VN Ren'Py The Hellcat Lounge [v0.3.67] [Wilson Wonka]

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SteelyDan14

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Yeah, I immerse deeply. There are a number of girls that I like, but after the breakup I'm not starting a relationship with anyone who is leaving at the end of summer, or one that I think would be bad for the Li. Personally I think Lane and Caitlin need each other more than they need MC and one of the reasons I hate the contest is MC picking one of them isn't going to create unity in the band it's going to create division - a lot of it. Of course it would also create problems if they knew the reason none of them had a chance from go is because of the contest. But at least if I pick none they can go on the road united in hating me and I can hang with Seok and my step-bartender (does Mastercard still allow that)?
I'm with you. I actually prefer the mechanic or even Caitlin's boss and the bartender more than I like the other LIs, besides, it's really not fair to the MC. I mean what if the MC doesn't choose any of them and just stays friends? Are they going to be okay with that? I loved it when Caitlin says something like "I am trying to figure out why I liked you". Like the MC did anything wrong. He did push back a little but I would pushed back a bit harder and complained about the contest to begin with. He never agreed to it and they just did it without any input from him. What if the roles were reversed and a bunch of guys did that to a women and didn't get a say in it either? And Mary... geesh... talk about boring. Not to mention she just wants to get married and pop out kids and the MC just got out of a shitty relationship so why the hell would he want to jump into another?

IDK. Sometimes these AVNs have crazy scenarios and you just have to roll with them, otherwise we would never play any of them.
 

Pixillin'

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I'm with you. I actually prefer the mechanic or even Caitlin's boss and the bartender more than I like the other LIs, besides, it's really not fair to the MC. I mean what if the MC doesn't choose any of them and just stays friends? Are they going to be okay with that? I loved it when Caitlin says something like "I am trying to figure out why I liked you". Like the MC did anything wrong. He did push back a little but I would pushed back a bit harder and complained about the contest to begin with. He never agreed to it and they just did it without any input from him. What if the roles were reversed and a bunch of guys did that to a women and didn't get a say in it either? And Mary... geesh... talk about boring. Not to mention she just wants to get married and pop out kids and the MC just got out of a shitty relationship so why the hell would he want to jump into another?

IDK. Sometimes these AVNs have crazy scenarios and you just have to roll with them, otherwise we would never play any of them.
Yeah, if I could have chosen my own words - when MC was first told about the contest, I would have told her it was a fucking stupid idea and it guaranteed that I wouldn't be with any of them.
 

Dr.TSoni

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I'm with you. I actually prefer the mechanic or even Caitlin's boss and the bartender more than I like the other LIs, besides, it's really not fair to the MC. I mean what if the MC doesn't choose any of them and just stays friends? Are they going to be okay with that? I loved it when Caitlin says something like "I am trying to figure out why I liked you". Like the MC did anything wrong. He did push back a little but I would pushed back a bit harder and complained about the contest to begin with. He never agreed to it and they just did it without any input from him. What if the roles were reversed and a bunch of guys did that to a women and didn't get a say in it either? And Mary... geesh... talk about boring. Not to mention she just wants to get married and pop out kids and the MC just got out of a shitty relationship so why the hell would he want to jump into another?

IDK. Sometimes these AVNs have crazy scenarios and you just have to roll with them, otherwise we would never play any of them.
Yeah, if I could have chosen my own words - when MC was first told about the contest, I would have told her it was a fucking stupid idea and it guaranteed that I wouldn't be with any of them.
the-girls-of-the-hellcat-lounge-are-getting-dolled-up-for-v0-dwf3v93cun1d1.jpg
 

Meiri

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Hi all,
This will be longer than even my normally chatty dev logs. I’m going to address some questions that have been thrown my way recently. I’m going to make this post public so that everyone knows what’s going on. I’ll eventually lock it to the top of the page so that everyone who visits sees it.

Puggy and I are still working on the game. I thought I was being transparent about this, but it’s obvious not everyone reads the dev logs. So here’s what’s up.
When I started making this game, even before Puggy was on full-time, I used actual band posters in the bar, in Noah’s house, in Lane’s house and in the tattoo parlor. There may be more that I’m just not remembering right now. But those are the main environments. In order for us to take the next steps of getting the game on Steam, we have to re-render all of the scenes with posters in them. There is no leeway here. Steam will see those posters and deny us instantly with no second attempt. We also have to re-render the tutorial at the beginning of the game as Steam doesn’t fuck around with school girl outfits apparently.

