Ren'Py Summertime Saga [v21.0.0 wip.5091] [Kompas Productions]

[Stiehl69x]

Help I am stuck in the Pink shop the exit button disappeared.

 

[mastodonte69]

Dogeek was kicked out? LOL

 

[mastodonte69]

Incorporating artists to draw or color in an ongoing project is a bad idea. DC would be forced to spend less time drawing to supervise the artists' work. Also, it is important to maintain homogeneity in the visual aspect.

If you think that with $50,000 monthly you can hire a whole team of cartoonists full time, you are hallucinating. In addition to salaries you have to pay taxes. Hiring is very expensive. Without forgetting, of course, that there has to be money left to live on.

with 50,000 a month you can pay a whole team, how? start hiring people who live's in countrys like Argentina/Mexico/Chile where 1 dollar have a lot of value after all dc already works "online" with he's colleagues, and you are crazy if you think that their work would be bad.

 

[secretsonny]

with 50,000 a month you can pay a whole team, how? start hiring people who live's in countrys like Argentina/Mexico/Chile where 1 dollar have a lot of value after all dc already works "online" with he's colleagues, and you are crazy if you think that their work would be bad.

Bold of you to think that there are artists lining up and applying. There aren't.

 

[srksrk 68]

Help I am stuck in the Pink shop the exit button disappeared.

I suggest doing as Jenny and the phone hints tell you. Buy the "Ultra Vibrator 2000".

 

[2xjj]

Dogeek was kicked out? LOL

Yes when you consistently lose your temper at your coworkers you get fired.

 

[Deleted member 519678]

with 50,000 a month you can pay a whole team, how? start hiring people who live's in countrys like Argentina/Mexico/Chile where 1 dollar have a lot of value after all dc already works "online" with he's colleagues, and you are crazy if you think that their work would be bad.

So your suggestion is to exploit artist workers? Nice.

 

[backgrounduser]

starting, new to everything, but i didnt realize how much of an industry and community there is behind everything, and the developers such interesting comments

 

[WtfwinPC]

So your suggestion is to exploit artist workers? Nice.

Sounds like a fantastic idea.

 

[lolhahawut]

Will progress from 0.19.5 carry to 0.20?

 

[Sir_EatsALot]

I still remember the time when updates for this game used to get released on the 29th of every month lol. But can't really blame the dev when his patrons have really low expectations. Good thing I stopped playing this game long back and looking at the changelog I didn't miss much in these two years lol.

 

[srksrk 68]

I still remember the time when updates for this game used to get released on the 29th of every month lol. But can't really blame the dev when his patrons have really low expectations. Good thing I stopped playing this game long back and looking at the changelog I didn't miss much in these two years lol.

So you're missing everything since 0.15.1? That's teachers, Roxxy, Diane, Daisy, Jenny, Jenny 2, Eve and Consuela. Not much, really.

 

[Sir_EatsALot]

So you're missing everything since 0.15.1? That's teachers, Roxxy, Diane, Daisy, Jenny, Jenny 2, Eve and Consuela. Not much, really.

Seeing as how it has been more than 2 years? Yeah not much. And if my memory serves correctly the teachers update was roughly around 16 lewd scenes? Not sex just lewd whereas his single updates used to contain 6 scenes. So yeah 50k a month for 4 lewd scenes. Man tough job indeed.

 

[Deleted member 426398]

I disagree quite strongly, to be honest. Everybody who starts for example as solo selfemployed or owns a small business will have to make the decision how far he wants to expand in case business goes well. Do you feel comfortable sharing certain aspects for your core work or not? Would you share it with anybody or just members of your family? Do you want to open and manage branches or not? Those are key questions for many small/family businesses and both directions are viable to any degree. If he doesn't want to expand his team/business beyond the current scale, he does indeed have to live the consquences, which mean less growth and revenue than he could have had. Even though the numbers look good, the game basically plateaued quite some time ago, unlike other games who continue to expand. Wild Life is probably the most prominent example, currently.

