- Oct 16, 2023
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HTML Syrup Town [v2.5] [NoodleJacuzzi]
- Thread starter NoodleJacuzzi
- Start date
- May 20, 2019
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More posts! I would really have loved to have responded right away, but for some inane reason gmail decided to move all emails for things like subscribestar and f95zone to a new tab and stopped notifying me of them. Thanks google!
So I've been working on v2, I have people testing sharly right now actually, but the long delay was caused by (among a few other personal life matters) me finally creating an SDXL LoRa for syrup town!
It would have been a lot easier to just straight up use my non-furry lora but I really like the softer nature of syrup town's current art and didn't want the shift to be -too- jarring. The ideal would be literally syrup town's current artstyle but with sharper lines and fewer anatomical errors.
So I went through every single image in the game and many other ones I found to be the best from my unused batches, cleaned them up heavily by hand, re-tagged them so they were more accurate, and then used Img2Img with various models at low denoising to get shots that I think still match the general vibe of syrup town but are much higher quality:
Some direct before/after shots:
Then I realized that the huge amount of Angelica, Riley, and Sorbet in particular would throw off the model by overfitting it to their details so I did the same thing with every one of my pokemon images and the tarot cards:
And the model can do even more pocketmanz designs as well:
You can find a link to the model and all the tags I used for it (and plan to include in the training data in the future) here, along with a link to all the training data as well:
In total making the lora required cleaning and retagging about 850 images, and while I'd really like to do a thousand more to get even better quality I called it here for now so I can get back to work on the game.
Notably the lora has trouble with Bluebell's hair, it likes to turn Marlow's ears and tail brown, it messes with Angelica's fur giving her a white fur pattern a lot, and I'll need to completely redesign Mary-Lou in the future as her current design feels really weird in the newer style.
I don't think it's a perfect improvement. There are some areas where I prefer the lighting style and more abstract backgrounds of easyfluff, but my main goal was to create a model that would let me:
- Generate the characters reliably and consistently, as when using easyfluff there are substantial detail and anatomy errors in around 60% of images.
- Use plugins like regional prompting so I can do threesome scenes.
- Generate profile shots with sharper edges so that I can use rembg to remove backgrounds instead of needing to remove them by hand.
- Take advantage of sdxl's larger database so that I can generate syrup characters doing things like footjobs, which just wasn't happening with the easyfluff model.
And the fact that I now can do all that is a big win in my book! So while it was a lot of work I think it was worth all the effort.
With every CG editted to match the new style I've spent the last few days generating new expression sheets for every character. A lot of the older ones had pretty notable errors that stood out a lot when you compared one costume to another in the museum. All 17 characters (dick vs no-dick system chars are treated as separate characters), 13 expressions each (I added a new 'blush' expression I felt was lacking while writing Sharly), and every character has at least two costumes.
At each stage of the process I used the scripts I made for making expressions for the non-furry cast, so really the only hard parts were:
- I generated 48 total base images for every character/outfit, and had to narrow it down to just one
- After generating the variants of the base image to use for the expressions I had to clean up details like breath clouds, floating hearts, and make sure details like clothing strap colors, hair styles, and tail patterns were consistent. This was a lot of manually cleaning things up.
As I write this I'm upscaling all of the images before I use remBG to remove the backgrounds, so the last bit of hard work will be going back in afterwards to clean up any areas remBG missed. Because the new model works so consistently I was able to img2img the whole character instead of just the face without it ruining the shots, so characters now leak precum in their ahegao portraits or sweat in their excited ones, for example.
I was actually able to try out lots of different new costumes as well:
And once all of that is finished I'll re-sort everything into its proper place, downscale it to reduce the massive filesize (SDXL hires images are almost 4 megabytes a pop) and put it all on the PTR for testing before getting back to work.
Sharly's main story like I mentioned is totally finished and all the framework for the rest is done, it's just scenewriting for the rest of the fluffies left now.