This isn’t us redoing anything we don’t need to do. Even though I feel like we’ve gotten better at what we do, I feel like the original chapter was still pretty damn good. I didn’t want to be the cliche of being known for going back and redoing our first chapter just to bump the cosmetics some. Once we’ve got the rework out you’ll see that even though we are redoing the scenes with the posters, we will not be redoing any scenes that do not have posters. In the scene with Simone, you’ll notice I only redid the images that show the posters. I left all the other renders in. I’m doing my best to match the original lighting so that we don’t have to redo anything that doesn’t stand out dramatically. Again,none of the scenes that do not have posters in them will be getting a re-render, for now. I may eventually go back to fix those in a post-release patch but I’m not going to halt forward progress more than necessary right now.

The silver lining to this is because the majority of the rework of this is on me, Puggy will have the time to go back and redo some of the original animations to bring them up to our current standards and with some missing much requested features added in to form a more cohesive finality to each scene. Depending on how quickly those go, we may be looking into other places to add more animations that aren’t just lewd scenes, like the dream sequence in the second chapter. Puggy stays pretty busy with all the other games he works on, so that’ll be a time permitting sort of thing.

So, we’re in a weird spot where we are working on the game but to you all things are seemingly slowing to a crawl. So, I want to be clear: We don’t make a living from Patreon. I think most people understand that this is for ultra fans who want to support the creators, since someone will eventually leak whatever we do anyways.

If you are uncomfortable with the time it’s taking, then please halt your subscription and stay on as a free member. We will make a public announcement as we always do before our release. We’d hate to lose you but we’ll welcome you back with open arms.

For everyone who sticks with us, I’m going to start getting back full blast on the special tiered renders. I need a creative outlet to help me with the burn out I’m starting to have from the rework. The burn out has metastasized into disinterest with talking about progress, as I’d literally just be telling you that I opened this many scenes, copied this many characters from one environment to the updated environment and placed them in the queue. It’s on me to get myself out of that rut. Doing some fun renders and getting back into the basics of why I originally liked doing this stuff seems like a great way to show that I’m still alive and still here, even if I’m not doing as many biweekly updates. Once we get closer to release and there are more interesting things to talk about I’ll get back into the cadence of the bi-weekly updates. Until then, I’ll try and do one near the end of each month to let you know where we are at. By the end of this month (April 2025), I’ll work out the exact number of renders we need to do, how many I’ve got to do and how many are done already. Whenever I get the chance to swap over to the new chapter I’ll share a render with a note. But I really just need to go whole hog on doing the update and put that shit in my review mirror before I go insane.

For the folks on the Custom Tiers, if you want your monthly render, I’ll need you to be proactive about contacting me when you want them. I appreciate you all sticking with us up there, but I kind of got tired of hunting folks down every month to get your requests from you. We’ll need to start from scratch as it’s been I don’t even know how long since I’ve even heard from you guys, but I’m just gonna assume things are cool if you aren’t yelling at me.

If there is anything I haven’t addressed here, please comment below so that your question is public as others may be wondering the same thing you are. I’m happy to address any concerns, but note that I’m making this post to hopefully save myself from answering the same questions over and over in separate DMs.
TLDR: We thank all of you all for supporting us. It lets us know we are appreciated. But we appreciate you all as well and don’t want you to support us while we are working our way through boring shit we’ve got to do, if you feel in some way this is us taking advantage of you. We will make a public announcement when the release is nearing and will hopefully be getting quicker with releases after that. If that sounds better, we’ll be here with open arms if you want to come back. For those that stay, we promise to get back to the tiered premiums moving forward.

Thank you all!
Wilson
As someone with very little knowledge about DAZ, do they really need to re-render every scene with a poster? Couldn't they use another tool, like Photoshop, to blur them instead?

I know the quality would drop, but I think I would rather sacrifice the poster quality and have a game than continue waiting. No game can survive a full year without updates only to receive barely the same content with just a few changed renders.

If they are indeed forced to redo everything and that is the only option, then forget I said anything. However, this situation is starting to look worrisome.
 

Justaphase

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As someone with very little knowledge about DAZ, do they really need to re-render every scene with a poster? Couldn't they use another tool, like Photoshop, to blur them instead?

I know the quality would drop, but I think I would rather sacrifice the poster quality and have a game than continue waiting. No game can survive a full year without updates only to receive barely the same content with just a few changed renders.

If they are indeed forced to redo everything and that is the only option, then forget I said anything. However, this situation is starting to look worrisome.
Abandoned tag incoming. Such a shame, I really enjoyed this one.
 

Newbe163

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As someone with very little knowledge about DAZ, do they really need to re-render every scene with a poster? Couldn't they use another tool, like Photoshop, to blur them instead?

