Ren'Py Supermodel Snapshot [v2.1.0] [Belle]

[Lies.]

And at this point I'm not certain if the attack phase and action phase need to be separate.

They do, though as with so many other things, the limited scenario in version 1.0 doesn't show why. Some cards may have abilities that can be triggered by playing them on a Challenge card, for example, and that wouldn't work if the two phases were joined.

This is worth questioning I think - having two phases adds mental overhead for the player and a fair bit of interface complexity, so you want the play benefit to be high to be worth it.

A rethink could just be interface refinement - at the moment switching phase and playing actions just feels clunky, refining how the player accomplishes those might be enough. Moving/resizing elements on the screen between phases perhaps?

Forcing some choice around two modes of how cards are used, or imposing ordering on them, could also be done with card types or keywords rather than a phase toggle, so there are options.

 

[Belle]

I just uploaded a hotfix for 1.1 that gets rid of an exception on one variation of the game over screen. I strongly recommend updating to 1.1.1 if you already downloaded 1.1. The links to the download page are the same as before (

You must be registered to see the links

and

You must be registered to see the links

.)

 

[Belle]

This is worth questioning I think - having two phases adds mental overhead for the player and a fair bit of interface complexity, so you want the play benefit to be high to be worth it.

A rethink could just be interface refinement - at the moment switching phase and playing actions just feels clunky, refining how the player accomplishes those might be enough. Moving/resizing elements on the screen between phases perhaps?

Forcing some choice around two modes of how cards are used, or imposing ordering on them, could also be done with card types or keywords rather than a phase toggle, so there are options.

I'm up for having this discussion again in a while, but the concept of phases in card games like these is hardly novel, and it opens up a lot of potential for cool card abilities that might not otherwise work while helping to balance others. Restrictions like these spark my creativity, which is exactly what this game needs.

Before we discuss any of this, however, I feel like version 2.0 with the deckbuilder should become available so that players can see the bigger picture. That update should add a bunch of new cards, including ones that push into territory entirely unseen in the current version. If that version fails to make a compelling argument for separate phases, then I would need to seriously reconsider this structure.

 

[fenyx]

I havent tried the new version yet. But I wanted to give you some aditional feedback and some suggestions.
After finally understanding the game I went from winning 1 in 3 games to winning 2 in 3 and getting close (like 46+ heat) everytime I lost
I used to play some magic the gathering , and some astral lust as card games (the original game for DOS, not the tabletop game)
And some magic the gathering from the epic store, Im not supergreat at these games, I think I was gold last year when I stopped playing?

Maybe it would be more interesting to take away the turn limit and lose when your heat goes down to 0 and start the game with some heat, that way cards that takes away heat would be a little less punishing , and yet it gives you the feeling of "oh man im so gonna lose if im not careful", and to win you could, play a card that cost high ammounts of heat (that you could upgrade as the game proggresses) The misshaps cards could level up by the turn, making you win earlier or be almost impossible or totally impossible, instead of each turn getting more cards (I suppose one of the reasons the games has a 10 turn limits are programming issues or cluttering issues?)
This way you can get rid of "total heat" and just have Heat, and it becomes the resource you need to constantly adjust and administer, from the developer side, and the playerside
(I got confused when I read the first tutorial earlier, and I have played a lot of games believing you needed Heat to win instead of total Heat , so playing high heat cost cards was even more punishing in my mind. After understanding it, its less punishing but cards that cost lots of heat but do damage only to 1 kind of cards are still underwhelming)

 

[Belle]

I havent tried the new version yet. But I wanted to give you some aditional feedback and some suggestions.
After finally understanding the game I went from winning 1 in 3 games to winning 2 in 3 and getting close (like 46+ heat) everytime I lost
I used to play some magic the gathering , and some astral lust as card games (the original game for DOS, not the tabletop game)
And some magic the gathering from the epic store, Im not supergreat at these games, I think I was gold last year when I stopped playing?