By the way while I was searching through my files I found a bunch of the very first shots I used of the syrup cast and made a little image comparing the oldest style to the newest one (sorry about the weird spacing I've used a lot of different image sizes over time):
And another to try and show off some of the game's major styles (fluffyrock with a generic lora, fluffyrock with the first lora I trained, fluffyrock with a vastly improved lora, an older version of easyfluff, and finally the latest SDXL lora)
Good gravy technology certainly has come a long way! I'm very grateful to have a patient community, if I'd stopped trying to constantly improve and better understand the tech I never would have gotten this far.
While there is a character who theoretically could do the swap, Helena, the one who actually owns the pocketmanz cards in the first place, I think trading the variants manually sounds tedious, especially because the only purpose for getting all the cards is to bask in a full collection.
While the new model might be able to generate decent feminine versions of specific mons some definitely still don't work, incineroar always wants pecs and a masculine frame. And I still have no idea how I'd make a dickgirl version of eevee among many other ferals.
Unironically I had a reference to this as one of the bug-hunting encounters planned:
But I scrapped it as I couldn't find a good way for easyfluff to do dinosaurs.
Please for the love of goodness do not hold me to expanding on the terrible ideas I have while writing at 3am. We barely avoided the timeline where one of the prisoners in anomaly vault was an american-flag bikini wearing bombshell who turned people into hamburgers:
To be honest every time I look at the oldest images I generated for the game I wonder how I ever thought "yeah, this could work for a game". I promised I'd eventually make a non-furry version to go alongside it so that people would stick around while I worked on the most cartoony goofy nonsense I don't understand how I thought I was cooking:
And while it can take me quite a while I try my best to stick to my word eventually, so the non-furry version is something I'm sticking with.
Plus I can use the models I create for the non-furry version on other games in the future, like rainy dayz:
Or argent science:
So I've been working on v2, I have people testing sharly right now actually, but the long delay was caused by (among a few other personal life matters) me finally creating an SDXL LoRa for syrup town!
It would have been a lot easier to just straight up use my non-furry lora but I really like the softer nature of syrup town's current art and didn't want the shift to be -too- jarring. The ideal would be literally syrup town's current artstyle but with sharper lines and fewer anatomical errors.
So I went through every single image in the game and many other ones I found to be the best from my unused batches, cleaned them up heavily by hand, re-tagged them so they were more accurate, and then used Img2Img with various models at low denoising to get shots that I think still match the general vibe of syrup town but are much higher quality:
Some direct before/after shots:
Then I realized that the huge amount of Angelica, Riley, and Sorbet in particular would throw off the model by overfitting it to their details so I did the same thing with every one of my pokemon images and the tarot cards:
And the model can do even more pocketmanz designs as well:
You can find a link to the model and all the tags I used for it (and plan to include in the training data in the future) here, along with a link to all the training data as well:
You must be registered to see the links
In total making the lora required cleaning and retagging about 850 images, and while I'd really like to do a thousand more to get even better quality I called it here for now so I can get back to work on the game.
Notably the lora has trouble with Bluebell's hair, it likes to turn Marlow's ears and tail brown, it messes with Angelica's fur giving her a white fur pattern a lot, and I'll need to completely redesign Mary-Lou in the future as her current design feels really weird in the newer style.
I don't think it's a perfect improvement. There are some areas where I prefer the lighting style and more abstract backgrounds of easyfluff, but my main goal was to create a model that would let me:
- Generate the characters reliably and consistently, as when using easyfluff there are substantial detail and anatomy errors in around 60% of images.
- Use plugins like regional prompting so I can do threesome scenes.
- Generate profile shots with sharper edges so that I can use rembg to remove backgrounds instead of needing to remove them by hand.
- Take advantage of sdxl's larger database so that I can generate syrup characters doing things like footjobs, which just wasn't happening with the easyfluff model.
And the fact that I now can do all that is a big win in my book! So while it was a lot of work I think it was worth all the effort.
With every CG editted to match the new style I've spent the last few days generating new expression sheets for every character. A lot of the older ones had pretty notable errors that stood out a lot when you compared one costume to another in the museum. All 17 characters (dick vs no-dick system chars are treated as separate characters), 13 expressions each (I added a new 'blush' expression I felt was lacking while writing Sharly), and every character has at least two costumes.
