VN Ren'Py Paracosmic Reality [v1.12.1 Main] [Jiggly Stone Studios]

[JigglyStone - Fero Seele]

I like the game or i wouldn't be coming back, but your updates are short and it's taking forever to get anywhere. You can't do a slow burn game if your updates are only 10 mins long and 3-4 months apart. It's gonna take literal years to get anywhere. The game has been in development for nearly 2.5 YEARS, it's only like 1 hour of playtime and we've gotten a dream BJ and a HJ...both of which we're well over a year ago. Which wouldn't be too big of a deal if it actually felt like the story had progressed much at all, but i think between the last 2 updates we've played like 6 in-game hours, roughly 15 mins of actual playtime...a shopping trip for shoes and getting our phone fixed. That's like 6 months of dev time...maybe half an in game day...15 mins of real playtime. By the time this game has a full week of in-game time we're all gonna be grey haired old men.

Got nothing for you bud. I've only got so much time in my day and only so much sanity at the end of it all. I have the need to unwind after a day of work and in general after pumping out renders for 12+ hours a day for weeks straight. I'll get faster at development and pushing updates, but that'll happen as my living situation allows for it and when not every dollar that I have is going towards keeping the ship from sinking.

There's also such things as writers block and hang-up points where assets needed for scenes/scenarios you want to do, simply don't exist yet. Look at other games made with Daz studio and you'll find games that rapidly shift environments without any transition or just straight up have holes trailing off into the never ending abyss. I'm not perfect and Daz Studio wasn't designed for this level of work load. It's a picture engine, not a game engine.

Go work a full time job, learn game dev, and develop your own game if you think you've got what it takes. Until then, don't tell me what game I can/can't do when I'm dedicating almost all of my waking free time towards putting out a product to you for free. Sure, it may take me 10 years to get anywhere, but I'd rather be happy with my product at the end of those 10 years than have sacrificed/rushed content or altered content for the sake of others. I think that the players playing the game 10 years from now will appreciate that sentiment as well.

I understand that your comment is out of a desire to see my game bear fruit and thrive amongst a sea of abandoned games. Trust me, I want that too, but not at the cost of my mental health or the standards by which I hold the game to.

 

[FatYoda]

I like the attention to detail. Jade gets in the car to drive and JigglyStone - Fero moved the seat around as she adjusts it to hear size. Totally unecessary but it shows the love for the project.

And yes, Sylvie is just too adorable.

while i agree that those details are nice...they are also a large part of the reason we get 10 minute updates every 4 months. Those are renders and coding that take time and don't add anything to the story. I'm really trying NOT to be an asshole here when i say this stuff because what he has is 10/10. But he has 60 supporters on Patreon. If he could put out 30 mins of content every 3-4 months I bet that'd quadruple at least. I love what he has here, I just don't think he'll gain any traction/support at this pace. If he's not looking to make money and is just doing it for the love of the game then I wish him the best, when this is done it has the potential to be one of the best games on this site, but it's so hard to remain a fan and be supportive when you only get to play it for 30 mins a year.

Edit: Fuck, I'm just gonna fuck off. I don't want to sit here and be critical of this game like this. What is here is fucking great and as he improves maybe it'll accelerate. I just hope we stop getting new girls soon. there's 9 of them already, i'd like to start developing relationships rather keep meeting new ones at least. I was SUPER excited for the twins/not twins but they've disappeared...and Sylvie is so fuckin adorable it hurts. I hope when he goes to bed after this day Sylvie comes and crawls into bed with him right as he's falling asleep and just snuggles up against him like a cat. I don't need sex, i just need to feel like there's some sort of emotional intimacy and relationship progression very soon. I need something like this with a girl to at least make it feel like the story/girls are progressing.

 

[kazeiheikaya]

Moderator Note/Warn:


I'm glad you look forward to the future of the game, but having people jump in to fuss about update speeds or complain that the update size isn't too their liking every update doesn't make me go any faster. It just wears on my excitement to work on the game.

It literally takes less effort to post something like "Hey, thanks for the update, look forward to seeing this game develop further!".

Literally my FIRST comment on this entire thread and didn't read the 15 pages before hand so sorry about that?
I hardly said anything negative just that I have trouble resisting updates when they appear knowing they'd be small.
Just tossed my own variation of feedback in, that I really like the game, just feel like It's in too much of a teasing state.

Good luck anyway.

 

[wreckinglord]

Got nothing for you bud. I've only got so much time in my day and only so much sanity at the end of it all. I have the need to unwind after a day of work and in general after pumping out renders for 12+ hours a day for weeks straight.

