Ren'Py Abandoned Patronus [v3.2.72 Final] [DVE Games]

[dvemail]

Excellent game so far. I like the context and setting, I like the art, heck I even like the accent of the girl narrating the game trailer !

That said, I do think that there's still a bit too much grind. Even when training Inlicio at every opportunity, the MC still has to beat a girl multiple times for the same task and that's kind of damaging to the "merchandise."


A suggestion: Slaves training slaves.

In non-sexual tasks, allow us to assign a slave (once fully trained in that skill) to train another (newbie) slave if the player so chooses. The negative penalty is obviously that the trainer would be unavailable for work and the brothel revenue takes a big hit whenever one does that. This is actually more realistic Whether they be they be gladiators, farm hands or masseuses - it's the old hands who do the brunt of the training of the newer hands. (GoT fans may also remember 2 scenes of pros training pros at Littlefinger's brothel).

No need for renders or anything. Just a mechanic to remove the trainer/trainee medallions for the day and a counter to add +1 skill to the trainee and reduce income from brothel at the end of it. With only a limited amount of time per day, this will allow MC to concentrate on training the higher arts

Anyway, good game, looking forward to more.

Interesting idea. How would this be as a 'halfway' mark? We've always intended to have a 'generic' slave girl option in the game, girls that don't have a back story and dont have loyalty quests (unlike Fasti, Kasa, Maeve, Parmida, and Inka). We could pretty easily add a training option for these generic girls that allows you to pay to have them trained by Alfidia or Valeria. There would be a roll each week with varying difficulty to see if they can be 'broken' to take on new sex acts. Several failures in a row would result in an attempt on your life, or the slave commits suicide. But, it would all be automated weekly so that you do not have to grind any chars except the main (named) slaves.

 

[jjackjjack]

cooooooooooooooooooooooooooool

 

[UltramanAchillies]

By mars ,,this game good as heck
But a little weird ui,didnt give a damn

Cant wait for full release game
Can compare this to subverse

 

[dvemail]

Update - We're at feature freeze for A3.2. We're now testing before release.

 

[Dideldidum]

Lots of design choices in this game seem to set people's teeth on edge for one reason or another. A number of complaints revolve around these choices:

• Making it a tiny bit difficult to cheat
• Having invisible stats

In the end, this game is based on my aesthetic design choices. I am certainly open to making my subscribers happy with changes to that design, but not without due consideration.

you can do what you want with what you create, but dont be suprised if people are trying to cheat repetitive/boring stats to progress easier than you intended.

inlicio is a great example of bullshit right now. you increase it by wasting 4 hours of the day and 100 gold. the player doesnt do shit, there is no character interaction or story how he increases this skill. just two buttons and boom you get 1 point.
what does it do? how good are you now in this skill ? no idea! how much time/money should i invest in it till i can use the skill for the first time? take a wild guess, because no one tells you!

so in essence this just leads you to beat your new whore into submission. great mechanic!

invisible stats are confusing and dumb at the same time if your game system has a hard number you must reach in a stat to succeed without telegraphing chances beforehand. if there is more character reaction and interaction invisible stats can actually good.

for example:
give slaves a mood, obidience, chastity or brocken/unbrocken stat to show the progress of training resistance.
enable certain items/actions to change the mood of a character (give a girl wine to relax her, before giving a command or in the other direction, her remembering a recent punishment) and this influences your chance to succeed.

the magic here lies in the way you show the player the interaction of the character. if the player sees a character smiling or sad or embarassed it works. if the player doesnt have a way to see the stat working it´s shit. in your game the player has no knowledge about anything relating to this invisible stat. it is a frustrating experience. especially if you dont want to go down a certain path.

if you dont want to beat your girls into submission your game has NOTHING of interest for a lot of playtime. just waste a few days, train once each day a stat, save, try to train the girl, fail, go to sleep and repeat until you maybe have the stat requirement to succeed in training the activity you wanted. <= if you tell me this is good gameplay you are mad.