At each stage of the process I used the scripts I made for making expressions for the non-furry cast, so really the only hard parts were:
- I generated 48 total base images for every character/outfit, and had to narrow it down to just one
- After generating the variants of the base image to use for the expressions I had to clean up details like breath clouds, floating hearts, and make sure details like clothing strap colors, hair styles, and tail patterns were consistent. This was a lot of manually cleaning things up.
As I write this I'm upscaling all of the images before I use remBG to remove the backgrounds, so the last bit of hard work will be going back in afterwards to clean up any areas remBG missed. Because the new model works so consistently I was able to img2img the whole character instead of just the face without it ruining the shots, so characters now leak precum in their ahegao portraits or sweat in their excited ones, for example.
I was actually able to try out lots of different new costumes as well:
And once all of that is finished I'll re-sort everything into its proper place, downscale it to reduce the massive filesize (SDXL hires images are almost 4 megabytes a pop) and put it all on the PTR for testing before getting back to work.
Sharly's main story like I mentioned is totally finished and all the framework for the rest is done, it's just scenewriting for the rest of the fluffies left now.
By the way while I was searching through my files I found a bunch of the very first shots I used of the syrup cast and made a little image comparing the oldest style to the newest one (sorry about the weird spacing I've used a lot of different image sizes over time):
And another to try and show off some of the game's major styles (fluffyrock with a generic lora, fluffyrock with the first lora I trained, fluffyrock with a vastly improved lora, an older version of easyfluff, and finally the latest SDXL lora)
Good gravy technology certainly has come a long way! I'm very grateful to have a patient community, if I'd stopped trying to constantly improve and better understand the tech I never would have gotten this far.
I think your first sentence there got cut off.
While there is a character who theoretically could do the swap, Helena, the one who actually owns the pocketmanz cards in the first place, I think trading the variants manually sounds tedious, especially because the only purpose for getting all the cards is to bask in a full collection.
While the new model might be able to generate decent feminine versions of specific mons some definitely still don't work, incineroar always wants pecs and a masculine frame. And I still have no idea how I'd make a dickgirl version of eevee among many other ferals.
Probably not, I'll probably run out of ideas for porn scenes long before I run out of characters who need content. The random encounters are just a space to do random things for one-off ideas, gags, or references.
Unironically I had a reference to this as one of the bug-hunting encounters planned:
But I scrapped it as I couldn't find a good way for easyfluff to do dinosaurs.
Please for the love of goodness do not hold me to expanding on the terrible ideas I have while writing at 3am. We barely avoided the timeline where one of the prisoners in anomaly vault was an american-flag bikini wearing bombshell who turned people into hamburgers:
Yes but I believe they were specifically talking about certain vibes not appealing to certain people, so trying to make a version of eevee that appeals to folks who would disable male content. Trying to decide if such a mode should disable characters like nutmeg, riley, and cayenne is hard given their very androgynous nature, it's even harder when you're working with ferals like eevee.
Yes someone coming into animal crossing rule 34 would probably not be interested in the non-furry version, but there's plenty of people who come to syrup town from my other games and if they just plain dislike furry art then the non-furry version gives them a way to enjoy the game.
To be honest every time I look at the oldest images I generated for the game I wonder how I ever thought "yeah, this could work for a game". I promised I'd eventually make a non-furry version to go alongside it so that people would stick around while I worked on the most cartoony goofy nonsense I don't understand how I thought I was cooking:
And while it can take me quite a while I try my best to stick to my word eventually, so the non-furry version is something I'm sticking with.
Plus I can use the models I create for the non-furry version on other games in the future, like rainy dayz:
Or argent science:
Rainy dayz sounds like a resident evil genre and argent science can be any form of science fiction of all types.
- May 20, 2019
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I think what you're saying is that games inspired by resident evil and science fiction would have very different tones from the non-furry version of syrup town? Apologies if I'm misunderstanding you.
That is true, but training an AI model revolves around two things:
1. Exposing the AI to known concepts, which is basically saying to the AI "You know X? This is how you do X in this style." This teaches the AI how to draw the things it already knows in the desired style.
