VN Ren'Py Our Red String [Ch. 12 Full] [Eva Kiss]

[_Zebra_]

Figuring how the choices impact the characters is an issue of coding.

What? The code has nothing to to with that. That is choice management, which is not that hard. You can track stuff on a piece of paper and/or create a map for each major choice that happens in each chapter.

The hardest thing by far is the coding, not the script writing.

IMO, it's exactly the opposite. The code is the easiest thing that you can do in this visual novel. It's bare bones. With a good script, you can write and test everything in a week or less; having 0 bugs at the end of the process. And I said a week, just because I think is boring to copy paste text from the script into a .rpy file. Probably after an hour or two you'll end up on YouTube watching, I don't know, a spaghetti eating competition between a golden retriever and a siberian husky.

 

[Night Hacker]

I'm telling you, it's not that complicated. The hardest thing by far is the coding, not the script writing. A writer can always cut corners when writing, take for example Jeremy in Chapter 8 and 9. After Lena has sex with him in Chapter 8 they never interact in Chapter 9. Eva probably decided to take a shortcut here and not address what they did yet. The biggest issue when writing is figuring where the story is going. Figuring how the choices impact the characters is an issue of coding. It's something that cannot be cut short.

Huh? I have coded in many languages for a few decades now... coding is easy, especially in RenPY (Python) which is probably the easiest languages I have used. Rendering the 3D scenes is also relatively easy (once you have hardware for it)... writing a story has by FAR been the most difficult. It's not something one can just learn from a tutorial. Tracking interactions in visual novels adds more difficulty, especially in this game that has to track two characters where the combination of what can happen is exponential, i dont know how they do it to be honest. I am creating a visual novel with one character and coming up with a good story and figuring out how the characters will act, how various inputs will effect them is far more difficult than coding it.

I have a new found respect for people who can write a good story, that takes a lot of talent.

 

[dontcarewhateverno]

And before taxes and Paypal fees, as well as paying the coder, colorist, etc. All of those expenses can easily subtract over 50% of income. It's easy to count someone else's money until you start doing something yourself and realize just how much you get ripped off by all that processing. For each $2 pledge you get only 1.25 or so before withdrawal, and after the transaction those .25 are gone as well.

Yep. But not sure if you're misinterpreting my intent there. My post wasn't a "see! She makes bank. WTF is she doing?!?" sort of thing. Merely guestimating how much she pulls off of Patreon, where I know a huge chunk goes to other expenses, fees and freelancers to help her out. All that takes money to keep the show rolling. My curiosity is merely in how much money certain devs have coming in to make a quality game (which means fees, freelancers, usage rights, ect). Plus what they've done right (or wrong) to gain that fanbase to help with the funding (or not). I wasn't using the estimate to imagine all the trips around the world she's probably not taking and I don't think she's lounging on a beach in Tahiti sipping away all that Patreon money with $20 Pina Coladas.

 

[JohnnyKiss]

What? The code has nothing to to with that. That is choice management, which is not that hard. You can track stuff on a piece of paper and/or create a map for each major choice that happens in each chapter.


IMO, it's exactly the opposite. The code is the easiest thing that you can do in this visual novel. It's bare bones. With a good script, you can write and test everything in a week or less; having 0 bugs at the end of the process. And I said a week, just because I think is boring to copy paste text from the script into a .rpy file. Probably after an hour or two you'll end up on YouTube watching, I don't know, a spaghetti eating competition between a golden retriever and a siberian husky.

I guess people just find stuff they are good at easier than the stuff they are bad at. Go figure.

 

[dontcarewhateverno]

Or you could just extrapolate her last known data. On Jan. 30, 2019 she got 7231$ from 1934 patreons. Now she has 2107 patreons so that would be 7878$, nowhere near your 14k. My secret source tells me it is about 9500 right now which fits very well considering she raised the minimum tier for the full game from 3$ to 5$ (On Jan. 30, 2019 she had 792 patreons on the 3$ tier, if they all raised to the new 5$ tier that would put it to 9500).
Using other creators as reference is not a good choice as their income per patreon differs wildly. Just take the 2 highest ranking adult creators(

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) who's income is still public, DC with 69,885 from 28442 patreons and AS with 117,301 from 11589 patreons. If you use these numbers to divine EvaKiss that would range from 5117 to 21327.