 

[dvemail]

you can do what you want with what you create, but dont be suprised if people are trying to cheat repetitive/boring stats to progress easier than you intended.

inlicio is a great example of bullshit right now. you increase it by wasting 4 hours of the day and 100 gold. the player doesnt do shit, there is no character interaction or story how he increases this skill. just two buttons and boom you get 1 point.
what does it do? how good are you now in this skill ? no idea! how much time/money should i invest in it till i can use the skill for the first time? take a wild guess, because no one tells you!

so in essence this just leads you to beat your new whore into submission. great mechanic!

invisible stats are confusing and dumb at the same time if your game system has a hard number you must reach in a stat to succeed without telegraphing chances beforehand. if there is more character reaction and interaction invisible stats can actually good.

for example:
give slaves a mood, obidience, chastity or brocken/unbrocken stat to show the progress of training resistance.
enable certain items/actions to change the mood of a character (give a girl wine to relax her, before giving a command or in the other direction, her remembering a recent punishment) and this influences your chance to succeed.

the magic here lies in the way you show the player the interaction of the character. if the player sees a character smiling or sad or embarassed it works. if the player doesnt have a way to see the stat working it´s shit. in your game the player has no knowledge about anything relating to this invisible stat. it is a frustrating experience. especially if you dont want to go down a certain path.

if you dont want to beat your girls into submission your game has NOTHING of interest for a lot of playtime. just waste a few days, train once each day a stat, save, try to train the girl, fail, go to sleep and repeat until you maybe have the stat requirement to succeed in training the activity you wanted. <= if you tell me this is good gameplay you are mad.

This is valuable feedback. A3.2 is complete at this moment, so nothing like this will make it into this release, but I can see adding a few points you bring up.

• We used to have facial expressions in the medallions for mood, but it got dropped. We should re-add it
• Each girl has cultural and personal taboo about specific things. Marcus needs more insight into this.
• Your feedback about one button training is really good, it needs dialog.
• Marcus needs an estimate of his prowess in Inlicio, Secularis and Sensitivo (the hidden stats)
  • This can be made available through dialog

I appreciate the thought you put into this.

 

[Dideldidum]

This is valuable feedback. A3.2 is complete at this moment, so nothing like this will make it into this release, but I can see adding a few points you bring up.

• We used to have facial expressions in the medallions for mood, but it got dropped. We should re-add it

i guess you had a good reason for it, maybe the amount of work it takes to animate. a colored border around the normal portrait of the character might be faster and equaly effective. it´s also a one time job to do it instead of animating every face. it also enables you to do it for every character ingame, maybe not just the girls.

• Each girl has cultural and personal taboo about specific things. Marcus needs more insight into this.

i actually expected that to happen since you took the time to implement different reactions to the girls arriving at the brothel. that was something i really liked about your game and which tiked me off after realising inclino doesnt seem to have different values between the girls.

I appreciate the thought you put into this.

thx for answering.

 

[dvemail]

Color scheme? Interesting.

 

[MisterL]

As Dideldidum wrote it is important to get any kind of feedback for your actions ingame, otherwiese it would lead to the feeling of wasting time without any benefit for the player.

I like the idea of colored borders to show the state a character is at and/or the idea about having some text options available for the player to check the progress of each individual character.

Of course this could be implemented in different ways, especially since it seems the dev prefers some stats to be more hidden or at least not shown in a number vaule.

Just two simple examples to show what I mean:

1. coloured border:

- three possible stats per character (good / neutral / bad)
- assuming a scale of 1-100
- weighting neutral less important than the other states at both ends of the scale

example: good (green, scale from 76-100) / neutral (blue, scale from 26-75) / bad (red, scale from 1-25)

Since this is just an exmaple, the numbers of different states, used colors and ranges on the scale can of course be changed to fit the needs of the game.

2. feedback via text

- this time 5 different states (to keep it easy, just numbered from 1-5)
- assuming again a scale form 1-100
- the weighting this time is distributed evenly between each of the states
- the player gets feedback talking to the character itself or talking to somebody supervising the porgress of the character in question

example: state 1 (text 1, scale from 81-100), state 2 (text 2, scale from 61-80), state 3 (text 3, scale from 41-60), state 4 (text 4, scale from 21-40), state 5 (text 5, scale from 1-20)

Again a simple example which could be tailored to the needs of the dev for his/her game.

I watch the development of this game quite some time, because I like the idea in general and it is a seldom used setting.

Wish good luck and alot of success to the dev for this project!

 

[ZagorTeNay]

Art is fantastic and I love the concept ( simple, straightforward, believable). And game seems to have more stats/rpg elements than most rpgs these days.
Only downside is this seems like it will take a loooong while to reach large amount of scenes/content.