2. Exposing the AI to new concepts, saying "This is Y in this style". This teaches the AI how to interpret the new concept and expands the total amount of concepts it can create, teaching it to draw new things.
SDXL knows natively how to draw anime-styled hair, shortstacks, shirts, and so-forth, so including those things in the training data teaches it how to draw in the style I like. But in order to do that I need multiple images in that style and I need to take the time to clean up any errors in that image. Making Syrup Town's non-furry version means I have a large trove of varied images that I've already spent a lot of time cleaning and that multiple others have looked at, giving me more eyes to find flaws.
From there I apply that style to new things teaching it bit by bit. The model now knows how what I mean when I ask for a penis, standing shot, and sneakers, so when I need to teach the AI how to do vore for rainy dayz I give it images where only needs to learn how to draw one unfamiliar concept, the rest is already in the training data, and so with only a bit of work I get:
And since my non-furry syrup lora has so many images I was able use it at a super low denoising level to clean up the furry version's images. There would be no furry SDXL model if not for the work I did making the non-furry version. For one example this means if the non-furry version of the game didn't exist, making a threesome scene with jasper and garnet would be unfeasible (because I'd need to use regional prompting, an extension that doesn't work with easyfluff but does work with SDXL)
Beyond the training are the scripts I've written for the non-furry version. Easyfluff had very messy outlines so there wasn't any point in learning how to use RemBG to automatically remove backgrounds, but SDXL models have much crisper lines so I learned how to use it, created scripts to upscale things to SDXL resolutions, scripts to generate full expression sheets, scripts to remove and re-inject PNG data, scripts to convert e621 tags to danbooru tags, etc. Among other things I used these scripts for generating the new syrup expression sheets, and hopefully once I've made them less jank and shared them, others will use these tools and the guides I've written to make their own games (and avoid the pitfalls I've already stumbled into)
In short I work on a variety of things, my understanding of the technology improves, I apply that understanding to make more training data, I get a better general use model, it forms the foundation for other more specific ideas. Just like how working on Syrup Town gave me more javascript knowledge that I'll apply to my other games.
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Those images from both types still looking good and it wasn't a bad idea to use some from RD in non-furry if this will make your job easier. But since there was that big delay, no one can be sure what will be next. And I know I asked that before, but anyways, What's the probable date of release? Like in 1-2 months or longer maybe?
Indeed, you have misunderstood me.
I made those guesses because the former reminds me of DayZ, which originated from a mod from Arma 2 and the latter is a pretty basic science fiction title. It's more of a basic observation than any relation to syurp town.
I do appreciate the non-sequitur SDXL explaination.
- Oct 10, 2020
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Alright... I am sold... Allow me to leave a comment here so that I may return to this awesome looking game... just need to finish... quite a bit of stuff, then I will dive on in and see the game for myself ;3
- Dec 16, 2019
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NGL, to save on file size, it might be worth it for the dev to package the game and the art separately, then split the art up into different downloads too, like male, female, and other (femboys and dickgirls and whatever), then the human alts for each. Rather than having the game with two completely separate downloads, just slot in the art that you like.
I mean 3GB is already kinda big for a v1 game, just worried the game'll end up doing that thing a lot of these kinds of games do where a year from now it'll be a 12GB download, then a year later it's up to like 99999TB just because of all the minute variations between characters and scenes and fetishes, etc.
I mean 3GB is already kinda big for a v1 game, just worried the game'll end up doing that thing a lot of these kinds of games do where a year from now it'll be a 12GB download, then a year later it's up to like 99999TB just because of all the minute variations between characters and scenes and fetishes, etc.
- May 20, 2019
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You must be registered to see the links
v2 is finally done! Holy moley that took way longer than expected!
