VN Ren'Py Abandoned Summer's Gone [S1 Steam + DLC] [Oceanlab]

4.30 star(s) 572 Votes
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flaviopaganini

flaviopaganini

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Lethal Flourish said:
Abandoned? Why is there a Abandoned tag?
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There’s a metric from some time ago where a visual novel that went more than 18 months without an update was considered abandoned, and back then that made sense. Updates were usually monthly, or at most every three months. Going 18 months without releasing anything really did mean abandonment.

Today, this has become normalized, and almost two years without an update from the developer seems acceptable to a lot of people. But when it comes to visual novels, I still consider that abandonment. I’ve been playing some that take a very long time to receive new versions, and that ends up being genuinely frustrating, because all the previously built story gets lost. Over time, I end up forgetting details and narrative paths.

Of course, I know that for many people the story isn’t even the main focus, and the interest is much more in the visual content. But from a narrative standpoint, an update that takes nearly two years seriously hurts the ability to follow the story.
 
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khumak

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flaviopaganini said:
There’s a metric from some time ago where a visual novel that went more than 18 months without an update was considered abandoned, and back then that made sense. Updates were usually monthly, or at most every three months. Going 18 months without releasing anything really did mean abandonment.
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I think 18 months as an automatic threshold for the abandoned tag is perfectly reasonable. There are some devs who might produce enough content for that long of a dev cycle to feel like it's not just greed and laziness, but there's really no reason a dev cycle needs to be that long. A super short cycle can make it tough, if not impossible to finish a big event so I have no issue with a dev saying a monthly release doesn't make sense for them. But a big update can be divided up into smaller chunks and still have plenty of completed events. IMO, there's really no reason for a dev cycle longer than 3-6 months. If you can't finish 1 big event in 6 months then you're being lazy IMO.

It's not an automatic no for me. If the finished product is still good quality, I'll still play it for free as each update comes out but I wouldn't consider paying anything until the full game is complete.

I think some devs focus too much on animations. I like sex animations as much as the next guy but you don't have to animate everything, especially if it takes you personally an unusually long time to do animations compared to other devs. I know I'm not personally good at animations. They take me forever.

I do think AI will eventually streamline the animation process a bit but a lot of the uncensored AI models seem to get side tracked when doing sex animations and not really focus on the part of the scene that's important. I've seen plenty of good ones, but a lot more bad ones. I don't know if it's an issue with the model itself not being trained well enough on sex videos or whether it's more an issue of having to run a model locally to avoid censorship on a GPU that doesn't have enough VRAM to run a really robust model (some of those take a lot more than 32GB of VRAM so a 5090 is not good enough).

I do think eventually we'll see a lot of devs render an original still in Daz though and then tell an AI model to take that still and animate it. So instead of an animation taking a month rendering every individual frame, it takes an hour or so setting up the scene for 1 render and then another hour for an AI to create a full animation based on that frame. So once the kinks get worked out we should start seeing more animations, of good quality and with less dev time.
 
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Elduriel

Elduriel

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Lethal Flourish said:
Abandoned? Why is there a Abandoned tag?
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for fucks sake, just read the forum rules once, many things will become clearer
  • Abandoned: used in the following cases:
    • The developer states that the development has been permanently suspended.
    • After 3 months of inactivity from the developer's public creator/crowdfunding accounts (Patreon, SS, etc), we will resolve special circumstances or scenarios on a case-by-case basis (no creator accounts, creators developing for free, Patreon accounts under review/ban).
    • No game update has been released for an abnormally long period of time (>18 months).
    • Game threads that are marked On-hold for over 6 months with no game update.
    • Note: this prefix is only removed upon the release of a new update for purchase/download.
 
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miltonlucifer

miltonlucifer

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DoryKingSword said:
Is this actually abandoned, because I just purchased this yesterday on Steam with all the DLC as well.
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welcome to the support group. you may ask this question every three months , while trying to enjoy the game you played already a hundred times while waiting eagerly for an update, and discussing bella and nami's trauma and ocean's subtle retcons.

good luck.
 
