VN Ren'Py Completed Snow Daze: The Music of Winter [v1.6] [Outbreak Games]

[outofpower007]

For the final day we wanted to make it bigger. There was a couple of endings that got simplified or cut. The harem ending still made it into the game but there was more dialogue planned for some of the girls if you ended up choosing them from your decisions in earlier days.

The first moments of the remake, and actually the entire idea of it, was CB's idea. It only came up because LL wanted to wipe any trace of me and my group (Kyungeki Workshop) from the game. So he convinced Cypress to remake in the game in Unity instead of the existing engine Ren'py. Of course, since Cypress no longer had a programmer (I was the programmer) he had to use CB's programmer who only knew C#. And following that decision, the entire dialogue system had to be re-written from scratch using just XML exports. That's why the remake never materialized. Because such a drastic change would take a year at best with a dedicated team remaking all of the dialogue and those effects. CB is not a dedicated team. Cypress is a writer at heart, not a tech project manager. That's why you haven't seen anything except concept art from the remake for years. The moment CB took over this game was doomed.

Are you comfortable sharing what the simplified or cut endings were, and what were the original plans for those?

 

[polisummer]

Are you comfortable sharing what the simplified or cut endings were, and what were the original plans for those?

They were rough drafts of extended dialogue and one of them were going to tie into Tropical Daze with a cannon choice, but Cypress may have decided on a completely different path for Tropical Daze since then. We didn't make any assets for those endings. We were crunching so much at the end that it came down to wishful thinking which could be pushed into the sequel. So I don't remember all of the details of those original plans.

 

[yercat]

Hah. He wishes he did. Cypress was the only writer for all of Snow Daze. We had about three artists (they were really good). That was it. It was just us handful of people building the entire game. There are even less people involved now that CB is in the picture, because CB doesn't pay people. There is only so much work you can do off of empty promises and a love of the game concept before you decide to leave. So of course, without dedicated people or a dedicated person steering the ship, you just get radio silence or hastily thrown together sketches from the latest artist that you were able to trick to draw for you temporarily.

The swap to Godot would be a good thing in theory. It is much smoother to do this type of game in that engine. But since no one behind the game really cares about it, and the one programmer doesn't know the primary language of the engine or the engine itself, there won't be a demo.

I agree. It's pretty dumb.

For what he said in a video, he had more writers. And yes, if you don't know how to manage a team, less you will know how to manage the project.

 

[youngbloodjulius]

Man, F95 updates have really 'sucked donkey balls' so far this year. There were a couple of good updates in early January, but after that it has been a slop-fest of lame AI games, underwhelming updates, and low-quality bottom-feeder trash games.

Here is to hoping that March-April are able to turn around this garbage train.

 

[azraelswegul]

Man, F95 updates have really 'sucked donkey balls' so far this year. There were a couple of good updates in early January, but after that it has been a slop-fest of lame AI games, underwhelming updates, and low-quality bottom-feeder trash games.

Here is to hoping that March-April are able to turn around this garbage train.

there are a couple of hidden gems with potential, but it is true it has been a year of letdowns and few worthy updates generally speaking.

I do blame AI games for this: since now a wave of people got into making games because 'with AI is fast and cheap to produce!' they no longer have to put as much thought an effort, because since you NEEDED to spend money to make the game to hire the artists before, and hence you needed to make it good enough to keep interest and attract enough paying customers and balance the loses, you were forced to deliver better quality or at least high enough to attract an apropiate number of paying customers, which meant you had to put effort in and deliver something good, instead of slop.

But now we have people who see that AI can generate the visual aspect of the game, (which is one of the main aspects people play nsfw games, the text only is a very niche public) and as such they can churn up a dozen of sloppy scenes every update with only a couple of clicks... so they don't have to think, nor put effort in the dialogue, or story, or gameplay, or anything... because they lose NOTHING if the game doesn't work out. "Churn up a dozen of them away, one of them is bound to fool a dude or two to give a couple of dollars on patreon" and it is always 0 loses and some reward. Which for some is worth it but it means oversaturation of VERY shitty games.

This combined with an era where the developers with already a name and developing a name with a reputation, either were working on big stuff that took a lot of time or where stalling to secure the bag from the name they already developed, working as slowly as possible so people keep donating...

An unfortunate set of circumstances by two different kinds of people obsessed with 'work as little as possible, get as much as possible'.

 

[WOMANpukumaru]

Man, F95 updates have really 'sucked donkey balls' so far this year. There were a couple of good updates in early January, but after that it has been a slop-fest of lame AI games, underwhelming updates, and low-quality bottom-feeder trash games.