New content:
- Switched to the SDXL model PrefectPony, every single one of the game's ~500 CGs and every single character's outfits and full expression sets were redone in the new style. Every event image, every pocketmanz card, every tarot card, every vein on Angelica's blue balls. Everything (except for the pog coins which I forgot uwu). New character: Madame Sharly, the Mystical Black Cat
- 2(-ish, his teasing is spread out over several days) new scenes for Riley
- New scene for Angelica & Bluebell (images & some text differ based on sex)
- New scene for Jasper, Garnet, and Sorbet
- You can now enter a character's house after becoming friends with them, leading to repeatable scenes
- Added 5 other pocketmanz cards and 2 new jiggies which can be obtained from gathering anything anywhere.
- The final new pocketmanz card is available from a new gathering spot in the forest wilderness
- Added a special new triad jiggy, obtained by collecting all pocketmanz cards, let me know if you like or dislike this new type!
- Added full SDXL and Easyfluff installation and usage guides to the museum's technology wing. In the future I'll have guides for other topics too, like img2img or how to make expression sets.
Other changes:
- Morning events and random encounters will now have a chance to repeat after a certain amount of time instead of restarting immediately after refreshing the game
- Added names to the accessories so you can see which square is for which item and if they're enabled or not
- Characters will give tours of their houses which is now how you unlock their clothes for personal use
Bugfixes:
- Fixed the broken styles (persona, lobotomy, and vaporwave) on mobile
- Fixed a bug where the encounter tabs in the basic style were missing some styling
- Fixed a bug where Garnet's pog coin was broken online
- Stopped the train noise after arriving in town
You must be registered to see the links
But the new style should allow for a lot of fun new possibilities! No longer am I bound to the constraints of Easyfluff!
Overall the new model makes image work a lot more smooth and leads to higher image quality overall. Personally, there are elements of Easyfluff I prefer, but I can't be fiddling with AI models forever can I?
Future versions of the new SDXL syurofluff model should fix up a lot of the weird quirks, but I don't plan on doing another complete game rebuild like this one. There are nearly 5000 files in my images folder, and nearly all of them were redone. I checked them all but if I missed any egregious errors, please let me know!
Really, I just wanted all the advantages that come with using an SDXL model. Better character consistency between scenes, less needing to correct details on the character and in the environment, threesomes, getting paws to look right, etc.
Other notes:
- The non-furry version is now out of date. If playing online be aware that the new content won't have images if playing on the non-furry version until v2.5 releases.
- A few extra random encounters and extra pocketmanz cards were left on the cutting room floor. V2.5 content? <.<
- Definitely let me know if you like the triad jiggy thing, the larger size makes assembling more fun (in my opinion), but the game may need more work on mobile for big images like that to be fun.
- Subscribers plz send avatar requests the sponsor wing is so bare LET ME THANK YOU FOR ALL YOUR SUPPORT ALREADY
- A large number of costumes are present in the game's files but not used yet. This is because they're totally ready for use but I don't know what costumes will be painful to translate to the non-furry version. Since both games use the same save data, if a costume is only present in one version it'll lead to a lot of weird errors, and I don't want to have to delay the non-furry version if it turns out that a costume is confusing the non-furry model.
- The only things not changed (aside from the UI) for the SDXL style are the pog coins (I forgor lmao) and the player. The player image was manually assembled and all the pieces were cropped out by hand to achieve the paperdoll style, so upgrading those to SDXL will be tough. Still, the player model stands out so much at this point I know I'll need to do it eventually.
Anyways, let me know what you think of the update! Who should be next? Coming soon will be all the new content of v2 for the non-furry version! I'll need to update my fur to non-fur script, but it shouldn't take me too long. Expect that version in about a week! If things go smoothly I'll include the new costumes and little bits I didn't finish for v2 as well.
After that I have a Hentai University update to write, busy busy busy! But I'd love to hear any feedback you have regardless. Sorry again that this took so long! It was meant to be the start of consistent updates the but the style change and working on LoRas really ballooned things out.
Dealing with exact timelines is hard because I mostly let myself bounce around which helps avoid burnout, and even with ADD meds my brain really likes bouncing. Sometimes it can take weeks to get myself to focus on writing scenes, other times I can get a bunch done in one day.
If it were just mechanical stuff like remaking the player avatar and all the clothes, or making spreadsheets of something, I could give you a very direct timeline, but writing in particular is very hard for me to force onto a specific timeline, I'm sorry.