That's useful info as I'm really just trying to figure this out for my own purposes, not to judge what Eva or any other creator is or isn't doing with the money. But isn't the minimum Tier to get the latest chapters (one week after Beta) $6.50 now? I don't even see a $5 tier on her patreon.

Are there any other sites to look at for these sort of metrics, btw? Links appreciated.

 

[dundun]

That's useful info as I'm really just trying to figure this out for my own purposes, not to judge what Eva or any other creator is or isn't doing with the money. But isn't the minimum Tier to get the latest chapters (one week after Beta) $6.50 now? I don't even see a $5 tier on her patreon.

Are there any other sites to look at for these sort of metrics, btw? Links appreciated.

For me is is 5€ so I just guessed the $ price.
Why would you need another site? There is everyting right there. (

You must be registered to see the links

)

 

[BloodyMares]

With a good script, you can write and test everything in a week or less

Are you a tester by any means? From my experience, the hardest/most time-consuming part of testing is reading the text and remembering which branch you're on (and some characters have A LOT of them), making sure the dialogue is accurate to what has happened in that particular playthrough. While it takes around a week to test the code itself, making sure there's nothing that would lead to an error or wrong sprite display, which I can even fix on my own, the branch-tracking takes A LOT more time to do by yourself. You got to have notes of everything that happened per branch and cross-reference anything you read with that data. The problem is, there is no such data to cross-reference with and you only have to rely on your memory (and the guide). Like, I was able to spot some branch-related issues in Chapters 2 - 5 only recently, because while testing it never occured to me to try and commit to unpopular choices such as getting black-eyed by Robert and seeing that the image of Ian sitting in front of computer doesn't have a black eye overlay.

 

[JoJoPool]

Wonder why she hasn't done her weekly update yet. Been over 11 days now

She's busy working she couldn't find the time, and by busy i mean sipping a cocktail on a nice beach somewhere.
P.S : THIS IS A TROLL POST MEANT AS A JOKE, DO NOT TAKE IT SERIOUSLY AND GO FULL RAGE MODE !

 

[reyir]

I'm telling you, it's not that complicated. The hardest thing by far is the coding, not the script writing. A writer can always cut corners when writing, take for example Jeremy in Chapter 8 and 9. After Lena has sex with him in Chapter 8 they never interact in Chapter 9. Eva probably decided to take a shortcut here and not address what they did yet. The biggest issue when writing is figuring where the story is going. Figuring how the choices impact the characters is an issue of coding. It's something that cannot be cut short.

The coding stuff its not that hard, cuz when she write the story with all of that branch, she will makes variable for every branch that she makes, and basically just use the code in the previous routes that already in the game and modify it a little by changing the variable and the rules for the new story... only if she had some kind of minigames in the new updates that need their own algorithms and logic to makes that minigame works, then the coding stuff will became difficult, but if she only focusing on the story stuff without adding new minigame, then its rather easy, the only bug that will pop up is the misplacement of the variable or some typo, thats it.

The story part is on another level if we compared it to coding part, cuz to makes one scene with multiple outcome then that every outcome will had multiple outcome for it and so on. And then its two character story, all of that branch need to combined in some occasions in the game and again it can be different based on what choices you makes before you reach it.

Her previous games, GGGB, if we use the standard of most games in this site, GGGB can split into multiple games and its still can beat most of the games in this site in story, art and content aspect, cuz most of the game in this site barely gave us a choices that will come up with different outcomes sometimes just pure linear, but GGGB has so many routes in it, and thats enough of proof of how hard it is to makes the story for ORS

 

[JohnnyKiss]

The coding stuff its not that hard, cuz when she write the story with all of that branch, she will makes variable for every branch that she makes, and basically just use the code in the previous routes that already in the game and modify it a little by changing the variable and the rules for the new story... only if she had some kind of minigames in the new updates that need their own algorithms and logic to makes that minigame works, then the coding stuff will became difficult, but if she only focusing on the story stuff without adding new minigame, then its rather easy, the only bug that will pop up is the misplacement of the variable or some typo, thats it.

The story part is on another level if we compared it to coding part, cuz to makes one scene with multiple outcome then that every outcome will had multiple outcome for it and so on. And then its two character story, all of that branch need to combined in some occasions in the game and again it can be different based on what choices you makes before you reach it.

