Arachnox

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Aug 3, 2018
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Hi Guys! For some reason, Liurial never appeared in my game?? Can anyone tell me what needs to be done to have the initial meeting with her? Any help would be appreciated! :)
 

Retromancer

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Aug 14, 2018
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I'm not sure if that's a fair comparison.
TLS is by far the best storytelling (and world building) experience in an adult RPGM game bar none. Very few games measure up to it in that regard, no matter the engine.
Yes, I completely agree that the standard TLS sets from that standpoint might be unmatched in my lifetime. But this game is trying, from what I can tell, to tell a story on a similar scale even if it is not executed as well. I believe it is in the first act of what, 3 or 5 to come? There are additional features like Rivals, completely new maps, etc that aren't even implemented yet? And it is already so incredibly clunky and difficult to manage in this VN format. I don't know enough about coding to know which engine would work better - Unity, RPGM, etc - but trying to cram a complicated RPG game into Ren'py seems stupid to me. But hey, I can just keep pirating and UnRen'py the files so at the end of the day no problem for me. Won't play or pay for this mess though.
 

DownTheDrain

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Aug 25, 2017
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I believe it is in the first act of what, 3 or 5 to come? There are additional features like Rivals, completely new maps, etc that aren't even implemented yet?
Sounds a bit like that maledom spin-off that a dev assured me they were developing more than two years ago in this very thread.
I'll believe it when I see it.

And it is already so incredibly clunky and difficult to manage in this VN format. I don't know enough about coding to know which engine would work better - Unity, RPGM, etc - but trying to cram a complicated RPG game into Ren'py seems stupid to me.
Presumably Unity would work best if you're willing to put in the work. At least the engine is capable of all that and much more but from what I can tell you have less of an established base structure than in Renpy, let alone RPGM.
That said, there's probably a lot that could be streamlined and/or optimized without switching engines but for now the devs seem more focused on expanding content rather than polishing the core mechanics.

Truth to be told I don't mind that much. While I enjoy the setting and (some of) the writing, a lot of the sexual content really isn't for me so I'm used to cheating to get to the scenes I enjoy and avoid the ones that make my dick shrivel up.
 

diebesgrab

Active Member
Feb 25, 2019
596
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I’m just going to say here that I fucking hate typical RPGM porn games. The gameplay is always an afterthought, and amounts to nothing more than meaningless grind to access the next porn scenes, and nothing kills my boner faster than being bored. Yes, SoC has too many random events. Playing without savescumming might result in different experiences, but that experience can accidentally gate you out of your preferred content. That said, they have gotten significantly better about this, with most important scenes tied to certain locations and accessible after certain dates, though this encourages the player to check every location every week, which is itself tedious. Still, credit where it’s due, getting onto Greyhide’s path used to essentially require savescumming since there was a low corruption requirement and getting the events early enough was a crapshoot, but in my latest playthrough, I’d gotten the intro events done by like the 9th week or something with no required savescumming thanks to the scenes being tied to castle locations. There’s still a lot of savescumming though, especially with Alexia’s job events growing in number and nothing but random chance dictating what you get.

I’d still take this optional mindless savescumming over mandatory equally mindless grindy gameplay and scenes tied to specific hidden locations, though; I have to pay a lot less attention, and generally spend less time, savescumming than “playing” generic RPG gameplay. And Ren’Py has the distinct advantage of rollback in case you accidentally skip too far, and fast forward if you have to retread your steps.

tl;dr: SoC is far from perfect in the gameplay department, and Ren’Py isn’t the absolute perfect fit, but I would rather it than pretty much any other EZ-Bake engine.
 

DownTheDrain

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Aug 25, 2017
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I’m just going to say here that I fucking hate typical RPGM porn games...
That's fair but we weren't talking about RPGM games in general.
The Last Sovereign is far from typical and arguably not even a porn game since the porn is the absolute least important and interesting part of it.

