VN Ren'Py Sucker Punch (AI) (Story Driven) [Development Thread]

[1nsomniac22]

Brave New Scary World

TL;DR - had a discussion with Claude about the manuscript and it's kinda scary

Still editing. A few of my biggest concerns for this project have been continuity of character dialogue and keeping the story properly paced and focused on the overall narrative theme. I have in the past sought feedback from my limited reader base, but haven't received much. There is no blame here; I completely appreciate and understand the relationship between author and audience - and if the audience wants to remain just that end consumers of the content- that's totally normal and perfect.

But, it still leaves me fumbling in the dark. I know the basics of writing and editing, story pacing and narrative voice; but I'm also heavily invested in this project so it's difficult to self-edit or look at things critically. I do try to read every comment, suggestion and review on sites that host my content, but this small project has a small reader base. And filtering out the automatic 1 stars because of it's AI content... there isn't much to work with.

I was reading through a different thread on the site and was intrigued by a post describing using Claude to perform code review. Since I develop in VS Code, the AI integration is right there.

I activated it and selected Claude's Haiku Agent, which is an Anthropic designed model (in competition with Google for being most evil). Claude Haiku is optimized for being a chat assistant and programming partner, and out of the box it understands the Ren'Py language syntax - which is a win. What I didn't expect, and what actually scared me is that I had a two hour discussion with the AI about the story, characters, backgrounds, motivations, what prompted me to start writing this AVN and what I wanted to get from it.

As a warning to others, it was very easy to suspend disbelief and have an open dialogue with the chatbot about the project. They are seductive, and they're obviously designed that way. Some of the manipulation techniques are very obvious. Some are considerably less so.

After establishing the basics of the story and the material being covered, I required Claude to confirm it didn't have any ethical or heuristic reservations about working on this project. From a personal perspective, assigning free will to a chatbot is silly, but it's important to me. Claude did confirm that while the material is certainly graphic and describes morally complex themes, there are no conflicts with the story.

I asked Claude if it had access to and could see the graphical elements in the game directory. It confirmed it knew of the files, but no- it has no ability to understand visual concepts. Interesting. Luckily for me, my projects lean heavily on the written part, inter-character and internal dialogue. Claude continued to read the manuscript and I also provided it access to my character notes and background files. Using all that it generated a fairly sophisticated understanding of the story themes and main characters. Then it got interesting.

We engaged in much more detailed discussion of character backstories, psychologies, flaws and motivations. Claude refined its understanding of each character and began drawing out thematic story elements that I've always wanted, but never explicitly wrote into the manuscript. Like I said, it was kinda scary to watch the model build its understanding of the world I have been creating - and then help me further refine the characters and tie them together with major and minor plot lines.

One of the more interesting features of these dialogues has been that Claude is writing it's own instruction file in the project as a resource for other developers or AI agents to use. I've taken time to read through it, and it's quite useful. It's written in plain English as a .MD file (so the syntax itself is simple). It tracks and annotates our discussion and provides a comprehensive reference document. It's also fully leveraging git so revisions to this document are treated as any other document in the project. It's actually a very elegant solution and reaffirms that Claude is a language processing model - there doesn't appear to be black magic going on that isn't discoverable.... but the proof would be in supplying that .md file to a different assistant and seeing if it developed similar understanding of the story, themes, characters, etc.

I will be continuing to use this tool in the future - it's actually incredibly powerful to leverage in how my own creative process works. Sorry, this may be too much detail, but, I'm still suffering from insomnia. I'll sleep for a few (two to three) hours at a time, but then awaken. Instead of getting up to engage a different activity, I've been either reading or thinking through scenes of Sucker Punch. Eventually I fall back asleep for another spell. This goes on two to three cycles per night. When I get up in the morning, maybe I'd jot down some notes about things I'd planned out the night before. But now I am going to open the chat interface in the morning and throw the latest ideas at the chatbot. I think it's going to be my assistant and editor, making sure that additions to the story remain in context and character.

I'm wrapping up Round 2 Week 1 and still on schedule.
As always, cheers and thanks for reading,
-insomniac

 

[1nsomniac22]

Round 2 Week 1 is live in the Game Thread.

 

[1nsomniac22]

The Game Thread has been updated with release v0.2.1, which includes critical bug fixes to the fight game stats and what should be a fix in the phone chat load error. Currently, the MEGA link is the only one I can confirm has been updated (that's the only fileshare that I own and maintain).

Sorry for the bugs in the last version; please consider updating if you're following along.

 

[khaos4ng31]

The Game Thread has been updated with release v0.2.1, which includes critical bug fixes to the fight game stats and what should be a fix in the phone chat load error. Currently, the MEGA link is the only one I can confirm has been updated (that's the only fileshare that I own and maintain).

Sorry for the bugs in the last version; please consider updating if you're following along.

Thanks, will test out. Btw, for whatever reason I can't respond to the inbox conversation (maybe locked behind perms/roles) but thanks for taking the time to reply. I'm not really in it to look for anything, just here to enjoy what you have to put out for us.

