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I mean this game used to be Ren'Py from what I have been told. They made the switch because certain really cool parts of what they had planned couldn't be programmed for it.
They want to make some action parts or something I'm guessing? I don't think they understand that people don't want action in their VNs.
I have no idea how you could lurk this thread for nearly a year and still never bother reading the OP.
I read it, but I don't think you understand that "real video game" is an actively negative term for many people. What you're doing is a bait and switch, going from VN to action game. VN fans hate really hate that stuff. A renpy port of any video game with all of that stuff removed would always be a good thing regardless of what type of game it is. But I mean it's your vision for what you want to do so I'm not going to bother trying to convince you, but I'm hoping someone else does such a port.
- Sep 16, 2019
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Uhhh... You know action comes in all forms right? Combat systems / Lewd scenes that can be better made in the newer engine / etc. They were already pushing Renpy to its limits as is prior to Unity. Are you having trouble running it now? Is that the reason you wished so badly for a renpy port?
If this was Renpy, it would already be compressed. It was before, end of subject.
- Sep 16, 2019
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That... Doesn't really say much. They moved to unity to pursue other goals they originally couldn't pull off with renpy. There are people on the site who can compress it even as Unity that's why I'm saying it'll help out to help point them to the game.
It's not a bait and switch, the combat mechanics have been in since our 1.0 release on Ren'py on February 1st.
You wouldn't know that though, because you've never played it.
Instead you've spent the better part of 2021 complaining about Unity without actually naming any features that Ren'py has that our Unity based engine does not.
This is going to be hard for you to hear, but that kind of feedback is worthless.
It took me about 3 months to convert the existing Ren'py scripts to Unity format and then game has about doubled in length since then. I wouldn't count on it.
What Indonesian bots can and can't do isn't something I can control, nor care to.
The game was too small for me to read before no my fault lol. But now that you fixed the resolution I'll try it, it was unplayable before on my 5K display. I also read all your reviews and didn't see them mention gameplay, seems like what people like about this game is the story. Sorry if my point is invalid then.
In regards to renpy benefit there are too many to count...
If you read the reviews, you'll also see people talking about how we've put a great amount of effort into making the transition from Ren'py to Unity as smooth (and beneficial) as possible for our player base, including reviews from people who say they despise Unity games.
We have bugs and issues like any other homegrown engine, but knowing what people want that we're lacking is a big deal for us. We want to make the game as easy to play as possible for everyone, but compromising the vision of the game in order to appease the minority of people who will never play it because of the Unity tag is not a rational course of action.
- Sep 16, 2019
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You may wanna read closer, a good bit of them also comment on the combat system of the game as well as the content within it.
Eh there's like 2 very small comments and they were both posted in the last month so wasn't there when I read them.
I do want to applaud what you did the Unity, not taking the easy way out and just lazying it and actually implementing
But I'll just list some of the renpy benefits:
- Generally less "gameplay", yes this is a feature.
- Easy mod support. Renpy games tend to have loads of mods including mods that add things like walkthroughs, achievements, etc. Unity games do not.
- Cross-platform by default. Developers do not have to expend any effort on that front. If you didn't produce a mac version mac users like me could've just used the windows version with renpy.
- Works on joiplay on android. Yes this is superior to native apks because...
- No installation process. The installation+verification for native apps usually takes 5+ minutes and takes 0 when using joiplay. And for frequently updated apks like patreon games this means you gotta do this quite frequently and it's annoying.
- In my experience every time you uninstall the game you lose all your saves, so you need to manually find and backup the saves hidden in the system files... The whole user experience of that is shit and you don't need to do that with joiplay.
- joiplay just works with windows versions and does not have to wait for a port.
- similarly, joiplay just works with mods, so even if your game does get mods modders will be unlikely to produce android versions for a unity game.
- Easy to cheat with dev console, even on android.
- joiplay reads games off of sdcards, my device is full but I have a 512gb SD card that I can't install native games on, but works perfectly with joiplay.
The idea that Ren'py is a perfect solution for VNs and wegs doesn't hold up to scrutiny, especially not the type of VNs that are proving popular on f95.