Here is to hoping that March-April are able to turn around this garbage train.

This year?

Imagine being me

90% of the games I follow on here

Either ended. Best case scenario. At least I have a finished game

They’re on indefinite hiatus like this shit

Got abandoned

They got removed from the site altogether and now have to go to all these weird places just to get news

The updates are ridiculously slow

Or the updates are lame stuff like “hey I decided I’m going to re-code the entire game and redo all the art even though the game isn’t finished!”

Or, the current updates haven’t had the content I’ve actually been waiting for all this time, focusing on stuff I’m not that interested in

Some games? Have multiple of the above things going on at once!

I think there is exactly ONE game I’m following that actually has new content in any sort regular fashion. I go months with downloading anything from this website.


I guess I should look for new stuff but honestly having literally all the games I follow fizzle out has kind of soured me on wegs in general. I mostly just come here to laugh at snow daze lol

 

[Fake438]

90% of the games I follow on here

Either ended. Best case scenario. At least I have a finished game

They’re on indefinite hiatus like this shit

Got abandoned

They got removed from the site altogether and now have to go to all these weird places just to get news

The updates are ridiculously slow

This is partly because most devs on here are amateurs who do not realize that in game development they need to think ahead. You cannot really make it up as you go, like you would with comics or books, you need to have a solid plan from start to finish. Meaning that by the time you are releasing 0.1 version of the game it needs to be already feature complete. Even if those features are not used for several updates they already have to be there and the author already has to know what they are there for.

Adding features retroactively almost always requires you to go back and rewrite everything before to both avoid bugs and keep the flow of the game. So no wonder games go regularly on hiatus when the guy making them suddenly realizes he basically has to start from scratch because his weekend VN project does not mechanically scale up to his goal world domination sim.

But mainly this is because the incentive structure is not there to get them to behave in any other way. Donation sites do not punish this sort of behavior, nor do they have any kind of basic code of conduct for this sort of thig. So really why not try to make a quick buck with some weekend project you may or may not finish when you get the money anyway?

 

[azraelswegul]

This is partly because most devs on here are amateurs who do not realize that in game development they need to think ahead. You cannot really make it up as you go, like you would with comics or books, you need to have a solid plan from start to finish. Meaning that by the time you are releasing 0.1 version of the game it needs to be already feature complete. Even if those features are not used for several updates they already have to be there and the author already has to know what they are there for.

Adding features retroactively almost always requires you to go back and rewrite everything before to both avoid bugs and keep the flow of the game. So no wonder games go regularly on hiatus when the guy making them suddenly realizes he basically has to start from scratch because his weekend VN project does not mechanically scale up to his goal world domination sim.

But mainly this is because the incentive structure is not there to get them to behave in any other way. Donation sites do not punish this sort of behavior, nor do they have any kind of basic code of conduct for this sort of thig. So really why not try to make a quick buck with some weekend project you may or may not finish when you get the money anyway?

"You cannot really make it up as you go, like you would with comics or books", heck I'd argue that's not even a good advice in comics or books... whenever you are creating a story you NEED a solid plan from day one, no matter the medium.

 

[sprigglesdiggles]

This is partly because most devs on here are amateurs who do not realize that in game development they need to think ahead. You cannot really make it up as you go, like you would with comics or books, you need to have a solid plan from start to finish. Meaning that by the time you are releasing 0.1 version of the game it needs to be already feature complete. Even if those features are not used for several updates they already have to be there and the author already has to know what they are there for.

Adding features retroactively almost always requires you to go back and rewrite everything before to both avoid bugs and keep the flow of the game. So no wonder games go regularly on hiatus when the guy making them suddenly realizes he basically has to start from scratch because his weekend VN project does not mechanically scale up to his goal world domination sim.

But mainly this is because the incentive structure is not there to get them to behave in any other way. Donation sites do not punish this sort of behavior, nor do they have any kind of basic code of conduct for this sort of thig. So really why not try to make a quick buck with some weekend project you may or may not finish when you get the money anyway?

but MUH CREATIVE VISION

 

[Fake438]

"You cannot really make it up as you go, like you would with comics or books", heck I'd argue that's not even a good advice in comics or books... whenever you are creating a story you NEED a solid plan from day one, no matter the medium.

Well, yeah having a plan is always better than going in blind but with a book or a comic its doable. When you decide to change something fundamental about your work in a book it takes at best a couple of hours to go back and rewrite whatever needs rewriting. With comics as long as you saved the individual pages in an editable format you also do not need more than a few hours to make retroactive changes.

