Ren'Py Shards of her memory [in production] Discussion Thread

[Nichiren]

Shards of her memory
Nichiren Games

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Overview:

Emi, a woman trapped inside her own mind must go back and explore memories of her past. With the help of a stranger she will try to discover the how and why she finds herself inside this strange void.

As this stranger you will be able to visit Emi’s past memories from three different times in her life. You will be able to take control and alter the events, reshaping Emi’s recollection of the past and changing the behavior and attitude of her future selves.


"Memories shatter like a mirror,

when you look into a Shard your vision of the past might never be the same.
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And sometimes it can cut you deeply. "​

Thread Updated: 2020-06-7
Release Date: TBD
Censored: No
OS: Windows
Language: English

Spoiler: Genre

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Our goal is to make every choice the player makes meaningful. All choices have consequences, not all of them immediately visible, but all of them will move the story forward. There is no game over, there is no failure, only your story. Who you chose to possess while inside the Shard and how you act while you control them will affect Emi and shape her future personas accordingly. So an action you take in a Shard from 18 year old Emi’s life may get a quick and instant reaction, but there might be a long term consequence for her 36 year old self.

There are no stats for you to track, no money to collect, or jobs to do. Your only goal is to unlock and explore more of Emi's past and discover or shape the truth.



I would also like to present to you the first pass on Emi, In this picture you can see her at the age of 18, 24 and 36.

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As we get closer to a release date for our demo I will be updating this thread with more details. Please feel free to follow our weekly production updates on our

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page.

Please note that all renders/images/content is still WIP, and should be considered as such.

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[somebodynobody]

I see in genre it says male protagonist. The overview mentions a "stranger" to help Emi, and that there will be possession. So wouldn't it be more fair to say male and female protagonist? Of course I don't know the story, so being male might have a purpose in the long run, but it does seem like you limit people who would play your game that dislike playing as males.

As for jumping around possession as a story mechanic it is pretty novel, I think only really the game "Betrayed" also here on f95 has that mechanic. So it will probably interest a lot of that audience.

Good luck on your game, I am interested to see your first release.

 

[Nichiren]

Yes you are right, for now i put male protagonist because on the story side the stranger is currently a male. but you will be playing many different characters so i wasn't sure yet if i should put multiple protagonist or not. il fix it.

The big difference with us compared to betrayed, is we plan to let you pick who you want to control during the memory and that will affect the pov you have of that part of the story.

thanks.

 

[Nichiren]

Update:

I just added some test renders from a test we are doing to prototype our character based branching. Since scenes can play out differently based on who the player decides to control and they choices they make.

This scene is taken from one of the events that will be found later in the demo we are working on.

enjoy.

 

[Nichiren]

So I want this thread to not just for updates till we have a downloadable demo but a place for players to discuss our game and give feedback.

one thing we are currently working on is the underlining system of stats and character progress for how the different personas of Emi evolve and her reactions. so far our plan has been to keep the system hidden from the player. You would not know what her current stats are, or when you gain more. The main reason for that is to avoid the habit of save/reload to see what gives you the benefit you want vs enjoying the game.

As an example, showing stats would mean that you can go into a menu and see current Emi's status like lust level or amount of deviance, etc. showing outcome of choice is more along the lines of after making a choice you would see a small +1 appear on the screen to tell you what stat went up or down.

now this is more a personal preference than anything else and after playing a couple of games that do things differently i would love to know what most people prefer.

1- hide stats / hide choice outcome
2- show stats / hide choice outcome
3- hide stats / show choice outcome
4- show stats / show choice outcome

thanks

 

[kytee]

I know this probably won't help much but all of the above work for me. The only caveat is if I'm about to make a choice that has dire consequences (NTR path vs harem, or a choice locks us out of that character's path entirely), I think I would like to be warned of that choice or at least drop several not-so-subtle hints at that consequence.

 

[Nichiren]

kytee makes total sense, at this point we dont plan on having any gameover style screens, but yea i think major shifts like that would be clearly stated.

 

[Nichiren]

Hi, just a quick update as we had a busy week and not much to share right now, progress on the demo is moving along but mostly some environment rework and character development.

we also just set up our discord server so anyone interested to join us there can find the link in my sig or on the first post of this thread.

