Ren'Py The Headmaster [Mykock's Manor Ch.3] [Altos and Herdone]

[Envoye]

So, I have decided to end my 1€/month membership, instead subscribing for 5€ for this month only. This way, I can be the one to post the development update for once. And hopefully, next month, there will be another hero instead.

Development Update 67
What have I been up to since the last development update?
Time does fly sometimes, I can’t believe it’s been a month since my last dev update already. So, what have I been up to since then? Well, I spent a few more days working on Debbie’s content, updating her post punishment options and recording an animation for her and the headmaster. I spent a little more time working on the script for the staff training storyline and adding that into the game’s code. I spent a few days working on boring technical and admin stuff. I made a little progress with the new Android build, although I have put that work to one side for the time being as we are in crunch time and I need to focus on the new update. I spent a few days working on the volleyball scenes, expanding the beach environment (to make space for some exciting future content) as well as trying to solve some long standing technical issues with the water surface (which I did and it looks great!).
View attachment 5332529
The beach environment has been expanded and improved for the coming update
Most of the rest of my time was spent capturing renders and animations for the twins storyline. Quite often I’ll do the first few scenes of the update near the end, that way I can make sure I am keeping the themes consistent and I am properly foreshadowing any twists or surprises later in the story. We are at the point now where I’ve started to fill in some of these gaps from the beginning and I needed a scene for the twins to get in trouble to kick off their punishment system in earnest. What was just a single line in my to-do list a couple of weeks ago saying “the twins get in trouble” is now a 5000 word and 100 render (and counting) scene. Which also happens to be one of the funniest I’ve written. I don’t think I’ve chuckled away to myself quite so much since Emily’s “nudist” scene in the headmaster’s office. Although I am very happy with the new scene and it is a fantastic addition to the update, it definitely hasn’t brought me any closer to getting to any of the endings I had in mind. In fact it’s probably moved my goal posts back a little bit.
View attachment 5332531
The twins have a hilarious surprise in store for the headmaster on the beach
Which I think neatly illustrates the difficulty I have with estimating release schedules. Firstly, I have no idea how long a scene is going to be until I’ve written it, and things often end up being way longer and more involved than I initially planned. Secondly, the amount of time and effort I put into making content is in no way proportional to the amount produced. I can spend a whole week agonising over a relatively short section of dialogue, or I can produce a whole lengthy scene (writing, renders and all) in the same amount of time. Which can be more than a little frustrating, especially with a deadline looming in the near future. Unfortunately, creativity is not something that can be turned on and off when needed. Inspiration comes when it comes and I find it’s usually best to just go along with it.
When is the next update going to be released?
We are approaching my initial estimated release time of mid to late October. I am sure you are all wondering; how close am I to having the update ready? The answer to that is a little complicated.
Currently I have somewhere around 50,000 words of dialogue, about 700 final renders complete and around 120 videos recorded. For comparison version 0.16 on release had a total of about 68,000 words, 1000 renders and 53 videos. So, on that basis, I am a little behind with my rendering and writing but I am already way ahead with the video recording. That said, these numbers are quite misleading. I generally do everything in draft form to begin with and capture most of the final renders at the end of the update cycle. Currently I have an absolute ton of stuff in draft form ready to record. Therefore, my expectation is that by the time I’m finished version 0.17 will be significantly bigger than version 0.16 (at least in terms of images and videos). The question I have to ask myself now is; how much of the content that is in draft form do I need to capture before I feel like the update feels “ready”? And the answer to that question is… It’s difficult to say.
I’ve taken a scatter gun approach to version 0.17 trying to take on a lot of work at the same time (Faye & Nina, the Twins, Debbie, Claire, plus the girls volleyball). So, although I have spent many weeks on each of these characters/storylines, I feel like more is needed for each before I would be happy showing them to everyone. Until I’ve filled in the gaps and played it all through in order, it’s very hard to get a feel for these things. I am hoping to be at a point where I can start Alpha testing within the next few weeks. Once I am at that stage I can figure out how much more content is needed, then I will set a firm release date.
At the moment, I would say that getting the update out by the end of October seems pretty unlikely. The end of November seems much more plausible, but if I’m honest it could be a little longer than that. We are definitely in the final stretch at this point though. I have more than enough content in the works for a huge update. Plus, what I have so far is really high quality and should make up for the long wait.
I will update you all again just as soon as I am feeling confident enough to set a release date. I should also have enough renders ready for a third and final batch of images previews (for patrons in the $10 and above tiers) in the next couple of weeks.