It still has the drawback of making you walk and click more than necessary, which is a known limitation of the engine, but it also manages to simulate warfare, politics and management in a way that RPGM really shouldn't be able to. Plus its writing kicks all of the ass.
 

RC-1138 Boss

Message Maven
Apr 26, 2017
13,114
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The Last Sovereign is a exception not the rule. diebesgrab is right, more often than not RPGmaker games turn up like Peasant's Quest: a bunch of boring walking around and fighting generic enemies on generic maps to level up a bunch of generic stats. All that so you can see the scenes.

No thank you, i take the roll dice from Seeds of Chaos on ren'py any day over that.
 
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Retromancer

Member
Aug 14, 2018
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Look, I understand that this game is not going to switch engines, 100%. My initial post was more of a thought on why Ren'py sucks for this type of game and why another engine might have supported it better. When even the writer of guides for the game talks about savescumming as a part of how they play the game this is an issue. I don't know if there are any tweaks that can be made at this point to make this game actually fun to play.

Also, as far as TLS goes, I don't think it's an unfair comparison. This game is trying to be almost as ambitious from what I can tell, so why can't we hold up other creators to that standard? Are they 5 year-olds fighting against grown men?
 
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Semantics

Member
Apr 28, 2017
286
366
Hi Guys! For some reason, Liurial never appeared in my game?? Can anyone tell me what needs to be done to have the initial meeting with her? Any help would be appreciated! :)
This could just be random chance. There was also (Not sure if it's been fixed, it was known before the last release but isn't mentioned in the changelog, though bugfixes often aren't) a bug that prevented Liurial's intro event from playing, though later events could still play. If she never appeared at all, I imagine it's just RNG that she didn't in yours rather than the bug, but I can't remember if there are any requirements for her intro in terms of week or anything.

Look, I understand that this game is not going to switch engines, 100%. My initial post was more of a thought on why Ren'py sucks for this type of game and why another engine might support it better. When even the writer of guides for the game talks about savescumming as a part of how they play the game this is an issue. I don't know if there are any tweaks can be made at this point to make this game actually fun to play.

Also, as far as TLS goes, I don't think it's an unfair comparison. This game is trying to be almost as ambitious from what I can tell, and why can't we hold up other creators to that standard? Are they 5 year-olds fighting against grown men?
I think the rub is that your comments were phrased as engine choice when what you're commenting on is design choice. The difference in question between this game (Events that proc in large part via RNG) and TLS (Events that proc entirely based off variables determined by your choices) is full stop because the devs designed each of their games that way and has nothing to do with engine.

The game could be changed to cut out a large chunk of the RNG in numerous ways (And I do wonder if more events someday will be. The Fey storyline in particular seems like it'd be pretty large, so having the intros all start from exploring certain tile types might seem a bit odd once the rest of it starts getting put in.) Changing the engine to RPG Maker wouldn't guarantee that, and would involve a lot, lot more work to re-design stuff.

Plus while this is an RPG, it isn't an RPG in the way of RPG Maker games. It's an RPG in the way of a tabletop game, with skill rolls. Just because RPG maker makes old JRPG style games and this is an RPG doesn't mean they're perfect for each other.
 

Nym85

Member
Dec 15, 2018
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Personally since it is a VN and not an RPG, I would have gone for far lighter RPG mechanics. No skill or ability points, just a number of feats that gives you proficiency (and possibly advantage) with certain types of checks which would be far fewer. Think 5E D&D with Rowan being a skill monkey (which is what he is, a rogue/skill-based character. And ofc Rowan should start with decent skills already given he is an experienced adventurer; you could perhaps pick a few things at character creation.
 

diebesgrab

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Feb 25, 2019
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When even the writer of guides for the game talks about savescumming as a part of how they play the game this is an issue.
I mean, I'm not saying it isn't an issue, but using me as an example probably isn't the best support for that statement: I'm incredibly impatient, and the entire reason I was able to write those guides is that I played the game enough times in a short enough period that a lot of the information I needed to write them stuck, and to make me want to make those playthroughs more efficient—and savescumming is pretty much the only way I'd have had the patience to do all that, even with far fewer random events.