Luckily the non-furry update won't involve engaging my creative brain so I can confidently say it'll be about a week, then I'll work on university, then back to syrup, bouncing between the two while also cooking rainy on the backburner.
Hopefully you'll enjoy!
That's what the .webp version is for, being a much smaller size without the quality drop from using .jpgs. I personally use the .webp version myself, but I keep the png version around as it holds the png info. I only recently figured out how to bulk re-inject png info back into an image so I had to keep all of v1's images at full size, which is why it was so large.
Got some bugs to share.
It seems that the Sharly outfit reward just gives you the same dress from the Sorbet one.
I don't know if it's a me problem, but i can't get one pocketzman card, is the one on the left of Lopunny(Female).
The Sharly blowjob repeat scene is missing one image, i was on the web version of the game, so i don't know if it's on all versions.
The Terrarium Wing sometimes forget the items you already got, it's really random, and it stop happening when you get all of them.
- May 20, 2019
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Pasta pazool, I am a fool. I left a note to myself to crop an image in the image's link causing it to break. And I added the female lopunny but forgot to add the male one to the pickup tables. I've attached the scripts which fix this
I can't replicate the sharly outfit reward giving you a dress, she should be giving you chest wrappings, I'll keep looking for a possible cause though.
The terrarium wing currently only checks your current inventory. In the future when I add proper collectables it'll track your progress more permanently. I've made a bunch in the game's files:
But v2 was already taking long enough so they'll be added later.
Just installed the patch and now a regular bug catch (ie no event and a single bug rewarded) has no exit will softlock the game.
Update: Fruit does too, but not fishing since it doesn't take you to a new screen if you don't proc an event.
On a related note, I've discovered refreshing the page will autosave any items you've collected but respawn all collection points, making it really fast to farm out Jiggies/Coins/Cards/Mags and probably museum slots in the future.
Also also, can we get a "sell all"? catching 30 fish in 5 minutes results in a lot of spam clicking to sell.
Update: Fruit does too, but not fishing since it doesn't take you to a new screen if you don't proc an event.
On a related note, I've discovered refreshing the page will autosave any items you've collected but respawn all collection points, making it really fast to farm out Jiggies/Coins/Cards/Mags and probably museum slots in the future.
Also also, can we get a "sell all"? catching 30 fish in 5 minutes results in a lot of spam clicking to sell.
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- May 20, 2019
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Thanks for letting me know!
All items should gather without changing screens unless something special is unlocked like a card or magazine. I think what's happening is one of the items is throwing an error and not unlocking when it should, softlocking the game. I believe I've solved it, along with the magazine issue. That one I missed because of png/webp version differences, juggling multiple builds makes my brain hurt...
I'll add a sell-all option in the next patch, I meant to add one this time, not sure how I forgot.
I updated the download links to v2.1, here's the script files which should fix your issues:
You must be registered to see the links
You actually did a good job, it's understandable why it's a little lack of content but it's ok. Just take your time like you did before and do everything whenever you can. Also if you don't mind, can you tell us what are you planning next
Is the middle poster available in this version? I'm pretty sure I 100%ed everything available, including the DLC jiggies, but don't have it.
- May 20, 2019
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I reported the update the day before yesterday, should the thread be updated by now? Did I do something wrong?
