We're at chapter 9, and the story just got going. Some of the characters in the main cast are still underdeveloped. If the dev ends it at 12, it will be a rushed and unsatisfying conclusion because of the pacing.
yeah the story just started(with holly,lena and cindy we can just start a relationship) know the kinky things begin and different routes it would be so unsatisfying if the story just rushed to an end there is so much potentially for different path especially for cindy and holly. And i dont understand what do you get if she starts a new story? I mean if she does 3 short games with worse cheracter devolopment or huge game with good cheracter devolopment I dont really see the difference or the value that you would get out of 3 short games?
Honestly I would agree with you if we were talking about writing a complex storyline, but we are talking about writing scripts for the same story from 2 different POVs and taking into account every different choice taken before. If you combine that with the absence of a set of complete storylines to follow, I still think that whether it's 5 or 10 writers, they'll still need 2 years minimum to complete this project properly, and we are talking about a single persone doing the writing part and everything else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess people just find stuff they are good at easier than the stuff they are bad at. Go figure.
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.
For me is is 5€ so I just guessed the $ price.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.
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.
She's busy working she couldn't find the time, and by busy i mean sipping a cocktail on a nice beach somewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