Maybe it would be more interesting to take away the turn limit and lose when your heat goes down to 0 and start the game with some heat, that way cards that takes away heat would be a little less punishing , and yet it gives you the feeling of "oh man im so gonna lose if im not careful", and to win you could, play a card that cost high ammounts of heat (that you could upgrade as the game proggresses) The misshaps cards could level up by the turn, making you win earlier or be almost impossible or totally impossible, instead of each turn getting more cards (I suppose one of the reasons the games has a 10 turn limits are programming issues or cluttering issues?)
This way you can get rid of "total heat" and just have Heat, and it becomes the resource you need to constantly adjust and administer, from the developer side, and the playerside
(I got confused when I read the first tutorial earlier, and I have played a lot of games believing you needed Heat to win instead of total Heat , so playing high heat cost cards was even more punishing in my mind. After understanding it, its less punishing but cards that cost lots of heat but do damage only to 1 kind of cards are still underwhelming)

You're describing an entirely different game, and one that doesn't even fit the theme. The growing Heat represents a photo session heating up and getting more, well, hot.

 

[rb813]

I clicked on this when I was looking for games that were further along in development, so I was pissed at first that "1.0.0" was the initial release. But it ended up being lucky for me, because I really like card games, so I'm gonna try this one even though it's just a demo. I'm really hoping there is or will be a mechanic like in News Desk (and to a lesser extent, Lust Hunter) where the art on some cards gets sexier as you go.

 

[Belle]

I clicked on this when I was looking for games that were further along in development, so I was pissed at first that "1.0.0" was the initial release. But it ended up being lucky for me, because I really like card games, so I'm gonna try this one even though it's just a demo. I'm really hoping there is or will be a mechanic like in News Desk (and to a lesser extent, Lust Hunter) where the art on some cards gets sexier as you go.

The card art will vary in how sexy it is, but it won't ever contain nudity or porn. The background images you see during matches, however...

Supermodel Snapshot won't ever be a porn game for the record, but the full Supermodel: Defenders of Desire definitely will be. I'm just keeping the porn away from the card art because I want that part of the game to be streamable in the future with only changes to the background art.

 

[glaurung]

Add me to the list of those who won't be playing it because the effect description text on the cards is way too small on my 21" desktop monitor. Peering intently to make out the text? No thanks. Double clicking on each and every card so I can see the text without eyestrain? No thanks.

There's room to increase the font size on the cards. Just do that, please.

 

[rb813]

The concept of this is very exciting to me. I most likely would've already been quite interested in this if it was just a card game representing a photoshoot. Those are both concepts I really like already, but superheroines are also a really big one for me. I appreciate the bright pink trim on the sample superhero costume, because I personally love bright colors, and I always get bummed out when superheroes just wear all black (black with brightly colored trim is fine, because that provides a good contrast, but I wouldn't want them all to look like that). I really like the uniqueness of a card game and a superhero game where the "combat" is seduction instead of fisticuffs. Here's my feedback after a couple games...

I would be very happy about having an undo button in the game (or at least restore the usual Renpy save ability). I get that this release is basically just a demo to get some early feedback about the mechanics, but if I were playing a real ongoing game, it would be pretty frustrating to not have any way to go back if I made a bonehead decision, or maybe even just misclicked. I'm the type of person who can make very intelligent strategic moves if I proceed very carefully to consider all the angles, but that's not very damn fun. It feels like work to me, so I generally tend to just kinda rush in headlong without thinking three steps ahead (like the time I played an Engine card and then realized I should've first played the Upgrade card that reduces the cost of other cards). Different people's brains work differently, and having the ability to undo or rollback would make a game like this a hell of a lot more fun for me. At the very least, it would be helpful to have like a Lock button or something during the Challenge Phase, so that I can essentially tell myself, "okay, this is a card I'm gonna use in the Attack Phase, so I can't use it now," and don't have to worry about accidentally playing or discarding something that I need later. That might seem silly to people who can keep multiple things in their brains at the same time, but not all of us can do that easily, and it makes games less fun if I'm having to do mental juggling (instead of just going for it and then going back if I make a stupid mistake because I forgot something).

...After writing all that, I lost my second game (which was going quite well) because I didn't destroy cards during the Challenge Phase, because I was planning to use Pose Freely during the Action Phase, to bring the number of challenges down to exactly 2 (because I had This Is Fine in play). But then, when I played Pose Freely, it only destroyed one challenge card, when I was expecting it to destroy 3. That's when I noticed that the challenge cards all have a label at the bottom defining which type they are; I had been under the impression that "all Trust Challenge cards" meant all challenge cards with a Trust icon on them. I certainly won't make that mistake again in the future, but for now, it would've been real nice if I could've gone back to the Challenge Phase and continued playing my current game with that knowledge, instead of having to lose everything and start all over because of one mistake (having to lose substantial progress and start something from scratch is a HUGE pet peeve of mine in gaming). That's the kind of frustration that will sometimes cause me to stop playing a game and never start again, if it happens too often. And I think it's the only major beef I have with this one, so I really hope it won't be a factor in the full release.