Animations are a prominent and important feature in most Koikatsu based VNs, but animations of all types are something Ren'py is absolutely abysmal at handling.
As anyone who has played the 4 most popular Koi VNs knows, Ren'py very frequently manages to lose frames and drop below 60 FPS during looping idle animations and when the cursor is moved and those are some of the most basic applications of animation you can have as a game developer.
For anything more than that, such as integrating animations with the UI (And yes God forbid, make combat animations) Ren'py screen language is an enormous ball & chain that must be forced to do something Ren'py Tom never, ever designed it to do.
"But what about Python?"
Yes you're right, coding that side of things in Python is perfectly doable. The issue is that Ren'py Script Language, Ren'py Screen Language and Python don't talk to each other very well.
In our case if we wanted to expand from our previous Ren'py combat build, we would have had to essentially just written the entire game in Python and used Ren'py for a few parts of the UI.
At that point the upsides for Unity far outweighed the downsides and that is how we came to the decision to rebuild the game.
Animations are a prominent and important feature in most Koikatsu based VNs, but animations of all types are something Ren'py is absolutely abysmal at handling.
As anyone who has played the 4 most popular Koi VNs knows, Ren'py very frequently manages to lose frames and drop below 60 FPS during looping idle animations and when the cursor is moved and those are some of the most basic applications of animation you can have as a game developer.
For anything more than that, such as integrating animations with the UI (And yes God forbid, make combat animations) Ren'py screen language is an enormous ball & chain that must be forced to do something Ren'py Tom never, ever designed it to do.
"But what about Python?"
Yes you're right, coding that side of things in Python is perfectly doable. The issue is that Ren'py Script Language, Ren'py Screen Language and Python don't talk to each other very well.
In our case if we wanted to expand from our previous Ren'py combat build, we would have had to essentially just written the entire game in Python and used Ren'py for a few parts of the UI.
At that point the upsides for Unity far outweighed the downsides and that is how we came to the decision to rebuild the game.
- Aug 25, 2017
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You do not speak for all VN fans. Also I hard disagree with the second point, even if you limited it to just "any VN" I still disagree, there's been other VNs that have done really interesting things which supported and improved their story using gameplay.
- Sep 16, 2019
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You should definitely look more, because there are pages of reviews that talk about the content within the game. Outside of that, I'd say leave that out the conversation if you can't do that much.
Ren'py games on f95 have the most amount of "gameplay" though, not the least (Especially in terms of hours required). The issue is that "gameplay" usually takes the form of shitty stat grinding and repetitive open world segments instead of anything one would consider 'fun'.
Now, that isn't directly a consequence of Ren'py's features but more a consequence of the limitations of the platform. I'm sure most of those devs were imagining Persona 4 in their head when they made their Ren'py Sandbox but found out very quickly that was not going to be feasible on Ren'py.
Speaking of gameplay, I actually love Kinetic Novels. I think they're a wonderful format. They're very unfairly lambasted on f95, which is a shame.
Unity is very specifically designed to be modular and has strong plugin support. If anyone had the idea to add a mod to OoT for whatever reason, they're going to find it's not difficult at all (Especially with how open our code is, we don't hide anything we're doing.)
The effort required for making a Mac version was 99% learning to get around Mac's absurd permissions fuckery when it reads Windows made zips so that Mac users wouldn't have to manually change permissions on their end. That happens to Ren'py games too.
The other 1% was remembering the slashes on Mac are swapped. Oops.
I would insert something here about how much WINE sucks and I wish it was a better program, but I digress.
The only reason you have to use Joiplay at all is because Ren'py has absolutely no support for any sort of file loading outside of its assembled .apk, which is a pretty big handicap. The fact that a workaround exists doesn't justify why that workaround had to exist in the first place.
Even if we removed all combat sections, got rid of all webm animations and compressed all images and music into oblivion, by Ch100 OoT will almost certainly still be more than 4gb just due to render count. If we're hitting the point where we're depending on a 3rd party emulator, it would have been far better just to come up with our own solution that is tailored for the project we're making.