Did the twins have a surgery? ;-)

 

[maxthruster]

...the whales!

Disappointed you didn't go for the naked mole rat.

 

[vicaddict]

6969???? lol

Fun fact: That is part of my license plate

 

[raven54]

Based on this one line, the German translation seems to be horrifically bad, anyway.

It's actually really hard to translate something, which is intended to be read for pleasure. It's not enough to translate the information, it also need to end up with a flow, which feels natural in the new language. I had the fortune of reading translated text before and after it got edited to have a natural flow in English and even through the information provided was the same, the edited text was much easier to read and made the story more enjoyable. A poor translation is distracting because even if you don't realize it, you start focusing on sucking out information from the text rather than focusing on the story itself.

Generally speaking, if I know the source language, I tend to use the source language and I recommend that in general. Sure there are super good translations once in a while, but translations are often inferior.

 

[hoshimota]

Is the appearance of the protagonist completely unchangeable?
He looks like a massive wimp.
I feel more like shoving him in a locker, than putting myself in his shoes, lol

He's just a pretty standard variant of the stock male protags that HS/HS2 have. If you notice, tons of AVNs have very similar small-framed Asian-looking dudes as the MCs.

Also, it kinda tracks if you think about it - this dude develops a whole shady ass system to be able to get away with feeling up hot girls and banging them, under the guise of "behavior modification therapy" - do you think jacked up attractive guys are out there doing that kind of shit? Nope.

 

[chin12]

Hello ,

I am interested in this game but is there clothed sex in this ?

 

[Fake Name Real Money]

I feel like some people may need a reference for word counts. Your average novel is around 70k to 100k depending on the genre. For example, a young adult novel may be as low as 50k words. Whereas, a fantasy novel can often get closer to 120k words. Now VNs are often quite a bit longer with more like 250k-500k words, but a "short VN" is usually only 20k-50k.

 

[Mak5025]

I feel like some people may need a reference for word counts. Your average novel is around 70k to 100k depending on the genre. For example, a young adult novel may be as low as 50k words. Whereas, a fantasy novel can often get closer to 120k words. Now VNs are often quite a bit longer with more like 250k-500k words, but a "short VN" is usually only 20k-50k.

Honestly... why would anyone need this "reference"? That's only relevant to bean counters. People who think a book of 120k words is inherently better than one of 100k.
This is a brilliant VN. I really don't care about how many words it contains. Strange notion...

 

[TonyMurray]

I feel like some people may need a reference for word counts. Your average novel is around 70k to 100k depending on the genre. For example, a young adult novel may be as low as 50k words. Whereas, a fantasy novel can often get closer to 120k words. Now VNs are often quite a bit longer with more like 250k-500k words, but a "short VN" is usually only 20k-50k.

It's pretty irrelevant to bring up in the first place, but to add to the irrelevance, my day job is proofreading fantasy novels (and others, but that's the main genre I do) and I'd say 120k would be considered "short". You're looking at more 150k, and potentially starting to call that "average".

 

[TheDevian]

Perhaps, but this isn't a novel, or even a normal visual novel, the number of words doesn't really matter. As a game it is about play time.

 

[Living In A Lewd World]

I think neither word count nor playtime really matters. They should certainly not be zero but in general I find the importance of quality way bigger than playtime or word count.

I know one game-dev here, who caters my kinks of exhibitionism/nudism and releases month for month content for hours of playtime. Nevertheless those games basically bore me to death as the characters are just homogenous shells without the slightest personality. And playtime is generated by repetitive events, big timetables and complex maps with the whole purpose for the player to guess the right place and time to trigger the next event.