I know the quality would drop, but I think I would rather sacrifice the poster quality and have a game than continue waiting. No game can survive a full year without updates only to receive barely the same content with just a few changed renders.

If they are indeed forced to redo everything and that is the only option, then forget I said anything. However, this situation is starting to look worrisome.
Nicely phrased. Wilson cannot even keep the bi-weekly update cycle any longer. Again, the different pressure points on developers seems to be huge. Wilson is not the only one who seems to need to look for other ways to make a living.
 
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SteelyDan14

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Nicely phrased. Wilson cannot even keep the bi-weekly update cycle any longer. Again, the different pressure points on developers seems to be huge. Wilson is not the only one who seems to need to look for other ways to make a living.
Speaking as a failed developer, it is a lot of hours of thankless work. I was able to write the entire script with no problem, infact I have 3 finished stories, but the renders are a nightmare. It can take an hour or longer just to setup a scene and then, depending on the complexity of the scene, it can take an hour or more to just render it. Then, when you notice a flaw or something missing from the render, like cloths not fitting right, or feet sinking into the floor, you have go back and adjust and re-render. If you have multiple paths, you might have to make multiple renders in order to fit with the story. Then there are all the assets you have to (or should do) purchase. Every outfit, every hair style, every model, every location, every vehicle, every prop... all those have to first be found and second you have to pay for and then sometimes you buy an outfit and it does not fit or look as good as you thought it would on your models. If you are doing all of this yourself, you then have to drop it into renpy. While renpy is a rather easy language to learn, it still takes time to get proficient with it so as a solo dev, you have to write the dialogue, create the images and code all of this into renpy. It's a lot of work for one person and I don't know how people like Dr. Pink Cake, despite what you think of their game, do it. They work their butts off for a whole year just to produce one chapter. It's crazy and most devs don't make enough money to even begin to pay for everything.

Anyway, as sad as I am to see this potentially be abandonded, I totally understand why. People, me included, get into this thinking they can be a dev and they don't have any clue just how hard it is.
 
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Pixillin'

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Speaking as a failed developer, it is a lot of hours of thankless work. I was able to write the entire script with no problem, infact I have 3 finished stories, but the renders are a nightmare. It can take an hour or longer just to setup a scene and then, depending on the complexity of the scene, it can take an hour or more to just render it. Then, when you notice a flaw or something missing from the render, like cloths not fitting right, or feet sinking into the floor, you have go back and adjust and re-render. If you have multiple paths, you might have to make multiple renders in order to fit with the story. Then there are all the assets you have to (or should do) purchase. Every outfit, every hair style, every model, every location, every vehicle, every prop... all those have to first be found and second you have to pay for and then sometimes you buy an outfit and it does not fit or look as good as you thought it would on your models. If you are doing all of this yourself, you then have to drop it into renpy. While renpy is a rather easy language to learn, it still takes time to get proficient with it so as a solo dev, you have to write the dialogue, create the images and code all of this into renpy. It's a lot of work for one person and I don't know how people like Dr. Pink Cake, despite what you think of their game, do it. They work their butts off for a whole year just to produce one chapter. It's crazy and most devs don't make enough money to even begin to pay for everything.

Anyway, as sad as I am to see this potentially be abandonded, I totally understand why. People, me included, get into this thinking they can be a dev and they don't have any clue just how hard it is.
I suspect that AI art / renders will eventually win out because of this. It doesn’t look as good (it’s getting better) but it’s easier to learn, faster, and less expensive. For every Doctor Pink Cake, there are 100 who lose money as Devs and 10000 stories that never get told at all.
 

Elduriel

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I suspect that AI art / renders will eventually win out because of this. It doesn’t look as good (it’s getting better) but it’s easier to learn, faster, and less expensive. For every Doctor Pink Cake, there are 100 who lose money as Devs and 10000 stories that never get told at all.
I have my issue with DPC, but one thing I can't deny... he is no slouch. Yes the updates take long, but he delivers so much content every time. And yep, AI will take over. You see AI content more and more frequently even in DAZ games, especially animations.
 
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Justaphase

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Everyone knows that to build a successful support base things need to be moving as quickly as possible. So many seem to get stuck in this "remake mode" which from what I've seen kills more games than anything. To not even have the decency to put out a weekly or bi-weekly development update honestly makes me think that they don't actually deserve support. If they can't be bothered with their supporters then why should they bother with them?
 