Her previous games, GGGB, if we use the standard of most games in this site, GGGB can split into multiple games and its still can beat most of the games in this site in story, art and content aspect, cuz most of the game in this site barely gave us a choices that will come up with different outcomes sometimes just pure linear, but GGGB has so many routes in it, and thats enough of proof of how hard it is to makes the story for ORS

I see where you are coming from but the story is definitely not that complex that 10 writers couldn't complete it in 4-5 years like someone else mentioned. You basically have 2 stories, Ian's and Lena and you write those two mostly separate from one another. You decide where you want to go with them and then write all of the supporting characters depending on how you want them to interact/react with the two protagonists.

Lets use the example of Ian asking Lena for them to be an official couple. The whole idea behind the scene is that Ian asks Lena to be his girlfriend and then you go from there writing the variables. For example, If Lena had sex with Jeremy she will say no to the request, and so on. Maybe writing the dialogue for all of the different scenes is time consuming and hard but figuring out the variables shouldn't be that hard as all of the supporting characters already have a role to fulfill which was assigned to them.

 

[RedTomato]

I see where you are coming from but the story is definitely not that complex that 10 writers couldn't complete it in 4-5 years like someone else mentioned. You basically have 2 stories, Ian's and Lena and you write those two mostly separate from one another. You decide where you want to go with them and then write all of the supporting characters depending on how you want them to interact/react with the two protagonists.

Lets use the example of Ian asking Lena for them to be an official couple. The whole idea behind the scene is that Ian asks Lena to be his girlfriend and then you go from there writing the variables. For example, If Lena had sex with Jeremy she will say no to the request, and so on. Maybe writing the dialogue for all of the different scenes is time consuming and hard but figuring out the variables shouldn't be that hard as all of the supporting characters already have a role to fulfill which was assigned to them.

I agree with you that the coding for this ain't trivial, but I think you are wildly underestimating how complex writing this particular VN is. In fact, the complexity of the coding and the writing come from the same place, the sheer number of branches and variables in the story.

Ian and Lena can already meet quite a few times, and each time they do you have to take into account their personal history with each other as well as any other people in the scene or that they may reference...this gets exponentially more complex with each subsequent interaction between them or anyone else, given that each character can interact with them independently and that also has to be taken into account.

This complexity also bleeds into other aspects like (as you said) coding the logic for all of this and taking into account all the different apparel that characters may wear in any scene (or details like the black eye mentioned earlier), or even if a character should appear in that scene at all.

I'm getting a headache just thinking about it.

 

[gazlene]

Are you a tester by any means? From my experience, the hardest/most time-consuming part of testing is reading the text and remembering which branch you're on (and some characters have A LOT of them), making sure the dialogue is accurate to what has happened in that particular playthrough. While it takes around a week to test the code itself, making sure there's nothing that would lead to an error or wrong sprite display, which I can even fix on my own, the branch-tracking takes A LOT more time to do by yourself. You got to have notes of everything that happened per branch and cross-reference anything you read with that data. The problem is, there is no such data to cross-reference with and you only have to rely on your memory (and the guide). Like, I was able to spot some branch-related issues in Chapters 2 - 5 only recently, because while testing it never occured to me to try and commit to unpopular choices such as getting black-eyed by Robert and seeing that the image of Ian sitting in front of computer doesn't have a black eye overlay.

I can't imagine being a tester for this kind of game without a mindmap program to keep track of how everything is supposed to split and connect.

 

[Geralt From Rivia]

Ten days without weekly update

 

[_Zebra_]

Are you a tester by any means? From my experience, the hardest/most time-consuming part of testing is reading the text and remembering which branch you're on (and some characters have A LOT of them), making sure the dialogue is accurate to what has happened in that particular playthrough. While it takes around a week to test the code itself, making sure there's nothing that would lead to an error or wrong sprite display, which I can even fix on my own, the branch-tracking takes A LOT more time to do by yourself. You got to have notes of everything that happened per branch and cross-reference anything you read with that data. The problem is, there is no such data to cross-reference with and you only have to rely on your memory (and the guide). Like, I was able to spot some branch-related issues in Chapters 2 - 5 only recently, because while testing it never occured to me to try and commit to unpopular choices such as getting black-eyed by Robert and seeing that the image of Ian sitting in front of computer doesn't have a black eye overlay.