Personally, I think the main thing that needs to happen in terms of making the game, perhaps if not fun, at least easier to get to the good parts, is to reduce—though not necessarily eliminate—the amount of randomness. I think that could actually pretty easily be done by tweaking the existing system. Just as examples of ideas:

  • Take the ruler events that are now tied to specific castle locations out of the pool of random events to reduce the number of events available;
  • Limit more events to more specific date ranges (not sex scenes or important events that gate further content)—this limits the mutability of a playthrough a bit, but again, reduces the number of available random events to pull from at any given time.
  • Make more events tied to locations, especially the ones that are just there for lore-building. Make them available at different dates so players interested in the lore at least have more reason to go around checking every location every week, and again, this reduces the number of available random scenes.
  • Make more events the result of player choice instead of simply randomly popping. You don't have to implement a full blown relationship stat for every NPC, but maybe certain choices made during events tied to certain NPCs open up more lore-building events tied to that NPC, instead of them just randomly occurring at the end of a week—as you experience more events connected to Cla-Min's thread of events, maybe you open up the Cla-Min ruler events (like the counterfeit gold one). This one's admittedly more difficult as it involves restructuring trigger paths for events, though.
  • Restructure Alexia's job system somewhat so the player has a bit more control over what job events he sees. There's clearly a limit to how far this can be taken without it being a major pain in the ass for the devs, but I feel like some means of reducing randomness is going to have to be worked into the job events, or else the increasing pool of is going to reduce the odds of getting a specific one to maddening levels. It's already gotten pretty annoying just savescumming for them in the current version (though to be fair, I have monumentally bad luck with RNG).
The skill system needs a lot of work, because in the current build that's where the majority of content that can become inaccessible due to pure RNG is, but a lot of work reportedly has gone into it and the new version is just around the corner.
 

Retromancer

Member
Aug 14, 2018
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I think the rub is that your comments were phrased as engine choice when what you're commenting on is design choice.
You have a point and I probably shouldn't have phrased it that way. I guess my deeper question is if game engine limits design choice, because I feel it does - maybe I'm wrong about this. Also, I'm no expert in tabletop games but a better translation of that to me on a computer would be NWN, and I hope we can agree that there are other game engines that support that type of feeling better than Ren'py
 
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Semantics

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Apr 28, 2017
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You have a point and I probably shouldn't have phrased it that way. I guess my deeper question is if game engine limits design choice, because I feel it does - maybe I'm wrong about this. Also, I'm no expert in tabletop games but a better translation of that to me on a computer would be NWN, and I hope we can agree that there are other game engines that support that type of feeling better than Ren'py
Engine can definitely limit design, but it also works the other way around. When a dev has a design in mind, they will (Presumably) try to pick the engine that works best for that design. (Programming language can muck that up some. If you only know Python and plan to be doing the programming yourself, the decision is made for you unless you plan to pick up a new language as you go.)

But this argument (Along with comparing it to NWN to say there are better engines for it, though amusingly NWN is of course based off a tabletop RPG) assumes that the game as it exists currently isn't what the devs intended, and switching the engine out would make it so. Plus scenes being RNG-triggered or purely triggered by progression is very much something that I'm pretty sure every game engine out there can do. There's RNG involved in RAGS, RPG Maker, and Unity games I can think of, and there are games where scenes progress one to the next relying or just rely on variables and no RNG for each of those engines too.

Either way, I just hope the upcoming stat/skill revamp includes a UI change so that you can actually see your previously distributed points and bonuses from feats (Assuming feats are kept) when leveling up. That honestly bugs me more than the size of the skill list.
 