Niuul

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Speaking as a failed developer, it is a lot of hours of thankless work. I was able to write the entire script with no problem, infact I have 3 finished stories, but the renders are a nightmare. It can take an hour or longer just to setup a scene and then, depending on the complexity of the scene, it can take an hour or more to just render it. Then, when you notice a flaw or something missing from the render, like cloths not fitting right, or feet sinking into the floor, you have go back and adjust and re-render. If you have multiple paths, you might have to make multiple renders in order to fit with the story. Then there are all the assets you have to (or should do) purchase. Every outfit, every hair style, every model, every location, every vehicle, every prop... all those have to first be found and second you have to pay for and then sometimes you buy an outfit and it does not fit or look as good as you thought it would on your models. If you are doing all of this yourself, you then have to drop it into renpy. While renpy is a rather easy language to learn, it still takes time to get proficient with it so as a solo dev, you have to write the dialogue, create the images and code all of this into renpy. It's a lot of work for one person and I don't know how people like Dr. Pink Cake, despite what you think of their game, do it. They work their butts off for a whole year just to produce one chapter. It's crazy and most devs don't make enough money to even begin to pay for everything.

Anyway, as sad as I am to see this potentially be abandonded, I totally understand why. People, me included, get into this thinking they can be a dev and they don't have any clue just how hard it is.
Yeah, some get in to it thinking their old unused PC from 7 years ago will get the job done. It's serviceable but if you don't want to have hours long render times you really need to build a PC for it specifically. All too often you hear of part failures because of how taxing it can be on a system so I'd be hesitant to use my gaming PC to do it instead of having a separate rig entirely.

Price of entry can be daunting if you want to go in to this as a way to make money or turn it in to a full time job. Since there's good games out there already from devs who have 2 workstations to pump out very high quality renders. So the market can feel oversaturated as it is.
 
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Elduriel

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Everyone knows that to build a successful support base things need to be moving as quickly as possible. So many seem to get stuck in this "remake mode" which from what I've seen kills more games than anything. To not even have the decency to put out a weekly or bi-weekly development update honestly makes me think that they don't actually deserve support. If they can't be bothered with their supporters then why should they bother with them?
don't get me started on reworks, at this point I could probably write a book on the subject and why I hate them so fucking much :ROFLMAO:
 

Niuul

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don't get me started on reworks, at this point I could probably write a book on the subject and why I hate them so fucking much :ROFLMAO:
What? Who doesn't love it when a game decides to completely stops story progression for 3 years while the current chapters get reworked and call it "new" :)
 
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SteelyDan14

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Everyone knows that to build a successful support base things need to be moving as quickly as possible. So many seem to get stuck in this "remake mode" which from what I've seen kills more games than anything. To not even have the decency to put out a weekly or bi-weekly development update honestly makes me think that they don't actually deserve support. If they can't be bothered with their supporters then why should they bother with them?
The remakes are largly do to the whole Steam illusion. They reformat their games to fit Steam guidlines and they think they are going to make millions just because it is going on Steam. There are so many crap and overrated AVNs on Steam, they are going to get a bad rap. In fact, they are starting to rethink the whole AVN program so it will be interesting to see what happens.
 
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Newbe163

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Speaking as a failed developer, it is a lot of hours of thankless work. I was able to write the entire script with no problem, infact I have 3 finished stories, but the renders are a nightmare. It can take an hour or longer just to setup a scene and then, depending on the complexity of the scene, it can take an hour or more to just render it. Then, when you notice a flaw or something missing from the render, like cloths not fitting right, or feet sinking into the floor, you have go back and adjust and re-render. If you have multiple paths, you might have to make multiple renders in order to fit with the story. Then there are all the assets you have to (or should do) purchase. Every outfit, every hair style, every model, every location, every vehicle, every prop... all those have to first be found and second you have to pay for and then sometimes you buy an outfit and it does not fit or look as good as you thought it would on your models. If you are doing all of this yourself, you then have to drop it into renpy. While renpy is a rather easy language to learn, it still takes time to get proficient with it so as a solo dev, you have to write the dialogue, create the images and code all of this into renpy. It's a lot of work for one person and I don't know how people like Dr. Pink Cake, despite what you think of their game, do it. They work their butts off for a whole year just to produce one chapter. It's crazy and most devs don't make enough money to even begin to pay for everything.

Anyway, as sad as I am to see this potentially be abandonded, I totally understand why. People, me included, get into this thinking they can be a dev and they don't have any clue just how hard it is.
Tks for sharing to people who are "just" watching the novel/story/game. It seems also to be a fine line, how long a developer is offering a story for free to attract customers and when to switch for new chapters to payment only. Had a discussion with one or two on this, as I had the feeling, that the existing story is good enought to attract new customers and that there should be a switch for new chapters to paid only. A lot of topics to think about as developer
 
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