I think we both agree that the game would very likely be more successful if he'd manage to hire another artist and to increase the update schedule and amount of content he releases. I mean, there are many who stopped being patreons after he changed his schedule, who likely would have stayed otherwise.

But that still doesn't mean that he's milking, which, at least in my eyes, requires a strong missmatch of the time it takes and the promised content (quantity and quality) released, which I just don't see in this case. Sure, there was some confusion when those changes happened, but I can't see any possible missunderstanding or ill will since.

There are multiple sites to hire talent from. You tell them what to do, they do it, you pay them. You don't have to give them your life story. This is about whether or not he can find someone help him finish art faster. The fact that every other company that does drawn art, from Miyazaki on down, can manage to do it, but this one person on the planet with income to do so, can't, points the issue squarely back at it being a DC problem. I don't care what the excuses are, even hiring someone strictly to do backgrounds, would speed the process up, and it won't cost him an arm and a leg to do it.

I got chewed out for being accepting of A Town Remembered being slow, having shitty art, and routinely being of poor release quality. I expect, and accept that, from one guy, working on this in whatever spare time he has. He's barely shown any growth in what he does over the 2 years or however long he's been at it. It is what it is. He's clearly just putzing along.

Here, DC hired a team, grew the team, and kept making more money. He claims he worked in gaming before this. He clearly knows what he is doing. This whole aw shucks got lucky act is garbage. Now, despite all that work and growth, magically, he's only managed to get to version .2 after 3 years, and over half a million dollars in his pocket. People make feature length independent films with smaller budgets in less time. Actual competently made video games by indie developers take about 5 to 6 years, and they don't look as low budget as SS.

The progress of this game stands at its pace, despite everything, for one simple reason - he's creating a bottleneck on purpose. He knows how this shit is done and he keeps saying how he can't find someone to match his style. People make careers off of mimicking other artist style. There are websites devoted to hiring people who can draw. No one else on the planet making 50k a month seems to have an issue finding someone simply to make background art to speed up a job. Last time I check, DC remains, not a unicorn. Hence, I feel this is a being done on milk an audience. Did anyone ask for a near complete overhaul of the art he spent months doing?

It's funny how he talks about future games....3 years into this one and he's at .2. If this slowness isn't being done on purpose I'm sure he'll start when he's had kid #15.

Yes when you consistently lose your temper at your coworkers you get fired.

He also directly interacted with an impossible to please group of people. No one should be surprised he developed anger issues. I saw a post on reddit saying this game needs more gay content....nothing pleases game players, ever.

 

[j4yj4m]

Here, DC hired a team, grew the team, and kept making more money. He claims he worked in gaming before this. He clearly knows what he is doing.

I kind of feel we aren't talking about the same thing. I mean, he partly seems to have left the industry because he didn't like the whole middle management thing and wanted to do his own thing on a small scale. It totally makes sense to not replicate that business environment again and grow above a certain level, if he hates to work like that. That's probably all I can answer to your post, because we fundamentally seem to disagree on this very, very basic princinple. You want to force him to grow, just because he happens to earn X amount of money. I respect his decision as long as he's willing to live with the consequences.

He also directly interacted with an impossible to please group of people. No one should be surprised he developed anger issues. I saw a post on reddit saying this game needs more gay content....nothing pleases game players, ever.

Hm? Anger issues? I'm listening to quite a few streams and I can't see any of that. He's doing his thing, people can send him good suggestions, if he likes them, he'll consider it, if not, then not. Next to that, people will always complain, no matter what one does, it just comes wit the numbers.

Edit: Sorry, I didn't realize this was about Dogeek. Well, he's always been a very free spirit, who quite often, even before he left, did things DC didn't really seem to approve. Given their interactions at times, I was actually surprised it didn't happen earlier. At least I wouldn't have have put up with some of those things...

Did anyone ask for a near complete overhaul of the art he spent months doing?

First of all, all those (in some areas, like south east asia more than 50%) who play on mobile required the rig-system for the game to stay as small as it is and second of all, the game has finally won some consistency, which greatly improve the overall quality.

