or vaginal and/or spanking, and some will be a single continuous scene. But expect a lot of the game's main fetish - which is breeding.

2) I think I fall into the "gardener" writer category. Here's the full quote from George R.R. Martin: "I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they're going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there's going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don't know how many branches it's going to have, they find out as it grows."

3) True, although drama can be very impactful. Just need to be careful to do it right.

4) Oh man that was an incredible game, glad to see you mention it. I do have plans for more... unconventional things like that. Just to give an example, I want an event that only ever appears if the main character has very little (1-5~) HP remaining at the end of a day, available only when the romance had advanced a bit.

5) No screenshake and flashes in the game so far. Not planning to add any either. Not really the best fit for the atmosphere I'm going for.

6) Hmm well... Like I said, this game is a novel-with-visuals - the narrative comes first. So I write this like I would be writing a book, and that does include some descriptions. BUT I also realize this is a game, so I try and keep these descriptions very short, only a few lines at most. Hopefully it won't be too big of a hang-up.

7) This is the one point where we can agree to disagree. Some people talk a lot during sex - and not just about the sex itself, but entirely random stuff like 'what do you want for dinner' or 'could you do this/that', or just laughing and awkwardly fumbling around. Many people actually get turned on by dirty talk. But anyway, that's not my point.
When it comes to writing sex scenes, I'm not going for realism. I'm going for fap material, or more specifically, what I personally find hot. This is a very subjective matter so I totally get it if you disagree, it's just that I have read a lot of erotic novels in the past and noticed that sex scenes that are spiced up by dialogue is widely preferred (with me included).
Also I can't really let my images do the work during sex scenes because I don't have good quality AI images with actual penetration.

 

[grohotor]

I feel like you could have just used daz to render at least some of the images. mainly those involving the characters. you can still let the text do the heavy lifting.

 

[brknsoul]

Excellent game so far. A small bug; If you obtain two of the same item and equip one of them, the game equips both, not allowing you to smelt one for essence until you unequip > smelt one > re-equip the other.

Not too much of an issue at the moment, since essence is plentiful, but later on, the fusing timer might kill you, if you can't equip a duplicate item for emergency smelting.

 

[JohnF95zone]

I feel like you could have just used daz to render at least some of the images. mainly those involving the characters. you can still let the text do the heavy lifting.

Most likely because Earliestbird doesn't have Daz in the first place, is not competent to use Daz for that matter or any ohter reason. I have no doubt that Earliestbird would have created a full blown 3D game using Unreal Engine 5 or Unity if he/she could. There is what you want and there is reality that cucks you from from what you want.

 

[TheOldGuard]

Daz would take a lot more work than AI prompts too. Epically if your purchasing items from daz/render hub/etc sites legally and not just stealing the files or hell of a lot longer making your own assets. Then you got to pose them, set the textures, the morphs, the lighting, sure you can use custom packs to make it faster but manually tweaking poses/assets is a must for better scenes. Then you got animations, which would be another can of worm then you have to render and do work in after effects or photoshop or both depending on the type of game.

That's only a small piece of the daz puzzle too what if you want to make your own textures, clothing, hair, maybe you want to take from daz import into blender and set it all up in there instead.. lol

AI art offers an interesting new take on game design. Its hell of a lot quicker and you can focus on the story, code and post edits to the Ai art generation.

Neat game I'll keep watching as it gets more content

 

[cooperdk]

Daz would take a lot more work than AI prompts too. Epically if your purchasing items from daz/render hub/etc sites legally and not just stealing the files or hell of a lot longer making your own assets. Then you got to pose them, set the textures, the morphs, the lighting, sure you can use custom packs to make it faster but manually tweaking poses/assets is a must for better scenes. Then you got animations, which would be another can of worm then you have to render and do work in after effects or photoshop or both depending on the type of game.

That's only a small piece of the daz puzzle too what if you want to make your own textures, clothing, hair, maybe you want to take from daz import into blender and set it all up in there instead.. lol

AI art offers an interesting new take on game design. Its hell of a lot quicker and you can focus on the story, code and post edits to the Ai art generation.

Neat game I'll keep watching as it gets more content

Having tried to use AI for image generation, I respectfully disagree. Daz is much more versatile, you can do exactly what you want without having errors to correct.

 

[cooperdk]

Did you compile Stable Diffusion yourself? I can't find a place that lets me put titties.

All those AI Image generation companies are a bunch of puritans, damnit.

BTW nice game indeed. Not just the art, but the whole mechanics and writing. Easily top tier.

Sounds a bit presumptuous in certain places lmao but hey, who cares? You deserve the right lol

No need (at all). There are loads of adult models, both realistic and anime/drawn artwork. Even some that do blowjobs, missionary, doggy, even fisting etc:

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Everything installs itself, you just need to load it with models and other smalls.
My current SD folder is about 50 gigabytes...

Would love a 32-bit version so we can play it on Mac via porting kit!

So, you want people to cater for an architecture that was basically extinct 15 years ago, because you want to use Mac?
Hummmmm...
Maybe consider installing Windows in parallel (if you have an Intel mac). Or just skip all the games you can't run.
Or ... just use the Linux version which should work for Mac (otherwise just use a binary from a game with the same python version)

 

[Earliestbird]

Having tried to use AI for image generation, I respectfully disagree. Daz is much more versatile, you can do exactly what you want without having errors to correct.

Well, I really prefer more oil-painting-esque artistic visuals which AI generation can do really well. Plus I already have my time full with a lot of things, learning another program on top of everything else (improving coding skills, writing, balancing, UI designing, audio engineering, evolving the game's creative direction, fixing bugs, etc.) would be neigh impossible.

But it's a moot point anyways since my PC sucks too much to do any sort of serious rendering.