I think it matters a lot on how the scripts are structured and how you approach the testing. In an ideal world, this is how I see things. You have a master script that connects each chapter script and each chapter script is a master script of its own, connecting each scene of said chapter. Right now, it's a bit of a mix. The project started out with one file per chapter, then it evolved to 2 parts and after that we got 4 parts. Chapter 9 is event more tangled and hard to understand. There are different parts but we can also find individual scenes written in their own files. I was a bit surprised that this was not addressed in the remastered version. Anyway, moving on.

After the code is done and everything is linked together I can start testing. I'll do that by checking out the functionality. What do I want? I want to make sure that there are no typos in the variable names and that there are no issues with the images displayed in the VN. I will jump to the first scene label and look over the script. For example: lets say that I have to test the Cindy scene from the last chapter. I start by setting up the variables that triggered the scene. After that I can look at the script. I find out that when Ian_Cindy_V7_Kiss = true, I am supposed to see this text. Does that happens? Yes. Did I encountered any issue with the images? No. Was there any dialog line missing? No. I'll reload everything and try another path, and another, until I'm done with that scene. At the end I will know for sure that there isn't any path that wasn't covered.

After I've tested everything in isolation, now it's time to verify the chapter master script. Are the scene triggers ok? Yes. Perfect!

What is next? I need to do an end to end test. I load an existing playthrough and I'll try to get to the end of the chapter as fast as I can - at this point I don't care about the content in any way; I probably know all the choices by heart. Skip! Skip! Skip! When I am done, I move to another playthrough. This final process will reveal if there are any balancing issues. Maybe in order to get the scene X you should need only 5 lust, not 6. When everything is done, as far as I am concerned, at that point in time the VNs functionality was tested and I fixed any potential balancing issues. By now the game should be bug free.

One final thought about keeping each scene in a separate file. I strongly believe that this approach will offer the following benefits:

• you don't remember what Cindy said in chapter 7; if you don't remember something, it will be much faster to find the text that you are interested in.
• you could use a scene again, in a later chapter. Maybe I want to play a shy Ian, that gets to have his first date with Lena in chapter 10. The art can be reused. Of course, you need to write and hide some dialog, but in the end, that won't take too long to do it. The player gets one more option and the developer gets an easy win for not that much effort.

Maybe this sounds like there is a lot of work needed to pull it off, but I still think it's do-able. Now, I know that you are actively involved in the project development testing, proofreading, etc. You have more knowledge about what happens behind the scenes. Probably an approach like the one described above is not good. Or even if it is, it might take a hell of a lot more than a week to do it.

 

[BloodyMares]

t the end I will know for sure that there isn't any path that wasn't covered.

Oh, but that only accounts for the branches present in the script, and doesn't account for those that are not but should be. Or vice versa, some branches are in the scene, but the context within does not match with what actually happened in the story, resulting in a plot hole... This game can be polished and bug-free gameplay-wise, but it's a massive pain in the ass to ensure there are not any plot holes or missed branches either, resulting in an event set up several chapters ago, but never acknowledged past a certain chapter. Eva should be the one maintaining narrative consistency, naturally, but I guess I pay more attention to details...

For the perfect testing to be done, you need to have a save collection so big, that you'd basically account for every combination of choices (per path) that have consequences (even cosmetic, because those result in dialogues or changes in sprites). And in order to build that save collection, you'd need at least a month of simply playing through the game. The alternative to save management is a database with every possible active path, but it's easier to switch a save and go through the chapter than each time manually enter values in the console.

 

[dontcarewhateverno]

For me is is 5€ so I just guessed the $ price.
Why would you need another site? There is everyting right there. (

You must be registered to see the links

)

Yeah. Wasn't sure if there was a site with more or different statistics per game, like subscriber base broken down by country, currency or tiers. All those help with better calculations (as 5€, 5$, GBP, ect with different totals and conversion fees, ect) & help to see a little better where to target your audience re: ads, localization, tastes, ect.

 

[reyir]

I see where you are coming from but the story is definitely not that complex that 10 writers couldn't complete it in 4-5 years like someone else mentioned. You basically have 2 stories, Ian's and Lena and you write those two mostly separate from one another. You decide where you want to go with them and then write all of the supporting characters depending on how you want them to interact/react with the two protagonists.