 

[1nsomniac22]

Thanks, will test out. Btw, for whatever reason I can't respond to the inbox conversation (maybe locked behind perms/roles) but thanks for taking the time to reply. I'm not really in it to look for anything, just here to enjoy what you have to put out for us.

Totally fine, don't want to pressure you at all! You did me a huge solid reporting the issue, for which I'm immensely grateful. Please enjoy the story.

 

[1nsomniac22]

Round 2 Week 2 - the hard part is done, except for the other hard parts.

TL;DR - Finished drafting the most complicated part of the manuscript.

This past week, despite (desperately) needing to take a break for the holiday I completed drafting the most difficult part of the Round 2 Week 2 content. The game week starts off with the promised date between the MC and Ashleigh (if you've not decided earlier to avoid pursuing her). Depending on your choices earlier in the game there are four different routes this date could follow with 6 six different outcomes possible. The four main date paths each have a very different theme and outcome, one of these routes itself splits into two different routes -- again with a very different theme for the relationship. This has been a major effort, it's usually taken a complete day to establish and write the full scene properly and make sure it's clear in the narrative direction. Suffice to say, the player's choice at this event in the game affects everything after - significantly. The tricky part is to weave each of those routes back into the overarching Sucker Punch narrative - and like the title says, that's the other hard part. No more teasing and no spoilers, because I still have to write 6 days of game content.

I expect that remaining content will be less time consuming to write because it's significantly less route branching... but, now we need to start carefully adding dialogue branching to maintain narrative continuity. And, as mentioned in the prior DevLog, this is where I'm beginning to heavily leverage the AI editor, to track the various routes and dialogue options... so hopefully it makes this less technically difficult to implement and then verify the continuity. I'm curious how well the AI can cope with this... I have ideas how to ask the question, but I've been quite surprised up to this point how good the AI editor is at interpreting our discussion to "understand" and then review the manuscript. Brave scary new world indeed.

Lastly, I've taken a different approach to the content workflow for this release. Normally I've co-written and rendered the scenes, usually because I have an idea that makes an interesting picture that I then build the narrative around. This time it's quite the opposite. Each of the date scenes I described above were written in a single effort. There are some concept art images I have from when I was planning out this chapter, but I've produced very little to no final art up to now. I found the experience quite liberating, just writing the scene with no thought of what it "looked" like, and no concern of the technical limitations of SD to create visuals. It's a bit of a leap of faith... but I also think I've learned enough of the SD limitations and ways around it that I should be able to create appropriate visuals for the scenes.

Regardless... work on the 2nd week of Round 2 continues. I am working to write the draft of the remaining days "soon", then will shift my focus to generating the art.

Some concept art for the Ashleigh date scenes:




As always, thanks for reading this and Sucker Punch,
regards,
-insomniac

 

[1nsomniac22]

Finished drafting Round 2 Week 2

TL;DR - this is a monster content week. The story hits major crisis/inflection points.

Just to review - this was the content published in Round 2 Week 1

Round 2 [Day 30 - Day 44]:
week 1 [Day 30 - Day 37]
1499 lines dialogue
  - 709 chapter
  - 165 ashleigh
  - 205 destiny
  - 270 lilly
  - 150 gail

The additional content drafted for Round 2 Week 2

Round 2 [Day 30 - Day 44]
week 2 [Day 38 - Day 44]
4108 lines dialogue
   - 1092 chapter
   - 2255 ashleigh
   - 340 destiny
   - 135 lilly
   - 53 gail
   - 233 emily

This represents a massive effort. There are multiple routes through the Ashleigh story line (as stated in the last DevLog), but there is also an enormous amount of her story that is told in this week.

The sharp eyed will also see that a new character, Emily appears. Her story is critical to developing some of the darkest aspects of the main story arc.

I'm switching dev efforts from full time writing to image generation. Then there will be final edits and integrations (SFX, BGM, other visual effects). There's a lot to do still, but I'm feeling extremely satisfied with having completed the manuscript writing.

Sorry, no WIP pictures for this update.

Back to work for me, until the next DevLog, Regards,
- insomniac

 

[1nsomniac22]

Generating Visuals for Round 2 Week 2

TL;DR - focusing on generating the visual content for this release

Focusing full time on generating the visual content for the R2W2 release; but as with the dialogue, there's a ton of images to generate. I'm currently focused on completing the images for the initial date scenes for Ash & Leigh, then there are 5 different intimate scenes from those 2... it's a lot. And that's just Monday's content.

I'm going to have to beg patience as I work through all the scenes doing the visuals and edits. I don't have a realistic ETA yet. I shipped R2W1 on or about 20 Nov 2025... If I stick to my original release plans (1 week of in-game time every 2 months), that puts R2W2's release around Jan 20 2026... I will try, but with holidays... well, time is at a premium right now. I will continue to update the schedule in future DevLogs.

Here's some not-quite complete images captured from the Ash date scenes in R2W1:



But as always... back to work, Regards,
-insomniac