See I suspected this was a problem, you're spending a lot of time on the renders.
We see the plans you have for the story and how much potential it has, but I think you might be obsessing too much on the renders.
I don't want to tell you how to work but I've seen more or less how others do it and the workflow is more like, get the script in the game, then rough out just a handful of renders with key scenes and scene changes, only after having all that worked out you then fill the gaps where you think it needs more detail, don't just go crazy with 1 render per dialog line.
Also don't be afraid to re-use renders in talking scenes, you shouldn't have to make a new mouth and camera position for every line, most people are not looking for detail in those kinds of scenes, they are looking at the text and not so much the image.
On key scenes yeah go crazy, get your detail feak out, we appreciate it.

As an example open the game images folder and look at the scene from picture 666 to 748, how much time do you think you spent just making the visuals for this scene? I think you could selectively halve the amount of renders in this scene and people wouldn't notice.

Like you said this is just my opinion in an effort to get you more efficient and get the story out so don't take it the wrong way, we like your work and we want to see more of it!

PS: Orra is best girl, she deserves more renders than the others.

 

[Havik79]

Yeah, I love this game and understand the slow updates, but it's still frustrating to just get teased.

So she has a condition. What does that mean? Is that the woke version of autistic or something?

 

[JigglyStone - Fero Seele]

See I suspected this was a problem, you're spending a lot of time on the renders.
We see the plans you have for the story and how much potential it has, but I think you might be obsessing too much on the renders.
I don't want to tell you how to work but I've seen more or less how others do it and the workflow is more like, get the script in the game, then rough out just a handful of renders with key scenes and scene changes, only after having all that worked out you then fill the gaps where you think it needs more detail, don't just go crazy with 1 render per dialog line.
Also don't be afraid to re-use renders in talking scenes, you shouldn't have to make a new mouth and camera position for every line, most people are not looking for detail in those kinds of scenes, they are looking at the text and not so much the image.
On key scenes yeah go crazy, get your detail feak out, we appreciate it.

As an example open the game images folder and look at the scene from picture 666 to 748, how much time do you think you spent just making the visuals for this scene? I think you could selectively halve the amount of renders in this scene and people wouldn't notice.

Like you said this is just my opinion in an effort to get you more efficient and get the story out so don't take it the wrong way, we like your work and we want to see more of it!

PS: Orra is best girl, she deserves more renders than the others.

It's funny you mention those scenes specifically, cause most of those scenes actually went pretty quick xD little variations like that that's just some mouth adjustments and such are 1-2min of changes in engine and then spot render out the different area. Then just photoshop the spot render over the previous image while the next is rendering. 666-748 (not counting 714-728) took a matter of an afternoon basically.

Where I really get hung up are intros and outros to scene areas. Figuring out the whole morning with Orra showing up to pick up Jade/MC (scenes 834 to 893) took me weeks to complete, mostly because of writer/render block and figuring out how I wanted to open up into that scene and transition it to the new home.

That's all something that's going to end up just needing time under my belt to learn how to work past easier.

 

[JigglyStone - Fero Seele]

Yeah, I love this game and understand the slow updates, but it's still frustrating to just get teased.

So she has a condition. What does that mean? Is that the woke version of autistic or something?

No, nothing like that lol.

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Inb4 "Ok, so she is actually autistic" xD

 

[Havik79]

Autism, got it.

 

[Hordragg]

It's funny you mention those scenes specifically, cause most of those scenes actually went pretty quick xD little variations like that that's just some mouth adjustments and such are 1-2min of changes in engine and then spot render out the different area. Then just photoshop the spot render over the previous image while the next is rendering. 666-748 (not counting 714-728) took a matter of an afternoon basically.

Where I really get hung up are intros and outros to scene areas. Figuring out the whole morning with Orra showing up to pick up Jade/MC (scenes 834 to 893) took me weeks to complete, mostly because of writer/render block and figuring out how I wanted to open up into that scene and transition it to the new home.

That's all something that's going to end up just needing time under my belt to learn how to work past easier.

The next step would be to only spruce up said spot renders so they'll blend seamlessly when being shown over the previous scene.

Granted, you'd need to export those renders to WEBP as JPEG sadly doesn't support transparency, the former's excellent performance in compressing uniform areas will allow you to pick high enough of a quality setting to work around it's other shortcomings – namely it's tendency to not play well with freckles. As Ren'Py is perfectly fine with you mixing image fomats, you'd get the best of both worlds while saving a bunch of space.

