Fan Art Something Unlimited - Sprite Re-Mix and Fanart Thread

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OhWee

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OK, so I've suggested to xMendoza that I think that things are far enough along with the SU Rebuilt demo that a "SU Rebuilt - Ren'Py build Community Development Thread" in the Programming and Development section of this forum might be a very good idea.

I've been hitting him with walls of text about coding via PMs over the last couple of weeks, and it'd be good to have more eyes looking at those walls of text to help flesh out the better ideas.

It occurred to me that due to the way that gameplay is structured in Something Unlimited (the Unity/Gunsmoke Games version), that a Ren'Py environment lends itself to the ideas of girl packs, if the SU Rebuilt code is set up in such a way to look for these in some fashion.

Events in SU are already following a specific formula (note the rule of 3, and how corruption generally follows the same pattern for each girl in SU). So you already have a 'laundry list' of pics that each girl needs to have (dancing pics, stripping pics, fucking pics...)

A really good example of girlpacks in action is Brothel King. This allows you to drop in artwork for pretty much anyone into Brothel King, as long as your girlpack images are configured/named in a specific way.

Seriously, if you like brothel management games, DEFINITELY check out Brothel King! I modded that game once, and a number of my interface suggestions were actually incorporated into the current game (with modifications of course), so I may be a bit biased, but it's definitely worth a looksee!

I've seen a number of times now in the SU game thread as well as here 'it'd be really cool if (this girl) was in SU!' And when I played Brothel King, you can absolutely bet that I had Starfire and Raven, as well as Nausicaa and a few other cartoon badass hotties working in my medieval Asian brothel! Yay girlpacks!

Anyways, SU Rebuilt is xMendoza's baby, so it's up to him to decide if and when he wants to start a development thread. I just think that it'd be a good idea to start one at this point, as I don't want to keep typing walls of text in this thread discussing things that aren't really fanart related (although girlpacks do contain art...).
 
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bayoassman

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Jan 11, 2020
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OK, so I've suggested to xMendoza that I think that things are far enough along with the SU Rebuilt demo that a "SU Rebuilt - Ren'Py build Community Development Thread" in the Programming and Development section of this forum might be a very good idea.

I've been hitting him with walls of text about coding via PMs over the last couple of weeks, and it'd be good to have more eyes looking at those walls of text to help flesh out the better ideas.

It occurred to me that due to the way that gameplay is structured in Something Unlimited (the Unity/Gunsmoke Games version), that a Ren'Py environment lends itself to the ideas of girl packs, if the SU Rebuilt code is set up in such a way to look for these in some fashion.

Events in SU are already following a specific formula (note the rule of 3, and how corruption generally follows the same pattern for each girl in SU). So you already have a 'laundry list' of pics that each girl needs to have (dancing pics, stripping pics, fucking pics...)

A really good example of girlpacks in action is Brothel King. This allows you to drop in artwork for pretty much anyone into Brothel King, as long as your girlpack images are configured/named in a specific way.

Seriously, if you like brothel management games, DEFINITELY check out Brothel King! I modded that game once, and a number of my interface suggestions were actually incorporated into the current game (with modifications of course), so I may be a bit biased, but it's definitely worth a looksee!

I've seen a number of times now in the SU game thread as well as here 'it'd be really cool if (this girl) was in SU!' And when I played Brothel King, you can absolutely bet that I had Starfire and Raven, as well as Nausicaa and a few other cartoon badass hotties working in my medieval Asian brothel! Yay girlpacks!

Anyways, SU Rebuilt is xMendoza's baby, so it's up to him to decide if and when he wants to start a development thread. I just think that it'd be a good idea to start one at this point, as I don't want to keep typing walls of text in this thread discussing things that aren't really fanart related (although girlpacks do contain art...).
I don't feel like we should put that much pressure on xMendoza. I don't know how good he is at coding and this seems like a lot to ask. I don't know how experienced he is but I think he was really the one brave enough to give it a shot. If there is anyone with more experience they should feel free to help.
 

UploadGuy

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Not knowing SR7's personal situation, or any other people that may be on the Gunsmoke Games team, I don't really know how much free time the Gunsmoke Games team has for this project. I also don't know what the tax situation is. If a lot of time is being spent trying to invest said money into things that have lower tax penalties and such, that's less time that is being spent on the game. And working on the same project for this long can also dull the creativity, as it becomes more of a job to manage all of the angles.