Oriandu

Engaged Member
Sep 1, 2017
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I see a lot on these forums about RPGMaker games being inferior to Ren'py, but I think this is the reverse. The game being in Ren'py is a complicated mess, with certain scenes only being seen if you cheat because you missed a certain trigger. If it was made in RPGMaker you could have clear questlines with step-by-step options taken. All the things like Alexis job events, the way stats and equipment are handled, the open-world aspect of it, and the sheer complication of the game are better handled by an engine that is more suited to RPGs than VNs. Also, with having Corruption, Affection and other stat points matter so much to the dialogue content and even scene content, being able to open a menu and seeing the characters stats matters a lot
Seeds of Chaos is a complicated mess because it suffers from bad game design, not because of Renpy. It'd be a mess no matter what engine it uses.
 

T51bwinterized

Well-Known Member
Game Developer
Oct 17, 2017
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Simple note here.

- We're largely on board with moving critical NPC events that set relationships out of the random event pools and into specific and easily triggered conditions. We're working how to effectively do that.
- Skill system is nearly done with it's rework. It's designed to be simpler, have less stats to track, and less random.
- Fey plotline rework is partially on moving away from random triggers to specific actionable start points.
- We're just cleaning out a whole bunch of unused or pointless mechanics that don't help anything.
 

Rein

Active Member
Game Developer
May 8, 2017
759
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Want more corruption for either Alexia or Rowan before a certain event triggers? Play again. Want to run into the Fey? Walk into a forest and see if it happens, it may or may not. We can agree to disagree but the gameplay is is so random, it drives me crazy.

In a game like this, give me specific things I can do to corrupt Delane in the Orc camp, for example, rather than wait for random chance to just even get the chance to make it happen. It's just frustrating design with so much good content behind it.
*I know*
this game is just going to fall under it's own weight with people just constantly asking for game files without bothering to play the game because it is too random,
The people who ask for game files are usually not the same as the people for are recognizing dedication, progress and hard work on a incredibly ambitious project for an extended period of time, and are actually funding this erotic endeavour. Funny how that works.

We'll be fine.
The game could be changed to cut out a large chunk of the RNG in numerous ways (And I do wonder if more events someday will be. The Fey storyline in particular seems like it'd be pretty large, so having the intros all start from exploring certain tile types might seem a bit odd once the rest of it starts getting put in.)
*I know*

For everyone who provides constructive criticism, I appriciate it, though we recognize most of it already. Sadly changing things this far into development is time consuming, and in certain cases you have to compromise and acknowledge the end product will be imperfect. The game must be finished at some point. There's no point chasing perfection.

For everyone who thinks our past design mistakes somehow mean we're shitty developers, well, to you, I dedicate this song:

 
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Back

Well-Known Member
Aug 3, 2017
1,473
5,773
Hey Rein or T51bwinterized, could you look into a possible (softlock) bug?

Issue: If Rowan doesn't have a weapon and has no means to acquire one, and also had failed rolls trying to approach the different factions during Orcaid, then is it even possible to progress the Orcaid arc at all?

Quick and Dirty Fix: Even a simple placeholder button with Cla-Min that says "Get an axe" or "Get a weapon" that places a weapon in Rowan's inventory to later surrender it would suffice for a solution until the inventory overhaul is completed.

Thanks. Stay rad; be safe.
 

Rein

Active Member
Game Developer
May 8, 2017
759
2,714
Issue: If Rowan doesn't have a weapon and has no means to acquire one, and also had failed rolls trying to approach the different factions during Orcaid, then is it even possible to progress the Orcaid arc at all?
The entire Orciad progression will be reviewed in phase 2 of the Skill rework. For the time being, I asked LA to remove the diplomacy check.
 

Tagliatele

New Member
Oct 14, 2017
10
34
I'm sure i missed something but I cant find where can I buy item from goblin caravan ?
I'm at week 12 and when I go to the caravan screen there is no button or menu to buy stuff.
 
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