Finally we would like to give a big thanks to our first top tier Exclusive Pateron supporter, he will get the chance to design and help the dev's create an exclusive character for this game.

Hoping to have some more updates next week as we get more work done this weekend.

 

[Nichiren]

Hi,
sorry if we have not updated with anything new in a little while but we are currently very busy with content that is not very interesting to show. Here is a quick list of some of the progress we have been doing over the last couple of weeks.

- Major story arc breakdown into chapters / scenes / events.
- Defining the major plot points we want to include in the Intro / demo we are currently working on.
- designing and setup of our main characters and all variants (outfits/styles/attitudes)
- first pass design of the secondary characters to be used in the Demo.
- Location first pass creation / selection.
I hope to have some renders to share later this week.

 

[Nichiren]

Its been busy with work lately so I am sorry for not updating this sooner, our first draft of the prologue story is now complete and we have started sorting through the remaining assets and environments to find out want we need to change or rebuild.

We also started our second pass on our main characters mostly School girl Emi. As you progress through the story your choices will affect Emi's attitude, actions and appearance. this is one of our biggest blockers right now as we want to make sure our Emi variants are well defined and complete before we start producing content. any change down the line will require a lot of rework.

so here is a taste of the 5 visual variants of the first Emi persona, Enjoy.

 

[somebodynobody]

Its been busy with work lately so I am sorry for not updating this sooner, our first draft of the prologue story is now complete and we have started sorting through the remaining assets and environments to find out want we need to change or rebuild.

We also started our second pass on our main characters mostly School girl Emi. As you progress through the story your choices will affect Emi's attitude, actions and appearance. this is one of our biggest blockers right now as we want to make sure our Emi variants are well defined and complete before we start producing content. any change down the line will require a lot of rework.

so here is a taste of the 5 visual variants of the first Emi persona, Enjoy.

View attachment 684975 View attachment 684974 View attachment 684973 View attachment 684976 View attachment 684977

You should really put some of your images here. You can both ask for tips to help you make them better, and also advertise your game, to have them come here and chat.

https://f95zone.to/threads/daz3d-art-show-us-your-dazskill.4764/

 

[Nichiren]

You should really put some of your images here. You can both ask for tips to help you make them better, and also advertise your game, to have them come here and chat.

https://f95zone.to/threads/daz3d-art-show-us-your-dazskill.4764/

Thanks we will take a look.

 

[Nichiren]

Ok so we are currently hard at work on the Prologue/Intro/Demo whichever way you want to call it. And would love to get some input from the community about what you expect to see or what grabs your interest when playing the first chapter of a game. What makes you decided to support and come back to see future chapters?

currently here are some of the main points of our Prologue to help shape the discussion.

- smaller cast of characters / concentrate on main characters (the three Emi personas & MC)
- understanding the big lines of the story exposition, (who, why, where, ...)
- touch some of the mechanics (Visit memories, possession, etc)
- light sexual content (flirting, voyeur, masturbation, etc)
- some branching with mostly low impact on game (2-3 high impact choices)

The main thing we want to hit for the Prologue is to make sure we concentrate enough on the story to get people to want to learn more, we also don't want to flood the player with out of game tutorials and mechanics so we are thinking of splitting it across the prologue and first chapter of the game.

Thanks

 

[somebodynobody]

The first 4 things are normally.

1. Visuals: Does the game look good enough in the player's eyes? This is of course personal to each player, by and large it is the first thing players look at.

2. Story: The broad concept of the game and what it might entail. Whether it be the oft used college boy visiting his Landlord/friend after being away for a while, to entering into a fantastical sci-fi kingdom and learning the ways of this new place. This is another major thing that will draw players in, since it allows players to make a guesstimate on tags. Oh landlord/friend is code for incest, and fantasy/sci-fi is code for alien/monster sex.

3. Engine: This sounds a bit silly, but yes there are some engines a lot of players hate for some reason or other. You can find many many posts on "why is this in unity and not Ren'Py" or "another RPGM walking simulator" etc.

4. Mechanics: This isn't generally about the actual mechanics of the game, this is about the type of game it is. Sandbox, VN, KN, Open world, etc. Some players hate each one of these.
------------

First thing that grabs my attention is obviously well done visuals and even going the extra step with those. Blinking, breathing, shifting bodies, changing of clothes, specialty made characters, if there are animations having them very fluid and not hair/clothing/body parts clipping through things.