Lets use the example of Ian asking Lena for them to be an official couple. The whole idea behind the scene is that Ian asks Lena to be his girlfriend and then you go from there writing the variables. For example, If Lena had sex with Jeremy she will say no to the request, and so on. Maybe writing the dialogue for all of the different scenes is time consuming and hard but figuring out the variables shouldn't be that hard as all of the supporting characters already have a role to fulfill which was assigned to them.

Of course its not in the point where 10 writers cant complete it even after 4-5 years, and i agree with you... but its also not as easy as you said, even if you already plan everything like side character and their roles in the game, its still hard to makes good story for it, its always easy to figure it out the outline of the story, but to makes the dialogue and the narrative for it is the hardest part, if you dont believe me, try it yourself and write any kind of novel, its always easy to figure it out the outline and at start its easy, but after around 100 chapter, you will see that the difficulty will gone up, you need to makes chapter 101 base on 100 chapter before that you already made, if you made a mistakes in the previous 100, you can easily encounter writer block, cuz i experienced it myself, even though i only write my novel for fun and when i got bored with all that programming stuff at college, but i still plan to release my novel on novel platform like webnovel in the future...

I always create the outline for every chapter first and plan it as good as i can before writing it, and my friends that has popular novel in different platforms also do that so they can create the novel more easily, but its still hard for us, cuz outline its nothing if we compared it to the story in every chapter even if we plan everything in the start, i can come up with the outline for 100-150 even 200 chapter ahead in matters of few days and its easy, but writing it? it takes a month if im fast, or few months if i got writers block, chapter 1-100 its always easy for me and my friends, but after that its became tricky, how you write the story as good as you can, how the writing makes the reader felt interested and how to makes the dialogue felt natural without any cringey line that doesnt even sounds natural and you need to take a note on everything that happend in previous 100 chapter so that the new story still had correlations with previous chapter...

For me who doesnt publish my novel on any platform its rather easy to fix writer blocks problem, i just revised the chapter that blocking the idea that i wanna uses in new chapter so that idea can be used in new chapter. But for my friend that already published their novel in different platform, they cant do that, and they need to used the story that already published as good as they can, thats why they faced more writer blocked than i am.

Even for author of novel that has a multiple popular novel in different platform (not like 100k, but 2-5 million views for each novel) its still very hard to come up with new and good story, so i cant agree with you for millions years that said writing its not that hard, but the reality is, IT IS very hard, try it yourself if you dont believe me

 

[lipe2410]

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Hi everyone,

I've started (almost) falling behind with my weekly status reports, but I'm gonna try to avoid that happening! I'll keep this one super-short because this weeks I've been very focused on writing, making slow but constant progress (at least slower than I'd like, but that's always the case).

I'm finishing writing Ian's part, one major scene and a few secondary ones remain, and I'll start writing Lena's part as soon as I'm done with that. So far the written content is as long as the entire Chapter 5, so this one will also be a chunky update.

I finally have some completed artwork, and that boosts my morale too. I took note of your observations about Emma's illustration and you were right, as sexy as she looked with that defined musculature, Emma's a bit chubbier than that. My colorist did a great job rendering those volumes, but I softened them down so they correspond to the character as seen on her sprite.

Goodbye buff Emma, your shine was intense and fleeting

 

[spar]

Mmmmmmmmm, at this rate an update will come out next year and even the worst can happen because it's already started, that's how all the authors start, so 8 months go by for the next chapter.

 

[CoalPhelps]

Oh, but that only accounts for the branches present in the script, and doesn't account for those that are not but should be. Or vice versa, some branches are in the scene, but the context within does not match with what actually happened in the story, resulting in a plot hole... This game can be polished and bug-free gameplay-wise, but it's a massive pain in the ass to ensure there are not any plot holes or missed branches either, resulting in an event set up several chapters ago, but never acknowledged past a certain chapter. Eva should be the one maintaining narrative consistency, naturally, but I guess I pay more attention to details...

For the perfect testing to be done, you need to have a save collection so big, that you'd basically account for every combination of choices (per path) that have consequences (even cosmetic, because those result in dialogues or changes in sprites). And in order to build that save collection, you'd need at least a month of simply playing through the game. The alternative to save management is a database with every possible active path, but it's easier to switch a save and go through the chapter than each time manually enter values in the console.

Hey, I thought about it and decided I might try translating a dynamic project like Our Red String. Can you please ask Eva if she's still interested in an official localization?