The mechanic of placing Engine/Upgrade cards in the play area, combined with the superhero theme, reminded me of Sentinels of the Multiverse. That game is not a deckbuilder where your deck gradually gets stronger by purchasing new cards, but you still do get stronger over time. In Sentinels, you gradually power up by introducing cards that have ongoing effects from your hand into the play area, so that heroes who could only do one or two points of damage at the start of the game can sometimes do crazy amounts of damage by the end. I really like that "getting powered up" mechanic, I think it's fun to see just how far you can take it. Which is all my way of asking, why did you decide to limit the Engine/Upgrade cards to a maximum of 5? Was it primarily for the sake of play balance, or was it more of a practical consideration, that you didn't want to have to design a play area that could accommodate unlimited cards? If it was the latter, that makes perfect sense to me, but if it was the former, I feel like that maybe isn't very necessary. The ten-turn limit and the number of Engine cards in your deck already provide a pretty good guard rail on getting too overpowered. And you know, sometimes getting too overpowered can be fun anyway.

I concur with what others have said about the text being hard to read. It might be nice to just have a tooltip with larger text on hover (that can be turned off in Options for people who don't need it).

Are the girls in the card art all featured in Defenders of Desire? I think the girl on Flattery is my favorite.

I figured it out soon enough, but it might not hurt to emphasize more in the tutorial that cards don't cost Heat during the challenge phase.

Especially in the full release, when the modeling gets more sexy, it would be nice to have a button and/or hotkey that makes everything but the background image disappear so you can just look at the superhero babe for a little while.

Since the active challenge cards reduce your final Heat score at the end of the game, it might be helpful to have that number on display (like maybe have a red number in parenthesis next to your current Heat total). Maybe this is just me with my inability to juggle different thoughts at the same time, but I feel like it can be easy to get too focused on not ending a turn with more than 3 challenge cards, and forget that there is still a potential failure state that can come from less than 3.

 

[Belle]

I would be very happy about having an undo button in the game

This is... complicated. There are gameplay reasons why I might not want an undo button (the randomness of some cards, in particular, would be ruined by undo functionality), but the primary reason is that Ren'py's rollback feature does not play nice with Python code that is as complex as what I have made for this game. I use rollback during testing, and it's an unpredictable mess that I would want my players to have to deal with.

You will get rollback during the other parts of the game, but I think we'll just have to live with the card game not having any of that. Ultimately, it won't matter that much (see below).

instead of having to lose everything and start all over because of one mistake (having to lose substantial progress and start something from scratch is a HUGE pet peeve of mine in gaming).

It's a pet peeve for me too. I hate repeating myself in games, at least if the time commitment for each failure is large. That's why I've made sure to design this game so that each card match is brief, typically over within 10 minutes or less, and it's why there is a turn limit of 10 turns. Additionally, there is no penalty for losing, neither here nor in the full game, so the only thing you actually lose by losing is the small amount of time you spent on that specific match.

This is going to be a balancing act, but I don't think it will be a genuine problem once we get to the full game. Playtesting and time will tell, but we'll deal with that problem when we get there. For now, just know that I'm well aware of this challenge and try to avoid it or at least minimize its impact.

why did you decide to limit the Engine/Upgrade cards to a maximum of 5? Was it primarily for the sake of play balance, or was it more of a practical consideration, that you didn't want to have to design a play area that could accommodate unlimited cards?

Game design is almost always iterative. You start out with a concept, playtest it, tweak it, playtest it some more, tweak it some more, and so on. Snapshot started out quite a bit simpler and less focused than it is today and only evolved whenever my testing revealed that parts of the design were lacking or problematic.

The card limit is one of those things, and it started out because of the limited screen estate. I want to avoid having cards overlap except in unusual circumstances, and testing showed that the ideal size of both your hand and the play area was 5 cards. That was why I set that number. However, once it was set, I could go about balancing everything to be enhanced by this limitation since limitations add neat tactical layers to most games.

I suppose I don't have to spell out the reasons why the card limit makes your decisions on what cards to play interesting. What I can add is that it makes card design considerably more straightforward, particularly when it comes to balance. If I design a new Engine card, I know that it's going to take the place of a card that might generate 1-3 Heat per turn in the play area. Knowing that, I can make better decisions about what power level that card needs to compensate for this sacrifice. If there was no card limit, the math (yes, math. I do a lot of math and even compose spreadsheets when designing this game) would be so complex as to be unusable, and the entire game would be designed in the playtesting phase. That's not a good approach for a one-person team.