 

[BurgerGal]

Great start to a game! The writing around the various characters is just top tier. They all have unique personalities with their own stories and interests that aren't just 3 lines that lead to a sex scenes. I'm loving the slow build but I hope the dev can pull off well written sex scenes as they are implemented. I think quality descriptions and buildup within sex scenes themselves is what separates an S tier writer and an A tier writer. Will definitely be considering supporting your projects going forward. Good luck Fero Steele!

 

[JigglyStone - Fero Seele]

The next step would be to only spruce up said spot renders so they'll blend seamlessly when being shown over the previous scene.

Granted, you'd need to export those renders to WEBP as JPEG sadly doesn't support transparency, the former's excellent performance in compressing uniform areas will allow you to pick high enough of a quality setting to work around it's other shortcomings – namely it's tendency to not play well with freckles. As Ren'Py is perfectly fine with you mixing image fomats, you'd get the best of both worlds while saving a bunch of space.

That's the photoshop part I was talking about xD. I'll often just change facial expressions but the rest of the scene doesn't change at all. So I'll render out someone's face but render out a square bigger than their actual head. Pull in previous scene into photo editor, layer spot render over top, soft erase the edges so there's no hard seams and such.

 

[nobody140]

I really enjoyed the new update. I wish more games focused on clothing. Revealing clothing has always been one of the things I love to see in games.

 

[Steppenwolf]

It's a bug that's been happening past couple updates. No idea actually why... It's just been targetting the window show/hide script for showing/hiding the dialogue box. Which like.. there's probably close to a hundred of those all through out the script. Something about each update for the past couple has been "corrupting" the most recent show/hide's.

My only leading theory is that the script file is too big. I plan to break it up into individual days scripts to hopefully fix the issue and if it doesn't, offer a "chapter select" system that lets you skip back up to where you were with the same choices you made. Just need to determine the best way to do that.

"My only leading theory is that the script file is too big"

Not really.
The problem is changing the script adding new lines or removing lines inside an already defined label section then, when load a savegame, renpy is trying to find a matching statement between the savefile and the <script>.rpyc file, if renpy fail to do so, it try to find the previous matching statement.
Obviously, renpy can fail to find multiple times until lunch the error: "Couldn’t find a place to stop rolling back"
Renaming a label or removing a label is even worse

Here:

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is a official documentation page where this is explained way better than my bad English
Another link

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In the second link there is a mitigation for this problem:

Use labels. Ren’Py can always match a label with itself, and so the more labels your game has, the more likely Ren’Py will be able to figure out control. In 7.4.2, Ren’Py looks about 128 statements back for a label. That will likely be changing to 1024 statements in 7.4.3.

You can use label section shorter than 128 statements, because the label name is a right place to rollback for renpy.

Sorry my english is not good and not sure I am able to deliver these concepts in clear way.

 

[Bommols01]

hella good game, put a smile on my face throughout the game. Jade, lily & lotus are really cute, looking forward to future update, thank dev.

 

[Kitchentable]

What's the point if Ferro starts cranking out renders that they themselves don't feel happy about as those renders do not meet their desired quality or attention to detail standard and Ferro in turn feels detached from their work or discontent to a point where they lose interest in their own project and drop it all toghter?

I'd rather have this cute and so far very wholesome little gem here finished in 2035 then being abandoned in 2026.

 

[JigglyStone - Fero Seele]

"My only leading theory is that the script file is too big"

Not really.
The problem is changing the script adding new lines or removing lines inside an already defined label section then, when load a savegame, renpy is trying to find a matching statement between the savefile and the <script>.rpyc file, if renpy fail to do so, it try to find the previous matching statement...

Very interesting read! Thank you a ton for posting this here. I'll make sure to give it a thorough look through when I can and see about using it to fix the issue!

 

[Kitchentable]

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TGIF, so enjoy your weekend mate!

No sense in fussin with those guys lol. Just report and move on.

Good to see that you don't let those drag you down!

Oh and while I got your attention: Sylvie needs head pats! Read: Render scene(s) where she receives head pats!!!!

 

[JigglyStone - Fero Seele]

And yet you somehow felt addressed enough to reply?

I made a general statement expressing my very own very personal opinion of stuff.
It's an internet thing. Happens alot on anonymus internet boards.
You might have encountered or even done it yourself before.

But don't worry I neither want to convince you nor do I claim that my opinion is the only correct one.
You can have yours, I can have mine.

TGIF, so enjoy your weekend mate!

No sense in fussin with those guys lol. Just report and move on.

 

[JigglyStone - Fero Seele]

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TGIF, so enjoy your weekend mate!



Good to see that you don't let those drag you down!

Oh and while I got your attention: Sylvie needs head pats! Read: Render scene(s) where she receives head pats!!!!

Will do xD headpats are on the list!

 

[Melmoth99]

Please Compress