Anyways, at the heart of this is SR7's creativity. For example, a lot of new art HAS been created for the Themyscira arc. And it takes time to take a piece of art and then break things apart into sprites and then position said sprites. This is one reason we don't see the 'full animations' anymore.

Setting these up can be a major pain, sure there's software that can help with that but it's still a chore.

I haven't attempted to extract 2.3.95 yet to see what was added, but new art was created in the last month, that then needed to be dropped into the story. I've never worked with Unity, mainly because I like Ren'Py better and Ren'Py at it's core is pretty straightforward, unless you are trying to do complex things.

But I can compare 2.3.6 with 2.3.7, 2.3.8 and 2.3.9, from a 'number of sprites created' aspect.

When I extracted the sprites for each version:
2.3.6 as 10,710 sprites.
2.3.7 has 10,830 sprites
2.3.8 has has 10,929 sprites
2.3.9 has 11,138 sprites.

So, the short form, a bit over 100 new unique pieces of artwork are being added with each update. Sure, some of this art is adapted from earier art, but it still takes time to work with all of those pieces. And THEN there's the whole positioning thing so that you can have conversations/animations/etc, which takes even more time.

THEN comes the bugslaying, as stuff that you are trying to do may not work right initially, and then there are the bugs from the last update that you may be trying to fix.

My point here is that this all takes time. I can easily see the potential for 160+ hours of work here with each update. Sure, some things get easier, but SR7 is also doing livestreams pretty much weekly, which takes even more time.

Finally, there's the creativity and burnout angle. Some days you may just not be in the mood to tackle things, so you do other things to clear your head.

I'm not sure how many people HERE are contributing to the Gunsmoke Games Patreon each month, but it's a pretty safe bet that the large majority of the people participating in this thread, and in the SU game thread, are not Patrons.

And the bottom line is that SR7 needs to keep his paying patrons happy, not the F95Zoner types in some buccaneer forum. If the paying patrons feel that they are being entertained and want to donate to the cause, that's their choice and their call.

------

So I want to address one other thing, that is why I think that Unity is holding Gunsmoke Games back. The word Fungus has been thrown around a few times, but I'm not familiar with the Unity backbone. What I can say from the outside looking in is that it looks like a LOT of work to work inside of the Unity framework.

The advantage of Unity is that it's opaque, so it sorta kinda helps you protect your IP, but what I'm finding, and what has been my experience as a modder and now game developer (FmF is my only game currently, well it's a team effort, I do comics too and a bunch of fanart but I digress) is that Renpy has some frameworks that make some things very easy.

An example of this is of course xMendoza 's efforts to build a Ren'Py port which I'm throwing suggestions at.

So as I said, I've been working inside of the Ren'Py framework with various games since late 2016. I started by doing a pretty extensive personal mod for Lab Rats 0.3. At the time, I communicated with the developer a couple of times, but he ulitmately went in a slightly different direction for 0.4 and later, so I gave up trying toupdate my mod as I'd have to essentially re-evaluate everything AGAIN to drop my code in. I never released said mod since later versions of the game were out at that point, plus at the time I was 'being nice' by trying to honor Vren's wishes, but I'm pretty proud of my first efforts as a modder. This was before I joined the F95Zone forums, and before I decided to take the plunge into Daz Studio...

My point is, over the years as a modder, I've seen things done a few different ways (btw, if you are able to take the time to try to understand it, Brothel King has a LOT going on coding wise that is actually pretty slick).

So when I saw how xMendoza was approaching a few things with his SU Rebuilt efforts, when I peeked under the hood I noticed that there were a few things that could be done more cleanly/easily, so of course I've been sending suggestions his way ever since.

The reason I'm bringing this up HERE, is I need to cite an example here that I can speak to on a personal level. About a day ago, I decided to try to tackle the profile screen for SU Rebuilt. So I spent the next 12 hours working on this one thing. BTW, if you want to see how that looks right now in the SU Rebuilt Ren'Py framework (on my end anyways):



I still want to make a couple more tweaks here, but I have this screen pretty much where I want it now. I spent an hour battling with wingdings/webdings fonts, which Ren'Py doesn't like, for those arrow symbols, and ended up 'falling back' on Comial Unicode, which has over 3600 symbols/glyphs/letters in it, and using the Unicode codes to 'summon' said symbols from the depths of Comial Unicode...