I was doubtful about both card limits at first, but as I played around with them, they grew on me until I came to love them. Right now, I consider them part of Snapshot's "secret sauce" and wouldn't want to get rid of them. And best of all, they open up avenues for powerful cards that let you bend these limits, such as Coffee. Imagine a card that lets you have another Engine in your play area! Isn't that exciting? Or a Challenge card that reduces the number of cards you can have in play. Isn't that frightening?

I love it.

I concur with what others have said about the text being hard to read. It might be nice to just have a tooltip with larger text on hover (that can be turned off in Options for people who don't need it).

Tooltips and hover effects are both things I wanted to avoid with Snapshot due to how the interface is meant to work equally well on touch devices as on computers. Besides, Ren'py isn't Unreal Engine or Unity; every graphical effect or interaction I add to the cards massively increases the code's complexity and the chances of obscure, hidden bugs that are next to impossible to track down.

For example, I would have loved to have the cards in your hand float slowly around at the bottom of the screen like in most other digital card games, but this comes with such a huge degree of risk, both of bugs and of making the code impenetrable even to myself, that I can't take the chance to implement it.

Having said all that, I would recommend that anyone complaining about the cards' font sizes have a look at screenshots from other popular digital card games on the market. You'll find that most of those games don't show you any text at all, instead hiding it until you click or hover over the cards. To me, that makes the game stop feeling like a card game and reduces my enjoyment of the whole thing. It's something I wanted to avoid despite how much screen estate it would have freed up.

I want Snapshot's cards to look like cards. If that's going to make the game cumbersome to a subset of the player base who has poor eyesight, then that's a damn shame and something that we're all just going to have to live with. As mentioned above, I'm a one-person team. While I want to keep my games accessible, I can only do so much with the time and money available to me. And no, despite what glaurung said above, there isn't room to increase font sizes for any but the most basic of cards.

The zoomed-in cards are there with a mere double-click. Use this to learn your cards, and know that you'll get so familiar with them after a few games that you won't really have to read them anymore. Once you start building your own deck, it becomes your deck with your cards. You're going to remember each and every one of them at a glance.

Are the girls in the card art all featured in Defenders of Desire? I think the girl on Flattery is my favorite.

The 3D-generated images all feature characters from Supermodel: Defenders of Desire (you can see them in the previews from the main menu). The 2D art is AI-generated and is only thematically related to the game and the cards, so you won't see the girl on the Flattery card in the game.

I went for this mix of art styles due to practical reasons. I started out making it all 3D, but the workload for that was massive, and the cards ended up looking too similar. As a result, I'm doing a mix of styles now, and I think it works quite well.

I figured it out soon enough, but it might not hurt to emphasize more in the tutorial that cards don't cost Heat during the challenge phase.

I guess it couldn't hurt. Noted.

Especially in the full release, when the modeling gets more sexy, it would be nice to have a button and/or hotkey that makes everything but the background image disappear so you can just look at the superhero babe for a little while.

This will be your reward for winning a photo shoot. You will get to browse every image you unlocked during the match at your leisure, seeing as they represent the photos you took. The plan is that these images get permanently unlocked in a gallery of some kind. Doing unusually well in a match might unlock bonus images that are lewder than the others.

Since the active challenge cards reduce your final Heat score at the end of the game, it might be helpful to have that number on display (like maybe have a red number in parenthesis next to your current Heat total).

Sure, it might not be a bad idea to do something like that. I've made a note of that as well.

 

[Armin]

Something that might be a consideration is to use symbols instead of text for common concepts, that would give you more room to work with.

An undo button would indeed be nice, since almost every card is dual purpose it's much easier to mess up than most games that use multiple phases in a turn. For me the demo doesn't really show the added value of the separate phases, though other cards in the full game could justify it.

For the full game, is there a plan to play around with the win conditions? I imagine you can do a lot by varying what you actually need to achieve for different levels.