On the other hand, I have read lewd stories of 5k words, that make me cum over and over again and tried to read 100k stories in the hope, that I get a bit aroused (or at least entertained).

The main challenge is that creating a high-quality game/story is often much harder than creating a long one. Quality isn't about hitting the extremes, but rather finding the balance: finding the right mix of surprise and familiarity, good pacing, the right amount of challenge and progress, and those small, well-timed rewards that keep the audience or player engaged.

In that sense, creating games, comics, and movies isn't all that different. They all rely on timing, structure, and emotional rhythm. What differs are the tools each medium gives creators to achieve those effects, with games having the broadest range, capable of using all the techniques of the other media plus interactivity.

 

[TheDevian]

I think neither word count nor playtime really matters. They should certainly not be zero but in general I find the importance of quality way bigger than playtime or word count.

I know one game-dev here, who caters my kinks of exhibitionism/nudism and releases month for month content for hours of playtime. Nevertheless those games basically bore me to death as the characters are just homogenous shells without the slightest personality. And playtime is generated by repetitive events, big timetables and complex maps with the whole purpose for the player to guess the right place and time to trigger the next event.

On the other hand, I have read lewd stories of 5k words, that make me cum over and over again and tried to read 100k stories in the hope, that I get a bit aroused (or at least entertained).

The main challenge is that creating a high-quality game/story is often much harder than creating a long one. Quality isn't about hitting the extremes, but rather finding the balance: finding the right mix of surprise and familiarity, good pacing, the right amount of challenge and progress, and those small, well-timed rewards that keep the audience or player engaged.

In that sense, creating games, comics, and movies isn't all that different. They all rely on timing, structure, and emotional rhythm. What differs are the tools each medium gives creators to achieve those effects, with games having the broadest range, capable of using all the techniques of the other media plus interactivity.

Too true, I just mean if you are talking about length, we all have our priorities, but there are many factors we have to weigh for if something is 'good' to us or not.

 

[Fake Name Real Money]

It's pretty irrelevant to bring up in the first place, but to add to the irrelevance, my day job is proofreading fantasy novels (and others, but that's the main genre I do) and I'd say 120k would be considered "short". You're looking at more 150k, and potentially starting to call that "average".

Well every single site on the first page of results for Google completely disagrees with you. Maybe you're ignoring first time authors as most agents won't even look at a first time author whose book is over 100k words. And I think the comparison matters as a reference for just how many words things are. 50k doesn't mean shit if you don't have point of reference.

 

[TonyMurray]

Well every single site on the first page of results for Google completely disagrees with you. Maybe you're ignoring first time authors as most agents won't even look at a first time author whose book is over 100k words. And I think the comparison matters as a reference for just how many words things are. 50k doesn't mean shit if you don't have point of reference.

Maybe I should go talk to all the authors and publishers I work with then and tell them Google says their books are too long. Not every published author uses an agent as well, times have moved on and the market is a lot more open and forgiving. I'm currently proofreading a 137k debut novel and the one I have waiting for when I finish it is 170k.

Slightly more on topic though, and wordcount doesn't really mean anything here, as a couple of the posts above rightly note. You can have two games with an identical wordcount but wildly different lengths of gameplay. Part of that is incorporated in the question: What is counted here as "wordcount"? Is it just looking at dialogue? What about menu choices, and coding in general?

Presuming for sanity's sake that everyone is considering dialogue only, you have games that have dozens of multiple choice scenarios. Some will give you a couple of unique lines of dialogue and then reconverge, some will give branching points that take you on two or three completely different paths and can effectively double or triple the resulting wordcount without necessarily increasing the playtime. Even just a choice that offers you the simple "yes/no/maybe" has three words when only one is selected, and that's before you get into any of the resulting dialogue or branching.

Some games might also have lots of scenes without dialogue, depending on the theme and the cinematography of the dev and/or artist. In this game, you have all the punishment scenes, for instance, that have minimal dialogue between choices and take up a disproportional amount of time. You also have repeatable events that increase the playtime without increasing the wordcount of the script, etc.