In videogame development going back and changing/adding something can take anywhere between those few hours to few weeks. You old code may simply not be compatible with your new addition. Even something as basic as flipping switches in different order may produce game breaking bugs.
Operative word here being "may" because it can but it does not have to cause any issues. Hence why you should avoid having to go back to add/change stuff in game development as much as possible.

 

[azraelswegul]

Well, yeah having a plan is always better than going in blind but with a book or a comic its doable. When you decide to change something fundamental about your work in a book it takes at best a couple of hours to go back and rewrite whatever needs rewriting. With comics as long as you saved the individual pages in an editable format you also do not need more than a few hours to make retroactive changes.

In videogame development going back and changing/adding something can take anywhere between those few hours to few weeks. You old code may simply not be compatible with your new addition. Even something as basic as flipping switches in different order may produce game breaking bugs.
Operative word here being "may" because it can but it does not have to cause any issues. Hence why you should avoid having to go back to add/change stuff in game development as much as possible.

well yeah, but in the same vain, once an issue of a comic-book is published you can't go back and edit it because you thought of something new for next chapter (generally speaking). But yeah, I agree it is an added factor.

 

[yercat]

This is partly because most devs on here are amateurs who do not realize that in game development they need to think ahead. You cannot really make it up as you go, like you would with comics or books, you need to have a solid plan from start to finish. Meaning that by the time you are releasing 0.1 version of the game it needs to be already feature complete. Even if those features are not used for several updates they already have to be there and the author already has to know what they are there for.

Adding features retroactively almost always requires you to go back and rewrite everything before to both avoid bugs and keep the flow of the game. So no wonder games go regularly on hiatus when the guy making them suddenly realizes he basically has to start from scratch because his weekend VN project does not mechanically scale up to his goal world domination sim.

But mainly this is because the incentive structure is not there to get them to behave in any other way. Donation sites do not punish this sort of behavior, nor do they have any kind of basic code of conduct for this sort of thig. So really why not try to make a quick buck with some weekend project you may or may not finish when you get the money anyway?

The bigger issue here is those plataforms to support projects, there's no control over it and everyone can start a project, make it big and at some point start to delay updates to literally no deliver anything and then abandon it with no consecuences at all.

 

[yercat]

The steam forum for redaze is dead silent, everyone got tired already l.

 

[Count Morado]

The steam forum for redaze is dead silent, everyone got tired already l.

If only this thread could be the same.

 

[polisummer]

The steam forum for redaze is dead silent, everyone got tired already l.

In two months, it would have been 1 year since the last official update about Redaze. By now, CB is already well onto its next publishing fraud scam lol

 

[yercat]

In two months, it would have been 1 year since the last official update about Redaze. By now, CB is already well onto its next publishing fraud scam lol

Like, he quited his own discord channel, for sure he's planning something new to scam.

 

[sprigglesdiggles]

It is about the time of year for him to scoop up another half dozen projects

 

[azraelswegul]

hey, look at the bright side: when they started working on the remake we all thought 'Making a remake on a brand new game that just finished is stupid'.

this year it will be 7 years since the full release came: April 17 2018.... so now it kinda makes sense a Remake could be in the works even if a bit early.

Won't come anyway, but at least it no longer sounds like a weird timeline thing, just a normal scam.

Edit: Holy molly, i just checked: the FIRST release of Snow Daze came in July of 2016, the FULL version in April 2018... The original took LESS than 2 years to make.

 

[yercat]

hey, look at the bright side: when they started working on the remake we all thought 'Making a remake on a brand new game that just finished is stupid'.

this year it will be 7 years since the full release came: April 17 2018.... so now it kinda makes sense a Remake could be in the works even if a bit early.

Won't come anyway, but at least it no longer sounds like a weird timeline thing, just a normal scam.

Edit: Holy molly, i just checked: the FIRST release of Snow Daze came in July of 2016, the FULL version in April 2018... The original took LESS than 2 years to make.

The thing is that Cypress was making the sequel, that i believe it's more important than a remake. Of course, making a remake could lead to a better a sequel, but it's not the case lol, on the contrary, it all went to destination fuck. The worst thing about the new project will be the 3D rooms that will add nothing to the experience and even takes time from development for more important things.

 

[WOMANpukumaru]

I remember coming here last year after being April fooled by f96


So I’m now met with two realizations

1 holy fuck it’s been a year already

2 absolutely nothing has changed here at all.

Snow daze fans don’t have to wait for April to be the fool do they! Hahahahahahahahahahahahhahahhahah



Ha