Sure, I could have made imagebuttons, but textbuttons have the advantage of being easily edited inside of the Ren'Py framework, without having to build a new button each time in Photoshop, etc..

So this one screen alone took me about a day's worth of work, from tracking down which sprite art I wanted to modify/use, throwing together a mockup to give me a visual target to work towards, adjusting said art so that things lined up like I wanted it to, then building this inside of the Ren'Py SU Rebuilt environment, and nudging things around until I eventually had everything lined up as you see above.

Oh, when I say 'adjusting' well here is one 'before and after' as an example, me and my Photoshop skillz...

View attachment 2225417 View attachment 2225411

That's the original SU art at the left, my modified version at the right.



So I can certainly see that working with 'just' somewhere around 130 sprites a month, well how that can take a lot of time to do. If this took me about a day, and it's just one screen...

I'm not a Ren'Py god by any means, and Python still isn't my jam, and I still regularly google things to try to find the right Ren'Py command and how exactly to type said command so that it works like I need it to...

Others are certainly faster at coding Ren'Py than I am, but I'm clearly no slouch at this point either. Note my fetish for designing different layouts for save screens... and I just do this stuff in my 'free time' too, for free, which is why some things take me so long to complete as I have other interests and real life stuff to do too.

-------

OK so this is now another massive wall of text, I just think that if Gunsmoke Game patrons want to bitch, that's their call, but most people here are acquiring this game by 'other means' for free, and should just be happy that the game isn't abandoned at this point. Plus this is the sprite re-mix and fanart thread, so it's probably not the place to bitch about such things in the first place.

Steps off of soapbox
:alien:
From a dev standpoint, I heard that the coding for SU is a nightmare, and maybe that is the issue in terms of the numerous bugs I have encountered.

Certainly the fact that Gunsmoke has made it past two years is impressive, and burnout is probably the case. I do think his recent update and what we are seeing now is going to be a lot of work because it seems like a lot of effort has been made going into the new recent artwork that has been made. Overall I agree that my opinion doesn't matter because I am not a patreon and from a business standpoint, you want the people who actually donate to your project to be satisfied. But I think my point about passion is probably what you stated earlier, he has been working on the same project for YEARS now and with some of the updates you can certainly feel it. With the new updates however, I think he is hitting the grind again. We can meme on him all we want, but if you look at other devs on this F95, he's one of the better ones because I have seen some horror shows lol.
 

OhWee

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I won't bore y'all with the minor details, but I'm beginning to lay some groundwork for SU Rebuilt related girl packs here...



The short form is that you artist and modder types will be able to drop girl packs into the SU Rebuilt Ren'Py project when I'm done. Essentially, I've set things up so that all of a girl's pics are in a single folder, along with an .rpy file that contains her scenes.

The game will be able to 'find' said scenes via some variable checks, so it'll be possible to put say She Hulk or whomever to work in the GS/MB when I'm done, as routines will be set up to add new girls to one of the 'recruit lists'. The game will detect when new folders are added to the /girls folder and then access the .rpy file for that girl from that point forward, calling on various scene related labels as needed.

You'll still need to capture them of course , or maybe when some other gal hits some threshold, she mentions having a friend...

Modder and artists types will be able to use a 'girl template' .rpy file, modifying it to add their own girls to SU Rebuilt, editing the dialogues and such for the various scenes (Glamour Slam scenes, Meta Bordello scenes, Cell scenes). The template will have the usual 'Rule of Three' routines already set up in the template with 'default' dialogues that can be easily changed, assuming you have Notepad2, Notepad++, or other another .rpy file friendly text editor.

This may also speed up the efforts to pull more girls into SU Rebuilt once I've tackled a few other things, mainly the GS/MB scheduling screen, which is next on my list. With these 'templates' if others are willing to help add various girls, well this could open the door for a 'divide and conquer' approach r.e. adding all of those scenes for the girls, to help split up the workload as it were.

Anyways, for you artist types out there, Chrisdarock19 suggested via a PM that it might be really cool to re-imagine/create alternate versions of a few scenes, and maybe fill in some blanks r.e. some of the Meta Bordello scenes that are currently missing. It's not a bad suggestion!