Don Sucio

Don Sucio

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Jan 17, 2021
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c.mork said:
Hello,

I’ve finished a bunch of animations, as well as the bibi cinematic.

I think I’ll finish all the animations around Christmas, I’ll then get the game presentable and send it to Steam to get it pre-approved.

What takes a lot of effort this time is the testing and polishing phase. Since I decided to invest more into sounddesign, combined with the update being 3-4x as big as usual, it has become tedious.

It feels tedious because of the underlying pressure.

There is nothing worth mentioning besides that. A consistent output of animations.

Patreon
In other news, when Patreon removed SGs' page, they said I could apply to return to the platform in two months.

What they didn’t mention is, that it can’t be one of the projects that were previously on Patreon and violated the TOS, even though SG has never violated any rules (and in my humble opinion, neither did WIAB). But they closed the ticket and ignored that SG has never been involved.

I also don’t want to create an alibi-project to get a page up, so I won’t be returning to Patreon.

This does limit potential future growth, and I might never get where I once was, but it is what it is.

Blender
I’ve been doing quite a lot of Blender again.

My mental is pretty damaged from this long ass development cycle (I bet yours is too.), combined with a few “minor” setbacks that happened in the past couple of months… But damn, do I feel good when I learn new stuff.

You see, I mentioned a while ago that I wanted to learn rigging to a degree… I need to at least somewhat understand the whole process to really make Blender work. I used Auto Rig Pro and delved into the world of rigging…

A few weeks ago, I realized something… This move to Blender isn’t some little bibi project. It’s a life-project to me.

I don’t just want to understand rigging and how to really get the most out of an armature, I want to master it.

So, I went ahead, purchased some valuable courses and books, and delved even deeper. Not just into rigging, but animation and posing as well.

The jumps I’ve made in the past 10 days are phenomenal, and it’s incredible how much momentum I gain from learning new things.

I’m only a fraction into it, but I went from awkward posing to creating an actually good looking jump cycle with Bella in less than 20 minutes, without prior guidance.

I’ve adapted a completely new approach to animations…

One drawback tho, I’m starting to despise Daz.

I’ve been speedrunning Blender issues that lead me to pause my Blender adventures in the past.

Certain actions get rid of your bone’s constraints? Make a bibi bone INSIDE the actual bone and parent them to each other and put the constraint on the bibi bone.

Clean as fuck results!

I will make blender logs soon, and I know I’ve been saying that for two years, but in the past, I spent 90% of my time on getting better ports from Daz to Blender, improving shaders, etc.

I don’t just wanna show screenshots of technical mumbo-jumbo… I want to share pretty pictures, fluid or experimental animations… and I’m finally getting there.

More about this in the future.

But it’s really helping me mentally.

Preview
This is the last preview of the update. I’ve mentioned earlier this year that after this update, I will severely reduce the number of previews I show.

Not every log will feature one, it goes hand in hand with faster updates.

View attachment 5528723

Oh, a while ago I mentioned that I was about to license a great song, but the guy didn’t answer anymore…

Two months later on the dot, I decided to check back in as you never know what’s going on in someone’s life and, 3 hours later I had the signed contract.

And with that, a great, 2-3min cinematic for a girl whose name has three letters will become a reality.

I may or may not publish a Christmas treat. Not as big as in the previous year. One image… A good one tho… Probably Jeff.

  • Ocean
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I really like this game. I think Ocean´s devlogs are the only ones I read at 100%.
For me the guy is one of the gods here, always trying to improve and change the rules. Like few others.

I want to start a clean game asap... This new season will be a separate one right? It's not going to be an update for the one season file? In that case I could start a new game without worrying about download again the same file.

Crashbullet said:
Zoe?
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Maybe Vic, but the name is Victoria so I don't know if Ocean is thinking about her like Vic or with the complete name.
 
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4.30 star(s) 572 Votes