 

[dvemail]

Update for everyone... we're trying a binary build for the release today. With luck we will release to our patrons tonight. Join our discord for details.

 

[dvemail]

As Dideldidum wrote it is important to get any kind of feedback for your actions ingame, otherwiese it would lead to the feeling of wasting time without any benefit for the player.

I like the idea of colored borders to show the state a character is at and/or the idea about having some text options available for the player to check the progress of each individual character.

Of course this could be implemented in different ways, especially since it seems the dev prefers some stats to be more hidden or at least not shown in a number vaule.

Just two simple examples to show what I mean:

1. coloured border:

- three possible stats per character (good / neutral / bad)
- assuming a scale of 1-100
- weighting neutral less important than the other states at both ends of the scale

example: good (green, scale from 76-100) / neutral (blue, scale from 26-75) / bad (red, scale from 1-25)

Since this is just an exmaple, the numbers of different states, used colors and ranges on the scale can of course be changed to fit the needs of the game.

2. feedback via text

- this time 5 different states (to keep it easy, just numbered from 1-5)
- assuming again a scale form 1-100
- the weighting this time is distributed evenly between each of the states
- the player gets feedback talking to the character itself or talking to somebody supervising the porgress of the character in question

example: state 1 (text 1, scale from 81-100), state 2 (text 2, scale from 61-80), state 3 (text 3, scale from 41-60), state 4 (text 4, scale from 21-40), state 5 (text 5, scale from 1-20)

Again a simple example which could be tailored to the needs of the dev for his/her game.

I watch the development of this game quite some time, because I like the idea in general and it is a seldom used setting.

Wish good luck and alot of success to the dev for this project!

We have decided that we are going to implement a version of what's been suggested here. We will start experimenting after the 3.2 release and after the 3.2 bugfix release. No promises on when it will be in the game, but this approach is good, and the feedback is good.

The other thing we might implement is a hover on the medallion. "[Fasti] seems angry and worried." for example - but only if you make your rolls.

 

[dvemail]

The release of Patronus Alpha 3.2 has been posted in our Discord server.
Here's a discord invite:

You must be registered to see the links

If anyone from here wants to update this thread with the most current info as a maintainer, please do so.
The release is provided in both a code-signed EXE installer and a zip file. I personally hit some weird snag with the installer wanting permissions, but no one else testing had an issue. The change-log was posted earlier, but here is the summary information.

Release Version: Alpha v3.2.0r4
Changelog:

Spoiler: A3.2 Changelog

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[megalol]

Compressed Alpha v3.2.0r4 (PC) 217Mb

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[dvemail]

Compressed Alpha v3.2.0r4 (PC) 217Mb Mega Workupload

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Past experience with compressed versions from people here is that stuff breaks. Use at your own risk

 

[megalol]

Past experience with compressed versions from people here is that stuff breaks. Use at your own risk

Can you show me those posts please where people complain about errors with compressed versions since I didn't find anything? I only unpacked images.rpa file and didn't touched scripts.rpa so I highly doubt that this could break anything...

 

[dvemail]

Should be fine then. Much earlier, one of the dudes here basically broke the game

 

[Babalui]

2 exe files in Ren'Py game, minmaxer.exe what is its function if it is not a virus?

 

[Deckmaster]

Can you please try to make our saves useable in your next update dvemail. I have spend a lot of time building a succesful brothel and now to start all over again is a bit of a let down.

 

[dvemail]

Can you please try to make our saves useable in your next update dvemail. I have spend a lot of time building a succesful brothel and now to start all over again is a bit of a let down.

Yeah, this is a huge, huge, huge problem. I understand. Without getting to too deep, the basic problem is associated with changes to the objects used in the game. If you try to load an object that is missing elements, renpy crashes. The reason other games can have save/load stability and we can't is because of the limited nature of their variable store. We're still actively adding systems to the game.

I'm hoping that there's some way we can build an exception handler that gracefully defaults when a load is missing elements, but it would take some significant development effort. And once again... sigh... we'd be extending RenPy to be more than it is.

The release road-map is 3.2.5 next, and it will include trade fixes and updates, which will break saves.
Then 3.3 which will include full rumors and reputation. That will break saves also. 3.3 will also include combat, also save breaking.

Sigh. My hope is that by 3.5 all the main systems in the game will be in place and stable. Meanwhile, we hope to entice you to stick with the pain with the new content we're adding.