 

[grey_shadow]

Word count, render count, download size, etc may not matter that much to the player's experience of the game, but they do generally correlate strongly with the amount of development work involved, so they're relevant when discussing how long you have to wait between updates. After all, we're not sitting in 2050, when all the major games currently in development are either complete or abandoned; we're in 2025, waiting for the next update to release...

 

[DavyDaoist]

I don’t find waiting to be a problem for this dev delivers (unlike others whom I won’t mention). It’s not like there’s no other game to play. Just open the top game and there’s bound to be a great one you haven’t tried yet.

 

[Fake Name Real Money]

Maybe I should go talk to all the authors and publishers I work with then and tell them Google says their books are too long. Not every published author uses an agent as well, times have moved on and the market is a lot more open and forgiving. I'm currently proofreading a 137k debut novel and the one I have waiting for when I finish it is 170k.

What great anecdotal evidence you have. Really cool that those handful of books are on the longer side. I think you've forgotten what the word "average" means. I didn't say they couldn't get that long. I was stating the average so people could get a point of reference of just how much writing that is. Not really sure why you're so upset over something so irrelevant.

Also, for the people pointing out that playtime is more important than word count. No shit. It is a game and not a book. I don't remember stating otherwise. I was merely pointing out just how much writing this guy was doing on top of renders and animations so people had a reference as to why it may take this long to put out updates.

 

[fblurblblarghl]

What great anecdotal evidence you have. Really cool that those handful of books are on the longer side. I think you've forgotten what the word "average" means. I didn't say they couldn't get that long. I was stating the average so people could get a point of reference of just how much writing that is. Not really sure why you're so upset over something so irrelevant.

Also, for the people pointing out that playtime is more important than word count. No shit. It is a game and not a book. I don't remember stating otherwise. I was merely pointing out just how much writing this guy was doing on top of renders and animations so people had a reference as to why it may take this long to put out updates.

The opinion of a professional in a field tends to be treated as being at least a bit more than anecdotal. Definitely higher than "I googled it".

 

[TonyMurray]

What great anecdotal evidence you have. Really cool that those handful of books are on the longer side. I think you've forgotten what the word "average" means. I didn't say they couldn't get that long. I was stating the average so people could get a point of reference of just how much writing that is. Not really sure why you're so upset over something so irrelevant.

Also, for the people pointing out that playtime is more important than word count. No shit. It is a game and not a book. I don't remember stating otherwise. I was merely pointing out just how much writing this guy was doing on top of renders and animations so people had a reference as to why it may take this long to put out updates.

Just giving accurate information rather than relying on Google searches where half the results look like they're a decade or two out of date. I work with authors and publishers of fantasy on a daily basis, I know what the averages look like, and they're definitely bigger today than those results tell you.

But yes, writing a lot takes time, but it's basically impossible to quantify the size of a game or the length of its playtime based on wordcount, which is the point several people were making.

 

[fblurblblarghl]

Just giving accurate information rather than relying on Google searches where half the results look like they're a decade or two out of date. I work with authors and publishers of fantasy on a daily basis, I know what the averages look like, and they're definitely bigger today than those results tell you.

But yes, writing a lot takes time, but it's basically impossible to quantify the size of a game or the length of its playtime based on wordcount, which is the point several people were making.

I'd say that you could go with some sort of logarithmic scale or something. A quick 5 minute rpgm game with like 500 words of text and a few sex cgs is a very different beast from a game with 5000 words, while the difference between something that is 100,000 words and something that is 150,000 words would be much more dependent on factors other than word count. It's a bit late at night for me to start trying to work out something based in information theory to try and actually evaluate this sort of thing, but I do think a mathematically rigorous system for estimating game size based upon word count could be created. It would probably be much more useful if at least a few other factors were considered, like number of cgs, size of the codebase, things like that. It wouldn't be at all useful for identifying if a game was good, but it would be useful for letting you know if you're in for a quick experience or something that'll take more time.