Second thing for me is how good/bad is the story/writing. Sometimes you get a great plot and good writing which is usually the best, sometimes you get a good plot but terrible engrish, which if they get a good translator/proof reader can be overcome, then sometimes you get a terribly generic plot and terrible engrish which seems like the person doesn't actually care.

Third would be mechanics, whether it be minigames, real games, or some conceptual idea, it gives a bit of time away from the story which can be good, and if done well adds more fun to the game. This also normally tries to give the MC a taste for everything that is to come. I personally think you can get away with adding mechanics within the first 3 chapters, post that it feels weirdly tacked on, unless it was preplanned and already in the code, and mentioned.

Fourth is cast. This is the hard one, since games like say WMV, Polarity, or Love and second base, and some others have massive casts that continue to grow. Getting all of your cast out of the way prior to chapter 5ish is best.
-----------

I know that was a bunch of rambling, sorry, what you have said that will be in your prologue seems like a good ball of things.

I would suggest if you are going to have what you might think of as too much/many mechanics/tutorials to remember, give the player a small journal or something that mentions it and the rules behind them.

 

[Nichiren]

Thanks for that well detailed write up somebodynobody its very helpful. We wont be doing Animation at this time as we want the first couple of chapters out as soon as possible maybe someday we will invest in doing that. our motto is to do something good or not at all so we will concentrate for now on well polished renders with nice lighting and transitions.

 

[Nichiren]

Hi, sorry for not putting up any updates recently but both of us have been pretty busy with work and we dident have time to post anything new.

here is an update of our current status on the project.

Chapter 1 characters are 80% finished (3-4 secondary characters need to be finalized)
First pass of scripting is ongoing about 25% done.
Placeholder low res renders currently in progress 25% done.

We should be able to get stuff moving faster in the next couple of weeks.

here are a couple of screens from the Intro.

 

[Nichiren]

Hi everyone,

here is our latest update, we got a lot of progress done in the last 2 weeks. Mostly on the story writing and placeholder renders.

Chapter 1 characters are 90% finished (1-2 secondary characters need to be finalized)
First pass of scripting is ongoing about 50% done.
Placeholder low res renders currently in progress 35% done.

Started working on transitions and effects shots this week.



Just so you know we will be away until sept so this will be are last update until then.

If all goes well we should have a first Alpha test build done for the end of September accessible only to paetrons for testing. Depending on how that goes we may have a first Beta release for all late October.

here are a couple more screens for your viewing pleasure

 

[Adabelitoo]

Just from reading the name it made me remember Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, I hope this one has a better ending.

 

[Nichiren]

Hi everyone,

We are back and in full on rendering mode. here is our current update as of today.

Chapter 1 characters are 100% finished
First pass of scripting is ongoing about 50% done.
Placeholder low res renders currently in progress 75% done.
Final polished renders 25% done.

So originally we had planned to get the first chapter to included the intro, and one story for each timeline (3 total) this would put us on a real slow start as it meant having all the characters and locations ready to go. so we have shifted our priorities to getting the intro and first timeline story out and available first then push quicker releases. this will also streamline the story in a more chronological order.

What i mean is that our first plan was to have you hop from 19 year old Emi to 26 year old Emi then 32 year old Emi and back and forth this made the story of her life harder to follow and required more up front content. Now will will focus on younger Emi for the first 2-3 updates before switching over in hopes of creating faster update turnaround and less chaotic story.

Here are some of our placeholder first pass renders, please not that there are still some pose tweeking, polish, touchup and lighting issues to work out. all of this is WIP.

 

[Nichiren]

Hi,

so this week we did a big push on posing and setting up all of our scenes and completed all first pass renders. this will free us up to continue scripting work but also start doing a polish pass and start final renders.

Chapter 1 characters are 100% finished
First pass of scripting is ongoing about 50% done.
Placeholder low res renders currently in progress 100% done.
Final polished renders 30% done.
Script / story for Chapter 1 95% (Wife needs to do a pass on dialogs to make sure no errors and typos)

If all goes according to plan we should be able to start testing an alpha version in the coming weeks with our patreon members (all tiers).

This is probably going to be the last image we post until release so please enjoy.