Also an observation from the games I played, this might just be a consequence of how the demo deck works, but managing my actual spendable heat was never really an issue apart from the start of the game, if I was doing poorly I didn't have the heat to spend on card effects (plus I'd lose to lack of heat anyway even if I did deal with the challenges) and if I was doing well then I usually had the means to deal with challenges for free due to some +damage upgrades, so I didn't need to spend my heat. Especially with the big AoE cards the cost to play them was basically never a consideration compared to losing heat for playing them, if I had trouble paying for them I could absolutely not afford losing the heat and in the situations where I could afford to lose the heat I had 30-40 spendable heat left anyway and probably could deal with the challenges for free.

 

[Belle]

Something that might be a consideration is to use symbols instead of text for common concepts, that would give you more room to work with.

This is something I always wanted to do but thought would be "impossible" combined dynamically with text. Turns out I was wrong, so this is definitely something I will look at again before the release of 2.0. It should help a lot with the readability of the simpler effects like Heat gain or loss.

An undo button would indeed be nice, since almost every card is dual purpose it's much easier to mess up than most games that use multiple phases in a turn. For me the demo doesn't really show the added value of the separate phases, though other cards in the full game could justify it.

See my answer in the above post.

For the full game, is there a plan to play around with the win conditions? I imagine you can do a lot by varying what you actually need to achieve for different levels.

Yes, different scenarios will have different win conditions. I plan to play with this concept a lot.

Also an observation from the games I played, this might just be a consequence of how the demo deck works, but managing my actual spendable heat was never really an issue apart from the start of the game

It's partly an issue with the deck, but it also comes from how Heat gain is exponential, leading to huge amounts of Heat in the final few turns, more than could be realistically spent without making some cards so expensive as to be next to useless (in this deck, anyway).

This is one of those things that I gave up on balancing properly for 1.0. For 2.0, I expect to include a bunch of extremely expensive (but powerful!) instants to give decks with massive Heat production or Heat cost reduction something to do toward the end, and also to give Skill-focused decks something they have to sacrifice.

Don't be surprised if you see cards costing 30+ Heat in version 2.0.

 

[rb813]

Don't be surprised if you see cards costing 30+ Heat in version 2.0.

And they'll have pretty good attack values as well, right? (So they're not just completely useless for the earlier rounds.)

 

[Belle]

And they'll have pretty good attack values as well, right? (So they're not just completely useless for the earlier rounds.)

That depends on a lot of factors. I try not to make more expensive cards more powerful as attack cards just because they're expensive (look at the difference in attack values between the Engines and the Upgrades in the current version to see what I mean). Their attacks will likely be competitive with other cards, but I don't want you to pick them for their attack values.

 

[rb813]

I played the game some more today. Maybe I'm just bad at it, but I can't tell you how many times I decided a Challenge card really needed to be eliminated, then looked at the cards in my hand and realized I couldn't possibly eliminate that card even if I spent every card in my hand (because there just weren't enough cards with the right attack type). My suggestion would be to either have more cards that cover multiple attack types, so it doesn't feel as dependent on luck of the draw, or make it so you can use any card to do one point of damage to any challenge type (if you think that's too powerful, maybe make it an engine instead). I have fun with strategy games when I feel like the game system provides me with multiple risk/reward avenues to deal with a problem (such as sacrificing a really powerful card to get just that extra little bit of attack you needed). I get frustrated with strategy games when I feel like there's simply nothing I can do to overcome an obstacle (especially when it's a challenge card that has a negative effect at the end of the turn, thus causing a "poor get poorer" situation).

 

[rb813]

When I finally did win, it didn't feel like I was doing something different or had learned some new tricks, it just felt like the luck of the draw was more in my favor. Maybe being able to build the deck in between rounds will help with that in the full game.

 

[Belle]

When I finally did win, it didn't feel like I was doing something different or had learned some new tricks, it just felt like the luck of the draw was more in my favor. Maybe being able to build the deck in between rounds will help with that in the full game.

The kind of control you want is obviously not available in this version, and the current deck is clearly not balanced or optimized. You will have much more control over this once version 2.0 is out and you get to deckbuild, allowing you to customize the types of cards to suit how you like to play.

 

[KristopheH]

Adding my voice to the chorus; the balance in this demo is way off, and the game feels unwinnable.
Been playing for a couple of hours, and I'm still only getting high 20s/low 30s most games.

 

[Belle]

Adding my voice to the chorus; the balance in this demo is way off, and the game feels unwinnable.
Been playing for a couple of hours, and I'm still only getting high 20s/low 30s most games.

1.0 or 1.1?

 

[rb813]

1.0 or 1.1?

1.1 hasn't been released here, has it?