I remember you mentioning Genshin Impact when you replied to me months ago about how Unity lets you achieve your vision on the games you want to make, and maybe that misled me in terms of the type of combat you were doing. If your game actually has less gameplay than "renpy games" then that's great.
If you look at the top Unity games: https://f95zone.to/latest/#/cat=games/page=1/prefixes=3/sort=likes generally they have what I consider atrocious gameplay. However, your VN sections so far (haven't gotten to the combat yet) are definitely far superior to those games and is an "ideal VN" experience.
Your grouse about renpy's bad animation support is valid, and I find something like hero's harem guild quite laggy. Though I care soooo much more about the writing in any VN that it's quite hard to prioritize for me, but as the dev you can't put up with that downside and I totally understand that.
Great to hear though the Unity development environment is definitely less popular and harder to deal with in terms of compiling etc.
The renpy sdk can just play any windows apps ez.
I don't know why you're talking about having to use joiplay, it's an excellent VN manager that can fully replicate the desktop experience on mobile. There's a lot of benefit to it and not being able to use it with any Unity games is a huge downside. The native unity games do not replicate the same UX as joiplay, they're inferior.
joiplay has no size limit though, I'm playing 10gb VNs like Shattered no problem. You can go to 50gbs and it'll be fine... Yes because it's joiplay. You'll run into problems with making a native android apk. This is an argument pro-renpy and against unity.
Generally speaking I probably wouldn't mind this as much if I read VNs on my desktop, but come on man VNs just make so much more sense on a tablet why would anyone read them on a computer.
The reason I used Genshin as an example is that OoT is going to have real time rendered models and animation for its combat, like a real game. Also specifically because Genshin runs on Unity and on phones just fine.
View attachment aineAttack-v1.mp4
But that's where any comparison to Genshin ends. Our gameplay will be a turned based RPG and will exist solely to support the narrative of the game. (i.e Will have no grind whatsoever, will function more as thematic engagement during climax sections of story arcs)
I can't speak to other Unity games but the requirement for some genuine knowledge of C# seems to trip up new devs who try to use Unity like Ren'py.
It very much is not and cannot be used like Ren'py, and the fault there lies partially with the Unity project for trying to market Unity as this super easy to use engine meant for casual devs.
In reality, the barrier to entry for Unity is much higher than Ren'py.
I would not recommend building something in Unity unless you have the expertise to do so (And preferably a multiperson team).
Glad you're enjoying the VN parts though, that is and always will be the main focus of the game.
You're going to find very few of those idle animations like in HHG in OoT even later down the line, I would rather keep animations as something that supports the narrative rather than something to justify looking at a map screen for 80% of one's playtime.
But that being said, those are features that people really want in modern VNs here on f95 (animated sex scenes are in the top 3 most requested features for OoT) and Ren'py just isn't handling it well.
It is and like I said above, it requires actual coding expertise. If you have that though, it isn't particularly difficult.
Of course as a dev, if there's a feature some people want so bad that they'll mod it in, I would rather reexamine the game and ask why we don't have that already.
The fact that you need an emulator to run VNs over 4gb should already show that there's an issue inherent to Ren'py's export function.
That is not necessary with Unity, they can run natively and be installed with little issue (coming back around to the Genshin comparison, the apex Unity mobile game at the moment).
If Ren'py was at all designed to handle these sorts of games, it would have some sort of functionality to call files outside of the apk. It doesn't, so someone had to make an emulator to work around the native 4gb limitation.
The existence of WINE doesn't justify a game's lack of native Mac support, Joiplay doesn't justify the lack of anything but the most basic Android support from Ren'py.
Just because the current solution to Ren'py's android issue is "okay" doesn't mean we as developers shouldn't strive to make a "good" solution instead.
The optimistic answer would be to play VN's that make use of more user features than a tablet can reasonably accommodate.
The real answer is that jerking off to anime tiddies on a tablet isn't optimal fapping for most users.
Could someone post a save for end of chapter 24? My save is completely cooked