Just wanted to share my tiny 'moment of victory' here. Still more to do, but xMendoza and I are diligently hammering away at this thing!

:cool:
 
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bayoassman

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Jan 11, 2020
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I won't bore y'all with the minor details, but I'm beginning to lay some groundwork for SU related girl packs here...



The short form is that you artist and modder types will be able to drop girl packs into the SU Rebuilt Ren'Py project when I'm done. Essentially, I've set things up so that all of a girl's pics are in a single folder, along with an .rpy file that contains her scenes.

The game will be able to 'find' said scenes via some variable checks, so it'll be possible to put say She Hulk or whomever to work in the GS/MB when I'm done, as routines will be set up to add new girls to one of the 'recruit lists'. The game will detect when new folders are added to the /girls folder and then access the .rpy file for that girl from that point forward, calling on various scene related labels as needed.

You'll still need to capture them of course , or maybe when some other gal hits some threshold, she mentions having a friend...

Modder and artists types will be able to use a 'girl template' .rpy file, modifying it to add their own girls to SU Rebuilt, editing the dialogues and such for the various scenes (Glamour Slam scenes, Meta Bordello scenes, Cell scenes). The template will have the usual 'Rule of Three' routines already set up in the template with 'default' dialogues that can be easily changed, assuming you have Notepad2, Notepad++, or other another .rpy file friendly text editor.

This may also speed up the efforts to pull more girls into SU Rebuilt once I've tackled a few other things, mainly the GS/MB scheduling screen, which is next on my list. With these 'templates' if others are willing to help add various girls, well this could open the door for a 'divide and conquer' approach r.e. adding all of those scenes for the girls, to help split up the workload as it were.

Anyways, for you artist types out there, Chrisdarock19 suggested via a PM that it might be really cool to re-imagine/create alternate versions of a few scenes, and maybe fill in some blanks r.e. some of the Meta Bordello scenes that are currently missing. It's not a bad suggestion!

Just wanted to share my tiny 'moment of victory' here. Still more to do, but xMendoza and I are diligently hammering away at this thing!

:cool:
Are you guys gonna make it so you can add additional costumes to existing girls?
 

OhWee

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Are you guys gonna make it so you can add additional costumes to existing girls?
Note that this is a Ren'Py Re_build and not a 'translated code' port. So efforts will be made to include the scenes you see in SU Unity, but since it's in Ren'Py now, if someone wants to add new scenes, and costume variations of scenes, well that just comes down to their photoshop skills.

SR7 is NOT using a 'paper doll' method in SU Unity, rather the torso/body includes the outfit, so different torsos are swapped out. If said torso hasn't been drawn/created though, then there's no way ingame to do that. You can attempt it in Photoshop, but if the pose of the 'source figure' isn't the same, this can be a a lot of work.

But if some artistic fanart type put together what you were looking for, and perhaps shared it in this thread, yeah you could edit the relevant .rpy file to add a scene with that new art. In SU Rebuilt anyways, SU Unity isn't set up to do such things...

That's a bit down the road though, we need to finish building the Ren'PYbackbone first!
 

bayoassman

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Jan 11, 2020
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Note that this is a Ren'Py Re_build and not a 'translated code' port. So efforts will be made to include the scenes you see in SU Unity, but since it's in Ren'Py now, if someone wants to add new scenes, and costume variations of scenes, well that just comes down to their photoshop skills.

SR7 is NOT using a 'paper doll' method in SU Unity, rather the torso/body includes the outfit, so different torsos are swapped out. If said torso hasn't been drawn/created though, then there's no way ingame to do that. You can attempt it in Photoshop, but if the pose of the 'source figure' isn't the same, this can be a a lot of work.

But if some artistic fanart type put together what you were looking for, and perhaps shared it in this thread, yeah you could edit the relevant .rpy file to add a scene with that new art. In SU Rebuilt anyways, SU Unity isn't set up to do such things...

That's a bit down the road though, we need to finish building the Ren'PYbackbone first!
I'm just saying if you do "girlpacks" will you leave slots open in the directory for additional costumes? I'm no expert on any of this, but I think Girlpacks need to have consistent naming to work? That might complicate adding additional costumes, no?
 
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