 

[cooperdk]

Well, I really prefer more oil-painting-esque artistic visuals which AI generation can do really well. Plus I already have my time full with a lot of things, learning another program on top of everything else (improving coding skills, writing, balancing, UI designing, audio engineering, evolving the game's creative direction, fixing bugs, etc.) would be neigh impossible.

But it's a moot point anyways since my PC sucks too much to do any sort of serious rendering.

So you're not running SD locally? I chose to, and it is much more adaptable than anything you find on sites or their discord bots (I guess you mean the Zeipher community?).

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So hoping you'll get funds for a good rig.

BTW with img2img you can give SD a figure - Daz, AI generated, whatever - and then modify it using SD img2img. That way you could give your favourite porn star ridiculously sized tits, another hairstyle, or whatever.
You can do the same with a simple Daz render.

ONE thing SD is really bad at is, it cannot work with transparency (I am not sure if they introduced it in v1.5).

 

[kurwa99]

I hope the developer reads this.

overall i like the writing and the concept, the gameplay is good, the economy is not to hard if you know what you are doing, the skill checks aspect and combat is also good.
but overall it needs polish, lots and lots of polish.

The writing is decent but goes on into two things a bit too much.

one is that the relationships progress to fast. raven being as invested as she is just after such a short amount of time feels unrealistic. need to be expanded and her getting out of her shell needs to take more time. this way the kiss and love scenes will feel more impact full.
second is that they go into MC worship a bit to much. i understand him surviving and thriving is a rere thing but when everyone worships the ground he walks on the moment he shows up it feels empty and not that gratifying. MC as a whole needs to struggle more before he achives the level of reputation that he currently has. prove himself more so any victory or girls he gets feels more earned.


Now to the images and presentation. someone mentioned that the UI with the heavy black bars feels claustrofobic, and i agree. the design overall is good but it just needs to be expanded so it feel less, closed in.

The AI generated images is a good idea and will speed up the proves but they need to be refined allot more. i understand the idea of shifting world but at the same time the images hit uncanny valley way to much, that goes for both landscapes and building as well and especially characters.
I dont know much about how the AI generated images are made but from what i do know is that there is a way to input the same image to the AI to refine it. i seen people do it and this game needs that. Right now its hard to get immersed and or enjoy the sceanss when i look at the images and they creep me out cus i notice all the detail the AI could not get quite right.
in normal art its fine when you look at it only a bit and not constantly but in a game, especially visual novel style game where you look at images the whole play true then it is inevitable that you notice all the detail and they will compound into unpleasant feelings.

Last thing i want to mention is that the choices feel a bit hallow at the moment. i agonized over what god i wanted to chose or why was i exiled and that did not come into the rolplay aspect much. i hope this is just because the game is in early stages and all the choices will have branches and important later on as the game develops.

Overall i really enjoyed my time and i will follow this game closely to see how it develops. Game dev keep up the good work and i wish you luck. just try not to burn yourself with passion early on only to abandon the project later on, keep a steady progress and im sure this will end up one of the best games on here in time.

 

[cooperdk]

Well, I really prefer more oil-painting-esque artistic visuals which AI generation can do really well. Plus I already have my time full with a lot of things, learning another program on top of everything else (improving coding skills, writing, balancing, UI designing, audio engineering, evolving the game's creative direction, fixing bugs, etc.) would be neigh impossible.

But it's a moot point anyways since my PC sucks too much to do any sort of serious rendering.

You can still use AI to post process etc. You can even place backgrounds behind DAZ (or any other) models, and even pose them etc using AI img2img and inpainting.

BTW I just noticed a cool new SD checkpoint model called Berry's Mix. It makes awsome artistic lewd stuff, Western style NSFW.

 

[Deleted member 4716251]

If you can fap this art, you can fap anything...

 

[BGRW2020]

really nice so far, do find it very hard to keep the essence up though but other than that it looks really good

 

[BGRW2020]

How do you know when you have completed this update

 

[yeeterboy2]

Putting aside all the concerns about AI and robots slowly taking everything over, I'm really excited for the future of AI in NSFW gaming and other creative media. I think having a tool like this is really going to level the playing field when it comes to having the means and power to start any (visual) creative writing project, especially in the NSFW genre, since i feel too often games have great art and terrible writing, or vice versa.

A few years ago I could not have dreamt of an AI creating anything coherent or accurate from a given prompt, especially a very specific one, but now your above average gaming systems can run an AI that is able to do exactly that. (granted still mostly quantity over quality, but eventually nailing or getting close enough to the creators original vision) If this technology has only now started to really gather steam, imagine where we will be a few years from now!

Anyway, ramble over. Good luck to the Dev. I hope this project is a success and ends up inspiring others to see what they can create with these tools!

 

[Pupurup]

Using AI to create content is an interesting thought. What AI tools did you use to create your product?

 

[Deragonison]

am enjoying, am certainly looking forward to seeing more with Raven, and is interesting how easily it would be to go over a year in game with the current system, probably even 2 if i went for it, but that would take way too much clicking xD

 

[kartolas]

RPGs were never my thing.

Best of luck.

 

[hyuugo]

This appeared when i opened the game

I'm sorry, but errors were detected in your script. Please correct the
errors listed below, and try again.


File "game/_classes.rpy", line 330: invalid syntax
                raise AssertionError, "No path provided for the Picture() object"
                                     ^
    

File "game/_functions.rpy", line 539: invalid syntax
            raise AssessmentError, "Item not in list"
                                  ^
    

Ren'Py Version: Ren'Py 8.0.0.22062402
Sat Nov 26 16:44:24 2022

 

[Vertius]

Could someone give a rough estimate to how much gameplay there is?