Sometimes I miss site updates so I'll search around, maybe there's some step I missed, I can be a silly goose sometimes
- A non-furry version of the tarot cards since Sharly will care about them eventually
- Adding a sell-all button to the shop
- Updating the pog coins
As for the farther future:
- Updating the fluffy lora model so it's stop generating marlow with brown fur
- Updating the player model to SDXL (meaning generating new clothes/expressions and cropping them out)
- Allowing the player to select their favorite color for dialogue and menu frames
- Detatching eyes from the expression images so that I can color the player's eyes
- Adding more settings (changing tect/dialogue size, sliders for sfx and music instead of buttons)
- Characters sending you letters (gotta generate a base image for stationary, then make signatures for each of the characters. Angelica uses a formal signature, Bluebell uses a paw print, Cayenne signs their letters with a pressed leaf, etc, as well as attaching lewd selfies) (Characters would send letters if you've been playing for a while without meeting them, after you've become friends, etc)
- Finding a way to allow player house customization (SPECIFICALLY for the froggy chair which the game absolutely must have)
- A full selection menu for posters in the collection room, as well as an alternative collection room image for mobile so it isn't so squished
- Sharly giving you tarot readings with her custom deck based on the real world day
- Letting you enter your birthday so sharly can tell you your astro sign (I got a piece of feedback for HU and it has lived rent-free in my head for years
- Figuring out exactly how I want to do the pocketman mystery dungeon
- Adding in better collectable critters/fruit and properly tracking them in the museum
- More sections in the museum (guides on img2img, expression sheet generation, larger outlines of how to get specific things from sdxl loke a kamasutra)
- Sections for referencing my other games so syrup players can try out HU/Rainy Dayz/etc
There's a lot about the collectables room that's scuffed. Initially the table was planned to have little figurines of all the cast, the room itself is actually based on the Melee trophy room. Unfortunately the models I was able to generate looked kinda... Cursed. So I use the table for showing collectable boxes now.
Sometimes I miss site updates so I'll search around, maybe there's some step I missed, I can be a silly goose sometimes
Well for v2.5 I'm doing all the new non-furry content, as well as:
- A non-furry version of the tarot cards since Sharly will care about them eventually
- Adding a sell-all button to the shop
- Updating the pog coins
As for the farther future:
- Updating the fluffy lora model so it's stop generating marlow with brown fur
- Updating the player model to SDXL (meaning generating new clothes/expressions and cropping them out)
- Allowing the player to select their favorite color for dialogue and menu frames
- Detatching eyes from the expression images so that I can color the player's eyes
- Adding more settings (changing tect/dialogue size, sliders for sfx and music instead of buttons)
- Characters sending you letters (gotta generate a base image for stationary, then make signatures for each of the characters. Angelica uses a formal signature, Bluebell uses a paw print, Cayenne signs their letters with a pressed leaf, etc, as well as attaching lewd selfies) (Characters would send letters if you've been playing for a while without meeting them, after you've become friends, etc)
- Finding a way to allow player house customization (SPECIFICALLY for the froggy chair which the game absolutely must have)
- A full selection menu for posters in the collection room, as well as an alternative collection room image for mobile so it isn't so squished
- Sharly giving you tarot readings with her custom deck based on the real world day
- Letting you enter your birthday so sharly can tell you your astro sign (I got a piece of feedback for HU and it has lived rent-free in my head for years
- Figuring out exactly how I want to do the pocketman mystery dungeon
- Adding in better collectable critters/fruit and properly tracking them in the museum
- More sections in the museum (guides on img2img, expression sheet generation, larger outlines of how to get specific things from sdxl loke a kamasutra)
- Sections for referencing my other games so syrup players can try out HU/Rainy Dayz/etc
Nothing there for now. That third image is sized for the magazines, my initial plan was that wheb you marry someone you could put their photo up there to rep your favorite character.
There's a lot about the collectables room that's scuffed. Initially the table was planned to have little figurines of all the cast, the room itself is actually based on the Melee trophy room. Unfortunately the models I was able to generate looked kinda... Cursed. So I use the table for showing collectable boxes now.
Howdy Noodle, you've probably got a lot on your plate, but if you've got the time to answer, I was wondering how necessary to the game you'd deem the player character's dialogue boxes. I grew up with silent protagonists, and games leaving it up to me what- if anything- I'm feeling from scene to scene. These days, a lot of the games I've been playing just flat out tell me what I'm supposedly thinking, what I ostensibly want. It deals a blow to any sense of immersion, and can be outright frustrating when the game's telling me I want something or that I'm enjoying or upset over something that just doesn't line up with my own feelings in that moment. No matter how many times a game insists I'm definitely enjoying everything that's happening throughout it, if I'm not then I'm not, and it's not going to change with that sort of writing.
