But that is odd that they only put in a Space Christmas Eve and not a morning scene with some sorta follow-up to spice up the scenes that followed.
Scenes from the Unity game often have the issue of not relating to previous scenes most of the time. I've had to add a lot of extra interaction for the flow of the game to have any semblance of connectivity. The vast majority of the time when you see a callback to a previous action you picked, or something that happened, that usually (not always) doesn't exist in the Unity game.
I'll use the last two "Beth" scenes from the Unity game as an example. These two scenes are: the water park (the pool in the Unity game), and Space Christmas Eve (just Christmas Eve in the Unity game). This means that in the Unity game, if you are doing Beth's story, it goes from the hottest day of the year, to Space Beth showing up in the kitchen, and no transition between the two (other than maybe wandering around the house looking for Beth to click on her).
This is not a unique issue to this scene, and stuff like this is all throughout the Unity game, events just sort happen with little to no setup or connection. Again, some do (mostly in the early game), but many that come out as their own update often don't get follow ups.
I should illiterate that i didn't think the writing was bad at all, it was pretty good. Funny too. I just didn't like the 5 windows part given the limitations.
This scene mainly exists as it does due to my own limited art ability and a desire to add something unique, but still Rick and Morty-esk into the game. When we were first talking Christmas morning there were three options: Don't make it and hope we don't need it (always the first thing when thinking about scenes I have to make), make a simple bumper scene to gloss over it (similar to the pre-breakfast content), or try and get a sexy scene out of it (usually a lot more effort).
I opted for option 3, knowing that if I couldn't pull it off, I could always roll back to just the bumper (and if we didn't need it, hold off including it entirely). But, this presented an issue, who would Morty spend Xmas Morning with? In fact, there is a choice with who to choose (that isn't a choice), there as a subversion of the trope of picking someone.
I don't really like branching content (either making it or playing it other games) and the reason why is that instead of the effort going to making 1 good scene, that effort is split into however many branches are needed. Case in point, if this had been a player choice to spend time with 1 of the 5 girls, then I have to make art to support 5 different paths. 4 of which players won't see and I wasted time making. I was already struggling to make 1 path, so, four additional ones were out of the question.
But I did have what felt like a fun idea, based very loosely off a Gravity Falls episode where the main character copies himself. The difference being, I didn't want the clones to have their own personalities (because people would cry NTR), but rather to be like extra arms and legs for the player.
In the first draft of the scene, I had Morty and Space Beth walking around the house, with Morty trying desperately to keep her away from all the places he is having sex. This meant one scene at a time with each girl, and felt a lot more like clones of Morty were having all the fun, while the player was not.
At some point, I thought, hey, wouldn't it be interesting if you could see what was going on all at once? And I tried different variants of the final result. An important aspect of them is that all the shots (sort of with Morticia, I have to work with the art I have) are POV, you don't see Morty's face in any of them, except the chat with Space Beth, to imply you are seeing through their eyes, not seeing what your clones are doing.
Does it work perfectly? Eh, I think it's fine. It most likely isn't a hot scene I'll replay to *ahem* enjoy, but to be honest, it is very hard to enjoy most of my own scenes (and many of the ones I've worked on (the one major downside of the project is that when I've worked on the same content for hundreds of hours, it is often impossible to get pleasure out of it anymore (so, yeah, I ruined the game for myself so other could enjoy (ironic really...)))).
It looked a LOT more complicated than previous updates - experimental to test Renpy's capabilities, perhaps? I may be reading too much into it, but are we going to expect some new ideas going forward in terms of features or what other possibilities we can explore?
If so, I'm very curious what else this engine can do!
The Ren'py engine is fairly robust and while I hadn't tired this specific thing before, code wise there is nothing too complicated going on behind the scenes.
Renpy is pretty great. There are a lot of good reasons why I picked it for this remake over other options. It does VNs exceptionally well compared to pretty much everything else. And there are few things I've tried to do in it that it can't do (ATL so far has been the most limiting for what I want it to do, but it is still very powerful).
I found an error on day 18, scene 3 (Liftin' Bro)
When Morty finishes helping Reka while she lifts the bar, they have the next conversation:
---
Reka: Hell no, it's your turn on the bench again.
Reka: B-, but my zipper...
Reka: Relax, all the girls are doing legs on the other side, nobody's gonna see anything.
---
The second one is said by Reka instead Morty.
Fixed! Thanks for the spot!