Seeing as how it has been more than 2 years? Yeah not much. And if my memory serves correctly the teachers update was roughly around 16 lewd scenes? Not sex just lewd whereas his single updates used to contain 6 scenes. So yeah 50k a month for 4 lewd scenes. Man tough job indeed.

Na, the next update will have 5 sex scenes and an unkown amount of lewd stuff. Those were never announced before the update dropped.

 

[Sir_EatsALot]

Na, the next update will have 5 sex scenes and an unkown amount of lewd stuff. Those were never announced before the update dropped.

Haha, I don't think you understood my point. Even if the next update has 5 sex scenes and (i am going to be generous and say) 20 lewd (stuff) scenes, that still puts it at 5 overall scenes a month. So yeah 50k for 5 scenes a month. If the patrons are happy with this math, then good for them.

 

[j4yj4m]

Haha, I don't think you understood my point. Even if the next update has 5 sex scenes and (i am going to be generous and say) 20 lewd (stuff) scenes, that still puts it at 5 overall scenes a month. So yeah 50k for 5 scenes a month. If the patrons are happy with this math, then good for them.

If you want to focus on sex scenes, this game isn't for you anyway. It has always been weak on those and since the started caring about proper quests design and basically doubled the quality of the scenes, the number stayed small. Having said that, the game as a game/product did improve massively. I've recently looked into 0.14.5 (the last true incest version) and one really tends to forget how bad it actually was back then.

 

[Sir_EatsALot]

The progress of this game stands at its pace, despite everything, for one simple reason - he's creating a bottleneck on purpose. He knows how this shit is done and he keeps saying how he can't find someone to match his style. People make careers off of mimicking other artist style. There are websites devoted to hiring people who can draw. No one else on the planet making 50k a month seems to have an issue finding someone simply to make background art to speed up a job. Last time I check, DC remains, not a unicorn. Hence, I feel this is a being done on milk an audience. Did anyone ask for a near complete overhaul of the art he spent months doing?

You don't need to look that far. Just take a peek at the fan art thread or some mod (I forgot which one) that has extra content indistinguishable from DC's work. He only needs to make assets. Facial expressions and body proportions. The rest can be worked on by any decent artist. Of course I don't blame him. He has no need to push out updates faster. There is no added reward. He is getting paid irrespective of his pace so it makes complete sense that he continues at the current pace and prolongs this project as long as possible. He made the right decision from a business perspective.

 

[Sir_EatsALot]

If you want to focus on sex scenes, this game isn't for you anyway. It has always been weak on those and since the started caring about proper quests design and basically doubled the quality of the scenes, the number stayed small. Having said that, the game as a game/product did improve massively. I've recently looked into 0.14.5 (the last true incest version) and one really tends to forget how bad it actually was back then.

I never said it was about sex scenes, I was basically crunching numbers. I have nothing against the dev. I stopped playing because I was annoyed at the dev's reasons for the updates taking so long and having little content increase in terms of actual scenes. The eagle eyed among the audience would notice the content seems massive but the story scenes use the same assets. Same character drawings with different background (not unique art) and new texts. So yeah, you only need to stop and look objectively at each update and the lack of content becomes abundantly clear. The size of new content is not proportional to the playtime, never is.

I think what I am trying to say is clear. I don't want to prolong this discussion and turn it into me vs everyone who absolutely loves the dev. But I stand by the dev's choice of limiting update size because that is the right move from a business perspective. Why deliver more when audience is happy with what they have? The game is good, always has been. I hope you guys do enjoy it.

 

[j4yj4m]

The eagle eyed among the audience would notice the content seems massive but the story scenes use the same assets.

That's what they did before to bloat their content, like Jenny's "story" was bascailly nothing else but a permanent repeat of quests and even scenes. Now the stories are a lot more diverse/unique, while the assetmanagement via the rig-system got a lot better, so many things can be combined at will. Actually basically just as you suggested in the post before. Every character now has a torso, interchangeable arms and facial impressions.

Else it's fine that people stop pledging if they don't agree with his way of working. After all, that's what patreon is about.