Honestly, if I play one more game that depicts me as a wise-cracking smartass that's always getting their comeuppance for being incapable of holding their tongue for five minutes, I might just bite my own tongue right off-
Do you think it'd be feasible at all to have the game play out with a silent protagonist, using narration to convey anything that might have needed to be observed or said to push the plot along instead of the player character? Even just as a toggle?
Going from "Maybe if I do this-" to "You try a myriad of-", or "What about that banana on the counter?" to "You ask about the suspicious banana looming ominously atop the nearby counter." That sort of thing.
Honestly, if I play one more game that depicts me as a wise-cracking smartass that's always getting their comeuppance for being incapable of holding their tongue for five minutes, I might just bite my own tongue right off-
Do you think it'd be feasible at all to have the game play out with a silent protagonist, using narration to convey anything that might have needed to be observed or said to push the plot along instead of the player character? Even just as a toggle?
Going from "Maybe if I do this-" to "You try a myriad of-", or "What about that banana on the counter?" to "You ask about the suspicious banana looming ominously atop the nearby counter." That sort of thing.
- May 20, 2019
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Great question! I actually thought about this issue a lot while developing the game. The reason the Syrup Town player character talks is specifically to avoid an situation that made writing specific parts of Hentai University really hard; when I have a quiet character and need to fill a scene. Very often I have trouble staring at a blank scene, unable to get started and having at least one character saying something unhinged or funny can help me get into a flow state and start writing. Characters like Lana Cummings were extremely fun to write, so I decided that in any scene there would be at least one off-the-wall character, and the player character serves that role a lot.
There is a second reason as well. When writing scenes I try to keep a varied screen, which means that I try to avoid:
1. Repeating the same medium twice in a row, such as two images in a row, two of the same character speaking in a row, etc.
2. Having a character's dialogue extend too far down.
These are much less of an issue in Syrup since I designed the character sprites to have a long aspect ratio and have them be bottomless to keep larger text boxes interesting, Plus I also added the expressions system so that I can switch expressions to break up dialogue boxes, but I try my hardest to avoid walls of text wherever possible and the player dialogue is one of the tools in my toolbox for that.
That's how my games end up with the style they have. While my default way of writing is to do as you describe ("You decide to...", "You grab her...", etc) I try to inject the player into scenes at least a few times, although characters eccentric enough to carry a scene will often end up with scenes where the player doesn't speak at all as I don't want to pull attention away from the character.
I've tried writing in different ways, I have a lot of respect for how The Company packs scenes into much smaller, bite-sized chunks, but for some reason scenes feel incomplete in my brain when I write them that way. The closest I've gotten is with Rainy DayZ, how many scenes will be entirely dialogue-free. But writing that way is a lot harder, as having a character describe what's happening or moan is a good way to fill space and is a crutch I rely on heavily when writing. If you compare my writings to other authors in Hentai University you can see I have a hard time actually filling out a scene and making it feel like more than just a series of images.
In addition, I also struggle sometimes when I feel directionless for how a path should go. Human Alteration App is very hard to write for because endless possibilities lead to choice paralysis, whereas having a very defined main character both tells me where I should take the story (asking 'what would the syrup town mc do' often leads to direct and easy answers, whereas asking the same thing about HAA often leads me nowhere) and also informs the player about where the game will probably go. For example just based on the MC's dialogue and traits, players can tell there probably won't be dubcon in the game. On top of that I tried to write the main character in such a way that people can just as easily assume they're playing an eccentric jokester vs an actually unhinged creature from a post-apocalyptic mad max society enjoying the comfy vibe.
Plusplus, a silent protagonist means less chance for the player to see the character they customized.
I hope you don't bite your tongue off, I'd feel very bad if my game led to you injuring yourself. If it helps, while some characters will think you're a bit weird or a goofball, or not really fitting their expectation for what a human should be, at no point do I plan for there to be any "getting their comeuppance" direction in the game.
While a toggle would be theoretically possible, the game wasn't written in a way to support a silent protagonist. We're only at v2 and I'm sure there are already a lot of bits that would need to be manually rewritten to fit a true first person perspective, like when Sharly asks what you're thinking about, and the player mentions wanting to stroke their tail.
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